Literacy beats out education in
India By Sudha Ramachandran
BANGALORE - The World Bank's extension of a
US$500 million credit towards an Indian government
education program might, to some extent, help Delhi tide
over a deficit in funds required for the project.
Experts in the field of education are, however, drawing
attention to the implications of the government's
increasing dependence on external sources for financing
a priority sector such as elementary education.
The $500 million World Bank loan is towards the
Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan program. The total project cost is
$3.5 billion for three and half years. This will have to
be raised by government and state governments. Others
pooling in include the European Commission, the
Department for International Development of the United
Kingdom and the World Bank.
The program aims at
providing education, including life skills, to all
children in the age group of 6-14 years by the year
2010. It has a special focus on education for girls and
children with special needs. It also envisages providing
computer education to bridge the digital divide.
Statistics indicate that since independence in
1947, India has taken significant strides in tackling
the problem of illiteracy. According to the 1951 census
- the first in independent India - only 18.33 percent of
the population was literate. This figure has increased
over the years to touch 52.21 percent in 1991 and 65.38
percent in 2001.
The increase in literacy
figures over the past 50 years is no mean achievement.
However, that 34.62 percent are illiterate in spite of
innumerable programs to tackle illiteracy is worrying.
What is more, the drop-out rate of children from schools
remains high, despite the launch of several schemes to
draw children to school and to keep them there. And most
important, to what extent the literate are educated is a
moot point.
For several decades, India was
reluctant to allow external funding in the primary
education sector, but this changed in the early 1990s.
Initially, the government formulated its policy and
plans, outlined its financial requirements and then
approached the international agencies for funds.
Increasingly, however, international agencies
participate in drafting the policies and plans from the
outset. This has been the experience, for instance, with
regard to the World Bank-sponsored District Primary
Education Programme (DPEP).
The World Bank's
role in the education sector has raised serious concerns
in the country. On the one hand, the World Bank
expresses an interest in improving literacy levels in
the country. On the other, it has pressured the
government to reduce its role in the crucial education
sector. Indeed, the winding up of various health and
education programs that were to support the economically
and socially weaker sections of society over the past
decade can be attributed to World Bank pressure.
In 2001-02, the government made education a
fundamental right for children. However, it put the onus
of a child's education on the parents, making education
the responsibility of parents, not the state. In a
country like India, where a large section of the
population lacks the means to send their children to
school, the government's dilution of its own
responsibility towards providing education is a big
blow.
Experts have been drawing attention to the
negative changes that have been introduced on the advice
of the World Bank. At the World Bank Conference on
Education for All (EFA) at Jomtien, Thailand, in 1990,
developing countries were pressured to go in for cheaper
alternatives to education, such as literacy drives and
non-formal education.
This was accompanied by a
dilution of the idea of what was the acceptable
minimum-level of schooling. Instead of elementary
education, governments were encouraged to provide five
years of primary education, the rationale being that
eight years of universal free elementary schooling was
too much for a developing economy to promise its people.
Poor countries were pushed to opt for adult literacy and
non-formal education, minimum levels of learning and
multi-grade teaching with fewer teachers. These World
Bank innovations - cheap alternatives to universal
elementary schooling - perpetuated socio-economic
divisions in society.
Under World Bank pressure,
the government is moving away from earlier commitments
that it had made on education. In the National Policy on
Education 1992, the government committed itself to
providing three teachers per primary school. Under the
World Bank-sponsored DPEP, an "innovative scheme" of
multi-grade teaching was introduced. This allows a
single teacher to handle five classes simultaneously.
Anil Sadgopal, a professor of education at Delhi
University and an activist in the cause of elementary
education, has pointed out the dilution of the
government's commitment in recent years on several
well-established norms. For instance, the teacher to
pupil ratio of 1:30 has been raised to 1:40; the
Operation Blackboard norm of three teachers and three
classrooms for every primary school has been reduced to
two teachers and two classrooms; the cost of educating a
disabled child in an inclusive classroom has been
reduced from Rs 3,000 (US$67.88) for a child a year to
Rs 1,200 a year.
