Education as fundamental right soon?

Cabinet Takes Up Bill Promising Free Edu In 6-14 Age Group Today

Akshaya Mukul & Mahendra Kumar Singh | TNN

New Delhi: After a wait for four years, and after a lot of dithering and resistance from finance and law ministries, the Union Cabinet on Friday will finally take up for consideration the Right to Education Bill, promising free and compulsory education to children in the age group of 6-14, by making it a fundamental right.

The proposed enabling legislation, first mooted by the Kothari Commission in 1964 and passionately argued for by former education minister M C Chagla later, would come before the cabinet six years after the 86th Constitutional Amendment making free and compulsory education a fundamental right. Earlier it was part of Directive Principles of State Policy of the Constitution. The proposed bill is expected to be introduced in the monsoon session of Parliament and is unlikely to meet any resistance since both NDA and Left have been demanding this legislation. The Constitutional amendment was done during the NDA regime but it would be notified only after the enabling bill becomes a law.

The right to education will cost the exchequer Rs 12,000 crore a year, and even unaided schools would not be outside its ambit since 25% of seats would have to be reserved by them for poor children in the neighbourhood. The Centre would reimburse the cost to these schools. The legislation has host of features that stresses not only on reaching out to every child in the 6- 14 age group but also on quality and accountability of the state and education system.

To ensure the law gets effectively implemented, the bill has provisions prohibiting teachers from undertaking tuitions as well as not letting them being used for non-educational purposes. The bill provides for school management committee in all government and aided schools. It would monitor and oversee the working of the school, manage its assets and ensure quality. There is also a provision that teacher vacancy should never exceed 10% of the strength. To monitor the law implementation, the bill proposes a National Commission for Elementary Education.

TIMES VIEW
This is a cause very dear to us. On July 6, we launched the Teach India campaign to make our little contribution towards education for all. Now the government is set to give the movement a huge boost by making education a fundamental right. A lot of time has been lost—for 44 years we’ve toyed with the idea but just not moved ahead. There is no time to lose. It’s an idea whose time has come.

1st time, 2nd round of IIT admissions

Govt Asks Institutes To Lower Cut-Off Marks To Fill Vacant Quota Seats

Hemali Chhapia | TNN

Mumbai: In the history of the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT), never has there been a second round of admissions. This year, though, all vacant seats at the 13 IIT campuses, as also at IT-BHU and ISM-Dhanbad, will be filled after a second admission list is put out soon.

After a campaign by TOI, officials from the Union HRD ministry met the IIT chiefs in Delhi on Tuesday and asked them to fill up the vacant seats.However, what comes as a shock is that the HRD ministry is not interested in dereserving the vacant seats that were meant for SC, ST and OBC candidates. Instead, the ministry wants the premier engineering schools to dilute merit and further bring down the cut-offs to admit reserved category students. After Tuesday’s meeting, IIT-Delhi director Surendra Prasad said, “We will be taking additional students.’’ The IIT Joint Admission Board has called for an urgent meeting next week to discuss the modalities of filling up the seats that have gone abegging. Director of IIT-Madras M S Ananth pointed out that it would be criminal to take in students by further lowering the cut-offs (see box). “These students will suffer, and so will their self-confidence,’’ he told TOI.

While the last general category student secured admission scored 180, the last SC/ST candidate got 104.

More students will also be accommodated in the preparatory course, which is like a feeder class that trains SC/ST students for a year to equip them to qualify for the IITs. Students need to take a test at the end of the year-long tutorial. If they qualify, the IIT gates are opened to them. For the preparatory course, each IIT relaxes the lowest SC/ST cut-offs by 55%.

With that figure being 104 for both reserved categories this year, the preparatory course cut-off turned out to be 57 out of a total of 489. This cut-off will dip further if additional students have to be admitted.

Times View
We had argued last week that the 430-odd IIT seats that were going vacant because the reserved quotas (OBC/SC/ST) couldn’t be filled should be thrown open to general category candidates in a second round of admissions. Unfortunately, the government seems to have accepted part of our argument—that letting so many seats go unfilled is a waste of resource—and has twisted it into something that threatens to dilute academic standards. Remember that the cut-off for SC/ST students was a much lower 104 marks (out of 489 marks) compared to 180 for general category students. Even then, there weren’t enough students from the OBC/SC/ST categories to fill the entire reserved quota of 2,380 seats (out of a total of 6,992). Allowing general category students to fill up the unutilised quota would’ve resulted in bringing down their cut-off from 180 to say 170, which would still have been way above the 104 cut-off for SC/ST. Instead, the cut-offs for the reserved categories are now likely to be lowered still further. Apart from the impact it could have on IIT standards, past experience shows that a lot of academically weaker students find it difficult to keep up with the rest, and are later forced to drop out. That does not serve the purpose of helping disadvantaged sections of society.


