Letter from the Editor
After the high of the August issue of EducationWorld in which for the first time a league table of India’s most respected schools was featured and received considerable press and television coverage, it’s time to go cold turkey. The inconvenient truth is that enthusiasm for reform and upgradation of teaching-learning norms to global standards is confined to a small minority of India’s top private schools. The great majority of the country’s 1.124 million schools — 83 percent of which are managed by the Central, state and/or local government authorities — confronted with myriad problems ranging from crumbling infrastructure, crowded classrooms, teacher shortages and absenteeism, ill-prepared curriculums, textbook printing rackets etc, are struggling to retain students and provide meaningful education to the 200 million children enrolled in them at the start of any given academic year. Unfortunately, public education is so low down the list of national priorities that lay citizens apart, even the great majority of teachers and educators are unaware of the pathetic conditions in public, i.e government managed, schools across the country. In the absence of an official, normative definition of a school, 46,364 institutions dispensing primary education don’t have a building; 15,791 don’t have a single student; 121,794 have only one teacher; 190,299 can’t provide drinking water and 539,535 are bereft of toilets. All this information and worse, is contained in Elementary Education in India 2005-06 — An Analytical Report — a data intensive survey published in July by the Delhi-based National University of Educational Planning and Administration (NUEPA) together with the department of school education and literacy of the Union HRD ministry. For the first time this NUEPA survey has covered all 604 administrative districts of the country under its DISE (district information system for education) information gathering programme. In short, EEI 2005-06 is official and comprehensive. The adverse social consequence of government failure to build a strong primary and elementary education system which attracts and retains children in school, is a colossal and perhaps globally unprecedented, wastage of human resources.
Although thus far EducationWorld has been a lone voice in the wilderness wailing for education reforms, fortunately the intelligentsia and even dim-bulb captains of Indian industry preoccupied with primitive accumulation, are becoming aware of the thousand unnatural socio-economic shocks that the country is suffering as a consequence of the establishment’s failure to accord quality education provision top national priority. The extent of the rot in elementary education, its socio-economic fallout and first steps towards reform are the subject matter of our cover story this month.
And in a companion special report feature, EducationWorld’s Lucknow-based correspondent Puja Awasthi reports on the problems confronting the country’s 1,226 Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidyalayas — residential upper primary schools for SC and ST (scheduled castes and scheduled tribes) and minority (Muslim) girls. This high-potential initiative to prevent millions of marginalised girl children from dropping out after primary (class V) education, is confronted with familiar implementation problems.
Dilip Thakore