Young Achiever: Shreya Singh
Even as an Indian manned mission to the Moon remains a distant dream, a small town in Maharashtra has already entered the space age. Shreya Singh (12), a pre-teen resident of Nagothane — a tiny village 100 km from Mumbai, the country’s commercial capital — was awarded top honours in the International Space Settlement Contest 2012, organised by NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration), USA in April. A class VII pupil of the Jindal Mount Litera Zee School, Nagothane (JMLZ-N), Shreya got the first prize in the class VI-VII (individual) category besting 1,246 children worldwide for her 78-page paper titled ‘Revelation 19 — The Settlement of Mars’, a comprehensive research project detailing an alternate habitat for human settlement on the Red Planet with in-depth representation of life and its necessities. After getting briefed about NASA’s International Space Settlement contest and its requirements by her maths teacher, Kalpesh Makawana, Shreya began work on the project named after chapter 19 of the Book of Revelations of the Old Testament, which prophecies the Second Coming of Jesus Christ to establish a new terrestrial kingdom. “Conceptualising and writing the project report wouldn’t have been possible without the great support I received from my teachers and parents,’’ acknowledges Shreya, daughter of R.K. Singh, an HR professional with Maharashtra Seamless Ltd, a division of the D.P. Jindal Group and his wife Renu, a homemaker. As winner of the NASA award, Shreya was invited to the International Space Development Conference (ISDC) held in Washington DC between May 24-28 this year. Shreya’s achievement has generated great excitement in village Nagothane (pop. 10,168) and in Raigad district which typically suffers backward and inadequate infrastructure. “I hope this is a stepping stone and Shreya continues to remain motivated in school and succeeds. Talent is not restricted to urban locales; it is everywhere and we are proving it,” says Urban D’Souza, principal, JMLZ-N (student strength 150). Though the NASA award has won her plaudits and media headlines, this youngster has won several other awards at inter-school levels. Moreover she is a budding badminton player, and an avid reader of books and encyclopedias. An admirer of the great scientist Albert Einstein, Shreya reveres him as a role model. Go girl! Praveer Sinha (Mumbai)
Strong case for school vouchers
Sandeep Banerjee is the Delhi-based managing director and CEO of Edenred India After decades of neglect of a directive principle (erstwhile Article 45) of the Constitution of India to provide free and compulsory education to all children until the age of 14 years “within ten years of the commencement of this Constitution”, Parliament passed the Right to Free & Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, 2009. However, the Act limits the obligation of the State (Central and state governments) to children aged six-14 years. Moreover, it imposes an obligation upon all private — including unaided — schools to reserve 25 percent capacity in elementary school (classes I-VIII) for poor children in their neighbourhood. The RTE Act and its constitutional validity was upheld by the Supreme Court in its majority judgement in Society for Unaided Private Schools of Rajasthan vs. Union of India & Anr (2010), delivered on April 12 this year. However, even two years after the RTE Act became law, there is no clear process to implement the 25 percent reservation mandated by s. 12(1)(c) of the RTE Act for economically weaker sections in private unaided schools, barring the state of Gujarat which has framed comprehensive rules. The conundrum is whether to fund students or schools. If schools are funded, the basis and proof of admission of poor neighbourhood children will remain a challenge. On the other hand, if students are funded, establishing whether the funds will be used for education by the child or her parents poses other challenges. Moreover, there are numerous delivery mechanisms for the transfer of funds — cheques, bank drafts, direct transfers or cash as not all beneficiaries will have bank accounts. In turn, writing cheques/drafts create administrative and logistics problems while cash transfers can be misused. Against this backdrop, the education/school voucher system is arguably the best solution for implementing the provisions of s.12(1)(c). School vouchers enable parents/students to use them as a financial instrument to easily access quality private education. Conceptually, a school voucher is a non-transferable, secure instrument that allows beneficiaries to pay tuition fees at a neighbourhood primary school in lieu of money. An increasingly popular methodology being adopted by governments worldwide to close the quality gap between private and government schools is through the issuance of school vouchers directly to socio-economically deprived children. The voucher submitted by a student to the school of her choice covers the full or partial cost of education at the school. Schools collect vouchers from students send them to a third-party service provider who credits the school’s bank account with the face value amount of the voucher with the bank debiting the account of the government. Under this scheme, leakages are controlled as transparency is maintained throughout the voucher ecosystem. The flow is managed by the third-party service provider as the voucher moves from the student to school, and back to the government. Under the current system, most state schools are accountable to the government. Adoption of the voucher system will make school managements directly accountable…