The document discusses the importance of education in India. It notes that many children, especially from marginalized communities, lack access to education. This perpetuates cycles of poverty and underdevelopment. The document outlines several issues with India's education system, including poor infrastructure, high dropout rates, lack of accountability, and rote learning rather than developing critical thinking. It argues that investing in universal education, as mandated by the Right to Education Act, is essential for India's development and for improving human development indicators. Access to education, especially for girls, has been shown to lower population growth and infant mortality. Overall, the document emphasizes that widespread quality education is needed to develop an informed citizenry and power socioeconomic progress in India.

1. The Importance of Education:
A beautiful anonymous quote often makes itself heard whenever the issue of how children
are placed in the ‘adult scheme of things’ comes up –
“We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it for our children.”
Children are of utmost importance not only because they are the torch bearers of the future,
but they are citizens of today; their present is as important as their future; and just because
they are not voters; they cannot be ignored by the government and much more so by their
parents. Also, in the context of children, an ancient Tibetan proverb claims:
“A child without education is like a bird without wings.”
The child learns by exploring and experimenting, insistently snooping into every little corner
that is open to us – and into the forbidden corners too! But sooner or later their wings get
cut-off. The real world created by grown-ups comes to bear down upon growing children,
moulding them into progressively more predictable members of society.
More than half of India’s population is poor and relatively high birth rate among the poor in
India. Nearly 60% of India’s children are born in underprivileged households; and their
chances to lead an educated, dignified life with socioeconomic freedom are stunted to say
the least.

2. India’s rank was at the bottom 102 out of 120 countries ranked by the Global Monitoring
Report 2012, quotes Oxfam’s policy brief, ‘Right to Education Act: Claiming Education for
Every Child’. It is beyond imagination that a country of 100 billionaires still has 6 million
children out of school. These children are between 6 to 13 years of age. A shocking majority
(75%) of these out of school children belong to Dalit (32.4%), Tribal (16.6%) and Muslim
(25.7%) communities.
Given that the country’s social sector spending, especially on education, is increasingly being
cut, it makes sense to invest and implement the RTE Act in full force. Though the budget for
FY 2015-16 talks about increasing outlay for higher education and establishing newer IITs
and IIMs, there has been a 16.5% decline in the budgetary allocation to Department of
School Education and Literacy and Department of Higher Education. The Union Government
is clearly steering away from its accountability and responsibility to allocate resources for the
RTE Act. As a nation, it is imperative upon us to allow all our children to access basic social
infrastructure like good education and gain the capabilities that will empower them to
contribute positively towards the development of themselves, society and the country.
Of what use is talk of smart cities, airports, metros and growth when the basic education of
the future youth of this country is neglected? It is undeniable that development of any
country is reflected in the quality of its education system, since knowledge and economic
opportunities depend on solid education achievements and skills. India’s education system is
largely carried out by the government, but the fact that the government is not able to
improve teacher absenteeism, track children’s learning progress and prove accountable for
learning outcomes is not only an issue of underinvestment in education; it is also the inability
of the government to understand the complexity of the issues confronting rural life and
urban life and how that translates to poor educational outcomes. There is a good reason why
the United Nations Human Development Index (HDI) which is a measure of average
achievement in key dimensions of human development for 187 countries around the world
as of 2014: the three main parameters used to gauge a country’s level of development is a
long and healthy life, being knowledgeable and have a decent standard of living, includes
‘mean years of schooling’ and ‘expected years of schooling’ as one of the parameters. India's
HDI value for 2013 is 0.586, ranking it 135 out of 187 countries and territories, the lowest
among the BRICS countries with Russia at 57, Brazil at 79, and China at 91, and South Africa
at 118, and slightly ahead of Bangladesh and Pakistan. What we are pointing out is that,
education is not merely about cramming book-loads of data and mastering mathematics.

