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In a move widely welcomed by academics if not the parents’ community, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC, aka Bombay Municipal Corporation) has introduced sex education into the class VIII-IX curriculums of its 1,153 schools with an aggregate enrolment of 404,251 students. “The programme started earlier this year and is being implemented in a phased manner across all BMC secondary schools,” says Dr. Srikala Acharya, additional project director, Mumbai District AIDS Control Society (MDACS), which is assisting BMC to integrate the sex education modules into classroom curriculums.
MDACS is training BMC medical officers, who in turn conduct the course christened the Adolescent Education Program (AEP).
The modules cover several issues faced by children in this age group with the curriculum designed within the guidelines of the National AIDS Control Organisation (NACO) and National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT). “We have taken a holistic approach to cover issues such as friendship, love, infatuation, self-assertion, self-esteem, and related issues. The programme also includes special sessions on drug addiction and sexual abuse. The delivery method is through case studies and role-play. We have ruled out the traditional lecture methodology,” says Acharya.
Significantly, the BMC’s sex education programme has been introduced by the BJP-Shiv Sena alliance which controls the corporation. These hindutva parties have hitherto opposed sex education in school curriculums. Indeed a few months ago, Dr. Harsh Vardhan, then Union health minister at the Centre, had recommended a total ban on sex education in the BJP’s education vision document for Delhi.
The subject of sex education has always been embroiled in controversy in India. Even as the number of child sexual abuse cases has increased significantly, social taboos have prevented frank discussions on the issue. “Though sex education was introduced in some schools a long time ago, it fizzled out because of lack of trained teachers. It is commendable that the government has finally realised its importance and urgency,” says Dr. Rajan Bhonsle, head of the department of sexual medicine at Mumbai’s KEM Hospital and GS Medical College, and co-author of The Ultimate Book of Sex (2013) which is being used as a manual in BMC’s AEP programme.
Welcoming the BMC’s overdue initiative, Swati Popat Vats, director of the Podar Institute of Education and president of the Early Childhood Association of India, says sex education in schools will have wider acceptability if its nomenclature is changed. “Instead of sex education, it should be called Body Intelligence Education. The change in terminology will make the subject more acceptable. Many parents believe that sex education is about how to have sex when in reality it is a scientific programme,” she says.
But even as the debate on the best pedagogy for dispensing sex education to children evolves, liberal educationists in Mumbai are relieved that discussion of this hitherto taboo subject is out in the open. In an era when sexual abuse of children by unhinged predators and perverts is multiplying and intensifying, only good can flow from this belated but commendable BMC initiative.
Gagandeep Kaur (Mumbai)