Education News

Belated quality concern

In a sharply worded indictment, the Planning Commission — the country’s apex policy-planning agency working directly under the prime minister — has castigated the Union human resource development ministry’s flagship Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan (education for all) programme for failing to maintain quality norms. In a note to the Union cabinet the commission is reported to have bluntly stated that the SSA programme has failed to provide qualitatively acceptable education to a wide section of children in the country besides failing to address systemic reform. The commission is categorical that quality of education is of prime importance right from the elementary level, and has therefore suggested transformation of the nomenclature of SSA into ‘National Mission for Quality Elementary Education’.

Meanwhile, the Union cabinet has approved the Centre-state funding ratio for the SSA programme upto 2012 and beyond. As per the revised approval, the Centre-state share will be in the ratio of 65:35 for 2007-08 and 2008-09; 60:40 for 2009-10; 55:45 for 2010-11 and 50:50 for 2011-12 and thereafter. However, for the eight north-eastern states, the ratio will be 90:10.

This ratio revision has not gone down well with the National Knowledge Commission (NKC) which has been advocating Central legislation to action the long-pending Right to Education Bill and Central funding of elementary education. In a letter dated August 8 to the prime minister, NKC chairman, Sam Pitroda has urged the Centre to share the revenues of the Bharat Shiksha Kosh (the HRD ministry’s national education development fund) with state governments and to mobilise additional resources to fund SSA.

On its part New Delhi too concedes that states have objected to linking SSA funding to implementation of the model Right to Education Bill circulated to the states last year. "The issue has been hanging in the balance because of internal sabotage. According to estimates 22 percent of members of Parliament run private schools and institutions. Naturally, they will never want a common school system as suggested by the model Bill to take off," says Prof. Anil Sadgopal who together with Prof. Muchkund Dubey and Dr. M.M. Jha are on the panel of Bihar’s Common School System Commission.

The Planning Commission too seems to be in favour of a common school system. "In the absence of good quality primary schools, children from better-off sections prefer private schools, the number of which is fast increasing across the country. SSA needs to ensure minimum norms and standards in schools accessible to all children as a matter of right. The programme also needs to address the issues of access, quality and equity holistically through a systematic approach. There is need to ensure that private schools also come up to the required minimum norms and standards," says a Planning Comm-ission mandarin.

Meanwhile at a NKC seminar on school education staged in Kolkata on August 26-28, issues regarding quality, access and lack of regulation of private schools, were raised. The needs of the urban poor, flexibility of state governments to develop their own need-based norms like allowing schools in 5-6 room buildings, the absence of a comprehensive strategy for merging alternate education schemes into mainstream schooling which has serious implications for drop outs, and the need for a results-based monitoring framework was expressed.

"SSA has now become the focus of education planning; however there are a considerable number of still illiterate children who will very soon be beyond the scope of SSA (when they attain the age of 15 years). Despite this, continuing education has not been adequately addressed and sufficient funding is not available for continuing education centres (CECs). No serious thinking has been done on CECs, and the achievements of NLM (National Literacy Mission) have been considerably diluted. Literacy and adult education programmes have continuing relevance and should not be de-prioritised," says the NKC report.

Clearly, now the quality of education being dispensed is uppermost in the minds of education policy makers. This priority needs to be accepted by educrats and teachers in the right spirit. Slowly but surely awareness is spreading that learning outcomes are more important than gross enrollment numbers.

Autar Nehru (Delhi)

Beyond student politics

Following the newly elected BSP government led by Dalit champion Ms. Mayawati banning student union polls in August to improve academic standards of colleges, the murder of an Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) student has hammered home the message that politics is not the only ailment of UP’s institutes of higher education.

Mazhar Naeem (21) of Baghpat in Meerut district was attacked by persons unknown with a blunt object and left to die in a narrow lane of the 1,200 acre AMU campus on the night of September 16. The second year BCA (bachelor of computer applications) student was on his way to his hostel after getting a recharge for his sim card. Earlier in the evening, the highly religious student had offered his fifth namaz of the day before breaking his Ramzan fast.

According to one students’ version the vice chancellor Abdul Azis declined to meet the angry students who then set his home and office on fire. Staff rooms, canteens and the proctor’s office were also ransacked. The small police force on the campus looked on helplessly until seven companies of the Rapid Action Force and the Provincial Armed Constabulary arrived four hours later.

