EDUCATION TO ALL by 2010: A HIT OR A

MYTH
“If you are planning for a few years, grow crops.
If you are planning for a hundred years, grow trees.
And if you are planning for a thousand years, educate
your children!”
-A
Chinese saying

Education encompasses teaching and learning specific

skills, and also something less tangible but more profound:
the imparting of knowledge, positive judgment and well-
developed wisdom. Education has as one of its fundamental
aspects the imparting of culture from generation to
generation). Education means 'to draw out', facilitating
realization of self-potential and latent talents of an
individual. The education of an individual human begins at
birth and continues throughout life. For some, the struggles
and triumphs of daily life provide far more instruction than
formal schooling (thus Mark Twain's admonition to "never let
school interfere with your education"). Family members may
have a profound educational effect — often more profound
than they realize — though family teaching may function
very informally.

Education is regarded as the most crucial investment in

human development. It significantly contributes to
improvement in health, hygiene, demographic profile,
productivity and so on –all those things that have a bearing
on the quality of a life of a nation”, so says the Ninth Five
year plan document. Our awareness notwithstanding, our
ranking in the annual HRD report (our educational status is
an integral part of this report) issued by the UNDP is
somewhere near the rock bottom. This is indeed not
surprising, for our country has the largest number of
illiterates in the world – a mind boggling 300 million adult
illiterates.
The inevitable question arises: how is that, even after sixty
years of independence, we are still far away from the goal of
universal literacy? Why have we come at such a sorry pass?
The reasons are not far to seek. India has been investing
much less than many Asian countries in terms of educational
expenditure. Besides, improper planning and poor
implementation have dogged our educational system.
Without mincing words, we can say that we lack the political
will to take the right steps to achieve total literacy.
Experts who have made an in-depth study of the chronic
problem of child labour have found that one of the positive
ways to tackle it is through the universalization of primary
education. Where the parents themselves are literate and
where the family realizes that the education child stands to
gain by going to school. In such societies one finds an
appreciable decline in the incidence of child labour. It is
indeed criminal injustice to children when they are forced to
work out of sheer poverty or out of ignorance and lack of
motivation on the part of parents; lakhs of children are made
to work in cottage industries, hotels, and eateries, auto
workshops or other vocations. At a time when a child ought
to be playing or studying in a school, many children are
compelled to carry too heavy burden on their frail shoulders.
At construction sites, you can see children carrying bricks or
helping the working women by looking after the younger
children. What a waste of young human resources!
The Ministries of Labour & Social Justice & Empowerment
have taken several steps to tackle the chronic problems of
child labour. Monetary incentives and income generation
projects are being implemented for poor families who are
thereby motivated to send their children to school and
wherever there are areas of child labour concentration,
special schools have been started. But these measures are
at best palliative and do not tackle child poverty, illiteracy
and problem of child labour in their totality. The crux of the
matter is that there is no alternative to compulsory primary
education.
For more than five decades, we have been harping on
universalisation of elementary education, but it was only
under the Vajpayee regime that it could be possible to make
primary school a fundamental right through a constitutional
amendment. Can we look forward to an immediate future
where we will not see a single child working in a hotel or a
domestic shop or as a domestic help or as a helper in an
automobile workshop or any of the hazardous industries
across the country? We cannot afford to have two India’s: an
India where children, smartly dressed in uniforms, go to
school and the ‘other’ India where children slog in factories
making carpets, matches, fireworks, glasses and locks.
Education alone can empower children to become self–
respecting citizens who can ultimately help both rural and
urban India in getting rid of their poverty.
An estimated 7.5 million youth enter the workforce every
year in our country without the benefit of a high school
education and most have no skills for the job market. This is
creating an embarrassing situation where one section of the
young, leap forward in our knowledge society and another
turn out to be drudges slogging in unskilled or semi-skilled
jobs with low pay and forced to work in exploitative
conditions.
The Ninth Five-Year Plan treats education as the most crucial
investment in human development. The Prime Minister’s
Special Action Plan (SAP) had stressed the need for
expansion and improvement of social infrastructure in the
field of education. A week before the Finance Minister, Mr. P.
Chidambaram presented the budget for the fiscal year 2005-
06, there had appeared an interesting news item that only
47 of the 100 children enrolled in Class I reach Class VIII. And
this happened four years after the government adopted the
“Mission Mode” to universalize elementary education
through Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA).
The high dropout rate can be attributed to a “lack of
adequate facilities, large–scale absenteeism of teachers and
inadequate supervision by the local authorities”. Is there
anyone accountable for this sorry state of affairs even after
60 years of independence, several months after we made
access to elementary education a Fundamental Right and
after the ritual of allocating funds for the sector in the Five-
Year plans and in every budget?
In elementary education & literacy, the biggest chunk of the
pie has gone to SSA that seeks to ensure the universalization
of elementary education by 2010 and we seem to be having
doubled the allocation of Mid-day meals in order to retain
poor children in elementary schools. Yet the HRD Minister
during Vajpayee’s regime, Mr. Arjun Singh, said the
dropout rate at the elementary level was 52.79% with that at
the primary level (Class I to V) being 34%.
What is the use of allocating huge funds for SSA in every
budget when such a laudable scheme is taking the country
nowhere and has fallen short of expectations? Have we ever
made an evaluation of the different schemes for which huge
funds have been allocated every year? It is high time that
the performance of every scheme in the social sector has to
be thoroughly evaluated before any further allocation is
made.
There is no use of blaming the teachers for the poor
performance of SSA. There is no dearth of good schemes but
the trouble lies in half-hearted implementation of the
programmes and the lack of motivation among school
teachers and the poor infrastructural facilities. We have not
bettered teacher – student ratio and we have not lent a
vocational bias in the curriculum of elementary and primary
schools. Parents refuse to send their daughters to schools
situated pretty far away from home for obvious security
reasons, and the incidence of school dropouts still remains
very high. A few States like Tamil Nadu pioneered the
Midday Meals Scheme to cut down the dropout rate and
provide supplementary nutrition to school children and in the
process wean the children away from the lure of child labour.
Many schools are still being run in dilapidated buildings or in
the open without any protection from the vagaries of nature.
We have to see whether the funds do really reach the
beneficiaries. It is absolutely essential that the problem of
universal elementary education is tackled so as to attain
education to all by 2010 through a powerful mass movement
with clearly perceived goals involving the Central and State
governments, the Municipal Corporations, Municipalities, the
Panchayati Raj institutions, NGO’s the media and every other
supportive agency in society. It is now universally
acknowledged that the best antidote to the problem of child
labour is universalization of elementary education. It is a
happy augury that the Constitution (86th Amendment) Act
2002 made the right to education a Fundamental right.
There is an urgent need to impart necessary training to
primary school teachers in order to bring down incidence of
dropouts and the high rate of attrition of primary school
teachers.
Emphasis is also laid on the skill upgradation and the
continuation of education package which offers a host of
programmes like income – generating, quality of life
improvement and individual interest promotion. The
launching of EDUSAT, a satellite for purely educational
purposes, on September 20 2004, marks a great leap
forward in the area of satellite education. Only these steps
can transform India into a World Power, free from the
clutches of pauperism, illiteracy and unemployment; and
resilient with economic prosperity, national security and
internal harmony.

Finally, I shall borrow the words of Rabindranath

Tagore to say that “ Where the mind is without fear
and the head is held high; where knowledge is free…”