Sunday, August 23, 2009

School Chale Hum....


MILLENIUM DEVELOPMENT GOAL 2:
ACHIEVE UNIVERSAL PRIMARY EDUCATION

Target 1: Ensure that, by 2015, children everywhere, boys and girls alike, will be able to complete a full course of primary schooling


This is the picture of a child in Bayakemutia Village of banspal in Keonjhar. He has never gone to school..

One of my favourite vision is of children going to school..Do not know the reason..when i am out on my field visits, it just elates me..to see rows of kids..young and younger..hair neatly combed down..uniforms..feet still without chappals..but walking still..with the books in hands..in polythene packets..in cloth bags..in school bags..

but going to school..

that's one vision that completely elates me..engulfs me..and specially when it is the girl children..That's one occasion when i feel, beyond my regular cynicism..that things will change..we still have hope..and tomorrow will be a better day..and that ad of "School Chale Hum..", don't remember whose election campaign that was, but..beautiful..and captures the soul of millions of children in India who are still out of schools..

Today is Ganesh Chaturthi, when thousands of kids in India will pick up a chalk pencil for the first time, and as in Odisha, start their educational careers with three "OOO" which once stood for Bramha, Vishnu, Maheswar, but i guess in the modern day scenario, it is the Legislature, Judiciary and Executive, the three big zeros of our democracy..

My cynicism apart, Parliament has adopted ‘The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Bill, 2009,’ which envisages free and compulsory education to children in the 6-14 age group with the Lok Sabha approving it by voice vote and the Rajya Sabha passing the Bill on July 20.The law would ensure that the child got free, compulsory and quality education by qualified teachers.It would also lay importance on local language as a medium of instruction, less rigorous course curriculum and importance on all round development. There are many other things that this law says..but this much is mouthful already.
 
Let's forget the point that India took 62 long years to pass a bill which should not have taken so long in coming..let's forget that the law in October 2006 banned child labor in hotels, restaurants, and as domestic servants and i'm still to find a restaurant, a hotel which doesn't have a child as a labour. In fact, in the last meeting at one of the leading hotels at Bhubaneswar, attended by the ministers, et al, it were the kids , aged about 10-13, passed for "above 15" in ill fitting uniforms , serving out drinks..But, i digress yet again.

Let's also conveniently forget that majority of the country is still illiterate, majority of those still live in dire poverty and incommunicable ares, where schools do exist, but without a building and any teacher..Let's forget that there is one teacher per hundred children in many places, and the one teacher is also the cook of the mid-day meal programme, the surveyor of the government, the supervisor in elections, the trainee in umpteen number of sub-standard trainings..

Well..before i get kicked by my friends for being such a pain in you-know-where, , i can say, there still is a silver lining..There are many people in and out of the government who are genuinely concerned about the quality of education, the student -teacher ratio, the course-curriculum that goes beyond the very hackneyed education which is based more on mugging up facts and reproducing them accurately, rather that igniting minds, that APJ AK, our ex-President believed it..Nehru, besides all his crankiness believed that children were the future..well, at least he put certain shapes in place, whose wheels have started moving now..There are NGOs like PRATHAM, CHIP, MOBILE CRECHE, PRAKALPA, EGG, and zillions of others doing some really great and innovative work..


There are also people like XYZ in the outskirts of Ranchi, a certain lady in outskirts of Bengaluroo, in Delhi, who are at grassroots, doing experimental teaching with excellent results..The challenge is to bring them to a single platform..the government, the planners, the educationist, and the scientists in education, that's what i'd like to call them..and understand how these all can be put together..

We all have a common dream..a bright india, an educated india...My husband-select has some crazy dreams about doing that..bringing them all to a single platform..and me being crazier, will go ahead with him in his dream..

[Photograph clicked by me in a remote village in banspal during my field visits . Editing of the photograph done by Udit K ]