Next day when an edgy peace returned, an emergency meeting of the 132-year-old university’s executive council (EC) was summoned. The EC decreed a shut down sine die of the university and directed that its 69 hostels be vacated within 48 hours. It also called for a CBI investigation into the murder and recommended the setting up of a committee headed by a retired justice of the Supreme Court to report within six months on all cases of indiscipline and violence that have plagued AMU for the past year.

Independent surveys of India’s best colleges rank AMU (estb.1875) high. The latest India Today-AC Nielson-ORG-MARG survey ranked AMU’s faculty of law at number 11; and its medical college among the country’s top 25. But in recent times particularly during the five-year rule of the Samajwadi party which ended in May when the Mayawati-led BSP won a landslide victory in the state assembly elections, law and order problems became frequent on the AMU campus, as they did across India’s most populous (180 million) Hindi heartland state.

On April 8, a B.Tech student Kauser Salik Mazhar was killed by unidentified men who forcibly stole his motorcycle. Barely a fortnight later on April 23, another student Mohammed Sabir Ali was murdered. Like Naeem, neither were active in campus politics. Since then four AMU students have been charged with Kauser’s murder, of whom three are in Aligarh jail and Ali’s case is with the CBI. Moreover five days before the murder, the campus had witnessed a mass protest by girl students against the alleged rape of a student in one of the university hostels.

How have things in this 132-year-old university promoted with the noblest motives come to such a sorry pass? Excessive subsidisation of higher education — a socialist mantra — has quite a lot to do with it. Tuition and residential accommodation fees are so low that students are loath to leave the hostels, and enroll for one study programme after another. According to AMU insiders, the campus swarms with so-called mature students.

"The university is so porous that anyone can enter the campus. Thus far the police has not been involved in maintaining law and order on campus, but now things have to change. Such arson is unprecedented, and clearly not the handiwork of students," says Meerut’s superintendent of police Raghubir Lal.

One explanation gaining currency on the AMU campus is that there’s a conspiracy to force Azis’s resignation. His predecessor Naseem Ahmed is believed to have resigned before empanelling his successor because he was under severe pressure from factions of teachers and employees, each pushing forward its own nominee. Consequently Azis was called in from Cochin University of Science and Technology, Kerala, as a compromise vice chancellor.

Such factionalism is hardly surprising. AMU has an annual budget of Rs.245 crore. Way back in 1997 the Mathew Commission was appointed to look into faculty recruitment irregularities. In its report made public two months ago, the commission confirmed large-scale bungling and favouritism in the appointment of teachers in the departments of geography, history and political science.

One of the major causes of the shocking socio-economic backwardness of India’s 140-million strong Muslim community, graphically confirmed by the report of the Justice Rajinder Sachar Committee released earlier this year, is the lack of access to quality secular education. Against this backdrop if the country’s showpiece minority institution is plagued by rackets and lawlessness, its impact will reverberate beyond institutional boundaries.

Vidya Pandit (Lucknow)

Rural service downer

Medical students in Tamil Nadu, whose number is estimated at 12,000, are up in arms against a directive of the Union health ministry to all medical colleges countrywide to introduce a year’s compulsory medical service in rural areas for students after they complete their MBBS studies. Controversial Union health minister Dr. Anbumani Ramadoss took time off from his long-running dog fight with Dr. P. Venugopal, director of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Delhi (India’s largest teaching hospital), to announce that from 2008 onwards, medical graduates will be awarded their MBBS degree certificates only after they complete a year’s service in district hospitals, taluk hospitals and primary health centres (four months in each). During this period they will receive a stipend of Rs.8,000 per month.

This directive is applicable to all 262 government and private medical colleges in the country which together churn out 29,000 medical graduates annually. The Centre’s proposal is a component of the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM 2005-2012) launched by prime minister Manmohan Singh in April 2005, with the objective of providing effective healthcare to the country’s rural population.

The compulsory rural service directive has evoked vociferous protests from medical students in Chennai, Coimbatore, Tirunelveli, Thanjavur and Madurai who wore black badges, held demonstrations and called a one-day strike on September 5. "Primary health centres in villages have no physical infrastructure, no diagnostic equipment or facilities for practicing medicine. If proper infrastructure is provided by the government we are willing to serve in them. Moreover if the compulsory rural service plan becomes effective, those aspiring to do postgraduation after they complete the MBBS degree will not be able to do so," says R. Vikram Vignesh, a final year MBBS student of Stanley Medical College, Chennai.

