Accountability

The various initiatives and resultant outcomes in the field of education need to be understood against the backdrop of the system of education. The belief that private schemes in education would suffice to educate all children in the country, is faulty as has been so proved by historical, constitutional and practical logic.

History records that in the past 200 years, be it under capitalism or socialism, no nation in the world has been able to provide quality education to its children solely by the private route. Success at the class 10 and 12 levels has come through government established and funded school systems. Economist Amartya Sen stands by this thought. India could never have a system of schooling that was public spirited and participatory. Our multi-level system has been centralised, bureaucratised and highly discriminatory. It could never realise the dream of offering quality education to children. The Right to Education brought into such a framework and it is bound to fail.

Constitutionally, it is the obligation of the state and not the private sector to educate children. Hence, when the government system fails, the question should not be what incentives should be offered to the private sector but what are the reasons for the failure of the public system? The political answer to that question is that we have an education system operative at various levels. Those who could afford it sent their children to private schools, those who could not, admitted their children to government ones.

When the Kothari Commission was set up in 1966, there were just 4,000  private schools. The manifold rise in this number is evidence of the failure of the government backed system. A decade after Independence, the middle class grew disenchanted with the government system and with Hindi as a language with possibilities. The stage was set for privately-owned English schools. The government lacked the vision for education for all. It was more focused on providing quality education to the elite and a few in society.

This brings us to the question: education for whom? Literacy is not a synonym for education. The Constitution does not use the word literate, instead it talks of an educated citizen who has faith in democracy, secularism, equity and law and makes mature contributions to nation building.

If private, corporate and social service agencies were to provide education, what would happen to these constitutional ideals? It were these ideals which were subsumed into the National Curriculum framework. Private schools neither have an inkling about this nor are interested in it. Their jobs are limited to manufacturing a product for the market. As privatization grows, so shall this trend. In 1920, Gandhiji had proclaimed that British schools were not structured to meet Indian needs; hence we needed to have an arrangement of nationalized schools. Kashi Vidyapeeth,

Gujarat Vidyapeeth and Jamia Millia Islamia were born out of the response to this proclamation. Their formation was accompanied by the refusal to pay taxes to the government and the birth of the Non-Cooperation movement. The question then is, have private organisations dabbling in education stopped paying taxes to the government and are they openly challenging the failures and policies of the government? Since the answer is no, what do we then expect out of these educational initiatives?

The third question pertains to the practicality of these efforts. Does educating a few thousand children for three to five years in different parts of the country amount to educating all of India’s child population? The number of children who need education from class one to 8 stands at 20 crores, those in the class 9 to 12 category total 9 crores, the same as children ready for nursery/KG classes. We are thus talking about 38 crores children. Private initiatives simply cannot cater to these vast numbers. To educate the first category of the aforementioned children, we need to spend 3 per cent of the GDP, which is Rs 1.80 lakh crores a year.

Educating children in the class 9 to 12 category requires 1.5 per cent of the GDP which amounts to Rs 90,000 crores a year and also requires same amount for educating children in higher education category. The total stands at a staggering Rs 3,60,000 crores a year, a figure clearly out of the reach of the private sector.

Private players in the game cannot become a reason for the government to abdicate its responsibility. They should instead build pressure on the government to improve the conditions of village schools, to provide quality education and to strive towards a common school system. This is not an impossible task and only requires focused energy. But the question is: Are we ready to take this step?