New IITs to also start preparatory courses
Mumbai: With IITs forced to go in for a second round of admissions to fill their seats, IIT-Delhi director Surendra Prasad said preparatory courses would begin at the six new IITs too from this year. While this will put an additional burden on the institutes born overnight, it will prevent a repeat of the ‘vacant seat’ scenario next year as those candidates will be eligible for admission then.

The older IITs managed to fill some SC/ST seats with students who were admitted to the preparatory course in 2007, but there were no such admissions at the new IITs.

This year’s sorry situation is the result of the government commissioning six new IITs—in the process increasing the pool of seats by 720—which led to the increase in quota seats (for which there were simply not enough eligible applicants). Despite the cut-off percentage being lowered in the name of affirmative action, enough reserved category students did not made the grade.

This year, 3.11 lakh students took the Joint Entrance Exam for the 6,992 seats in 13 IITs, the Benaras Hindu University (Information Technology school) and the Indian School of Mines, Dhanbad. Of these, 414 seats had been reserved for ST candidates, but only 159 students were shortlisted. Similarly, only 690 were shortlisted for the 832 SC seats. The OBC figures were 1,099 out of 1,134.

GREAT DIVIDE-III

BUCK STOPS HERE

Education is still the preserve of those who can pay for it

Subodh Varma | TIMES INSIGHT GROUP

If the economic structure of our society seems like a pyramid with a large base of low-income people, educational levels are a mirror image — the lower the income, the less educated people are. Conversely, high incomes invariably mean a much higher level of education. Even after 60 years of Independence, the equation between poverty and lack of education is chillingly stark.

Consider the poorest third of the rural adult population, made up of over 105 million people, earning about Rs 11 per day — 61% of them have had no education and a minuscule 0.7% were graduates or technical qualifiers. Compare this to the richest one-third — 33% were illiterate and 7% were graduates or technically qualified.

The remaining one third of the population, called ‘middle’ for convenience and not to be confused with what is generally called the ‘middle class’, has monthly expenditure between Rs 365-580 in rural areas and Rs 580-1100 in urban areas. Its educational level is somewhere midway between the two extremes.

A similar divide exists in urban areas. Here, the poorest one third, numbering some 45 million, are those with monthly spending of less than Rs 20 per day. Among them, 38% were illiterate, and just 3% were graduates or other diploma holders. On the other hand, among the richest onethird, with monthly spending of more than Rs 1,100, just 6% were illiterate, and 35% were graduates. These are results from a National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) survey in 2004-05.

In case you are thinking that this is a legacy of an ill-managed past, think again. Tracking current attendance in educational institutions, the survey found that nearly 29% children between 5 and 14 years of age of the poorest families were out of school in rural areas. In the next age group of 15 to 19, 75% were not attending. For the richest families, the situation was different — only about 8% in the first age group and 45% in the next age group were not attending school. In urban areas, 20% of the 5-14 age group from poorest families were out of school, increasing to over 64% for the next age group. In the richest section, these shares of children not studying were only 2% and 16%.

What is the reason for this mass abandonment of education by the poor? It cannot be that education is seen as irrelevant to future income. A graduate can earn anything from three to ten times more than an illiterate person, as another NSSO survey found. This is also true of agricultural work. So it is not as if the poor want to remain uneducated, for they well know that education may provide a way out of their present misery.

The main reason is that they are poor. A family of five, earning Rs 1,175 per month, can ill afford to send its kids to school for 12 years, not to mention college. As soon as the children grow up, they start contributing to family income. The survey found that over 35% persons said that they were not attending an educational institution to supplement the family income, while another 16% said they were helping in domestic work, which includes economic activities like looking after cattle.

Rising costs are also a barrier to spread of education at all levels. Between 1999-2000 and 2004-2005, family spending on tuition and other fees went up by an astounding 188% in rural areas and 153% in urban areas. The general price rise in this period was about 30%, showing that education demanded a very high premium.

