Education Ministry should be taught the basics

What difference will it make if it is a fundamental right? Does the government expect that this right will inspire millions of the poorest, most illiterate of our citizens to take the Education Minister to court when their children have no schools to go to? These are the same people, please remember, who have the fundamental right not to have their daughters raped in police stations, their sons killed in custody.

It happens all the time and yet how many people go to court? Would they dare then to try and demand their children’s right to elementary education? Of course not. All that this latest gimmick from the Education Ministry tells us is that at the highest levels of government there is still no comprehension of why we have been unable to provide full literacy in fifty years of Independence.

Announcements of grandiose schemes and gimmicks come easily to the Education Ministry, we have had any number of them. Operation Blackboard, Each one Teach One, Navodaya Vidyalayas and, most recently from Maharashtra’s Education Department, the attempt to reduce the weight of schoolbags.

Schools in our most industrialised state have been ordered to ensure that this measure be implemented by cutting down on notebooks and geometry boxes.

They will also have to try and cut down the syllabus by 15 per cent. It’s hard to think of a sillier, more uncomprehending set of measures. For a start who is going to police the schoolbags? Will Maharashtra now set up a schoolbag police squad who will spend their time stopping children on their way to school to weigh their bags? How farcical can we get.

In the 21st century, India will have the largest number of illiterate people on Earth and we still close our eyes to the fact that no country in the world has been able to achieve high rates of literacy without making elementary education compulsory.

It is now summer time and most of our ministers will be off on various foreign tours to study any number of obscure things could we have one excursion for our education ministers to go and study how they can go about making elementary education compulsory?

Usually what happens is that you begin with the first two classes. You budget and plan accordingly and in our case we would need to make special provisions for our four Bimaru states (Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh) where literacy levels are way below the national average.

In these states an extra-special effort will be needed to ensure that there are schools and teachers and that, as far as possible, these are controlled by panchayats at the village level. This is the only hope we have of spending the money where it should be spent instead of on vast networks of officials whose main concern is not mass literacy but a government job.

One of the most sickening sights in this our fiftieth year of Independence is that of small children, sometimes no older than three and four, selling newspapers at traffic lights late into the night when most adult workers have gone to bed. We are told that this horrific practice, as well as other equally horrific practices like small children working in dangerous jobs, cannot be stopped because their parents are too poor.

This is nonsense. If children were forced to go to school their parents would find some other way of supplementing their incomes.

If we really want full literacy for India in the 21st century we cannot allow any more excuses nor can we afford to allow education ministries to get away with any more silly gimmicks. Mr S. R. Bommai needs to ask himself what difference his new fundamental right will make to the child who is forced to sell newspapers at midnight by his parents.