If there’s any initiative that the government can count on all citizens to give it their whole-hearted support, it is for education projects. Which is why so few complained about the education cess that was introduced last year. Having said that, the government should realise that its arbitrary dumping of the responsibilities and costs of primary schooling projects on privately run institutes is unfair. In fact, it tells us a lot about its inability to use the money it has gathered through the education cess. Now that the Delhi High Court has stayed an HRD Ministry-inspired CBSE circular stating that the cost of education of girls who are their parents’ only child be borne by private schools, it is time to have a relook at some of the garbled initiatives and haphazard implementation of well-intentioned schemes.
The HRD initiative of freeship to a girl child after Class VI is fundamentally flawed. The midday meal is a similarly noble enterprise, but its continued mismanagement in the hands of NGOs (pilferage of truckloads of rice being the latest case) is well documented. The integration model imposed upon private schools which were expected to devise novel ways to bridge the economic divide in the classroom met with limited success. Thus the gap between free students and fee-paying ones had to be borne by the schools. Several private schools have admirable projects in place to teach underprivileged children by running parallel ‘afternoon schools’, slum schools and special classes for vocational training of underprivileged women — all without government help.
Which brings us back to the cess. The 2 per cent education cess, expected to amass Rs 40-50 billion per annum, was to be used to drive various literacy projects. But there’s little on-ground activity to show that schools have been opened in remote areas, infrastructure beefed up in rural India, enrolment incentivised or teacher training modules launched across the country. Our message to the government: start with the alphabet; you can always write magnificent poetry later.