Joshi class: all ears, nose pressed

What struck me instantly, though, was the absence of upkeep. The school is housed in a fine, old-fashioned building built around a garden but, other than the Principal8217;s office, which was relatively clean, no attempt appeared to have been made at either maintenance or cleanliness. The classrooms had broken furniture and dirty floors and the garden looked as if it had not been tended in 20 years. When I asked the Principal why there was so little attempt at cleanliness, he said: 8216;8216;What to do, the government gives us money to employ only one bhangi.8217;8217; He used the word without even realising that it was pejorative.

The school8217;s 1700 students pay a monthly tuition fee of Rs 25 in the higher classes and Rs 15 at the middle and junior level and girls pay nothing at all. The 28 teachers employed by the school teach a wide range of subjects 8212; from physics to 8216;8216;radio-TV8217;8217; 8212; but I found it hard not to get the feeling that there was more tokenism than learning and the school library 8212; a gloomy room with a handful of token books locked in glass cupboards 8212; confirmed this.

At bigger schools like Agarsain and the nearby K L Shastri Inter College, there appears to be no dearth of money. Teachers8217; salaries range from Rs 10,000 to Rs 18,000 and there are proper buildings and classrooms but no atmosphere of learning, no sense that the children who graduate from these schools will need to compete in the increasingly linked global village.

If the big schools are bad, it is hard to find words to describe the wretchedness of some of the smaller primary schools I visited. They were so bad that it is hard to call them schools. At the primary school in the village of Chola, there was a single teacher who made no attempt to teach. The 8216;8216;masterji8217;8217; had gone out, she said, and she was just supervising. So, a group of bored, sleepy children of varying ages, neatly dressed and with their hair carefully combed and oiled, sat in the single classroom doing nothing.

These were village children, the teacher said, and they were not really that interested in studying. They were also lucky to be studying in a village school in relatively clean surroundings. Had they lived, a few kilometers down the road, in Khurja, they would have found themselves studying at the edge of a garbage dump.

8216;8216;You are seeing it when it8217;s not so bad,8217;8217; the teacher there said, 8216;8216;they have just cleared the garbage. Most days we have to hold our noses because the smell is so awful.8217;8217;

The children sat on the ground in the open facing the garbage dump and listening, wide-eyed, as their teacher explained that the school8217;s roof had fallen in and nobody had bothered to repair it, so all classes were held in the open on the edge of the garbage dump.

8216;8216;We have complained often to the Basic Shiksha Adhikari,8217;8217; the teacher said, 8216;8216;but nothing has been done so far. It8217;s no wonder that most of the children don8217;t like coming to school.8217;8217;

No wonder at all because not only is there the backdrop of the garbage dump but they are also forced to take their classes in a crowded square filled with cows and pigs and traffic.

Other schools I visited on my way to Mulayam8217;s home village were in similar shape. Some had no proper school house, others no teachers and most seemed like schools that had been hastily created to justify the figures in Murli Manohar Joshi8217;s glossy pamphlet.

PART I: All Maya, Joshi8217;s 8216;strides8217; invisible