Education News

Good start

After facing flak for turning his back on the proposal for India (Delhi) hosting the 2014 Asian Games, Union youth and sports minister, Mani Shankar Aiyer has drafted a new national sports policy. The draft has been posted on the ministry’s website and suggestions are invited from the public before a comprehensive sports policy, likely to be legislated later this year, is finalised. The draft envisages physical and sports education as an integral component of school curriculums up to the higher secondary level.

"This might be mandated through the national core curriculum with effect from the academic year 2010 to coincide with the hosting of the Commonwealth Games by India, thereby giving three years to all educational institutions to provide the required facilities, equipment and trained staff to meet the deadline and bequeathing the programme to future generations as a key legacy of the Commonwealth Games," says the policy draft.

About time too, because as per the latest Seventh All India Educational Survey with September 30, 2002 as the reference date, only 39 percent of primary, 57 percent of upper primary and 78 percent of secondary and higher secondary schools have playfields. In absolute numbers, out of 1.12 million schools in the country, only 48 percent have access to playfields (42.96 percent have their own and the remaining 5 percent have to access outside facilities). Playfields in usable condition are accessible in only 43 percent of schools, implying that between 1978 and 2002 access to playfields has actually reduced by 7 percent in primary, 9 percent in upper primary and 5 percent in secondary and higher secondary schools.

The availability of other sports facilities like indoor halls, gymnasia, etc, is even less than of basic outdoor playfields. "Traditionally, we had a rich sports culture, but the formal education system didn’t encourage it. As a result respectability and acceptability of sports in society is very low. Schools hold the key to sports promotion and unless it is made a mandatory part of the curriculum, things won’t change. Such integration will help raise standards and improve chances of winning Olympic medals and create a healthy, unstressed, and balanced pool of young people," says Dr. M.C. Paul, professor of sociology at Delhi’s showpiece Jawaharlal Nehru University who has long been associated with youth and sports policy planning programmes.

The draft policy makes the shocking disclosure that 720 million of the 770 million Indians below age 35 have little/nil access to organised sports and games — clear proof that previous national sports policies (initiated in 1984) have failed to universalise sports education. The draft also highlights the abysmal budgetary support to sports education in India — a mere 0.073 percent of the current Union budget, the bulk of it for Commonwealth Games. "Youth development policies in this country have unfortunately steered clear of sports education. I hope the new policy will make sports education an integral component of primary and secondary school curriculums," says Purva Ghosh of Pravah, a Delhi-based youth development organisation.

Yet the fundamental problem of Indian sport is that access to sports education and facilities is ruled out for 90 percent of the youth population. Unless the country’s pool of sports-playing youth is vastly expanded, Olympic medals and international honours will remain elusive. The current elitist sports education model — herding a few thousand promising sportsmen into specialist sport academies — is a proven failure.

In this connection the Chinese sports development model is instructive. Over 37 percent of its youth population, 480 million citizens, actively participate in physical education and sports activities. Contemporary China boasts 350,000 sports instructors. As far back as the year 2000, China had over 40,000 grassroots level sports associations, 3,854 urban community associations, 2,000 community sports institutions, and over 100,000 part-time sports instructors, besides an incredible 620,000 sports facilities spread across the country. Even Cuba (pop. 11.5 million) boasts approximately 2 million athletes, of whom 23,000 are in the high performance category.

The moral of the China, Cuba (and Australia) stories is that sports education needs to be universalised before exceptional natural talent surfaces for nurturance and development. Fortunately the new national sports policy draft acknowledges this. That’s a good start.

Autar Nehru (Delhi)

The American way

The tradition and practice of routine alumni donations and bequests to alma maters (schools, colleges, universities), which has facilitated the spectacular growth and development of America’s globally respected tertiary education system, has yet to strike root in Indian soil. Despite the overwhelming majority of the estimated 9-10 million privileged school leavers who are admitted into the too few institutions of higher education (only 9 percent of Indians in the age group 17-23 enter tertiary education institutions cf. an estimated 80 percent in the US) receiving heavily subsidised higher education, donations and endowments to education institutions are the exception rather than the rule in contemporary India.

However there is thaw in the air. With the Indian economy recording unprecedented rates of industrial growth in the new post-liberalisation and deregulation era and over 100,000 entrepreneurs and businessmen currently classified as dollar millionaires, the tradition of endowing education institutions — initiated in India by founders of the Tata, Birla, Shri Ram etc business dynasties — is experiencing a revival. In particular IT millionaires Nandan Nilekani, Shailesh Mehta and Vin Gupta among others, have set a good example by generously (by grudging Indian standards) funding infrastructure projects in their alma mater IITs (Indian Institutes of Technology).

