The government should stop asking parents to send their children to school. After all, they learn precious little there.
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While the Sarva Siksha Abhiyan and the mid-day meal scheme are bringing in more children to government schools, truant teachers and crumbling infrastructure ensure that they don’t pick up the basics, says the Planning Commission.
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And how will they, when on any given day, over 25 per cent of teachers skip schools and of the ones who turn up — only 50 per cent of bother to teach?
Despite that, only one principal in 3,000 has ever fired a teacher for absenteeism or teaching standard. So, after four years of schooling, 38 per cent of the children can’t read sentences meant for class II. About 55 per cent can’t divide a three-digit number by a single digit.
The number of teachers is inadequate. At the national level, the student: teacher ratio is a respectable 1:45.
But it is as high as one teacher for 74 students in Bihar, 73 in Jharkhand, 57 in Uttar Pradesh and 56 in Orissa.
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Not surprisingly, the abysmal quality is driving children, especially girls, away. “The national average dropout rate is as high as 31 per cent,” says a government official. “Girls and students from the reserved categories constitute the highest percentage of dropouts,” the official said.
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Not surprisingly, the abysmal quality is driving children, especially girls, away. “The national average dropout rate is as high as 31 per cent,” says a government official. “Girls and students from the reserved categories constitute the highest percentage of dropouts,” the official said.
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The national average might be 82 girls for every 100 boys in school, but Bihar and Rajasthan have less than 40 girls in school for every 100 boys.
The commission has prescribed a course correction in the 11th plan, starting from the 2007-08 fiscal.
Infrastructure and quality of education should be on a par with Kendriya Vidyalaya standards. The Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan should be extended to the secondary level. Decentralisation of the school system and a focus on jobs are among its other suggestions.
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.
