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Journalism of Courage
How unchanging can rhetoric be? The state’s track record on women’s education provides an answer. Homilies about women’s education that can be found in the 10th five year plan are the same as those that we have been hearing for the last three decades — educating a woman will ensure that her children are educated, reduce fertility, ensure hygiene, increase life expectancy etc.
Yet a close look at the budget for 2003, clearly indicates that the government is not putting money where its mouth is.
Budget 2003 does not accord priority to education. A meager 5 per cent of the total central plan outlay has been marked for education for 2002-2007. The education budget itself reflects a hierarchy of entitlements to resources.
Adult education is the Dalit in this hierarchy, as it gets a paltry 4.9 per cent share of the 5 per cent allotment to the education sector. But you can get lower than that. Lower than the Dalit is the Dalit woman. In a curious way, she is invisible in the present budget too with the budget head of women’s education being scrapped in the 10th five year plan!
Mahila Samakhya, the ministry of human resources development’s flagship programme for women’s education, finds itself subsumed in the budget, within the head of ‘Elementary Education’. It gets a meager 0.06 per cent of the resources allocated for elementary education. The gains are minimal but the price it pays is high.
Collapsing an adult women’s education programme within ‘Elementary’ education rather than locating it within adult education is indicative of the state’s priorities. With the success of the Mahila Samakhya programme in developing women’s strength in communication, it has become a plum proposition to enroll its workers as mobilisers in getting children to school as part of the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (the state, of course, never speaks of anything less than campaigns and missions).
It is evident that the 10th plan no longer even wishes to teach the woman in order to teach her family. It merely wishes to involve her in getting children to school. Women’s role both within and outside the home, seems to be the same — invisible and poorly paid.
In the Sarv Shiksha Abhiyan, women do not find any new possibilities or roles. The category of ‘Sarv’ clearly does not include them. We also have before us a case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand does. In the 10th plan itself, the chapter on woman and child identifies women’s education as a priority in its plan for social empowerment of women. It calls for “a consolidation of the progress made under female education towards the goals set in the National Policy of Education”.
Yet we find neither vision or strategy as to how women’s literacy is to be sustained. What we do have in the 10th plan document as well as the budget notes of 2003 is a call for an efficiency approach in adult education, which essentially translates as cutbacks in institutional investments and minimal investments in post literacy and continuing education.
This talk of efficiency is ironic. In the absence of a strategy for sustaining women’s literacy, precious resources are being lost. Literacy missions across the country are busy in ‘mopping up’ operations. Literacy volunteers are being implored, yet again, to do their bit for the cause of literacy.
Literacy figures are chased without any long term vision of how this is going to be sustained. Women forget how to decode the alphabets and the state is back to mopping them up.
The sooner the state recognises that unless it invests sufficient resources, both financial and human, towards concrete strategies to enable women to gain and use literacy in ways empowering for them, the 10th plan target of achieving full literacy to a sustainable threshold level — 75 per cent by 2005 — will at best remain a dream.