Quality of education also varies among institutions, with higher quality schools and colleges usually demanding much higher costs. So the less privileged sections have to make do with poorer quality.

OBSTACLE COURSE: Students in a Bengal village have to carry the blackboard home as their school is just a tent

Search for school takes a model turn

A couple’s quest for a good school for their kids gives Rajasthan a unique teaching centre

Amit Bhattacharya | TNN

Back in the 1970s, Doon School alumnus, J P Singh, had a peculiar problem. He just couldn't find a school where his three children could get an “appropriate” education. “My wife, Faith, and I didn't want them to go to an elite public school like I did, because children in such schools don't get to know the real world,” says the scion of a well-known Rajput family.

The Jaipur-based Singh and his English wife, who had by then set up apparel brand Anokhi, sought an environment where their kids could learn at their own pace. “We didn't want lessons stuffed down their throat,” says Singh.

The couple found what they were looking for at Neel Bagh, a unique school in rural Andhra Pradesh being run by a pioneering British educationist, David Horsburgh. But Neel Bagh, located in Srinivasapur taluk of AP, took in just local children. So Horsburgh made the Singhs an offer — if they start a small school of their own, he could train the teachers for it.

Thus in a section of an apparel factory in Jaipur, with three children of well-off parents and the rest working class kids, started a small experiment in alternative education that was named Digantar. The name, meaning a change in direction, was chosen by the school's founders and its only teachers, Rohit Dhankar and Reena Das. “We started in 1978 and eventually had 25 children of various ages. The two of us taught all subjects from Class I to X,” says Dhankar.

Dhankar and Das, who got married around that time, adapted and developed Horsburgh's pedagogy of free learning — the school had no system of examinations (except after classes V, VIII and X, as required by the state government) and the teacher's role was that of a facilitator who helped children become independent learners. “It turned out to be a crucible where our teaching techniques were tested and refined,” says Dhankar.

The school ran till 1986, by which time all three Singh children had passed Class X and had gone to England for further studies. By this time, the teacher couple had realized that their methods had great potential to help rural children. Singh then donated a piece of his land at Todi Ramzanipura, around 20km from Jaipur, and chipped in with an initial grant for the building. So in 1988, with a grant from the Union HRD ministry, Digantar's experiment to bring quality education to rural children got under way.

It wasn’t easy convincing the villagers. Says Dhankar, “The standard reply we got was: ‘We don’t send girls to school in our community; schools don’t teach anything anyway’.” But the couple’s commitment and the school’s unique pedagogy slowly brought results. Today, there are long admission queues at the four Digantar schools that operate in the rural hamlet of Kho Nagoriyan (population around 10,000), where roughly 80% of inhabitants are Muslim and the rest mostly Dalits. “When we started in 1988, female literacy here was 2%. In 1992, we conducted a survey that found 91% of girls in the age group 5-14 didn’t go to school. In 2008, this figure is down to 12%,” says Das.

The schools’ children, most of them firstgeneration learners, do surprisingly well at examinations conducted by the state board. “Hardly anyone ever fails. Most of our students get above average marks in these tests though there’s hardly anyone who has an exceptional score,” says Dhankar. That’s remarkable for a system that lays no stress on examinations. In fact, competition of any kind is discouraged.

But Digantar’s story isn’t just about numbers. Its alternative teaching methods produce confident individuals who are slowly bringing about attitudinal changes in their communities. For instance, Rehana, Nasreen and Arjina, students of Class XI at Digantar’s school in Bandhyali village, are the first girls in their village to reach the Plus 2 level. All three have warded off family pressure to marry and convinced their parents to allow them to continue studies. “We constantly interact with the community in order to build trust,” says Das.

Digantar's activities have spread much beyond the four schools. It’s now a major resource centre for training of teachers coming from across the country, has a project for improving teaching techniques in 75 government schools, conducts research in early reading processes, helps the government with its flagship SSA programme, develops curriculum for government schools, brings out Shiksha Vimarsh, an acclaimed journal on education, and also collaborates in running a Master’s programme in elementary education at TISS in Mumbai.

The “directional change” that two teachers decided to take in 1978, is now showing the direction to a model of quality education for the deprived.

A principal at 18!

