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Journalism of Courage
We still need to be educated about the right way to go on schooling. Fifty five years of efforts in this direction have yielded significant results but not nearly enough to ensure total literacy. In its report to the UN General Assembly Special Session on Children, India conceded that almost 43 million children — including 25 million girls — out of a population of 200 million in the age group of 6 to 14, are not in school. This despite constitutional guarantee that the state will ensure eight years of schooling for every child.
There is therefore an urgency about a bill that goes by the name Free and Compulsory Education for Children Bill, 2003, which is expected to be placed before Parliament in the forthcoming Winter Session. The four key reforms in this bill reflect the desperate search to lay low the spectre of illiteracy through relatively innovative approaches. For instance, the idea of bringing private schools into the picture for the first time is worthy of support. Involving institutions that have benefitted immensely from this sector — and which have a great deal of expertise to share — in the education of children from deprived backgrounds is a good thing, and it is not just the poor kids who will benefit from such close interaction with those whose lives are far removed from theirs. The success of this approach would depend crucially though on the seriousness with which it is undertaken. Tokenism is the last thing that we need in this important sector.
However, the regulatory devices the bill suggests, both to check child labour and to ensure that all children in the stipulated age group are in school, appear over ambitious. Experience from the field suggests that these, in a nation as large as this, will at best be cosmetic. Schooling is sustainable only when its beneficiaries make their own assessment of the opportunity costs involved. This is where a holistic approach, based on the general development of the hinterland, is valuable. And it can be done. Pockets of total literacy in districts considered beyond the pale like Bihar’s Madhubani and Darbhanga, demonstrate that with some political will and local energy, schooling can indeed be brought to every child.