Likewise a reunion of the batch of 1957 of Mumbai’s Grant Medical College (GMC) has resulted in the emergence of an alumni coalition, which is all set to restore the beautiful, historic building of this 150-year-old college. Grouped under the umbrella name of Friends of GMC and J.J. Hospital, they have made common cause with former teachers of the institution to restore the architectural pride of their alma mater. Currently GMC admits 200 students per year into its undergraduate programme and 110 students into its 22 postgrad courses. One of the pioneer institutions of medical (allopathic) education in India, GMC’s rich historical past is reflected in its splendid Victorian architecture including a winding staircase, teak flooring and heritage building.

Evidently shocked by the shabby, rundown condition of GMC, whose tuition fees and administration are rigidly controlled by the state government, and particularly the library which they found "pathetically depleted", Friends’ representatives drew up a list of required books and journals and refurbished the college library with reading material valued at Rs.4.5 lakh. Moreover they have commissioned well-known architect Abha Narain Lambah and historian Sharada Dwivedi to draw up a plan for the restoration of GMC’s 150-year-old administration building which has been deemed a grade II (B) heritage structure by the state government. Says Lambah: "It’s a very beautiful building but there is a lot of work to be done on it. It suffers several structural problems, but it can certainly be restored while preserving its historical character."

Comments Dr. N.H. Wadia, a highly respected senior neurologist and member of the alumni coalition spearheading the GMC refurbishment and restoration initiative: "We are serious about this project. Though the initiative has to be taken by the state government to contemporise GMC, we are willing to give any assistance — technical or financial — to the government."

Mumbai’s flourishing medical fraternity is not particularly noted for its philanthropy or generosity. Yet it’s a sign of better things to come that some of the city’s most well known medicos who received the benefit of heavily subsidised medical education have felt the prick of conscience to volunteer to help their alma mater. Five years ago, alumni of the J.J. School of Arts had successfully engineered a similar initiative. Suddenly there’s new hope that with some help from their alumni India’s crumbling institutions of higher education will go the American way.

Gaver Chatterjee (Mumbai)

Harsh indictment

While Uttar Pradesh’s newly-elected chief minister Mayawati keeps herself busy with "social engineering" and putting her political adversaries down, reports of every development monitoring agency continue to trash the performance of India’s most populous state on educational and socio-economic progression parameters. Reassertion of the education backwardness of this Hindi heartland state came at a conference of vice-chancellors organised in Lucknow in early August. The conference was part of a series of interactions which the University Grants Commission (UGC) is conducting with educationists to solicit inputs on higher education reforms to be implemented during the Eleventh Plan (2007-12) period.

UGC chairman Sukhdev Thorat, who chaired the vice-chancellors conference didn’t mince his words. "No university in Uttar Pradesh has the potential to be developed into a centre of excellence," he said, trashing the state’s 13 universities, none of which qualifies for UGC’s ‘Potential for Excellence University’ and/or ‘Centre for Excellence’ special grants. Under UGC guidelines, infrastructure, quality of faculty, research projects, research publications and teaching methodologies are evaluated before higher education institutions can qualify for these tags, which attract an additional grant of Rs.60 lakh from the commission. Thirty universities countrywide have been conferred this qualification.

Educationists in Lucknow link Thorat’s harsh remarks to the reality that UP’s universities have a woeful record of spending funds on infrastructure upgradation. In the Tenth Plan (2002-07) period Rs.3,165.81 crore was provided to the state’s universities but none managed to utilise all the funds allocated to it.

Thorat also criticised universities in this Hindi heartland state for not introducing special programmes (such as remedial courses for SC/ST and minorities, women study centres, national eligibility coaching and adult education centres) launched by UGC. "Since the universities have shown scant interest in running these courses, funds allotted by UGC for them have not come their way either," he explained.

However according to the consensus of academic opinion in UP, given the actual condition of higher education institutions in the state, Thorat’s indictment was rather mild. Although 242 colleges across India receive grants from UGC, only seven of them are in UP. The state’s 13 universities have 311 departments between them, but only 23 get assistance from the UGC (under the special assistance programme), while of the 242 government and government aided colleges in the state, 70 have been denied permanent affiliation by the state’s universities for lack of infrastructure and faculty.