Divya A | TNN

Every evening, Anjali Singh, all of 18, becomes a headmistress. Her students — 20 youngsters from poor homes in Kolkata’s Park Circus area — don’t mind her age. For them, she’s mentor, teacher and friend, all rolled into one. By day though, Anjali is a regular first year student of Lady Brabourne College who is carrying on a tradition that her college established decades ago. Batch after batch of college freshers have tutored underprivileged kids from nearby areas.

Every year, two freshers are elected headmistress and assistant headmistress and they run the evening school independently. “We use innovative methods like personalizing question papers for students so that it matches their day school syllabus,” says Anjali, whose students range from Class I to X. Besides tuition, the college-goers also help out with funds for books and snacks, says Irina Chakrabarty who is assistant headmistress.

“We do help students run this ‘school’ but it’s largely their baby,” says hostel superintendent Writuparna Chakraborty.

This teaching initiative is almost as old as the institute itself, now in its 56th year. “The idea was to give students some organisational experience while they pursued academics. But more than that, it has given them a sense of social responsibility,” says principal Sanghamitra Mukherjee.

Parents, too are full of praise. Says Shabnam, a domestic help and mother of Raja, “Much of my son’s success is due to their efforts. We are illiterate and could never have provided such education.” While the evening effort is quite taxing, the students turned teachers don’t mind it. “These kids are part of the extended Brabourne family,” says Anjali.

Municipal school or private? The choice is clear

‘Municipal schools give free books, uniforms and mid-day meals. The only thing missing is teaching’

Julio Ribeiro

Is it better to send your child to a parish school, run by the Catholic Archdiocese of Bombay, or to a municipal school? This is a question that confronts policemen who stay in various police colonies in Mumbai. If the demand for admissions to just one such parish school in Worli is a pointer, then the answer is clear—low-wage earners prefer parish schools.

Municipal schools provide uniforms, books and mid-day meals. They do not charge fees unlike parish schools which levy fees up to class IV. Despite this, policemen, drivers, housemaids and peons still seek to send their wards to parish schools. The reason is plain: teachers in municipal schools do not teach. Their salaries are higher but motivation is low.

Next to my Worli residence is an English medium municipal school inaugurated a few years ago by one of the Thackerays. It should have been a boon for the poorer sections, including the police families who live in Worli Police Colony just behind my house. But within one or two years of its establishment, the parents started pestering me to get their wards into the school attached to the parish church. Every June, at admission time this is a major headache I have to endure.

At the last meeting of the Mohalla Committee Movement, discussions were diverted from the problem of communal discord to the deteriorating standards in municipal schools. Concern was expressed about the practice of private schools insisting on purchase of books and uniforms from school-appointed suppliers and many felt that this was hard on the not-so-affluent. But most thought this was a small price to pay for the better quality of education that most private schools, particularly convent schools, provide.

There are municipal teachers who talk on their mobiles in class.They also argue that much of their time is spent on distributing books, meals and other goodies under the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan. On the last day of every month, municipal schools are closed to enable teachers to draw salaries.

Even the poor now want quality education for their children in English medium. They want them to have a better quality of life than they ever did even if it comes at a high cost. Parish schools are in particular demand because of the commitment of the priests and nuns who run them. The obvious solution is to improve the quality of education in municipal schools. Many of these schools have closed as there are no takers and in others, some classes have been discontinued. This is a great waste of public money and space.

The Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan should not be confined to distributing food and uniforms, but should include teaching. There is no earthly reason why poorer paid staff in convent schools should attract greater respect than the better paid teachers of municipal schools.

IITs to push for dereserving vacant seats

Times View Impact?

Hemali Chhapia | TNN

This year, six new Indian Institutes of Technology were brought into being, each with 120 seats —that’s a total of 720 seats. And yet, because the OBC, SC and ST quotas could not be filled up (as enough applicants could not get the generously relaxed pass marks set for these categories), as many as 432 seats will go abegging.

Consider the absurdity of the situation. On the one hand, new IITs are being created at enormous cost; on the other, as many as 432 seats—that’s the equivalent of threeand-a-half IITs—are being allowed to go waste. In Saturday’s edition, we wrote a Times View saying: “To let over 430 seats in IITs go vacant is a criminal waste of infrastructure (such as faculty and physical facilities). Reservations are meant to give disadvantaged sections of society a boost. But where quotas cannot be filled because there aren’t enough suitable candidates, the cut-off for the general category should be relaxed so that all seats are used up—the cut-off will still be higher than for SC/STs, so no one can argue that it will dilute academic standards. As with airline seats and hotel rooms, these seats are ‘perishable’, they must be filled the same year. This should not affect next year’s quota.’’

