In 1991, when the female literacy rate in India was less than 40%, rural female literacy rate was even lower, at 30%. By 2001, rural female literacy rate had risen to 46%, and in 2011, to 59%.
One of the several efforts that has helped to contribute to this increase, and to a greater demand for rural girls’ education over the years, has been the unique grassroots initiative called Mahila Samakhya. The programme grew out of the National Policy on Education 1986 which had stated: “Education will be used as an agent of basic change in the status of woman.”
Launched by the Central government in 1988, Mahila Samakhya focused on education for women’s equality. With its unique grassroots focus on engaging marginalised women — Dalits, tribals, other backward castes, minorities — the programme was able to reach out to out-of-school girls, working with the community to create learning opportunities in alternative centres and residential camps.
In 2014, about 25 years after the inception of Mahila Samakhya, an IIM-Ahmedabad report found that the programme had grown to over 44,000 villages in 130 districts and 14 lakh sangha members. It operated 187 Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidyalayas (KGBVs) and 102 Mahila Shikshan Kendras (MSKs), apart from over 16,000 alternative learning centres.
Vimala Ramachandran was the first National Programme Director of Mahila Samakhya. Since then, she has designed and extensively studied several education initiatives, giving her a rich and nuanced perspective of the evolution of the school education sector in India. For example, when Mahila Samakhya started residential programmes for out-of-school adolescent girls, rural poor women eagerly brought their daughters to be admitted. This, and the residential Balika Shikshan Shivirs of Lok Jumbish, Rajasthan, led in 2004 to the launch of the Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidyalaya scheme for quality residential education for rural girls. Within a decade, over 3,500 KGBVs were set up in the most educationally backward blocks of India.
Biased system
Inside Indian Schools: The Enigma of Equity and Quality is the detailed, reflective and granular narrative of Ramachandran’s travels to the schools in which some of the poorest and most marginalised children study. She takes us into the Indian classroom to unpack fundamental assumptions about equity, quality and education.
Although Indian educationists have argued for a common school system since the Kothari Commission Report in the 1960s, what we have today is a highly stratified system across both public and private sectors. The debate over quality is usually reduced to one of public vs private schools, but the reality is that children from different socio-economic backgrounds attend different kinds of schools in both systems. As increasing numbers of children have been enrolled in school over the years, especially with the passing of the Right to Education Act — many of them first-generation learners — teaching capacity and other resources have not increased in proportion to the growing needs of the system. Apart from the shortage of qualified and trained teachers, the crucial factor of teaching quality has been neglected. There continue to be a sizeable number of single-teacher, multi-grade schools. This has led to concern about learning outcomes.
While teacher absenteeism is usually held up as a cause for poor learning outcomes, Ramachandran unpacks this assumption citing the Azim Premji Foundation study which finds that actual teacher absenteeism is 2.5%. It is not absenteeism but legitimate teacher absence — due to administrative and other non-academic reasons — that needs to be addressed, thus pointing back to the issue of vacancies and the working conditions of this beleaguered community of frontline educators.
Learning outcomes are not the only things or even the first things that we should be concerned about. Discrimination at school occurs at the intersections of different identities: social group and community; poverty; academic performance; disability; and not least of all, gender. Not surprisingly, higher numbers of children from poor homes and disadvantaged communities end up in ‘high-poverty’ schools. Nearly two out of every five children are malnourished. In one study of the very poor, she finds that many children come to school hungry, after only a glass of water in the morning. “On most days, 10% to 15% of children (most of them girls) came to school without eating.”
A book in hand
Apart from infrastructure issues, especially functional toilets, co-curricular resources and activities — sport materials, school libraries — remain insufficient. If we want our children to read, we should give them books.
For tribal children, access itself remains a formidable challenge: many of them must travel long distances to reach secondary school. Another issue is language: although the benefits of mother tongue instruction in the early grades are well known, this remains a challenge in tribal areas, reflecting also a need for qualified teachers from tribal communities; moreover, content in textbooks only has a few perfunctory and stereotypical representations of tribal communities and way of life, and needs more diversity.
What is the way forward? In the final chapter, ‘What it Means to be a Dalit or Tribal Child in our Schools,’ Ramachandran asks questions such as: Who sits where? Who cooks? Who eats? In a deeply unequal society, these fundamental questions matter. Schools can be one of the first settings to reduce discrimination. This requires not only funding and resources, but also support for the teaching community. Progress in the direction of equity is what will finally lead to quality.
Inside Indian Schools: The Enigma of Equity and Quality ; Vimala Ramachandran, Social Science Press, ₹850.