Against this backdrop of widespread negligence and deterioration of institutions of higher education in India’s most populous state, Thorat described UP as a perfect case study for reforms. He suggested a new system of evaluation of teachers and mandatory accreditation of all institutions by the Bangalore-based National Accreditation and Assessment Council, which awards excellence ratings to colleges and universities across the country.

The vice-chancellor’s conference was also attended by Rakesh Dhar Tripathi, the state’s minister for higher education. Tripathi says the Bahujan Samaj Party is committed to improving higher education standards and that it has already initiated reforms such as making 75 percent attendance compulsory; scrapping the self-examination system and mandating semesters of at least 180 days. "We are also aware of the growing politicisation of university campuses and are committed to implementing the Lyngdoh committee recommendations for student unions and elections," he says.

Meanwhile the Eleventh Plan outlay for higher and technical education countrywide is set to triple in the next quinquennium with the Planning Commission having recommended an outlay of Rs.26,000 crore, compared to the Rs.8,876 crore expended in the recently concluded Tenth Plan period (2002-07). But given the deplorable state of UP’s reforms-proof institutions of higher education, little of that bounty is likely to flow into Uttar Pradesh.

Vidya Pandit (Lucknow)

Season of distress

The world over the period following completion of school leaving examinations is a time of joy and merriment — a time when students can let their hair down. Not so in India, particularly communist ruled West Bengal (pop. 80 million) where the post-exam period is a time of anxiety and tension for students. Because every year there is widespread fear of negligent and haphazard marking of answer papers by government appointed examiners.

This year was no exception. There’s a widespread outcry against the higher secondary (class XII) results announced by the West Bengal Council for Higher Secondary Examinations (WBCHSE). A record number of over 10,000 candidates have contested their grades, claiming their papers have been under-marked, jeopardising their college admissions which closed in end August. All of them have applied to the council for scrutiny of their answer papers. WBCHSE secretary Debashish Sarkar, however, declines to reveal the exact number of scrutiny applications received.

Moreover there’s a hidden catch in the council’s rules for scrutiny. The scrutiny process does not guarantee qualitative re-assessment of allegedly under-marked answer scripts. The scrutiny process is limited to ascertaining whether the examiner evaluated all the answers; awarded marks to all the answers assessed; whether marks awarded have been correctly added; and whether the examiner has correctly noted the score of each examinee on the marks foil. The issue of whether the answer papers have been fairly assessed is not gone into at all.

Unsurprisingly, aggrieved parents and students moved the Calcutta high court pleading that the answer scripts need to be re-assessed. Specifically, 14 pupils of Belghoria Vidyamandir, Kolkata, who were failed in English in this year’s higher secondary examination, moved the court, representing the interests of 142 pupils of this school, all of whom failed in the subject. The petition was heard on August 8 by the Hon’ble Justice Biswanath Somadder in a packed courtroom.

For the high court, it was an unusual case; so were Justice Somadder’s dicta. One, he asked the council to submit the answer scripts to the court. Second he ordered that a few scripts of students who had been awarded high marks also be submitted to the court. Third, he ordered the council to submit the model answers given to examiners to the court. And lastly, in an unusual remark that attracted wide media comment, he said he would go through these three sets of papers himself.

Inevitably, WBCHSE appealed against the judge’s order, arguing the court had "no authority" to ask for the model answers. But the council’s appeal was rejected by a division bench of the court.

Since the merits and demerits of the council’s scrutiny process is sub judice, Debasish Sarkar is loath to comment. However, he stoutly defends the council’s track record. Stating that 564,424 students had written the higher secondary examination this year, he admits that "the council has resigned itself to the fact that its results can never be error free". "The errors are mostly committed by the examiners," he admits adding that "in most cases, the marks are increased."

According to educationists in Kolkata, the root cause of this malaise is poor quality of examiners, which is attributed to the stranglehold of the ruling Communist Part of India-Marxist (CPM) over West Bengal’s education system. As a result the faculties of West Bengal’s government schools and colleges are packed with either party members or sympathisers. Loyalty to the Left cause, rather than merit, is the premier criterion for faculty appointments.

Within academia there’s a general consensus that following 30 years of Communist rule in West Bengal, academic standards and work culture in the state’s schools and colleges have registered a steep decline. So has teacher and student discipline. Therefore there’s little surprise that utterly incompetent examiners are the rule at the higher secondary and collegiate levels. And miserably for West Bengal, no end to this state of affairs is in sight.

