Government provision of foundational elementary (primary and upper primary) and usually even secondary education, is normative in almost all nation states around the world. Curiously the founding fathers — who wrote the elaborate Constitution of India which became the supreme charter for the governance of free and independent India on January 26, 1950 — included education as a directive principle (Part IV of the Constitution) instead of a fundamental right (Part III) which exhorted the State to “endeavour” to provide early childhood care and education to children in the 0-6 age group (Article 45), and education assistance “within the limits of its economic capacity and development” (Article 41). In retrospect that was perhaps the most expensive mistake in Indian history. All the ills that afflict the polity — over-population, poverty, mass ignorance, low productivity, poor governance etc — can be traced back to this inexplicable act of omission.
This historic error was compounded by successive governments of independent India at the Centre and in the states which accorded greater priority to grandiose industrialisation projects. Consequently the common-sense recommendation made by the Kothari Commission way back in 1966 to expend 6 percent (Centre plus states) of GDP on education was — and continues to be – ignored. During the past 65 years since independence, education expenditure has averaged 3.5 percent of GDP against the global average of 4.4 percent, and 6-8 percent of GDP which is normative in the industrial nations of the developed world.
It was only after the dawn of the new millennium when 189 countries signed the Millennium Declaration of the United Nations to universalise primary education by the year 2015 — and EducationWorld was launched with the avowed objective to “build the pressure of public opinion to make education the # 1 item on the national agenda” — that wisdom dawned on the Indian establishment. In 2002 a new Article 21-A was inserted into the Constitution making elementary education a fundamental right of children in the age group 6-14. The Right to Free and Compulsory Education (aka RTE) Act, 2009 which guarantees all children in the age group 6-14 free and compulsory elementary (class I-VIII) education in neighbourhood schools and became operational on April 1, 2010, is the outcome of Article 21-A.
Three years after the RTE Act became law, it’s becoming increasingly apparent this milestone legislation has several ill-considered provisions — closure of private budget schools, abolition of testing, no detention in elementary classes, and government interference in private schools — which have the potential to further damage rather than improve primary-secondary education countrywide. Our summer cover story highlights the chaos, confusion and concern generated by the hastily drafted RTE Act, driven by populist rather than genuinely reformist motives.
Unfortunately, the special report feature in this issue is also a harbinger of bad tidings. Once the global epicentre of mathematics learning and knowledge, India has descended a long way. On the occasion of the 125th birth anniversary of Srinivasa Ramanujan, a self-made maths genius who scaled international heights of glory, our Chennai-based correspondent Hemalatha Raghupathi details the causes and effects of India’s lost maths heritage.