[Assam] From NY Times

[Chan Mahanta]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/17/world/asia/17india.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=all




Education Push Yields Little for India's Poor
Ruth Fremson/The New York Times


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By SOMINI SENGUPTA
Published: January 17, 2008



The school in Lahtora was crowded and cold, so 
classes were held outside. More Photos »

LAHTORA, India - With the dew just rising from 
the fields, dozens of children streamed into the 
two-room school in this small, poor village, 
tucking used rice sacks under their arms to use 
as makeshift chairs. So many children streamed in 
that the newly appointed head teacher, Rashid 
Hassan, pored through attendance books for the 
first two hours of class and complained bitterly. 
He had no idea who belonged in which grade. There 
was no way he could teach.

Another teacher arrived 90 minutes late. A third 
did not show up. The most senior teacher, the 
only one with a teaching degree, was believed to 
be on official government duty preparing voter 
registration cards. No one could quite recall 
when he had last taught.

"When they get older, they'll curse their 
teachers," said Arnab Ghosh, 26, a social worker 
trying to help the government improve its 
schools, as he stared at clusters of children 
sitting on the grass outside. "They'll say, 'We 
came every day and we learned nothing.' "

Sixty years after independence, with 40 percent 
of its population under 18, India is now 
confronting the perils of its failure to educate 
its citizens, notably the poor. More Indian 
children are in school than ever before, but the 
quality of public schools like this one has sunk 
to spectacularly low levels, as government 
schools have become reserves of children at the 
very bottom of India's social ladder.

The children in this school come from the poorest 
of families - those who cannot afford to send 
away their young to private schools elsewhere, as 
do most Indian families with any means.

India has long had a legacy of weak schooling for 
its young, even as it has promoted high-quality 
government-financed universities. But if in the 
past a largely poor and agrarian nation could 
afford to leave millions of its people 
illiterate, that is no longer the case. Not only 
has the roaring economy run into a shortage of 
skilled labor, but also the nation's many new 
roads, phones and television sets have fueled new 
ambitions for economic advancement among its 
people - and new expectations for schools to help 
them achieve it.

That they remain ill equipped to do so is clearly 
illustrated by an annual survey, conducted by 
Pratham, the organization for which Mr. Ghosh 
works. The latest survey, conducted across 16,000 
villages in 2007 and released Wednesday, found 
that while many more children were sitting in 
class, vast numbers of them could not read, write 
or perform basic arithmetic, to say nothing of 
those who were not in school at all.

Among children in fifth grade, 4 out of 10 could 
not read text at the second grade level, and 7 
out of 10 could not subtract. The results 
reflected a slight improvement in reading from 
2006 and a slight decline in arithmetic; together 
they underscored one of the most worrying gaps in 
India's prospects for continued growth.

Education experts debate the reasons for failure. 
Some point out that children of illiterate 
parents are less likely to get help at home; the 
Pratham survey shows that the child of a literate 
woman performs better at school. Others blame 
longstanding neglect, insufficient public 
financing and accountability, and a lack of 
motivation among some teachers to pay special 
attention to poor children from lower castes.

"Education is a long-term investment," said 
Montek Singh Ahluwalia, the deputy chairman of 
the Planning Commission and the government's top 
policy czar. "We have neglected it, in my view 
quite criminally, for an enormously long period 
of time."

Looking for a Way Up

Arguments aside, India is today engaged in an 
epic experiment to lift up its schools. Along the 
way lie many hurdles, and Mr. Ghosh, on his 
visits to villages like this one, encounters them 
all.

The aides who were hired to draw more village 
children into school complain that they have not 
received money to buy educational materials. Or 
the school has stopped serving lunch even though 
sacks of rice are piled in the classroom. Or 
parents agree to enroll their son in school, but 
know that they will soon send the child away to 
work. Or worst of all, from Mr. Ghosh's 
perspective, all these stick-thin, bright-eyed 
children trickle into school every morning and 
take back so little.

"They're coming with some hope of getting 
something," Mr. Ghosh muttered. "It's our fault 
we can't give them anything."

Even here, the kind of place from which millions 
of uneducated men and women have traditionally 
migrated to cities for work, an appetite for 
education has begun to set in. An educated person 
would not only be more likely to find a good job, 
parents here reasoned, but also less likely to be 
cheated in a bad one. "I want my children to do 
something, to advance themselves," is how 
Muhammad Alam Ansari put it. "To do that they 
must study."

Education in the new India has become a crucial 
marker of inequality. Among the poorest 20 
percent of Indian men, half are illiterate, and 
barely 2 percent graduate from high school, 
according to government data. By contrast, among 
the richest 20 percent of Indian men, nearly half 
are high school graduates and only 2 percent are 
illiterate.

Just as important, at a time when only one in 10 
college-age Indians actually go to college, 
higher education has become the most effective 
way to scale the golden ladder of the new 
economy. A recent study by two economists based 
in Delhi found that between 1993-94 and 2004-5, 
college graduates enjoyed pay raises of 11 
percent every year, and illiterates saw their pay 
rise by roughly 8.5 percent, though from a 
miserably low base; here in Bihar State, for 
instance, a day laborer makes barely more than $1 
a day.

