Design a new transformative education agenda for Muslims
Focus on expanding programmes for the education of 21 million Muslim children under six years; 12 years of quality school education for 27 million Muslim students; and education and training opportunities for 31 million Muslim out-of-school and college youth under 25 years
Few know that Muslims — and not Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Scheduled Tribes (STs) — have the lowest rates of school and higher education enrolment in India. Far fewer are aware that Indian Muslim children (under five years) have the highest rates of stunting, resulting mainly from chronic childhood malnutrition. Equally unrecognised are the 31 million poor and lower-middle-class Muslim youth (under 25 years), outside the formal education system, whose numbers are larger than their disadvantaged Muslim peers enrolled in schools and colleges.
Muslim educational reform debates, therefore, cannot continue to be limited to schools and colleges, madrasas, and Urdu. They must also include the development of young vulnerable Muslim children as stunting in the overall child population, for example, has a diminishing effect on later school performance and intellectual development, adult earnings, and the national economy. Moreover, as the vast majority of out-of-school and college-disadvantaged Muslim youth (under 25 years) drop out before completing Class 8 or soon after, their limited literacy, numeracy, and life-sustaining skills and knowledge — currently unaddressed — should also feature in Muslim educational reform discussions.
Muslims are among the most socio-economically and politically marginalised groups in India. If a transformational education is to be the lifeline for lifting Muslims from the morass that they find themselves in, a new agenda must prioritise the development and educational needs of poor and lower-middle-class Muslims (under 25 years), composing the vast majority of India’s Muslims.
This agenda should, therefore, focus on improving and expanding programmes for the development and education of 21 million Muslim children under six years; 12 years of quality school education for 27 million Muslim students; and education and training opportunities for 31 million Muslim out-of-school and college youth under 25 years. The main National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 goals are similar, but cover only children (under six years) and school students, while the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for education and health cover all three groups, including youth outside the formal educational system.
In implementing this agenda, Muslim organisations and civil society groups have a crucial role in two main areas: Initiating community-level institutional initiatives and rights-based advocacy with government. These community-level interventions should compensate disadvantaged Muslim households and communities for their limited social and cultural capital, which their wealthier counterparts have in comparative abundance, and primarily accounts for their children’s far more successful development, education, and career outcomes.
Such compensatory community-level initiatives for vulnerable Muslims include learning support classes and English classes, academic and career counselling, continuing education and skill development for students and youth, and for older married Muslim youth — family planning, health, and parental education.
The enormity of implementing large-scale quantitative and qualitative programmes for improving the development and education of 79 million disadvantaged Muslims (under 25 years) cannot be underestimated. These three groups — from poor and lower-middle-class Muslim households — were estimated to be roughly 79 million Muslims (under 25 years) in 2020-21. This group is larger than the population of France, Italy, or South Africa. Only the government — central, state, and sub-state — has the primary responsibility, and the human and financial resources capable of undertaking this Herculean task.
Therefore, rights-based advocacy by Muslim organisations and civil society groups is critical to ensure the proper implementation of official schemes. Muslims, especially, cannot expect governments to act effectively on their behalf without sustained advocacy and monitoring of performance.
Such advocacy cannot be undertaken without interventions to ensure that government agencies publish detailed development and educational statistics that are currently publicly available for SCs and STs, but not for Muslims — for example, the learning surveys of National Council of Educational Research and Training, and enrolment statistics for Navodaya Vidyalayas and Kendriya Vidyalayas. Without such comprehensive data, schemes for disadvantaged Muslims can neither be properly designed nor monitored and evaluated.
Advocacy with the government will be especially challenging due to grave omissions in NEP, which states are rolling out. For example, while specific recommendations are detailed for SCs and STs, Muslims are conspicuously not mentioned in the document. Also missing in the 2020 NEP are comprehensive schemes for all disadvantaged youth outside the formal educational system.
The Covid-19 pandemic will ensure a further deterioration in the unacceptably high rates of child malnutrition and negatively impact access and retention in schools of all disadvantaged groups and their quality of learning. Muslim organisations and civil society groups must, therefore, advocate with government authorities such as the Integrated Child Development Services for the development of the nutritional needs of Muslim children (under six years), while their community-level initiatives need to persuade poor Muslim parents to send and retain their children in schools, and also provide neighbourhood support classes for these students to cope with their recent learning losses.
In the deepening existential crisis among Indian Muslims, implementing a transformative education agenda for poor and lower-middle-class Muslims under 25 years will be their indispensable lifeline to significantly improving their position and inclusion in the Indian polity, and also contribute to the development of the country.
John Kurrien has recently completed an online report on the education of Indian Muslims, Lifting Indian Muslims from the Bottom of the Development and Education Ladder: A Transformative Agenda for the 21st Century
The views expressed are personal
