Special Report

Should failing government schools be leased to NGOs?Government-NGO cooperation has become urgently necessary to revive and re-establish the country‚s 867,000 plus government primary and secondary schools as genuine centres of learning, providing the 200 million children who enroll in them annually a fair chance to step aboard the escalator of fast-track, shining India. Dilip Thakore reports K. Mariappa and his wife Anjana are daily wage (Rs.65 and Rs.50) construction workers helping to build tony homes for Bangalore‚s technology entrepreneurs and professionals. Their son Anil Kumar (13) and his two younger sisters attend a neighbourhood government primary school. Anil is a class VII student of a publicly-funded school run by the Bruhat Bangalore Mahanagar Palike (Greater Bangalore Municipal Corporation). Mariappa and Anjana‚s neighbour in a slum colony is Ramamurthy Reddy, a peon in a private printing press earning three times the monthly wages of Mariappa and Anjana. Reddy and his wife Neelima have two children ‚ Shashi (10) and his sister Thangamma (8) ‚ enrolled in a private school in the same neighbourhood, which levies a monthly tuition fee of Rs.100 per child. Although Anil Kumar‚s school has a large playground and he and his sisters get a free mid-day meal in the school, he is dependent upon the younger Shashi for tutoring him in Kannada, maths and English twice a week. “Though my children are happy in the government school, very little learning happens in their classrooms because the teachers are often absent. I would like to send my children to the convent (private) school where they teach English. But unfortunately I can‚t afford it,” says the emaciated Mariappa, speaking through a translator and wiping a tear from his eye. But tears may be in store for the Reddys as well. The cramped two-storied private primary school to which Shashi and Thangamma go may be closed down on the orders of the Karnataka state government. The school‚s management has committed the cardinal sin of teaching ‚ more accurately attempting to teach ‚ with English as the medium of instruction. However when it was licensed 12 years ago, it had undertaken to teach in the Kannada medium. The state‚s recently-appointed education minister Basvaraj Horatti is incensed by this breach of contract by over 2,600 schools (with an aggregate enrollment of 3 lakh children) to which government inspectors turned a blind eye for over a decade in return for regular pay-offs by their managements, and is determined to close them down unless they switch to teaching children in classes I-V solely in Kannada as per their licence agreement. Appeals by KUSMA (Karnataka Unaided Schools Management Association) to the high court for a stay order have proved infructuous. Now the Reddys are frantically searching for a legally established English medium school for Shashi and Thangamma, with little success because most of them are full up and/or much too expensive. This perhaps over-detailed morality tale with strange twists and turns provides an insight into all that‚s gone wrong with post-independence India‚s primary school system.…