Frontline
Volume 20 - Issue 24, November 22 - December 05, 2003
Education
for too few
ANIL SADGOPAL
At the `Education for All'
conference held recently in Delhi, India appealed
for additional foreign funds to educate all
children. For a country that is reeling under the
fallout of the IMF-World Bank-dictated structural
adjustment programme, dependence on external
agencies might undermine national sovereignty in
framing educational policies. |
WHILE inaugurating the meeting of the
high-level group on Education For All (EFA) on November 10,
Prime Minister expressed Atal Bihari Vajpayee deep concern
about the lack of funds for elementary education in India.
Making a strong bid for additional external aid, he reminded
bilateral and multilateral aid agencies, including the World
Bank, that in the year 2000 they had made a pledge in Dakar,
Senegal, that "no country seriously committed to basic
education will be thwarted in the achievement of this goal
by lack of resources." He lamented that "the Fast Track
Initiative started by the international funding agencies in
2002 has so far been neither fast nor adequate." He seemed
to be saying that India will be willing to educate her
children only if external aid agencies shell out additional
funds. Does this not imply that the recent constitutional
amendment, making elementary education a fundamental right,
is at the mercy of aid agencies? What implications does this
`dependency syndrome' have for national sovereignty?
These questions can be answered only by
examining the logical basis of the hue and cry about fund
crunch for a task that is crucial to nation building. The
Government of India constituted the Tapas Majumdar Committee
in 1999 to estimate the funds required to ensure that
elementary education of eight years is provided to all
children. (The Dakar Framework has diluted this goal to just
five years of primary education.) The Committee estimated
that an additional investment of Rs.1,37,600 crores would
have to be made over a 10-year period to bring all
out-of-school children into the school system (not parallel
streams) and enable them to complete the elementary stage.
This works out to an average investment of Rs.14,000 crores
a year, which in 1999 amounted to a mere 0.78 per cent of
the gross domestic product (GDP); in other words, 78 paise
out of every Rs.100 India then earned. In 2002-03, the same
amount works out to a lesser proportion, that is, 0.63 per
cent of the GDP. However, the Financial Memorandum to the
Constitution (93rd) Amendment Bill, 2001 states that a sum
of Rs.98,000 crores will be required over a 10-year period
to implement the fundamental right to education for children
in the age group of six to 14 years. It works out to
Rs.9,800 crores a year on an average (0.44 per cent of the
GDP in 2002-03), about 30 per cent less than that estimated
by the Tapas Majumdar Committee.
Is the government saying that it cannot
allocate an additional sum of merely 44 paise out of Rs.100
from the national income to ensure that every child in India
exercises his/her fundamental right? Even the lowered
estimate of 44 paise out of Rs. 100 of the GDP was
eventually not allocated. Yet, at the EFA meeting, the Human
Resource Development Ministry sought to establish India's
claim to being `seriously committed' to the Dakar goals by
citing repeatedly as evidence the constitutional amendment.
The lowered estimate of the fund
requirement in the Constitutional Amendment Bill is a result
of the dilution of many of the well-accepted norms relied
upon by the Tapas Majumdar Committee. For instance, the
teacher to pupil ratio of 1:30 was reduced to 1:40; the
Operation Blackboard norm of three teachers and three
classrooms for every primary school was reduced to two
teachers and two classrooms; the cost of educating a
disabled child in an inclusive classroom was reduced from
Rs.3,000 for a child a year to Rs.1,200 a year. No pedagogic
justification was provided for the dilution of such
educationally sound norms but this has not stopped the
Ministry from continuing its rhetoric on quality education
at the EFA meeting.
The most critical dilution, however, was
conceptual (and even moral and ethical), rather than
quantitative. The government decided to replace the regular
formal schools with low-quality, low-budget parallel streams
of primary education for the educationally deprived
children, two-thirds of whom are girls. This policy stance
is apparently the result of the structural adjustment
programme of the International Monetary Fund (IMF)-World
Bank, which imposes drastic cuts in expenditures on
education, health and other social welfare sectors as a
condition for the grant of additional loans or aid.
The parallel streams included Alternative
Schools, Education Guarantee Scheme (EGS) centres and
Multi-Grade Teaching - the so-called `innovations' designed
under the canvass of the World Bank-sponsored District
Primary Education Programme (DPEP), during the 1990s. In
violation of our National Policy on Education, 1986, upper
primary education (Grades VI to VIII) was essentially
forgotten, presumably to please external aid agencies
committed to the Dakar Framework of primary education of
only five years. Also, the regular teacher was replaced by a
para-teacher who is an under-qualified, untrained and
under-paid local youth appointed on the basis of a
short-term contract.
The government was not perturbed that its
policy stance was tantamount to institutionalising
discrimination against the poor, a majority of whom would be
Dalits, the tribal people and religious or cultural
minorities, two-thirds of each segment being girls. Most of
the disabled children will also fall in this category,
earmarked for discrimination.
