INDIA NEEDS EDUCATION, NOT JUST SCHOOLS
It was June 2008, when news broke one fine morning that 38 people had been killed in a deadly Maoist attack on a boat carrying greyhound commandoes from Andhra Pradesh through a water reservoir along its border with Odisha. It caught my attention instantly, because the scene of the attack – Chitrakonda — was where I had spent much of my childhood in the 1970s. My father, an engineer, was posted there for the construction of what Jawaharlal Nehru used to call “the temples of modern India” — a dam and a hydroelectric power plant.
Chitrakonda was etched in my memory for the rich forests and spectacular mountains that surrounded it and for its simple and beautiful tribal people. How could such a place of peace and tranquillity turn into a Maoist den? In search of an answer, I travelled there a few months later to find what was once a story of hope had indeed turned into a story of despair.
Electricity and irrigation generated from the project benefited farmers and industries in neighbouring Andhra Pradesh, not the local people who were displaced twice to make way for the reservoir and the dam. Economic opportunities had shrunk following the project’s completion, leaving behind widespread unemployment in the area and pushing its people into the Maoist fold. In several villages, families had turned to illegal farming and trading of opium, for which they got protection from the Maoists and the local police.
I wondered if the story of Chitrakonda could have been different if its children had access to the same education that I received, growing up there.
They have access to the same school, where I spent my primary years, but not the education I got. Because, education requires a robust curriculum, classrooms and teachers who are qual- ified and trained. All of these had gone missing. In the years after the completion of the project, when engineers and the staff brought in from outside packed up, the authorities stopped caring about the school. At the time of my visit in early 2009, it had just four fulltime teachers compared to the dozenplus that we had. The classrooms no longer had chairs and tables; black boards were blank; teacher attendance was sporadic; and the most important entry on the school’s daily itinerary was the distribution of mid-day meals.
In all these years, Chitrakonda’s children have been going to school, but not getting educated. They have been growing up to join the ranks of unemployed youth, turn violent and take to socially disruptive practices.
The reason why I have chosen to write about Chitrakonda and the ruinous decline of my school is to highlight the risk aspirational India faces in allowing a steady and systemic deterioration of its school education system. As we speak, Parliament is debating changes to the Right to Education Act (RTE) and a high-powered government panel is finalising a new education policy for the country.
In bringing these twin processes to an early closure, primacy must be assigned to building a time-bound plan to enhance public spending on education from 2.7% of GDP to 6% of GDP. This target, first set in 1966, remains elusive. A significant and sustained spike in public spending is critical to overcoming everything else — from lack of qualified teachers to wellequipped classrooms and monitoring learning outcomes — that is hurting school education in this country.
Our legislators and policy makers would also do well to bear in mind three most desirable outcomes from a good schooling system: citizenship training, enhancing economic productivity and social mobility. An educated populace, in essence, reduces a range of transaction costs by being able to raise the quality of a nation’s cultural and social spheres. This is, however, not to suggest that the poorly educated and the illiterate are undesirable as humans. Rather, it is important to acknowledge that those lacking meaningful education are most likely to be left powerless and, therefore, become victims in any society that is based on choice and informed decision-making.
THOSE LACKING MEANINGFUL EDUCATION ARE LIKELY TO BE LEFT POWERLESS AND, THEREFORE, BECOME VICTIMS IN ANY SOCIETY BASED ON INFORMED DECISIONMAKING