According to government
statistics, the number of schools has increased
four-fold - from 231,000 in 1950-51 to 930,000 in
1988-99, while enrollment in the primary cycle jumped by
about six times from 19.2 million to 110 million. Of the
200 million children in the age group of 6-14 years, 59
million children are not attending school. Of this, 35
million are girls and 24 million are boys.
Government figures (2000-2001) reveal that the
dropout rate from grade one to five was 40.67 percent in
2000-2001, a marginal improvement from 1990-1991 when
the dropout rate was 42.6 percent.
There are
problems regarding a high drop-out rate and low
participation of girls, tribals and other disadvantaged
groups. At least 100,000 habitations in the country are
still without a schooling facility within a kilometer.
Education suffers from various systemic problems like
inadequate school infrastructure, poorly functioning
schools, high teacher absenteeism, poor quality of
education and inadequate funds.
The government
admits that the country is a long way off from achieving
the "elusive goal of universalization of elementary
education, which means 100 percent enrollment and
retention of children with schooling facilities in all
habitations. It is to fill this gap that the government
launched the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan in 2001".
In
an article "Education for too few" in the newsmagazine
Frontline, Sadgopal writes: "The government decided to
replace the regular formal schools with low-quality,
low-budget parallel streams of primary education for the
educationally deprived children, two-thirds of whom are
girls. This policy stance is apparently the result of
the structural adjustment program of the International
Monetary Fund-World Bank, which imposes drastic cuts in
expenditures on education, health and other social
welfare sectors as a condition for the grant of
additional loans or aid."
He argues that the
adoption of various World Bank innovations such as
introduction of parallel systems of education and the
replacement of the regular teacher with "a para-teacher
who is an underqualified, untrained and underpaid local
youth appointed on the basis of a short-term contract"
is "tantamount to institutionalizing discrimination
against the poor, a majority of whom would be Dalits
[the oppressed castes], the tribal people and religious
or cultural minorities, two-thirds of each segment being
girls. Most of the disabled children will also fall in
this category, earmarked for discrimination."
In
an essay "Globalization and the Political Economy of
Education" in a non-governmental organization report
titled "Children in Globalizing India: Challenging Our
Conscience" Sadgopal points out that it was pressure
from the World Bank that forced the government to reduce
the tenure of elementary education from eight to five
years. And this has been further reduced to three years
under the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan program.
Critics
of the World Bank's role in education have drawn
attention to the fact that it is interested in literacy,
not education.
"There is plenty of evidence to
show that this over-emphasis on literacy, making it
almost synonymous with education, is part of the
international literacy 'conspiracy', conceived by the
World Bank and the agencies of the United Nations. The
Jomtien Declaration (1990), issued by the first World
Conference on EFA [Education for All] and followed up in
the Dakar Framework (2000), is evidence of market forces
working overtime to push the literacy paradigm in the
global education scenario. Literacy skill is all that
the masses need, argue the market forces, so that they
can read the product labels and advertisements. Its
somewhat evolved form would be adequate for factory
workers to read production instructions and to use even
the Internet. Critical thinking, creativity, scientific
temper, analytical abilities, sense of history or
philosophy, aesthetic appreciation and other such
educational attributes need to be reserved for the
privileged few - this is the implication of the literacy
paradigm and the market forces," writes Sadgopal.
A bureaucrat involved in a World Bank-funded
project told Asia Times Online that the total literacy
campaign appears to be an exercise in numbers, in trying
to get children to enroll in schools rather than an
effort to empower them through education.
In a
country like India where so many people live in abysmal
poverty, tackling illiteracy requires a multi-pronged
approach to eliminating poverty - something in which the
World Bank does not appear to be interested. Given that
simple fact, dependence on the World Bank for funding
the education sector seems foolish.
It is in
this context that the World Banks extension of credit to
India's Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan must be seen. Far from
improving the number of educated, it will contribute to
institutionalizing discrimination and widening the gap
between the rich and the poor in the country.
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