The (sickly) green face of Indian
education By Piyush Mathur
Call it the apathy of the Indian media to
environmental issues, blame an obsession with flamboyant
trivia such as India's rare cricket win over Australia,
or view it as a measure of how much the media care about
education: An important recent mandate by the Supreme
Court to "green" curricula at all levels of education
received barely any commentary, and only skimpy reports
confined to obscure corners of national newspapers.
Tracing the history of the case that culminated
in the December 18 court order may itself constitute an
academic exercise of sorts. One would have to go all the
way back to 1991 when the court responded favorably to a
Public Interest Litigation (PIL) that M C Mehta -
perhaps the world's best-known environmental lawyer -
had filed pleading the court to order education bodies
to introduce environmental studies as a compulsory
subject at all levels of Indian education.
Mehta
had made the plea invoking clause (g) of article (51 A)
of the constitution, "with a view to educating the
people of India about their social obligation in matter
of upkeep of the environment in proper shape and making
them alive to their obligation not to act as polluting
agencies or factors". Headed Fundamental Duties, article
(51 A) was incorporated into the Indian constitution
through an amendment in 1976; its clause (g) "requires
every citizen to protect and improve the natural
environment including forests, lakes, rivers and wild
life and to have compassion for all living creatures".
In its order, delivered on November 22, 1991,
the court had directed the central government, states,
union territories and educational organizations
responsible for prescribing syllabi to comply with its
ruling by the academic year 1992-1993; it had also
mandated commercial cinema halls to allow a minimum
number of free slide shows on the theme of environmental
protection and asked authorities to cancel the licenses
of errant halls. However, in a not unusual display of
government agencies' indifference to environmental
concerns - especially as expressed within the generally
neglected realm of education - the directive was
anything but honored.
So Mehta petitioned the
court again on July 21, 2003, whereupon the court issued
notices to the same state agencies, seeking their
responses regarding the implementation of its 1991
order. The court failed to receive responses from all
the parties within the stipulated time; so on September
22 it slapped a fine of Rs 15, 000 (US$329) each on the
10 defaulting states, which it also asked to file
affidavits. Out of those 10 states, Tamil Nadu, Andhra
Pradesh and Haryana failed to oblige even thereafter; so
on October 28 the court summoned their chief secretaries
to answer "why contempt of court proceedings not be
initiated against them for deliberately disobeying the
court orders". (About a month later, on November 25, the
court also had to issue notices to Tamil Nadu regarding
contradictions in its request for exemptions from filing
the affidavit before the deadline; on December 9, the
chief secretary apologized in that regard on behalf of
that state).
On December 18, in resuming the
hearing of Mehta's PIL, the court ordered all of the
same agencies to implement the same old directive: now
from the 2004-2005 academic year. The situation now,
however, is a little different: This time the court has
taken it on itself to oversee the process directly, one
of whose chief elements includes for it to approve the
syllabi that the agencies are ordered to turn in by
April 14.
The court's order, though its own
rehash with a fresh and mandatory urgency, has a wider
context than has been acknowledged in the press. (Of
course, as noted earlier, the Indian press has relegated
this whole issue to insignificance, even at the level of
news.) A number of factors actually point to the
probability that the order at best extends and empowers
the vapid and, in many ways, crudely technocratic Indian
bureaucracy; at worst, it outclasses the bureaucracy in
its lack of imagination and anti-democratic paternalism.
For one, it is ludicrous for the court to assume
that the myriad agencies that have dishonored it for the
past 12 years would now be excited about and capable of
activating - genuinely teaching - the syllabi in
classrooms once they are designed and introduced. Short
of that, how is the court going to ensure anything
significant in the sensitive area of education? The
court's own answer is of course increased and closer
supervision: but is that the answer or a mere
bureaucratic imitation - hence prolonging - of the
larger bureaucracy called the government of India it has
sought to rectify?
The fact of the matter is
that the Indian education system, a single but
formidable component of the government, is an unwieldy
bureaucracy still firmly rooted in the colonial past:
Qualitatively it was the branch of British colonial
government entrusted to breed clerks and petty officials
to serve the Crown; administratively it was and
continues to be highly centralized, even though India
has a large number of universities, most of which are
geographically divided into small colleges.
Anybody who has an Indian education is likely to
agree that most of it is based on learning by rote and
time-bound annual exams. In such a system, enlightened
awareness and ethical consciousness of any kind are hard
to impart, cultivate, and reward: Individual teachers
have neither the authority nor the training to design
their own syllabi or even exams. The exams, in most
cases occurring only once at the end of the academic
year, typically appear as question papers secretly
designed by teachers discretely picked up by central
committees; as for their delivery, students sit for
three gruelling hours to handwrite answers they are
supposed to have imbibed along the year through
memorization: to time-tested questions constituting the
papers.
