People's Democracy

WE are all familiar with the full-scale saffronisation of syllabi by the BJP regime, and also the determined efforts towards privatisation and commercialisation of education. What is not so well known are the intended and unintended effects of various other policies that educationists and teacher activists pay little attention to, but which nevertheless are depriving India’s children of even the most rudimentary elements of education.

A cut in teaching posts, the shift towards non-formal centres as substitute and as part of policy of deliberate decrease in the number of sanctioned formal schools, and a consequent dismantling of the government aided school system are now beginning to be perceived by those linked with the educational sector as disinvestments in education by the state.

Yet much else is happening that remains un-resisted because it is un-perceived, and does not make it to the front pages of the newspapers. Much of it impacts unequally on minority children, girls and those of the poor and scheduled castes, who suffer more from any negative developments in the government system of schooling.

Two years ago one saw a small item that warned of many schools closing down as a result of disinvestments in the public sector. According to a small report by Vrinda Gopinath, placed in the middle pages of the Indian Express, already in 1999, a dozen Kendriya Vidyalayas (popularly known as Central Schools), falling under the Human Resources and Development Ministry, were dismantled in the space of two months both in the public sector and in the civil and defence units. To make it worse, she pointed out, that this happened in states which are desperate for reasonable literacy levels.

Kendriya Vidyalayas that were started around coal, power and cement plants were forced to shut down as these sectors virtually collapsed and closed shop. This applies to schools in Bihar, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, where literacy levels are dismal. From Cement Corporation of India and Central Coal Ltd to Hindustan Copper Ltd and also Steel Authority of India, all urged that they could no longer afford the schools. These Vidyalyas had been allowed by the Central Government on the condition that the HRD Ministry would provide the teachers and the education skills, unlike in case of the civil and defence Kendriyas, the PSUs would have to fund the schools, teachers etc entirely from their own resources. In its annual audit in 1999, the HRD Ministry finally decided that it could no longer afford to sustain these "sick'' schools and accepted the request to close them down. She also points out that the ministry could have saved these beleaguered schools if it had converted them from a PSU school to a civilian one, but officials admit the requests to opt out came from the PSUs themselves.

There were already proposals in 1999 to hand them over to private players, and the end result is many such schools are closed down, some altogether and others replaced by private institutions functioning from the same premises owned by the PSU, but now charging higher fees, while making huge profits through being provided the infrastructure of the former schools. The public sector employee faces the double threat of retrenchment and much higher costs for educating his children.

There are reports in the Indian express of state government employees who have not been paid salaries for ten to fourteen years, whose families are steadily undergoing destitution and whose children have fallen back in education due to no fault of their parents. These are families where the father is employed and holding a coveted government post, but his children are going to grow up as dropouts. Thousands of school teachers posts that have been abolished will have the same impact on the children of those who are teachers and should have been the best equipped to educate their children. The scale on which education is being effected due to non payment of salaries and retrenchment in jobs all over the country is something that the government is not even prepared to recognize as a problem, and neither has it been commented upon by educationists and teacher activists.

In Gujarat the problem, predictably, is linked to the communalism. A citizen’s team consisting of Kavita Panjabi, Krishna Bandopadhyay, and Bolan Gangopadhyay from Calcutta, which visited Gujarat from May 3 to May 11, 2002, and investigated the impact of the carnage on children, has brought out a report titled The Next Generation: in the Wake of the Genocide. A report on the impact of the Gujarat pogrom on children and the Young. It throws some light on the matter of education also.

The report reveals that there has been a systematic crackdown on the education of minority children and youth at all levels, in both private and government schools, in Gujarat, and that this is a process that was initiated months prior to the carnage and peaked in the period starting February 28. In addition to the more obvious economic, physical and psychological devastation that the largest minority community has been subject to, the denial of education to its children has been the surest way of crippling its chances of its recovery in the future.

The textbooks have of course been communalized for a long time now in Gujarat, and there have been atrocious questions in exam papers of Classes V and VI, such as, "What is the basic difference between miyans and Others?" These questions rocked the Parliament in late April in the midst of continued violence in Gujarat. Yet no action has been taken so far against the Gujarat government, which has retaliated to the recommendations of the Standing Parliamentary Committee on Textbooks by sending a letter stating its disagreements with the parliamentary committee’s observations and reprinting the textbooks in 2002 in complete dismissal of the committee’s strictures against particular sections in the texts.

Apart from that the team learnt that minority children were forced to withdraw from private schools, there were great differences in the numbers admitted in municipality schools, and phasing out of these children in stages even in minority areas. In colleges there was the pressure to conform to the appearance and dress codes of the majority community in the build up to February 27. According to testimonies of those working in the camps, in the direct aftermath of the Godhra train incident the Bajrang Dal attacked the schools, broke down sections, beat up the watchman and demanded that the principal hand over lists of minority children in the school. Similar events took place in Little Flower, Don Bosco, Trinity, GLS, all English medium schools. (See "Muslim school kids targetted" in The Hindustan Times, April 6 for more details, and regarding other schools too.) Two of them have already sent notices to parents asking them to take Transfer Certificates for their children as they could no longer guarantee their safety." All this pertains to private schools where middle class children study.

According to a testimony in the same report " the strength of the eight Gujarati medium municipality schools in the minority area has been scaled down; now there is an average of only 40-50 children in each of these schools, whereas the Gujarati medium schools in the majority areas run to full strength, with approximately 700 children in each. That is why upto 95 per cent of the children in the majority area Gujarati medium schools on the "border" come from minority families… so we send our children to those schools because they are better run and better equipped. In the last two years there has been a gradual closing down of classes 5-7 in the primary schools in the minority areas. This year, three municipality schools shut down classes 5-7. The school opposite the railway station used to go upto class seven. For the last two years now classes 5-7 have not been run there. The strength of classes 1-4 has also been decreased; there are now four classes and only two teachers there. After the danga (riots), Urdu medium teachers have also been transferred to Gujarati schools."

With large scale displacement and the inability of families to return to their homes, the very real and pertinent question with regard to education is: where would the children of these families now get admission, a no easy task even in the best of circumstances. If they go to new areas and if the municipality and private schools in these areas cannot extend their capacity to admit these children, or if new municipality schools are not set up, then who will guarantee their education? Thousands of displaced children will be further deprived of education; the only alternative these members of the community can see is admitting as many children as possible, into madrasaas.

All this is apart from the traumatic fact that thousands of children could not do their exams this year, that girls may never again be permitted by many families to go to schools in the aftermath of the widespread rapes, that destitution may make education unaffordable, that psychological scars may render children incapable of faring well even if they do manage to somehow continue, that the treatment they receive there does not force them out again, that carnage is not yet again perpetrated. So many ifs and buts that stand before normalcy can even be attempted in children’s bid to continue education. For the moment there is only fear and despair and little awareness on the part of general people of how fascist normalcy operates to not only hit out at the present generation, but to debilitate an entire community for the future as well.

In the light of the above, just what does the amendment in the constitution, lying defunct in any case, mean? And how does all this tie up with the dismantling of the formal school system run by the government and all the big talk of "linking up" and state of the art educational technology that MHRD officials are mouthing even as they go for negotiations on the GATTS issue. This is something all of us must think about as part of our activism on affairs connected with education.