West Bengal: Cosmetic reforms

After having established herself as the undisputed mass leader of West Bengal (pop. 91 million) following her landslide victory in the 16th legislative assembly elections held in May 2016, chief minister Mamata Banerjee has now focused her attention on education by introducing a slew of populist reforms to revive the state’s languishing primary-secondary school system. During the past six months, the state government has recruited teachers for government schools, issued directives to regulate tuition fees of private schools and made Bengali a compulsory subject in all primary-secondary schools.  Banerjee’s crackdown on private schools is being interpreted as a political initiative to boost her image and popularity in West Bengal, and establish her as an regional opposition leader of substance. With the General Election 2019 a mere 18 months away and efforts being made by opposition parties to forge a mahagathbandhan (grand alliance) against the BJP, the ruling party at the Centre, Banerjee is consolidating her base in West Bengal to establish herself as a force to be reckoned with in the proposed grand alliance, if and when it’s put together. Hence, her initiatives to improve government school education while bringing ‘elite’ private schools to heel.  Banerjee’s TMC (Trinamool Congress) government also proposes to amend the West Bengal Board of Secondary Education Act, 1963, to make Bengali a compulsory subject in 95,000 government schools and 9,725 private schools including 1,000 CISCE, CBSE and international schools statewide. Under the amendment, all schools — government or private — affiliated with the West Bengal Board of Secondary Education (WBBSE) will be required to use Bengali as the medium of instruction in classes I to VIII. The only exceptions will be schools in areas notified under the Gorkhaland Territorial Administration Act, where Nepali is the first language. Inevitably, some academics have welcomed the proposal to make Bengali the medium of instruction in all state board primaries. But Swapan Mandol, assistant general-secretary of the Bengal Teachers and Employees’ Association, believes that the proposed amendment is a populist red herring unlikely to pass legal scrutiny. “The infrastructure of primary schools in Bengal is abysmal with 40 percent of schools without libraries, 36 percent without toilets for girls, and 96 percent without computers. Instead of focusing on these serious issues, the TMC government is imposing cosmetic and needless changes to the curriculum and disrupting the school education system,” says Mandol. Curiously, state officials seem to be unaware of a Supreme Court judgement of 2014 in which a constitution bench ruled that the choice of medium of instruction in primary school is of a child’s parents/guardians and not of the state. A 1994 notification of the Karnataka government which imposed Kannada as the medium of instruction for all primary schools was struck down as violative of Article 19 (1) (a) of the Constitution (freedom of speech). However, West Bengal education ministry officials argue that the Karnataka government had imposed Kannada as the medium of instruction through a notification. “We are not taking the executive order route, we are passing…