"The link between getting your children prepared 
and being part of this big, changing India is 
certainly there in everyone's minds," said 
Rukmini Banerji, the research director of 
Pratham. "The question is: What's the best way to 
get there, how much to do, what to do? As a 
country, I think we are trying to figure this 
out."

She added, "If we wait another 5 or 10 years, you 
are going to lose millions of children."

Money From the State

India has lately begun investing in education. 
Public spending on schools has steadily increased 
over the last few years, and the government now 
proposes to triple its financial commitment over 
the next five years. At present, education 
spending is about 4 percent of the gross domestic 
product. Every village with more than 1,000 
residents has a primary school. There is money 
for free lunch every day.

Even in a state like Bihar, which had an 
estimated population of 83 million in 2001 and 
where schools are in particularly bad shape, the 
scale of the effort is staggering. In the last 
year or so, 100,000 new teachers have been hired. 
Unemployed villagers are paid to recruit children 
who have never been to school. A village 
education committee has been created, in theory 
to keep the school and its principal accountable 
to the community. And buckets of money have been 
thrown at education, to buy swings and benches, 
to paint classrooms, even to put up fences around 
the campus to keep children from running away.

And yet, as Lahtora shows, good intentions can 
become terribly complicated on the ground.

At the moment, the village was not lacking for 
money for its school. The state had committed 
$15,000 to construct a new school building, $900 
for a new kitchen and $400 for new school 
benches. But only some of the money had arrived, 
so no construction had started, and the school 
committee chairman said he was not sure how much 
local officials might demand in bribes. The 
chairman's friend from a neighboring village said 
$750 had been demanded of his village committee 
in exchange for building permits.

The chairman here also happens to be the head 
teacher's uncle, making the idea of 
accountability additionally complicated. One 
parent told Mr. Ghosh that their complaints fell 
on deaf ears: the teachers were connected to 
powerful people in the community.

It is a common refrain in a country where 
teaching jobs are a powerful instrument of 
political patronage.

The school's drinking-water tap had stopped 
working long ago, like 30 percent of schools 
nationwide, according to the Pratham survey. 
Despite the extra money, the toilet was broken, 
as was the case in nearly half of all schools 
nationwide.

Thankfully, there was a heap of rice in one 
corner of the classroom, provisions for the 
savory rice porridge that is one of the main 
draws of government schools. Except that Mr. 
Hassan, the head teacher, said the rice was not 
officially reflected in his books, and therefore 
he had not served lunch for the last week.

What about the money that comes from the state to 
buy eggs and other provisions for lunch, Mr. 
Ghosh asked? That too remained unspent, Mr. 
Hassan explained, because there was no rice to 
serve them with - at least not in his record 
books.

(Analysts of government antipoverty programs say 
rice can be a tempting side income for 
unscrupulous school officials; food meant for the 
poor in general, though not at this particular 
village school, is sometimes found diverted and 
sold on the private market, but one of the 
brighter findings of the Pratham survey was that 
free meals were served in over 90 percent of 
schools.)

Mr. Ghosh went from befuddled to exasperated. 
"You have rice. You have money. You prefer that 
kids don't eat?" he asked.

Mr. Hassan shook his head. He said he could only 
cook what rice was in his records, or cook this 
rice if a senior government officer instructed 
him to do so. Mr. Ghosh went on to point out that 
one of the aides had shown up more than an hour 
late, and then with a crying baby in her arms. 
Two teachers were altogether absent. Even Mr. 
Hassan, Mr. Ghosh added, had pulled up a 
half-hour late.

"You're the head of this school," Mr. Ghosh told 
him. "Only you can improve this school."

Mr. Hassan fired back: "What are you talking 
about? For the last 25 years this school wasn't 
running at all."

New Plans, Old Attitudes

Mr. Ghosh could not dispute that. There were 
times when the school doors did not open. One 
father, an agricultural laborer, said he had 
tried a few times to enroll his children but gave 
up after the former principal demanded money. 
Many parents in this largely Muslim village chose 
Islamic schools because they were seen to offer 
better discipline.

Others saw no need to send their children to school at all.

Mr. Ghosh, too, went to government schools, in a 
small town in neighboring West Bengal state, 
which is only slightly better off than here. But 
if he dared skip class, he recalled, he would be 
thrashed by his father, a public school 
principal. The children of this village, he knew, 
would not be so lucky. "When I first started 
coming here," Mr. Ghosh recalled, parents "would 
ask me, 'What are you going to give me? Your 
porridge isn't enough. Because if I send my child 
to herd a buffalo, at least he'll make 3 rupees.' 
" Three rupees is less than 10 cents.

One morning Mr. Ghosh reached the mud-and-thatch 
compound of Mohammed Zakir, a migrant laborer who 
goes to work in Delhi each year. Mr. Zakir's son, 
Farooq, about 10 years old, was going to school 
for the first time this week. And as Mr. Zakir 
saw it, that was fine until Farooq turned 14, the 
legal age for employment, when he too would have 
to go work in Delhi. Keeping children in school 
through their teenage years, the father said 
flatly, was not a luxury the family could afford.

Walking out of the Zakir family compound, Mr. 
Ghosh looked utterly worn out. "If I don't get 
this child in school," he said, "then his child 
in turn won't go to school."