Certainly the government has a case. In consonance with socialist ideology, medical education in India is highly subsidised with the annual tuition fee for the MBBS programme in government medical colleges in Tamil Nadu as low as Rs.4,000 per year. Even private medical colleges in the state provide tuition at Rs.150,000 per year to government quota students admitted on merit, and as per the caste-based reservation policy of the state. Against this the Medical Council of India has assessed the actual cost of medical education provision at Rs.4.5 lakh annually per student. As a quid pro quo the government is demanding a year of rural service from medical students.

Although well aware of their social obligation to serve both rural and urban citizens, medical students express frustration about being targeted by government while students of engineering and other disciplines, who also receive subsidised education, are free to walk into well-paying jobs immediately after graduation. As it is, an MBBS study programme (five-and-a half years) is of longer duration than engineering (four years) and arts, science and commerce programmes (three years). Moreover most MBBS graduates aspire to postgrad qualifi-cations which require an additional three years of study. Therefore there is considerable sympathy for medical students whose already long-duration study programmes will in effect be prolonged by an additional year.

Within the medical fraternity there’s also puzzlement about the role the government envisages for MBBS graduates in rural areas which are already served by a large cadre of trained healthcare workers, village health nurses and auxiliary midwives. They argue that except for performing purely administrative tasks like advising the village population on sanitation, immunisation, contraception and writing prescriptions for minor injuries and fevers, MBBS graduates will not serve any useful purpose.

While ex facie the idea of making medical practitioners partly pay back the cost of their heavily subsidised education by way of one year’s rural service is a laudable idea, typically the health ministry has not prepared the ground by way of upgrading the country’s 22,669 primary and community health centres, or in the matter of providing better living conditions. Already medical education is losing its hitherto hallowed allure because of long duration study programmes and time taken to establish a practice. Compelling students to work in ill-equipped and under-prepared rural areas could further disillusion the declining number of youth aspiring to enter this profession. That’s a development that a country with an abysmal five doctors per 10,000 citizens (cf. China’s 11.5) cannot afford.

Hemalatha Raghupathi (Chennai)

Abusive teachers row

A great hue and cry is reverberating through Kolkata and several rural districts over the issue of harsh corporal punishment being inflicted upon school children in West Bengal. For all their faults and shortcomings, communist governments are perceived to be child-centric, as testified by high literacy percentages of Russia and the liberated countries of the former Soviet Union. Therefore public opinion in West Bengal, which has been ruled by Communist Part of India-Marxist (CPI-M) led coalition governments for the past three decades, has been particularly outraged. Especially since almost all cases of cruel and unusual punishment of children highlighted by the press have occurred in government-run rural schools.

In the government Rajendra Free Primary School in North 24-Parganas district, headmaster Subal Haldar caned a class IV student aged ten for waking him from his siesta in the post-tiffin period. Infuriated, Haldar beat her so hard that the little girl fell unconscious and had to be rushed to hospital. In another widely reported incident Krishna Gupta, who runs a coaching centre in south Kolkata, belaboured class V pupil Neha Das with a wooden ruler reportedly because her grandfather had asked Gupta to see the scripts of nine tests Neha had written.

Widespread reports of corporal punishment being inflicted without restraint in government primaries and secondaries, has sent the CPM politburo into overdrive. Party commissars are well aware that adverse publicity on this issue could cost the ruling CPI (M) heavily by way of middle class votes. Therefore West Bengal school education minister Partha Dey has publicly promised to "root out fear from the classroom". As a first step, government school teachers have been prohibited from inflicting any form of punishment that might cause students to "panic, feel scared or threatened". "If an incident of physical abuse is reported the child’s version will be given great importance," warns Dey.

Moreover the education ministry has constituted an informal committee of eminent psychologists, pediatricians, district inspectors of schools, the president of the West Bengal Board of Secondary Education and representatives from the West Bengal Higher Secondary Council to suggest ways and means to abate if not eliminate, classroom violence against children. "I have asked all the teachers’ organisations to submit a report specifying instances in which teachers should be penalised and also the extent of punishment," says Dey. Educationists in Kolkata however point out that teacher unions are a major support base of the CPM. Therefore not much can be expected from this initiative.

