INDIAN ‘GHOST SCHOOLS’ EXPOSE FAILURES OF STATE SYSTEM
Perched on a hill and painted snow white, the government primary school in Shuklapur, a small hamlet on the outskirts of Dehradun, the capital of Uttarakhand state, looks majestic.
The slogans and pictures painted in black, blue, yellow and green on its facade and on interior walls hail India’s commitment to “education for all” its citizens. A platform on the rising front lawn is a reminder of the spirit of nationalism inculcated in children by the hoisting of the tricolour.
But this particular three-room school building has been empty since April last year when it was closed due to a lack of pupils.
When the Uttarakhand government decided to shut the school, it only had two students left on its rolls. Its solitary teacher, Razia Begum, was shifted to another school.
Since February, local housewife Asha Rawat has run an anganwadi (rural mother and child care) centre from the school building. But when her day is done, she says, the school building is taken over by cattle, drunks and gamblers.
“Every morning the first thing I have to do is to clean dung heaps, liquor bottles and snack wrappers from the front lawn,” she says with a frown on her face.
The government primary school in Shuklapur is among 748 schools in the state that have been abandoned in the recent years due to lack of students. The government blames the continuing migration of people from communities in the hills to the plains for employment, and parents’ preference for private schools for their children.
Uttarakhand today is home to 1,768 uninhabited or ghost villages, around 80% of them in hilly districts. That compares with 1,034 of the state’s 16,700 villages in 2011, according to a Rural Development and Migration Commission (RDMC) set up six months ago.
A study by the commission found that 15% of those who migrated to cities and towns did so to secure a better education for their children. They said their villages lacked quality schools that offered English-language instruction.
“There is no doubt that there is a craze for English-medium education. People come down to towns and district headquarters for this. The state will have to go for the English medium,” RDMC chairman SS Negi told Asia Focus.
Apart from education, the commission will be working on improvements in health, infrastructure, employment and tourism.
Northern Thailand could provide a template where tourism is concerned, said Mr Negi. “Uttarakhand can learn from Thailand about how the latter has developed tourism in its northern regions. We need high-end tourists who can stay and spend in the state. There is immense scope for nature-based and eco-based tourism.”
According to the commission report, services and manufacturing now account for 90% of Uttarakhand’s gross domestic product and agriculture the rest.
Private schools, meanwhile, are attracting higher enrollments because the medium of instruction is English from the early primary grades, and children can be enrolled at three years of age. In government schools, instruction is in Hindi, a language largely spoken in northern and central India and accorded official status along with English in the constitution. Children are only admitted from age five.
Private schools also are far superior to government schools when it comes to infrastructure and amenities. In government primary schools, the students sit on mats laid on the floor, make do with fans even in sweltering heat, and have no transport available. Private schools offer access to benches and desks, and often have air-conditioned rooms and good buses.
Appalled by the condition of the government schools across the state, the Uttarakhand High Court last year barred the state government from buying luxury items and threatened to freeze salaries of state education officials unless the schools were furnished with basic amenities such as water purifiers, clean toilets and furniture. Since then most intermediate colleges and schools have been spruced up.
But as India develops economically, there is a growing aspirational class that looks to private schools to ensure their children will be proficient in English.
“Parents and children nowadays have too many options. The former prefer to put their children first in preparatory schools and then in private schools (in both, the medium of education is English). They have a craze for private education,” says Pankaj Sharma, block education officer (BEO) for Sahaspur, where two primary schools closed down in the last year.
The only places where the classrooms of government schools are still full are poorer communities. Gambhir Singh Kashyap, headmaster of a primary school in Shigniwala, a village on the Dehradun-Shimla road, can attest to that.
“In my school, the number of students has always been on the rise and is expected to cross 200 this year. The increase is happening because the places around us are inhabited by Muslims and scheduled tribes, deprived peoples provided reservation under the law,” Mr Kashyap told Asia Focus.
Unlike in private schools that charge hefty fees, education in government schools is free. Moreover, the government schools provide books, uniforms, midday meals and scholarships.
Recently, the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi made it mandatory for all government and private schools to teach only from books approved by the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT). The decision was hailed by educators and seen as an attempt to promote uniform standards. However, private schools have challenged the decision in the courts.
Uttarakhand and the neighbouring state of Himachal Pradesh have some of the most highly regarded English boarding schools in India. However, they are mostly concentrated in and around Dehradun, Nainital and Mussoorie in Uttarakhand; and Shimla and Solan in Himachal Pradesh.
The Indian government in 1986 adopted the prototype of the English boarding school and set up a Jawahar Navodaya School (JNS) in each district of the country, with a goal to offer education to children from poorer families and communities. The schools provide instruction in three languages — Hindi, English and a regional language — and place great emphasis on cultural and sports activities.
The model has been a major success with JNS students excelling in competitive examinations. There are now 626 Jawahar Navodaya schools across 28 states and the government plans to open many more.