EDUCATION FOR ALL - India’s pipe dream?

Education, particularly basic education, is fundamental to the development of any society. Unfortunately, the target year set by the UNESCO for achieving universal primary education is still a far cry away.

In the context of Tamil Nadu, I along with one of my research scholars, had prepared a report as part of the Government of India’s input to the World Summit on Education for All held at Dakar in April 2000. The problem with the UNESCO is that it sets out a target year without understanding the realities on the ground, and when the target year appears it convenes a summit with much hype and hoopla, and then sets out another target year, and the farce goes on and on.

If India’s “unwashed millions” lack access even to basic education — as in many other underdeveloped and developing countries — it is important to identify its causes and contexts. These in my view include the following:

1) Traditional caste practices which deny a major section of the population access to the basic common resources of society through various discriminatory and exclusionary practices.

2) Gender inequality, as a result of the persistence of traditional caste and religion-based patriarchy.

3) Backwardness of Muslims as a religious community, which is yet to be integrated into India’s mainstream society, and about whose educational status no comprehensive data are available (though collected) from the Census Department.

4) Poverty which prevents parents from sending children to school and instead forces them to send them to work.

5) Lack of educational facilities within the reach of toddlers along with basic infrastructure facilities, atmosphere conducive for learning, and a reasonable hope to the parents that after their children’s education the family’s social and economic condition will improve.

6) Lack of up-to-date education data (at any given point in time, the data available is at least 10 years old).

7) Obsession of India’s former Minister for Human Resource Development, Murli Manohar Joshi, with textbooks rewritten in saffron, and introduction of astrology, numerology, palmistry, Saraswati Vandana and such other pathos as part of his Hindutva politics for taking India to an illusory and socially and nationally harmful Vedic past.

8) Failure of the Census Department to give priority to the release of data, particularly educational data, on the deprived sections such as the Scheduled Castes, the Scheduled Tribes, and the Muslims (about whom, as already said, no data are in any case released), which invariably become available, if at all, to social critics like me only by the time of the next decennial census.

9) The sleaze, sloppiness, and sloth in the education system throughout the country, which has been in total disarray for a long time now; so much so that even if basic education is fully supported and funded, the indifference, inefficiency, ignorance, ineptitude, and social prejudices of India’s bureaucracy, and the rampant corruption in it (according to Transparency International, education is the most corrupt sector in India, followed by health), and interference of politicians in and out of power, their hangers-on, middle-men, and fixers with a system which is already tottering on the brink.

The government has been waxing eloquent about the improvement in literacy over the decade 1991-2001. It does not seem to have realized that even the much touted increase in literacy in India (the census definition is simplistic, that is, reading and writing a paragraph), does not add up to the cause of basic education, unless and until it has cleaned up the Augean Stables of its education system, apart from addressing the crucial social issues mentioned earlier which prevent children from being in schools. So long as this does not happen, India will only have target years and not target achievements.

(C) Author