Sujoy Gupta (Kolkata)

Sanitation breakthrough

For mysterious reasons, provision of adequate facilitative infrastructure for government schools has been a blindspot of post-independence India’s educrats, who under the aegis of the Central, state and local governments (mis) manage 83 percent of India’s 1.12 million ‘recognised’ schools. In particular this omniscient tribe has not thought it necessary to equip half (48.95 percent) of the 738,150 government primary schools countrywide with toilet facilities. Moreover only 28.25 percent of primary schools countrywide offer separate toilet facilities for girl children.

This conspicuous failure of government which subscribes to detailed Soviet-style Central planning, to make this basic provision for school-going children is particularly lamentable in the light of several studies of the United Nations Development Programme, World Bank, Unesco, World Health Organisation etc, having established a direct causal connection between lack of toilet provision and high number of girl children dropping out of school. Of the 102 million girl children across India enrolled in classes I-V, only 63 million stick it out to class VIII.

In particular EducationWorld has consistently been advocating the provision of toilets in all schools as the pre-condition of improving literacy and learning outcomes. In its path-breaking cover story ‘Reaping India’s demographic dividend’ (EW February 2007) which provided the Union finance ministry a roadmap to mobilise and allocate an additional Rs.151,000 crore for education and health, a massive provision of Rs.38,250 crore was made for the construction of toilets in all schools.

Against this backdrop of growing awareness of toilet provisioning in schools, an initiative in Kameswaram village (pop. 5,300) in Tamil Nadu, near the tsunami ravaged Nagapattinam district, offers hope of a mindset change within the educracy and public. Four ecosan toilet compost toilets and 20 urinals have been installed in the village’s St. Sebastian School (aggregate enrollment 500) at an affordable price of Rs. 2.5 lakh.

The project is the outcome of a post tsunami reconstruction programme initiated by Dr. Shyama Ramani, senior researcher, Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique (INRA), France. Christened Project FIR (Franco-Indian Reconstruction), it has been funded through individual donations mobilised in India and France. The French contributors are grouped under Association Un Ami, supported by the students’ association of Grenoble Business School and its affiliate in India, Friend-in-Need (FIN).

"Project FIR’s mission is attainment of the United Nation’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) which includes primary education for all children in rural India by the year 2015. Kameswaram, where the impact of the tsunami of 2004 had worsened old problems, was chosen for our pilot project. We resolved to address sanitation in particular which was non-existent," recalls Ramani.

Although the Union government launched its Total Sanitation Campaign (TSC) in 2004, thus far this initiative has been limited to reimbursing Rs.1,300 per toilet to organisations building privies in marginalised zones with payouts after six-12 months of construction. The TSC has no strategy for creating a sustainable dynamic process for achieving complete sanitation. Consequently the FIR-FIN think tank resolved to eliminate the practice of open defecation; assure clean and working toilets; install waste management systems and make Kameswaram village as clean as its counterparts in France. To achieve this, the Society for Community Organisation and People’s Education (SCOPE), a Trichy-based NGO, inventor of the environmentally friendly Ecosan toilet was inducted as a partner.

Comments M. Subburaman, director SCOPE: "Our specially designed eco-sanitary or Ecosan toilets separate human waste at source and recycle it into compost. Ecosan toilets don’t emanate smell and are insects, worms, etc proof. More significantly they are not conventional flush toilets which consume gallons of scarce water. Minimum water is used and external infrastructure such as expensive plumbing is not required."

Before the students started using the toilets an intensive awareness and training programme was conducted by SCOPE. FIR was represented by Grenoble Business School students Antonin Benyacar and Annabelle Didier, who were based in Trichy and researched and documented the progress of Project FIR. "The collective toilets built in the school are a first step for most of the village children in using toilets. Since then they have motivated their families to install Ecosan toilets at home and school toilets are now being used regularly," says Didier. Encouragingly, following word-of-mouth publicity, this sanitation model is being replicated in two schools in neighbouring villages.

Three years on after Project FIR was initiated, Kameswaram is all set to achieve fame as the first village in India where every house will have its own toilet. So far half of the 500 households have installed Ecosan toilets. "These toilets are especially a boon for women who have suffered embarrassment and health problems for centuries," says Shanti Madhi, a resident, who was recently elected vice president of the village panchayat for her enthusiastic promotion of toilets for every household.

Sangeeta Venkatesh (Kameswaram)