The ministry’s belated but well meaning initiatives to rein in abusive teachers are applicable only to government schools. To enforce the new rules across the board, covering both private and state schools, will require a new law passed by the state assembly. Academics say this is easier said than done because legislation drafted in India tends to be based on existing laws in Britain. As such, the law in Britain still allows parents and others to justify common assault of children as "reasonable punishment". This despite a United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child having reiterated that giving children protection from assault is "an immediate and unqualified obligation" under the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

This time the state government and the education department would be well advised to ignore British precedent and follow UN guidelines.

Sujoy Gupta (Kolkata)

Changed education scenario

Political wrangling and confusion within the incumbent Janata Dal (S)-Bharatiya Janata Party coalition government which assumed office in Karnataka (pop.55 million), on February 3, 2006 after a backroom deal in which the rural-based JD(S) then allied with the Congress party suddenly switched sides to form a government with its arch-enemy the BJP, has taken a heavy toll of the education sector.

When the incumbent coalition government was sworn in 20 months ago with three education ministers — Basavaraj Horatti (JD-S, primary and secondary), V.S. Acharya (BJP, medical) and D.H. Shankaramurthy (BJP, higher) — there were great expectations. In particular much was expected of Horatti, a former physical education teacher, who had been involved in the education sector as a representative of the teachers’ constituency for over two decades and had played a leading role in introducing in-service training programmes for science teachers in government schools. But 20 months later it is painfully apparent that school education — especially primary education and teacher morale — has suffered considerably.

In March 2006, barely a month after taking charge of the primary and secondary education portfolio, Horatti cracked down on rural teachers who had opted for non-teaching jobs in urban locations. But he failed to address the hardships endured by teachers in rural schools, most of which don’t have even basic facilities such as buildings, drinking water, toilets or adequate housing for teachers, a majority of whom are women. Consequently according to a NUEPA (National University of Educational Planning and Administration) report, the average number of teachers per primary school has fallen from 8.5 in 2004-05 to 4.2 in 2005-06 and to 3.7 in 2006-07.

Moreover shortly thereafter he ordered de-recognition and closure of 2,215 private primary schools with an enrollment of over 300,000 lower middle class and poor children, which were in violation of the state government’s medium of instruction (language) policy. It mandates that Kannada or the mother tongue should be the sole medium of instruction for students in classes I-V in all state board affiliated schools established in Karnataka after 1994.

Following a long drawn out battle in the media and courts, under a complex high court order private primaries which had switched to English may continue to teach in English. However all new students admitted into class I will have to be taught all subjects in Kannada or the mother tongue until class V, regardless of parental preference. The Karnataka Unaided Schools Management Association (KUSMA) has appealed this judgement of the Karnataka high court as being violative of the right of all citizens to establish and administer educational institutions of their choice as stipulated by the Supreme Court in the T.M.A Pai (2002) and P.A. Inamdar (2005) cases.

Nor is the situation in higher education institutions under the care of BJP ministers Shankara Murthy and Acharya any better. The vice- chancellors of three (out of seven) state universities have been adjudged guilty of corruption by the Lok Ayukta. But typically the government has not sacked them or sanctioned their prosecution.

In medical education only three of the scheduled six government medical colleges have become operational in the current academic year. Moreover the status of two (out of four) state government medical colleges has been downgraded by the Medical Council of India for deteriorating infrastructure and inadequate faculty.

"The past 20 months have been quite disappointing for education development in Karnataka. Perhaps the only positive policy decision taken by this government is to introduce teaching English as a subject from class I onwards. Higher education institutions in the state are experiencing a critical shortage of faculty and investible resources. A determined resource mobilisation effort has to be made for the education sector," says Dr. A.S. Seetharamu, former professor of education at the Institute for Social and Economic Change, Bangalore.

This is the sad condition of Karnataka which has a proud tradition of education innovation and progressivism, and prides itself on its capital Bangalore being an information technology and knowledge industries hub. Three years ago at the height of the country’s IT boom, Karnataka was voted the ‘most enabling state for education’ in a nationwide poll of industry chief executives conducted by the Delhi-based fortnightly Business Today (May 2004).

The education scenario in the state has changed dramatically since then. But not for the better.

Srinidhi Raghavendra (Bangalore)