Competing for praise and popularity is as common between Ministries as are turf wars. When officers from different Ministries get the rare opportunity to meet and discuss matters of shared concern, they behave like alert soldiers who are expected to fight for every inch of territory. I had an exposure to this phenomenon while working for a Planning Commission sub-committee on vocational education for skill development. Vocational and technical training is a chaotic corner of our education system. Seventeen Ministries are involved in such training but the overall coverage is poor in both numbers and quality. The Ministry of Labour controls Industrial Training Institutes (ITI) where secondary level children receive technical training. A small proportion of higher secondary schools also offers vocational courses. Joint courses given by schools and ITIs are unheard of, apparently because the two institutions have separate directorates. This is a common and continuous story. When a Ministry launches a new scheme, it seldom takes into account the schemes under which other Ministries might be addressing the same problem.
The Ministry of Women and Child Development (WCD) recently announced a scheme to ‘empower' adolescent girls. Before looking at its salient features, let us briefly recall the entry and progress of ‘empowerment' as a term in the discourse of development. In the last three decades, the term has pushed out earlier ways of addressing the welfare needs of the economically weak and culturally oppressed sections. ‘Empowerment' connotes a radical change after which the weak would cease to feel weak. The term camouflages the sharply unequal distribution of power in society by promising that those without power will gain it without someone else losing it. Initially used in the context of devolution of authority, ‘empowerment' soon became a footloose linguistic device. Welfare schemes — even those which offered little more than escape from hunger — were endowed with the miraculous capacity to empower.
The new scheme launched by the WCD Ministry belongs to this class. It offers free “take-home ration” and iron tablets, a smattering of life skills education and vocational training to girls in 200 underdeveloped districts. The overall food budget has been calculated at the daily rate of Rs. 5 per beneficiary, while the feasibility of cash transfer to a girl is “being explored.” The Ministry intends using its anganwadis for implementing the scheme. So far, anganwadis have served as a vehicle for the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS). Long past its prime, the ICDS has failed to evolve a credible early childhood educational programme. Operated with the help of poorly paid local women, many of whom are illiterate, most ICDS centres serve mainly to feed.
There is no doubt that providing food to children is a laudable thing to do, but the ‘D' in ICDS was supposed to stand for all-round development, not just survival. As a national programme, it runs parallel to the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA). Had the two come together, we might have seen a credible early childhood education coverage in every corner of the country. And now the WCD Ministry is starting a programme for adolescent girls, which will parallel the remarkable network of Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidyalayas (KGBVs) run under the SSA. Instead of contributing to these schools, the new scheme will use the anganwadis to distribute food supplements and so on. A fresh, quiet turf war will slowly encircle rural childhood.
KGBVs are meant to serve rural girls belonging to families whose economy is below the poverty line and others who come from Dalit and minority communities. Now they provide a full-time residential facility and regular education from classes VI to VIII. Girls who never enrolled in a primary school or who dropped out before completing Class V are eligible for enrolment in a KGBV. By any standards, it is a bold and imaginative scheme and over the recent years, it has gained both popularity and status in State after State.
There are some 2,500 functioning KGBVs in rural India today. Visit any of them, and the one demand you will hear from residents and their parents is that they want the school to go up to Class XII or at least Class X. They also want more money to expand infrastructure. Though run on the minimalist principles of SSA, the KGBVs have been a spectacular success, especially in States where the Mahila Samakhya (MS) is managing them. Although Uttar Pradesh and Bihar have treated the MS quite shabbily — setting an example of a turf war between the government and the NGOs — the scheme is blossoming in almost every State. One naturally wonders why the WCD Ministry did not choose to tie up with the HRD Ministry to strengthen the KGBV scheme instead of launching a stand-alone, minimalist programme of food distribution and skill development. The choice of anganwadis as the dispenser of the meagre benefits the new scheme offers is astonishing.
That this scheme has been named Sabla also deserves attention. The coinage is supposed to convey the opposite of abla , which means ‘the one who has no power.' In the Hindi belt, abla inevitably reminds people of a couplet, composed by nationalist poet Maithili Sharan Gupta, which conveys pity for a woman's fate. By playing on that helpless image and inverting it with the prefix ‘s,' to denote ‘one who has power,' the Ministry is trying to perform a semiotic trick. Recall a similar trick in the scheme laadli (the pampered one) which is supposed to reverse foeticide and discourage discrimination against girls. A similar trick is performed when para-teachers are given attractive titles like vidya mitra (friends of knowledge). All such jugglery comprises a disdainful attitude towards the poor. It also attempts to mask the reality in which the poor live, unreached by the state's generous arms. In fact, the name Sabla humiliates poor adolescent girls by claiming to empower them with food supplements worth Rs. 5 a day.
To decode this humiliation, we need to recall how difficult the life of adolescent girls in India is, and not just on the poorer strata of society. Our culture poses formidable mental and social barriers to girls when they attain puberty. Some of these mental blocks make it extremely difficult for education to do what it is supposed to — namely, boost confidence in one's abilities by developing a positive self-concept. Right from early childhood, girls are socialised to perceive matrimony and motherhood as the ultimate goals of their life. A numbing array of rituals and customs is used to prepare girls for the inescapability of leaving their natal homes and for a life of dependence and silent compliance. Negative psychological attributes are compounded by everyday experience of discrimination — in all matters ranging from food intake and health care to education opportunities. It is no surprise that the overwhelming majority of adolescent girls in India are anaemic and sickly. This distressful scenario, in which poverty and early marriage often combine to cause permanent oppression, cannot be erased by distributing a handful of grain and iron tablets, or by imparting some so-called life skills. If the WCD Ministry means business, it should talk to the HRD Ministry and SSA experts to explore collaborative opportunities available in the KGBV scheme. And both Ministries should consider how the girls studying in KGBVs can become the nodal resource for the female literacy mission.
The institutionalisation of the KGBV scheme is not going to be easy. For now, expansion and improvement of quality are major challenges. So is the revision of norms for staff strength and training of teachers. Mainstreaming of the KGBV alumni is also a difficult task, given the aggressive ethos which characterises co-educational secondary schools. Recognition of KGBVs as institutions capable of creating a new generation of women leaders and scholars in rural India ought to become a policy goal. The NCERT has formulated a plan to reserve a few scholarships for them in the National Talent Search examination, but the proposal is still pending with the HRD Ministry. If the WCD Ministry decides to join the pool of resources available for the development of KGBVs, the outcome could well end the impasse one notices in many spheres of women's education and welfare.
(The author is professor of education at Delhi University and former Director of NCERT.)