The policy was pushed forward ruthlessly
in spite of wide public criticism and the principle of
equality enshrined in the Constitution. The government's
refrain of `something is better than nothing' seemed to
justify, instead of questioning, the collapse of education
policies during the past 56 years. The concept of a parallel
stream was first institutionalised by the 1986 policy in the
form of non-formal education for the poor, especially child
workers.
This has been acknowledged as major
policy fault line, as it was used by the policy-makers of
the 1980s as a rationale for not focussing political
attention on the transformation of the mainstream school
system in favour of the poor, especially the girls and the
disabled children. Although the policy was committed to
establishing a common school system through the promotion of
neighbourhood schools, as recommended by the Kothari
Commission (1964-66), the parallel stream of non-formal
education became the dominant policy imperative. This
effectively marginaliesd the concept of common school system
and the constitutional principle of equality. Quality
education rapidly became the preserve of the privileged,
making education a commodity.
The Prime Minister did well by expressing
concern at the EFA meeting about the phenomenon of the
market determining the quality of education. But one cannot
ignore the fact that the policy was designed precisely to
achieve this end.
The much-hyped adult literacy programme
is an example of how attention has been diverted from the
central issue of universalisation of elementary education
(UEE). The literacy programme is akin to `mopping the floor
while the tap is on' as it seems to be waiting for half of
the children in the age group of six to 14 who are
out-of-school to become adult illiterates in the 15-35 age
group (the official group for literacy mission) so that the
literacy programme can be thrust on them. With this policy,
the literacy business will be on well beyond 2015.
There is plenty of evidence to show that
this over-emphasis on literacy, making it almost synonymous
with education, is part of the international literacy
`conspiracy', conceived by the World Bank and the agencies
of the United Nations. The Jomtien Declaration (1990),
issued by the first World Conference on EFA and followed up
in the Dakar Framework (2000), is evidence of market forces
working over-time to push the literacy paradigm in the
global education scenario. Literacy skill is all that the
masses need, argue the market forces, so that they can read
the product labels and advertisements. Its somewhat evolved
form would be adequate for factory workers to read
production instructions and to use even the Internet.
Critical thinking, creativity, scientific temper, analytical
abilities, sense of history or philosophy, aesthetic
appreciation and other such educational attributes need to
be reserved for the privileged few - this is the implication
of the literacy paradigm and the market forces. The
Ambani-Birla Report (2000), submitted to the Prime
Minister's Council on Trade and Industry, was prepared to
extend the market framework into Indian education.
THE current deterioration in the quality
of schooling, including in the private school system, can be
traced historically and pedagogically to this erroneous
policy perception. If there was even a modicum of commitment
to the UEE goal, the government would have analysed the
causes of this policy collapse and drawn useful lessons for
re-formulating the future policy framework.
Significantly, India's 1986 education
policy had made a much clearer commitment on `education for
women's equality' than the Jomtien-Dakar Framework. It
states that "education will be used as an agent of basic
change in the status of women" in order to "neutralise the
accumulated distortions of the past". It promises that
"there will be a well-conceived edge in favour of women" and
that the education system will "play a positive,
interventionist role" in their empowerment and "this will be
an act of faith and social engineering". The credit for this
clarity must go entirely to the women's movement in India.
However, the only programme that was
designed to reflect this policy insight was the Mahila
Samakhya. Its objective was to enhance the self-esteem and
self-confidence of women; build their positive image by
recognising their contribution to society, the polity and
the economy; develop their ability to think critically;
enable them to make informed choices in areas such as
education, employment and health, especially reproductive
health; and ensure equal participation in developmental
processes. But the programme remained marginal throughout
the 1990s. For every Rs.100 allocated for elementary
education in the Union Budget, hardly 25 paise was given to
it. In due course of time, even this miniscule programme
lost its basic direction.
The Jomtien-Dakar Framework does not even
refer to patriarchy as an issue and essentially reduces
girls' education to their mere enrolment in school registers
and to the provision of literacy skills. This is exactly
what happened when the World Bank-sponsored DPEP adopted the
Mahila Samakhya. The focus on collective reflection and
socio-cultural action by organised women's groups was
abandoned. It became a mere enrolment programme for the girl
child. Critical issues such as the participation of girls in
schools, gender sensitising of learning material and teacher
education and other holistic educational aims were ignored.
