Time for new strategies and ideas

JS Rajput is former director NCERT and National Council for Teacher Education The outcome of the anomalies and aberrations in implementation of education policies over the past six decades in post-independence India presents the most intriguing contrast in human development worldwide. Despite the constitutional mandate of 1950 to provide free and compulsory education to all children until they attain 14 years of age, the Right to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009 (aka RTE Act) became law 60 years later on April 1, 2010. Moreover, it encompasses only the six-14 age group. Nevertheless, although belated, the RTE Act is welcome as it has aroused great expectations, particularly within the weaker, deprived and deficient segments of the population which have been continuously suffering neglect on almost every count, particularly primary education.   India’s neo-natal mortality rate of 33 per 1,000 consumed 862,000 children in 2010. Moreover an estimated 46 percent of children below age five suffer severe malnutrition despite the nation and government having known about it for decades. The impact of chronic malnutrition on preschool and primary children is painfully obvious, reflected in the abysmal learning outcomes of rural primaries. The nationwide mid-day meal scheme — trumpeted as the world’s largest — languishes because of faulty, unimaginative and sluggish implementation by most state governments. Yet this dismal litany is only the tip of the huge subterranean mountain of depressing statistics relating to primary and upper primary education in India 65 years after independence.   Numbers and percentages aside, it’s common knowledge that only 25 percent of India’s 220 million school-going children receive elementary education of acceptable quality. The great majority are left to their fate in schools with innumerable deficiencies and deprivations, including lack of drinking water and toilets.   Those who rejoice in the reported clamour of multi-nationals to invest in India and this country’s impressive annual rate of GDP growth, would do well to ponder about factor productivity and annual rates of economic growth if 80-90 percent of the country’s children were receiving good quality education and effective skills development training. It would catalyse unimaginable transformation in every sector of the economy and India’s annual rate of GDP growth could be the envy of all nations.   In this connection, it’s a conundrum why non-bureaucratic reform options never attract the attention of governments at the Centre and in state capitals. Although the demographic advantage India has by way of the world’s largest child population has fired the imagination of several countries and belatedly even of New Delhi which has flashed the green signal to the National Skills Development Mission, obvious solutions to the intensifying shortage of teachers seem to bypass the Union government and Planning Commission.   Curiously, government and the education establishment seem to be oblivious to the ‘aged and retired but active and in good health’ segment of the country’s population. In every village, city and town, there’s a pool of retired teachers, defence personnel, government officials and others who are active, alert and willing to contribute their…