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How You Can Educate India For A Song

This happened last week, I swear. A conference that was supposed to consider reforms in education dissolved into an argument over whether a song should be sung.

The quality of absurdity in this episode is not strained, please believe me. It comes to us full-strength, undiluted. Everything about it makes you want to beat somebody over the head. Check it out: The conference allocates time to be wasted on a song instead of getting right down to the urgent task of overhauling education. Ministers react by walking out rather than saying, "OK, let's get the chant over with and get on with our work." An uproar erupts about an insult to Hinduism. I sit down to write a column about all this.

Forgotten, quite naturally and all over again, is the mess that is Indian education.

What education desperately needs is some sincere, sustained and innovative attention. What it has got instead is half a century of neglect, punctured from time to time by partisan symbolism like the education ministers' conference put on display last week.

Consider the problems. One of every two primary schools in the country has no blackboard. Three of every five have only one teacher -- though most teachers absent themselves from teaching, anyway. Four of every five have no toilet. These schools have an average of 48 students to every teacher -- every teacher, whether absent or otherwise -- a ratio in which we are outdone only by countries like Lesotho, Bangladesh, the Central African Republic and Malawi. Even in urban India, where schools are relatively widespread, the racket of coaching classes conspires to take education away from those who most need it.

With all that, the real bane of education, if I had to pick one, is the rate at which kids drop out of school. Nearly 40 per cent of the children who enter primary school vanish before they reach Standard V. Among girls, things are worse. In 1992-93, 45 million girls between 6 and 11 -- 92.7 per cent of the girls of that age -- were enrolled in primary schools. But only 15 million aged between 11 and 14 -- 54 per cent of girls in that bracket -- were in middle school.

It gives me no pleasure either to read or quote such dismal truths about India. Especially because they have, together with other dismal truths, turned India into the world's deepest cesspool of utterly wasted human potential: every second Indian cannot read and write. That face of India is the major reason for the thoroughly ignominious place South Asia has laid claim to: our subcontinent is, by far, the most illiterate region in the world.

Besides, the consequences for India are magnified because nearly two-thirds of our illiterates are women. For example, that is one reason we have 62 million malnourished children in India: again, the highest number in the world. (Second-ranked China has 19 million, less than one-third our collection). "No society has ever progressed far," wrote Mahbub-Ul-Haq in 'Human Development in South Asia', "if it has neglected its women, and if it has invested so little in the education of its people."

That's the magnitude of the crisis of education in India, a glimpse at the price we pay for nurturing it.

Indeed, education needs attention. The challenges are many and tangled. How do you get teachers to show up every day, to teach every day? How do you attract people to the teaching profession? How do you provide basic facilities -- starting with buildings, in too many cases -- for thousands of schools that lack them? How are the goals of education to be reconciled with the rate at which children disappear from schools? How, then, do you get kids, and particularly girls, to stay in school?

And if you do manage to come to grips with those questions, what of what is taught in schools? How do you give children an education that is relevant and valuable? In a country that is comfortable with universal corruption, that thinks ethics are for the crows, how do you teach values in schools so as to bring about the generational change in attitude that we probably need? In fact, what values do you teach?

Many hard challenges, as I said. But the longer we turn aside from tackling them, the harder they get. The neglect of education, the way it destroys so many Indian lives, is eating away at India far more surely than our belligerent neighbours are. You'd think that would be the true spittle on the face of Indians.

Instead the clowns who don't want to sing a song are matched by buffoons who claim that melodious reluctance insults India.

Why this quarter-hearted attitude towards educating all Indians? Part of the reason is that in India, the Ministry of Education has always been treated as a punishment posting, least desirable among the portfolios. When Maulana Azad, that giant of our freedom struggle, was appointed independent India's first Minister for Education, he and others saw it as a denigration of his stature and talents. He was bitterly disappointed that Nehru did not assign him Defence, Finance, Home or External Affairs rather than Education.

Azad's successors in that ministry have had similar attitudes to education, besides being less than half the man the Maulana was. So what really is the country's most vital task -- educating its citizens -- has been overseen by men who were, at best, simply marking time until a more attractive option came up. They may have offered a few platitudes, voiced some plastic concerns. But they have all come and gone without making much of a difference to the slipshod way India educates Indians.

So Murli Manohar Joshi is only the latest minister to talk about reforming education. Pursuing that noble aim, he wants all students to learn Sanskrit. He wants them to learn the Vedas and the Upanishads. He wants older girls to learn the special skills of keeping a home. He wants to "Indianise, nationalise and spiritualise" the curriculum.

Now I want to know how learning a language not a soul speaks is going to help Indian children. I don't like this notion of channeling girls into the home-keeping route. And all the rhetoric that we've heard about teaching the Vedas and Upanishads, as well as about this "Indianise, nationalise, spiritualise" business, suggests that the real purpose of these proposals is a gaggle of political points to be scored. Not an overhaul of the education system.

Still, if Joshi really wants to teach values via the Vedas and Upanishads, if he truly has no other motives, more power to him. What's inexplicable, even inexcusable, is that he has so little to say about the immediate urgencies in education. What is he going to do about missing school buildings, missing blackboards, missing toilets? Missing teachers? What is he going to do about students dropping out of school?

Or, to put another twist on this, who is going to teach Sanskrit and home-keeping and the Vedas and the Upanishads, besides all else students must learn, if teachers arrive at school only to collect their pay? Who is going to learn those things if the students drop out at the rate they do? And if some fortunate school does happen to have both teachers and students, where will all this learning happen if it has no building? Or blackboard?

Why is "Indianising" and "nationalising" education apparently unconcerned with these vital details?

Why, too, was there no mention in this conference about the 83rd Amendment to the Constitution, the one that will make education a fundamental right? On November 24 1997, the Parliament's Committee on Human Resource Development, a body of 60 MPs, presented a report to Parliament about this amendment. It said: "Universalisation of Elementary Education (UEE) has been recognised as a crucial input for nation building since Independence. ... [The 83rd Amendment] is expected to provide the desired momentum to the efforts being made in the country to achieve UEE by 2000 AD." 2000 AD was just over two years away then, and one of those two years has been frittered away. The 83rd Amendment remains where it was: still to be approved by Parliament. Of course 2000 AD was always a stupidly unrealistic target, but will there ever be some urgency for the issue?

Not likely: there ensues, instead, a wrangle over a song. It's more than absurd, actually. It's criminal. Obscene.

Yes, the real insult to Hindu culture is not that some people objected to singing "Saraswati Vandana" at that conference. That's just small change. The real insult to Hindu culture, and in fact to all of India, is that education has been treated so flippantly over the years, that it continues to be treated that way. That treatment has made the lives of millions of Indians -- Hindus, Christians, Muslims, whatever -- miserable.

Yes, I really do want to know. Just how is learning Sanskrit going to fix that?

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