Unfortunately, the notion of gender
parity (ratio of enrolment of girls and boys) in the EFA
Global Monitoring Report, 2003-04 released by the United
Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation
(UNESCO) reinforces this confusion. It is a different matter
that the UNESCO report reveals that India will fail to
achieve even this diluted objective by 2015. Also, the World
Bank diluted the goal of women's education to just raising
their literacy levels and productivity (rather than
educating or empowering them) and turning them into mere
transmitters of messages related to fertility control,
health or nutrition. The Dakar Framework has now added the
ambiguous notion of Life Skills that seems to be yet another
mechanism for social manipulation and market control of the
adolescent mindset, particularly girls. India unfortunately
gave up its progressive policy on women's education in
favour of the international framework that was guided more
by the considerations of market than by women's
socio-cultural and political rights.
Policy-level recommendations to attach
Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) to every school
have been rejected. Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS),
a poor substitute for ECCE, hardly covers 20 per cent of
children in the age group of zero to six years. The
situation is unlikely to change significantly since the 86th
Constitutional Amendment, claiming to accord the status of
fundamental right to education, has excluded 160 million
children in the age group of zero to six years. Also, the
amended Article 45 has withdrawn the previous constitutional
obligation to provide free ECCE to all children below six
years of age.
The amendment implies that the girls in
the six-14 age group as well, especially those belonging to
the deprived sections, will be denied their right to
education as they will not be disengaged from sibling care.
Human Resource Development Minister Murli Manohar Joshi made
a shocking statement in Parliament on November 28, 2001,
that amounted to transferring the government's obligation in
the matter of ECCE to the NGOs and the corporate sector.
This policy stance is in consonance with
the World Bank's policy of privatisation of social services.
Even children in the six to 14 age group
have been granted the fundamental right to education with
certain conditions. As per the new Article 21A, free and
compulsory education shall be provided "in such manner as
the state may, by law, determine". This conditionality was
introduced to legitimise the system of low-quality,
low-budget parallel streams of education. The discriminatory
multiple-track education has become the backbone of Sarva
Shiksha Abhiyan in the Tenth Five-Year Plan.
(`Back-to-school' camp is the latest addition to the
multiple-track system.)
Soon, even the para-teacher will be
replaced by a postman, as the government has decided to push
correspondence courses for children in the six to 14 age
group. This implies that the girl child will be denied the
relatively more liberating atmosphere of the school rather
than her home, which is still bound by patriarchal
traditions. The introduction of correspondence courses for
children in the six to14 age group was recommended by the
National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT)
in its National Curriculum Framework for School Education,
2000. This was in violation of the 1986 policy, which
provided for open schooling only from the secondary and
senior secondary stages onwards. The NCERT has failed to
provide even a shred of research evidence to justify a
system of open schooling for this tender age group.
Worse is to come. Schedule A of `The Free
and Compulsory Education for Children Bill, 2003', which is
expected to be introduced in the winter session of
Parliament, provides for EGS Centres and Alternative Schools
with under-qualified and ill-trained para-teachers.
Amazingly, the Schedule legitimises the so-called `open
schooling' system where the postman (unlikely to be a
postwoman) will presumably deliver learning material to girl
children engaged in sibling care and domestic chores,
reinforcing gender bias. The disabled children will be
covered by the correspondence courses, making inclusive
classrooms `unnecessary'. (Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan's rhetoric
on inclusive classrooms for the disabled thus stands
exposed.) The Bill thus aims to complete the process started
by the 86th Constitutional Amendment to fulfil the dictates
of the IMF-World Bank structural adjustment programme in
elementary education.
As far as the issue of funding is
concerned, it is a myth that external aid has been helpful.
Apart from leading to serious policy dilutions and
distortions, external aid has had an adverse impact in terms
of the political will to re-prioritise the national economy
to help mobilise public resources for UEE. Soon after the
1986 policy, there was an upswing in the national effort to
mobilise state resources for elementary education.
By 1989-90, almost 4 per cent of the GDP
was spent on education, with little less than half on
elementary education. Ironically, with the influx of
external aid into the primary education sector in the 1990s,
the investment in education (including elementary education)
declined steadily to reach as low as 3.49 per cent of the
GDP in 1997-98, the same level as in 1985-86, just before
the 1986 policy came into being . Clearly, the political
will to mobilise resources for elementary education weakened
with the entry of external aid.
It is only during the last two to three
years that there has been some improvement, followed by a
declining trend again in 2001-2002, though the level of
external aid was twice as much in comparison to 1997-98.
Without a grassroots-based people's
movement, it is unlikely that the government will even
attempt to extricate itself from the trap of external
conditionalities that dilute our constitutional and policy
commitments. A genuine political movement should not be
confused with noises made by NGOs, who are co-opted
eventually (`A convenient consensus', Frontline,
January 4, 2002). The gap in resources can be met by
revising the priorities of the national economy and
rectifying the multiple distortions that have crept into the
education policy during the 1990s. UEE will be achieved only
when national sovereignty is restored with respect to policy
formulation.
Anil Sadgopal is Professor of
Education, University of Delhi, and Senior Fellow, Nehru
Memorial Museum & Library. An activist in the people's
science movement, he has a special interest in elementary
education.