Illetracy, who cares?

Launched by successive governments and other agencies, and you’d think India runs one of the most efficient literacy programmes in the world. Witness Operation Blackboard, Total Literacy Commission, Adult Literacy Mission, Non-Formal Education, District Institutes of Education and Learning, Mahila Samakhya, Shiksha Karmis, Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan ( SSA)District Elementary Education Programmes....
Many policies, many committees, many buzzwords and yetlater, we also have many more illiterates. Having superpower dreams is not enough, every third illiterate in the world is an Indian. Unicef already predicted in ‘State of the World’s Children 1999 report’, that by 2000 India will be “the most illiterate country in the world”.A disgraceful distinction. Compounded by yet another conclusion reached by a parliamentary committee report tabled India’s education network—the world’s largest—is also the “most diseased”.
Statistics, and schools that are mere statistics: Year after year, statistics, reports, studies, committees and demographers have devoted themselves (and often the taxpayers’ money and the nation’s time) to calculating how unlettered we are. Worked themselves into a tizzy researching how a country with so many illiterates, in the Information Age, needs to invest more than a mere four per cent of its GDP on education. On how the number of illiterates in today’s India is larger than the population of the country three decades ago. How less than half of India’s children between age six and 14 go to school. How 110 million of them never do. How, more than half the children who enrol themselves into school drop out by the end of the fifth grade. How, states like Andhra, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, UP and West Bengal have 94 per cent districts with female literacy rates less than 30 per cent. How, on an average the Indian spends a little over two years in school whereas the Chinese, Sri Lankan and South Korean spends five, seven and nine years respectively.
“This isn’t a school, it’s a farce. I’d like to meet the fools who thought up of starting it here—in the middle of nowhere, with nothing to teach; none to learn! I’m trying influence to be posted to Jaipur,” says Kesra Ram, primary school teacher at Bha-gwaniyon ki Dani in Rajasthan’s Barmer district where literacy rates are an abysmal 18.8 per cent; worse, at 7.7 per cent for women. A deadwood hutment, wiggly children squatting on sand, no water for over three miles, no blackboard, no table, no books—this is what the system has given Master Kesra Ram to work and educate India with. Little wonder then, he neither works nor educates. He drones out lessons that interest neither him nor his students. Unhappily he says: “It’s tough being a teacher here, tougher being a student. Tough getting them in, tougher keeping them here.”
Any ideas then on how to resolve Kesra Ram’s dilemma? Any suggestions on how best to educate the largest illiterate mass in the world? Any prescriptives on tackling the problems involved in schooling children across so many cities and small towns, over 600,000 villages, in little hamlets with no more than 150 people, children who speak over 17 major languages and more than 1,600 dialects?

Defying textbook solutions: “To begin with, we have to redefine the nature of literacy. Policies have to be geared at changing the perception of education as being merely about reading and writing; schooling being about parroting alien text-books,” says Prof. Marmar Mukhopadhyay of the National Institute of Educational Planning and Administration (NIEPA). Having conducted a unique four-year-long experiment on arresting dropouts among 6,304 children in 20 villages around West Bengal’s Udang in the Howrah district, Mukhopadhyay saw dropout rates coming down to 17 per cent as against the state average of 49 per cent. “At one level it was so simple: it happened through music, sports and using unemployed local youth as resource,” says the expert.
Among other things local primary teachers were encouraged to write out lyrics and set them to local tunes on subjects as varied as mathematics and environment. Local youth were employed with the simple brief to come in, play and sing with the students. Attendance in these schools peaked to 79 per cent on the days with music and sport periods; 76 per cent on other days. “Their songs, their sports, their school, that’s what got the children into school and made them stay there. Cultural compatibility and relevance of content and activities was their uppermost consideration,” says Mukhopadhyay.
Something Prof. Anil Sadgopal, head of the department of education in the Delhi University, has been advocating for long. “Nothing will work in this vast country if our geo-cultural plurality is not recognised as the basis for decentralised and segregated curricula development,” says the academic. Further, he suggests the concept of a locally managed Common Neighbourhood school system to be introduced by an Act of Parliament. School clusters, if Sadgopal’s concept were to be operative, would through local communities decide upon their own curricula, appoint their own teachers and monitor their own management. Centralised board exams and out-of-context syllabi would have no place in this system.
“In the beginning, many such schools would enhance results to prove their merit. But over time, the quality of the outgoing students would manifest the actual worth of each cluster. What good are the board results anyway—most institutes of higher education already have their own entrance tests over and above the standardised result the country’s education system seeks to manufacture annually,” says Sadgopal. Too revolutionary? Not really. Canada works this way. So does Switzerland.
Our politicians and their unlettered voters: The commitment of our politicians to education is pathetically wanting, to say the least. In the world’s largest democracy, where even onions have made political parties lose power, few believe that the issue of education will cost them an election! Besides, educating the Indian populace would certainly not benefit the manipulative, rhetoric-gurgling politician. Where else in civilised society would a state education ministers’ conference be boycotted by state education ministers themselves as happened some time ago? The reason for the whimsical abandonment: a frenzied argument not about how we need to educate our children but whether we should teach them the Upanishads and make them sing Saraswati vandanas.
The Constitution, though, had made a commitment to educate the country. It had envisaged having every Indian child in school by 1960 through its directive to “provide free and compulsory education for all children until they complete the age of 14 years”. If present trends continue, this promise is still, at least, half-a-century away.
Wiping clean myths and rewriting rights on the blackboard: “Many things need to be done. Allocation of funds, teachers’ moral accountability in the system, contextualising curricula. But to begin with education has to be made a Fundamental Right. While Parliament is caught up in the discussion of trivial issues, a constitutional amendment bill aimed at making every child’s fundamental right to be educated gathers dust,” points out economist Jean Dreze, who as part of an eight-member research team brought out a Public Report on Basic Education (PROBE). Conducted in over 200 villages of north India, the survey investigates the country’s schooling situation to explode some common myths.
MYTH I: Unlettered rural parents don’t want their children in school. The survey, in fact, had a resounding 80.2 per cent demanding that education be made compulsory for all children.
MYTH 2: The overworked rural child who has no time to attend class was shown to be an empty stereotype. The study revealed that the rural boy and girl child have 71 and 62 per cent of a 12-hour day free.

A Vision and a Mission: “Somehow the vision has to expand. The focus has to change from ‘we have to get kids into school’ to ‘what do we want them there for’. There’s no point in having schools everywhere if there’s no social or gender accessibility to them,” says Alan Court, representative, Unicef’s India Country Office. Putting forth a radical suggestion, Court says a Primary School Mission should perhaps be set up with University lecturers teaching children on a war-footing on their vacations: “It doesn’t have to be a permanent solution. It can be a transitory scheme to break the cycle of ignorance.”

Because it is a vicious one, this cycle of ignorance and poverty, illiteracy and deprivation. One begets the other. Till both become humungous. And both thrive. And along with them thrives the growing number of Indian illiterates: every third illiterate in the world. People are not illiterate by choice. They are illiterate because they never had the opportunity to learn, or when they had the opportunity, they lacked the motivation to learn. The fact is that when they are motivated, they can and do learn. And revel in the new found power that the ability to read and write suddenly gives them. But then, that is what our netas are mortally afraid of.