Contrary to what India's educated class
would like to believe (despite its often vocal internal
complaints and skepticism): the mainstream Indian
education system typically desensitizes and standardizes
otherwise curious young minds - students and freshly
appointed teachers alike. Complementing this
counter-creativity machine are the numerous standardized
competitive exams that high school and college graduates
are expected to pass in order to become anybodies from
bank clerks, railway executives and insurance officials
to revenue collectors with state or central government.
(The great Indian family hardly helps there as it steers
its young members deeper into self-centered career games
for the sake of pecuniary gains.)
By
deliberately pushing the theme of environment into this
soulless quagmire called Indian education, the court has
paved the way for the stultification of any ecological
consciousness that the Indian youngster may have
inherited from custom and spiritual traditions. Worse,
after going through the mandatory courses, the young and
increasingly consumerist graduate might actually begin
to believe that he knows a thing or two about the
environment - more than, let's say, the uneducated poor,
the scheduled tribes, or the "ecosystem people" (a-la
Madhav Gadgil and Ramchandra Guha). By virtue of that
self-congratulatory myopia, he may in fact victimize
India's social ecology as well as himself. In a country
that can boast of only 65.38 percent literacy, it is not
difficult, especially for the quasi-urban college
graduate, to consider himself smarter than the huge
illiterate minority.
Here, it is difficult to
resist thinking whether the court is not myopic itself:
After all, it is the same court that not too long ago
held activist and author Arundhati Roy guilty for a
contemptibly flimsy charge of contempt of court, and
which has quite a reputation for flaunting its own
immunity from public criticism on the basis of the same
arcane, feudalistic law traceable to the yester-century
of British colonialism.
On that count, what is
dreadful in the current legal instance is the way the
court assumed the authority to verify and approve
uniform courses on environment for such an ecologically,
economically, linguistically and culturally diverse
region as India. The court has sought that uniformity by
directing the central agencies of the National Council
of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), the
University Grants Commission and the All India Council
of Technical Education to coordinate among themselves;
but, again, those agencies are altogether too removed
from the local geographical and classroom contexts
within which the courses they would suggest would be
taught.
For all that, those agencies are quite
likely - in some sense obligated - to present a highly
statist, government-of-India view of the environment and
environmental problems: in which big dams, for example,
may well be touted as ecological solutions rather than
the gargantuan headaches they really are. Likewise, one
could also expect biotechnology, bioengineering and
other high-tech, capital-intensive knowledge and
infrastructures to be showcased as progressive solutions
to environmental damage. One could also expect a rather
urban, middle class profile of the environment - in
which pollution rather than development and displacement
would hold the center stage of analysis. Unsurprisingly,
the court has already suggested to the aforementioned
three agencies to seek advice from the Central Pollution
Control Board as they design the syllabi.
No
less important, however, are the presumably
non-environmental issues of academic freedom, on one
hand, and political freedom on the other. What arrogates
the court to decide what teachers must teach in their
classes, to mandate a certain thematic not only for
under-age school students but also for mature adults at
college? As it is, the typical Indian school kid feels,
and most certainly is, overburdened mainly because he or
she must learn how to compress to three momentous hours
everything that has been learnt over the course of one
year. The overburdening has already been cited by the
state of West Bengal and the NCERT as a reason for their
erstwhile reluctance to follow the court's original
directives.
However, under the new pressure, the
authorities have agreed to replace some of the previous
readings with environmental themes. What that shows,
though, is that the solution to India's knowledge woes -
including in the environmental sector - lies in a
radical decentralization and localization of education,
in its being made more intimate than exam-based: But the
ultimate solution may actually reside in the removal of
the government monopoly over academic certification at
all levels.
Last but not least, it is quite a
stretch for the court to suggest that the clause (g) -
which "requires every citizen to protect and improve the
natural environment ... and to have compassion for all
living creatures" - also requires going through
government sermons on the environment, or that it is
extendable to commercial establishments such as cinema
halls. The imprudence in that jurisprudence is echoed by
an article by Shobita Punja, "Learning to Care for their
World" (The Telegraph, Kolkata, December 3, 2003).
Inspired by one of the hearings through this long legal
battle, Punja argues: "On the same principle we really
need to make a similar petition regarding the compulsory
teaching of India's composite heritage so that every
child in this country (who is privileged enough to have
gone to school) knows the fundamental duties of every
Indian (51A). Here too it is the responsibility of every
state government to inform and teach our children how -
clause (e) and (f) - to promote harmony and the spirit
of brotherhood amongst all the people of India
transcending religious, linguistic and regional or
sectional diversities and to value and preserve the rich
heritage of our composite culture".
I have a
hunch that Punja has drawn the right conclusions from
the court's verdict: It tells us to mistake
state-sponsored nationalism for environmentalism.
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Jan 6, 2004
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