Here's An Account Of How And Where Education In India Stands 72 Years After Independence
Today is National Education Day, set aside to mark the importance of education and promote it across the country. In a nation with 74.04% per cent literacy rate, there is still a void to be filled.
Access to resources, lack of reforms and discrimination on the basis of caste, creed and religion are the biggest impediments to our country getting 100 per cent literacy.
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The “Sarv Shiksha Abhiyan” was launched by the government in 2002 to provide free and compulsory education of all children in the age group of six to fourteen years as a Fundamental Right. The much-needed programme affirmed India’s commitment to the changing times and aimed to foster primary education among its citizens. This aim was to establish an easily accessible government school in rural communities and as a result, thousands of new government schools were set up. The scheme that was sought to bring changes did hit a lot of roadblocks, not just bureaucratic but from people it sought to help.
Parents from rural households refused to send their wards to school, instead they would rather their kids helped in the fields or at home doing chores. The message of education being a necessity was hard to deliver to each rural household. This is where the mid-day scheme was introduced.
The mid day scareA mid day meal scheme has been in use for decades. Supreme Court passed an order in 2001 stating "a basic entitlement of every child in every Government and Government assisted Primary Schools with a prepared Mid-day Meal with a minimum content of 300 calories and 8–12 grams of protein each day of school for a minimum of 200 days”. Over the years, this scheme did help increase footfall in schools and saw more present days as compared to absent ones.
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This was the perfect way to get children from lower strata of society, educated and nourished, and reducing the burden on poor families of feeding their kids meals at home. The scheme however, has been plagued with several controversies. Yesterday, In Assam, 41 students fell ill after consuming a mid-day meal at a high school in Tinsukia district. Last week, around 60 students of a primary school in Karnataka's Chitradurga were hospitalised after allegedly consuming mid-day meal at school.
And if this news was not disheartening enough. Public schools in Uttar Pradesh under the ruling Yogi Adityanath government were found to be feeding their children with rice and turmeric under the very same mid-day meal scheme that sought to increase the footfall in public school. Another Uttar Pradesh school was found to be feeding its children a roti and salt, as a part of the same scheme, and the local journalist who recorded the shocking visuals was instead charged with conspiracy.
India's dream of becoming a global seat of education with reputed institutions in the field of science and technology, it is still a pipe dream. How can one expect to challenge the world when we cannot bridge the gap between the quality of education that is imparted to the rich and the poor in the country. While we have world-class private schools that make use of the latest technology to educate their pupils, government school teachers in Bihar were found to be lacking the basic knowledge of alphabets, and television visuals showed teachers imparting false lessons to their children. In other words, the teachers themselves lacked the education that they were tasked to impart to their children.
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The visuals of guardians in Bihar climbing the school building in order to pass cheats to their children appearing for examination brought global shame to the country then the prevalent corruption in our education system is a travesty of all the promises that we make to ourselves in terms of educational upliftment. In another episode that surfaced only last month, a college in Karnataka came up with a solution that can simply be described as bizarre. In order to stop students from cheating during the examination, the college authorities came up with the ‘out-of-the-box’ idea to make the students don cardboard boxes over their heads. The step was taken to prevent students from cheating. But that is not all.
There is a reason that the states of Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh are combinedly referred to as the “BIMARU” states. These states fail in terms of child nutrition and education. In fact, Madhya Pradesh and Jharkhand - which was bifurcated from Bihar - are among the worst undernourished as well as illiterate states.
That’s why the mid-day meal scheme was introduced with double the vigour in these regions. Nutrition is key to better mental and physical health for children, and this includes having a protein-rich (including an egg in the meal) diet. The Madhya Pradesh BJP leader Gopal Bhargava, who is also the leader of the Opposition in the state, believes that children who eat meat could grow up to become cannibals and he made these outrageous comments against the backdrop of his party condemning the inclusion of eggs in food served to children at anganwadis in Madhya Pradesh.
Illiteracy continues to gnaw at the very existence of this country. It is not only preventing us from catching up in the race of development as compared to other nations but also depriving our very own citizens of the right to dignity and a better future. Ignorance is bliss for our leaders, and they seem to be proud to be seen making remarkably horrendous statements. Mythology and history are inter-twined on a frequent basis to refute facts.
According to a statement by union minister Piyush Goyal, Albert Einstein discovered gravity. And Maths did not help him do that. Further, the country’s finance minister blamed the attitude of millennials when she was asked to comment on the reasons behind the slowdown in the automobile industry. And Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad went a step ahead to convey that Bollywood movies doing good business on a holiday was proof enough that India’s economy was skyrocketing under the ruling dispensation.
Son: Papa, Maths ka exam hai, thoda padha do.Piyush Goyal: Don't get into maths. Maths never helped Einstein discover Gravity.Son: But Papa Einstein didn't discover Gravity.Piyush Goyal: Don't get into Science.#YoPiyushHatesMaths
— Millennial Nirmala Tai (@Vishj05)As it is, science has been taken for a toss. Newton and Einstein may be turning deep down in their graves even as our leaders twist theories to cater to their own interests, and relish the controversy they stir.
For a country that is racing for the moon and beyond, we are still a handful of privileged elites against hundreds of thousands of deprived citizens and the longer we continue to look in the oblivion, the more likely are the chances of our continued perils. We must remember that the fall of India’s education system is a story of bad economics at its heart and the abysmal budgets allocated to education by governments is the prime reason behind this sordid state of affairs.
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In May, the government drafted a new education policy and it hopes to increase the total government expenditure on education from the current 10 per cent to about 20 per cent by 2030. According to IndiaSpend, the government expenses on education is instrumental in education, child development and empowerment. States such as Himachal Pradesh and Kerala, which spend more on education than other states, have performed better on the recorded indexes, which takes into account attendance levels at primary, upper primary, secondary and senior secondary levels, as well as indicators linked with gender equality such as sex ratio at birth and early marriage.
On the flip side, and quite contrary to the government’s claims of raising the education expenditure from 10 to 20 per cent, government spending on school education has actually decreased since 2015.
On National Education Day, we should remind ourselves that good public education is a fundamental right and thousands of our citizens are deprived of it. The government needs to put its money where its mouth is but our prolonged failure in upholding their promises is only pushing us further into the trenches of illiteracy.
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