Educating India

Governments across the country have abdicated their responsibility in the field of education. In fact they seem to have given up on improving education in public schools. Enrolment continues to drop in public schools with no improvement in Infrastructure and in teacher quality. The poorest in the society choose to send their kids to a private run school ( though they too provide questionable quality).

It is just one more of failures of governance in the country. Sarvashiksha Abhiyan program was supposed to be the initiative to provide ““Right of Children to free and Compulsory Education” while improving Infrastructure etc. Just last year this program was allocated INR 21,000 cr which is big by any measure. The bane of such progressive policies has been ineffective implementation, monitoring and measurement. I have seen as part of the Sarvashiksha Abhiyan many schools in the rural areas have been given Television sets and PC’s, both are not so useful in the rural areas since power in intermittent and teachers are not trained enough and of course there is not enough content to deliver. Example of lopsided execution of policies, wouldn’t blackboards, chocks, books and toilets help kids better. It is easier to dispatch a TV and PC and so a tick mark for the bureaucrat.

A recent study by Pratham throws depressing statistics-
“Government of India statistics show that 89 out of 100 children enter schools in India but 40% of those who join school dropout before completing primary education (grade IV or V). Another 30% of the remaining, dropout before completing grade VII or VIII. Thus nearly 80% of children in India do not complete elementary education in a country that has recorded 64% literacy. This is an indicator of the status of literacy in India in the third millennium.”
 Estimates suggest that the percentage of children who can read nothing and those who can read only alphabets is about 52%
 Across the country, 11% do not enter school and 40% children drop out before completing primary school. “

A huge problem at hand for the country, there needs to be no less than a mass movement to make India literate. Pratham has launched an initiative called Project Read India – it is about getting every child read in a short-predictable time frame” (www. Pratham.org).

I am doing my bit to make India read, please associate with any initiative that helps achieve the objective of 100% literacy. The deity of education “Saraswati” has left our shores, we need to bring her back.