This sorry situation is the result of two major education policies framed by the Centre. The government not only commissioned six new IITs, but simultaneously increased the number of quota seats (for which there are simply not enough eligible applicants). Despite the cut-off percentage being lowered in the name of affirmative action, the students have not made the grade. The old IITs can fill some of the seats with students from the preparatory course, but the new IITs have nothing to fall back on.

IIT-Guwahati director Gautam Barua said that the institute heads who are meeting later this month may ask the HRD ministry to dereserve the unfilled quota seats. “There is no time this year but we may try to seek permission to transfer the vacant seats to the general category for next year,’’ said Barua.

The prospect of empty chairs in the classroom has disheartened faculty members, many of whom echoed Saturday’s Times View.

WASTING RESOURCES
IITs across the country offer a total of 119 streams. Each IIT sets aside 15% of the seats for SC students, 7.5% for students from the STs and, from this year, will reserve 9% of seats for OBCs (though the six new IITs have implemented 27% reservation for OBCs)

IIT-Bombay, for instance, has 64 seats in computer science and engineering; 44 seats go to students from the general category, six to OBCs (9% of 64), 10 to SCs (15% of 64) and 4 to STs (7.5% of 64). IITs release four merit lists, one for the general category and three others for each reserved category. This year, the cut-off mark for the general category was 180, for OBCs 173, and for both SCs and STs, 104.

The OBC topper was ranked 27th overall, while the two who were first among SCs and STs were ranked 166th and 429th overall, respectively.

Politics before merit, says IIT top brass
“Every IIT seat has the potential to produce a Nandan Nilekani or a Vinod Khosla,’’ said a senior faculty from Kharagpur. “To allow even one seat to go vacant is like crushing a million dreams and aspirations.’’

Another professor from IITBombay said that the empty-seat syndrome while not new had been aggravated this year because of the “unthinking way in which the HRD ministry merrily commissioned half-a-dozen new institutes and expanded quota seats without so much as a thought as to whether or not reserved candidates would qualify’’.

Down the years, IIT deans have faced the brunt of political interventions. When the first batch of IIT-Delhi students graduated, 47 of the 53 reserved category students failed. The dean was summoned. Recalling the meeting with the “big fat man’’, education minister Nurul Hasan, P V Indiresan said, “He kept his bulky hand on my shoulder and asked me, ‘Professor, yeh kya kar diya?’ (Professor what have you done?)’’ Little has changed. Only two months ago, IIT-Delhi was pulled up by the Minorities Commission for asking 20 reserved students to pack their bags because of “very poor performance’’.

These instances of political pressure though fairly common rarely come out in the open. IIT heads who are accused of casteism or deliberately failing reserved category students prefer to stay silent. Most are reluctant to even broach the topic of transferring vacant seats to the general pool, said a former IIT director. “Any issue regarding reserved students has a lot of political repercussions,’’ said Indiresan. “After all, these students have constitutional protection.’’

According to a government report nearly 50% of the reserved seats remain vacant. And of those who make it, 25% drop out. The situation in the next academic year is likely to be even worse. This is because the six newbies do not have the back-up preparatory course. This course, which is like a feeder class, trains quota students for a year to equip them to qualify for the IITs. IITMadras head M S Ananth said that while filling SC and OBC seats is still manageable, it is much more difficult when it comes to the tribal quota. “Despite this, these seats cannot be de-reserved as they were created as super-numeric seats over and above the existing number so as to ensure that quotas did not eat into the open category.’’

Ananth added that transferring seats was not encouraged—except in the case of OBC quota—“because of the fear that the IITs would try to fill them up with forward candidates. It’s just that the government wants us to make enough efforts to look for backward students. Hence, if unfilled, the seats have to go vacant.’’

Old hands like Indiresan rue the fact that the government is killing its golden goose for shortterm political profit. “The reason the IITs are such a success is because they enjoy three basic freedoms: freedom to choose whom to teach, who will teach, and what to teach. These are now endangered.’’ TNN