Gandhi Fellowship: From India to Bharat: Aditya Natraj and one Gandhi Fellow on 'Problems of Primary Education in India'

Beyond the realm of armchair talk to walking grassroot realities

The Kaivalya Education Foundation (KEF), the first of its kind in India, was conceived by the necessity that preceded it. The necessity spun out of the fact that teachers and headmasters of government schools, though trained well to be inside the classroom, were being deprived of appropriate and adequate training to run a school as an independent unit. This was largely due to a complete absence or careless scarcity of available options in terms of institutions to meet this need. This need was congruent to certain researches that showed that low standards of quality in learning are directly related to low levels of proficiency in running a school.

To strike at the root of this problem, KEF devised the Principal Leadership Development Program (PLDP) in Rajasthan. Only recently garnering state support via an MOU, the PLDP although had unwound its initial stages at the grassroots level since January this year, consolidating the requisite support from the lower echelons of local and district departments up to the state educational departments. This was done from down to up instead of up to down to ensure that sustenance for this initiative remains with the passage of time.

The PLDP ultimately places keen focus on the Headmaster/ Principal as it is believed that if appropriate and adequate assistance to them in the arenas of personal, social, instructional and institutional functioning is provided a change in schools is sure to be noted. The school as a unit is but viewed as a triangle with the HM at the top, the teachers in the middle and the students the largest mass at the bottom. It was logically derived that the HM receiving training from the top would divulge quality for it to filter down to the bottom.
To transport the PLDP from the boundaries of filed papers, posters and spoken word into a breathing reality, the Ajay G. Piramal Foundation supported the creation of the Gandhi Fellowship. This brought together able and compassionate youth from colleges in and around Delhi as fellows, all strung together by the oneness of cause.

Jhunjhunu: More Than A Funny Sounding Word

The coming together of eleven people: all from different backgrounds, all with different utopias, all with different methods in their peculiar madness, all with different passions and biases, but needled into the same thread by the singularity of belief and cause – sustainable change – within the self and in the targeted environment, that of government schools.

Leaving behind friends, televisions, movie halls, malls, cloistered academic lives and everything else urban, apart from the contrast it constantly provides, us folk came around to Jhunjhunu like a breeze here to stay. After excursions into the town and swallowing all of the little it had to offer one felt at home in these new environs. From making friends with the juice and cigarette guy to having made acquaintances of the waiters at the town’s only two restaurants, life here in its limited space has managed to offer endless bounty in terms of peeling new experiences.

It is, however, the incursions into the villages that will not ever be gratified. From earning the wrath of the bus conductor for making anachronistic noise to arguing ceaselessly about the pros and cons of purdah (oppression of the woman to protection from sun), from gazing cows and camels to restless flowers in tranquil landscapes, from smoking cigarettes behind the elaborate pillars of abandoned wells (dhaani) to conversing with heavily jeweled women, and so much more that there will be justice only if it is seen with one’s own eyes and felt by the heart.

After a long day (which would include getting ready, gobbling a quick bite while slowing down for relishing slurps of tea, riding the motorbike at average speed into the assigned village for an assigned task which can range from interaction with the sarpanch to teaching students math, that too in Hindi laced with broken Rajasthani!, coming back home/office, reflecting over the day’s incidents and experiences, sharing it with peers, bitching about the cook’s turmeric dosed food) one finally retires to the room or the roof where the moon and her harem of stars nurse…

Sunday, November 8, 2009

Aditya Natraj and one Gandhi Fellow on 'Problems of Primary Education in India'

http://www2.dw-world.de/southasia/South_Asia/1.235743.1.html

Primary Education in India is the Country's Problem Child

Many primary school children in India don't have proper teachers to train them
Sixty-two years after India’s independence, many of India's children are still not getting schooling. Although a constitutional directive urges all states to provide free and compulsory education for all children up to the age of 14, India is still far from achieving it.
More than 80 percent of India's children start school in the first grade, but less than 50 percent continue up to grade eight -- which means that dropout rates are high. That's what the latest official statistics say. The government of India started a Sarva Shiksha or "Education for all" plan in 2001 and pledged that by 2005 it would get every Indian child into school.
Disparity between enrolment and attendance
While this has lead to more than 90 percent enrolment rates in some places, many non-governmental reports have found that many students are just registered while on average only 70 percent of them attend classes. Aditya Natraj, Programme Director of the Gujarat state operations of Pratham, India’s largest educational NGO, explains the disparity between enrolment and attendance:
"Some children are enrolled there because teachers are pressured to enrol a large number of children in order to keep their jobs. But actually those children are studying in a local private school or dropped out from the school but you still keep them on the rolls. The other reason can be that schools are designed as per the urban lifestyle so the rural schools do not have any break for the harvesting season when children go to work to bring in the harvest. The third reason is that unfortunately in several schools teacher attendance is itself very weak."
Sugandha, a so-called Gandhi fellow, is attached to an organisation which works with the government to improve education in rural India, and is based in a village in Rajasthan in Northern India. "Teachers are there in the school but they do not go to the classes to teach", she says. "They see it as a burden to teach the students."
Many students are attracted to school to get a free lunch offered there by the government. But even then, Sugandha says, the quality of education provided in the rural schools is a problem: "Many times, even a standard 7 student does not know how to read and write. They do not know ‘A, B, C, D’. They are not able to form sentences."
Lagging behind China
India's failure in primary education becomes more apparent when compared to its neighbour China which has long attained almost full literacy. Aditya Natraj explains why India is lagging behind:
"India spends three and a half percent of its GDP on education while China spends six percent on education and until we make that provisioning we are not going to catch up with China. So it's basically financial provisioning. Apart from that there are a lot of technical issues. In order to educate such a large number of children you need a lot of capacity development of a large number of teachers, improving the quality of schools."
Experts agree that a dramatic change is needed to improve the education system of India from grassroots level, including stricter checks on the functioning of schools and the quality of teaching. Otherwise, many bright minds will continue to lack a proper education in India, which is more and more relying on knowledge-based industries to compete on world markets.
Author: Debarati Mukherjee
Editor: Grahame Lucas