State of schooling

The contrast between north and south India in terms of human development indices is so sharp that some remarkable developments in a northe...

The contrast between north and south India in terms of human development indices is so sharp that some remarkable developments in a northern state called Himachal Pradesh has been largely overlooked. Early last year, the Public Report on Basic Education (PROBE), which was released by Amartya Sen, pointed out, for the first time, that this hill state was well on the way to achieving total literacy within a few years and was, in fact, next only to Kerala and Goa in terms of its literacy levels. This newspaper revisited the region a few days ago, keeping in mind the PROBE findings, and has reported that Himachal’s primary education revolution is very much on course.

What has been Himachal’s most conspicuous gain is in having been able to impart social value to education. The pride in being literate manifests itself in innumerable ways but the marriage index is the most eloquent. In most of northern India, parents are discouraged from sending their daughters to school because they believe that education will ruin their chances in the marriage market. In Himachal, by contrast, parents are convinced that no one will marry their daughters if they don’t know how to read and write! The figures bear this out — in 1991, only 52 per cent of the women in the state were literate, today the figure is 86 per cent — only marginally lower than that of their male counterparts. What is even more heartening is that the dropout rate — the bane of education activists everywhere else in the north — is so low in Himachal as to be almost negligible.

This leads to an obvious question. How did Himachal Pradesh buck the trend? What were the factors that helped it register success when other states in the region failed so abysmally? At the outset, there are some basic socio-economic markers that need to be acknowledged. The great discrepancies between various communities caused by rigid caste hierarchies are relatively absent in the hill state and early initiatives in land reform have created a far more egalitarian social structure than that prevailing in states like UP and Bihar. Besides this, women here have traditionally enjoyed a fair degree of independence and female-headed households are not uncommon given the fact that a significant proportion of the adult male population migrates out of the state in search of employment. While these are engendering factors, the direct agency of the State in encouraging literacy should also not be ignored.

The government-run total literacy campaign embarked upon in the late eighties and through the nineties helped raise popular consciousness on the merits of schooling. Himachal is one of the few states that invests Rs 700 per capita, per annum on education — which is roughly twice that of the national average. This investment has paid off in several ways — both in terms of penetration and quality of education. There are some 16,000 schools in the state, which means that there is a school within a 1.5-km radius of every child. But the most encouraging sign of all is that the odium attached to government schools that is manifest in most parts of the country is missing here because government-run schools here are actually delivering. There are important lessons to be learnt in the Himachal experiment for states like UP and Bihar.

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