3. For Example: Kerala is one of India's most crowded states - but the population is stable
because nearly everybody has small families. At the root of it all is education. Thanks to a
long tradition of compulsory schooling for boys and girls Kerala has one of the highest
literacy rates in the World. Where women are well educated they tend to choose to have
smaller families.
What Kerala shows is that we don't need aggressive policies or government incentives for
birth-rates to fall. Everywhere in the world where women have access to education and have
the freedom to run their own lives, on the whole they and their partners have been choosing
to have smaller families than their parents.
In rural India, mother's education has been shown to improve their mobility and their ability
to make decisions on seeking care when a child is sick – and infant children of women.
Education is consistently found to have a strong effect on reducing mortality before children
reach their first birthday – when the majority of child deaths occur – even taking household
wealth into account. In northern India, looking at the analysis based on the Annual Health
Survey and the census in 2011 showed that, female literacy was strongly linked to child
mortality, even after taking into account access to reproductive and child health services. An
increase in the female literacy rate from 58%, the current average in the districts surveyed, to
100% would lead to a reduction in the under-5 mortality rate from 81 to 55 deaths per 1,000
live births.
The Right to Education and NGO’s:
The Right to Education (RTE) act, which came into being during April 2010, is a fundamental
right for all those children who are in the age group of 6-14 years. Through this act, the
government is entitled to provide education to every child up to the eighth grade, free of
cost and irrespective of class and gender. RTE is the first legislation in the world that lays
such duties on the government.

4. According to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights Article 13.2,
the right to education includes the right to free, compulsory primary education for all, an
obligation to develop secondary education accessible to all, in particular by the progressive
introduction of free secondary education, as well as an obligation to develop equitable
access to higher education, ideally by the progressive introduction of free higher education.
The right to education also includes a responsibility to provide basic education for
individuals who have not completed primary education. In addition to these access to
education provisions, the right to education encompasses the obligation to rule out
discrimination at all levels of the educational system, to set minimum standards and to
improve quality of education.
The Government, Corporates and Media – everyone is talking about ‘Education in India’.
There are no second opinions on the fact that lack of excellent education, in whatever way
we define excellence, is probably the root cause of most issues in the World.
There are a many NGOs toiling it out to bring about a change, the government is bringing in
new schemes to enhance existing systems, and corporates are pledging exorbitant money
for funding new programs or improving infrastructure. Teach for India, Pratham Foundation
and Barefoot College are some of the most progressive institutional examples of innovative
practices put to use to bridge educational inequalities. But, private institutions can only reach
so many children, no matter how noble and effective the cause. It is truly a policy issue that
centres on enforcing accountability- on teacher selections, promotion rules, competency
versus memorization evaluations and the encouragement of parents to have a greater role in
their child’s education. Indeed, without such push for reform, India will have a few pockets of
elite progress floating on a large pool of illiteracy and under-performance, which will
continue to enforce the cycle of poverty and lack of socio-economic progress. The high
school drop-out rates still remain above 85% (Source: District Information System for
Education DISE) – an alarming loss of potential.

5. Inclusion of people with disabilities into the mainstream society is a much neglected issue in
a country like India where a large percentage of children (about 10%) are born with birth
defects. These children with disabilities have to face enormous challenges in their lives to get
a formal education. The percentage of people who are successful in integrating themselves
with the activities of mainstream life is very less as compared to the total number of such
people. Children with physical and mental disabilities (like autism, cerebral palsy, hearing and
visual impairments,) have to face enormous challenges in their life to get formal education.
The attitude of the mainstream schools towards the inclusion of students with disabilities is
extremely disappointing. According to the Persons with Disabilities (PWD) Act, every child
with a disability has equal right to free education in an appropriate environment till he
attains the age of 18. But how many schools in our country are actually aware of the Act?
Very few, it seems. Most of the school authorities are not equipped with the knowledge and
attitude or skills required for successful inclusion. The parents of these children have to face
rejection at each and every stage of their endeavour.
An NGO called ‘Purti’ is an effort towards special education needs of children with learning
disabilities in New Delhi. The word Purti means “to fulfil”, and aptly the school aims to fulfil the
needs of children who are considered “special” by society. The initiative to start the school was
taken by Ms. Ravinder Arora when she sought to provide a wholesome education to the
“learning disabled” as distinguished from the “mentally disabled”. The immediate inspiration
for Ms. Arora was her own daughter, who was facing learning difficulties at St. Thomas’
School. At that time, most special schools in Delhi mixed the children who had learning
difficulties with those who had extremely low IQ’s. Out of the need to provide what later
came to be known as Specialized Education Environment (SEE), Purti was born on 16th May
1997 in a small flat in Ashok Vihar, New Delhi.
Nearly fifteen years down the line, Purti has a vision of its own and a structured system in
place which provides individualised education to its students. The school accepts students
who are not completely mentally disabled. Instead, they are in need of a specialized
environment to pursue their academic goals which is not available to them in a conventional
school. Although the distinction between learning disabled and mentally disabled may be an
abstruse one to many, psychologists would categorise the students at Purti under the
following categories:

6. 1. Having Learning Disabilities
2. Autism
3. Slow Learners
4. Having Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)
5. Having Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD)
6. Physically Differently Abled
7. Having Cerebral Palsy
At Purti, the students are divided into groups based on their academic level, their age group
and their need for individualized education, all the while maintaining a ratio of five children
per educator. A child is given special individualized attention to assess the shortcomings in
the basic academic areas before merging the student in an appropriate study group, thus
introducing a SEE [Specialized Education Environment]. Purti focuses primarily on academics,
eventually aiming to help the children clear their X and XII examinations under the National
Institute of Open Schooling (NIOS). The academic programs are designed within the school
and aim to simultaneously achieve two major objectives: to strengthen the basic
indispensable factors of core academics, and to secondarily extract the latent capabilities out
of an individual.
As such, the programs often include a combination of regular academics with pre-vocational
skills training. Purti also places great emphasis on the role of parents and family members
in helping the special child to gain acceptance within the society. Picnics with parents and
siblings are organised to help the parents overcome their complexes pertaining to a member
with special needs in the family. Besides, parents are kept in the loop as to the educational
patterns adopted for their child and are also invited to attend workshops where eminent
child psychologists and experienced speakers deal with queries, doubts and fears of the
parents and siblings.
Besides, to provide a comprehensive education and to provide basic life skills to the children,
Purti does not restrict itself to the classroom. Regular outings are organised which include
visits to historical locations, educational sites or simply a restaurant, a shopping mall, grocery
stores, banks, post offices or the Delhi Metro. The idea behind such outings is to acquaint
the children with these locations and to enable them to perform regular social processes in
such environments.

7. Role of a Teacher:
India was a nation where teaching as a profession was deeply revered in ancient times. Since
times of the ancient Vedic gurukuls, a teacher was like a second parent, someone who is
always there to guide you in the most crucial crossroads of your life; someone for whom
teaching is not a business but a profession chosen from heart and out of genuine concern.
Standing today, this old definition seems to have grown old with age. Time is ripe for a new
definition:
“Someone who is there to ridicule you, someone who is not there to help you overcome the
hurdles but to present you with ridicule on your capabilities“. I have heard teachers say —
“Do whatever you want. I will get my salary anyway”. How cheap and shoddy is that!
Thus, a teacher can easily get away with being just mediocre inside a classroom. This
degradation in the quality of teaching has directly resulted in the loss of respect for teaching
as a profession.
In India, teaching is the last career option we look at. Most people resort to teaching as a last
desperate attempt at earning their livelihood. Thanks to our teachers, institutions and the
system. There is a visible power dynamics where the students do not see the teacher as a
facilitator of knowledge but rather as someone who comes and simply delivers information.
There is no effective engagement with the lived realities the students face. They are taught to
memorize the information taught inside the class and are expected to perform well in the
exams.
The present system of education makes students aspire for professional degrees thereby
neglecting arts. Arts were means of aesthetic experience, Philosophy, music, literature were
taught to enhance ‘human’ experience.
But the education of today is anaesthetic one; it takes away your creative abilities. In the
book, ‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed’, the author Paulo Freire talks about the education as it
were a banking system where:
“Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and
the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiqués and
makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat”.
Freire also said in his book:
“The teacher talks about reality as if it were motionless, static, compartmentalized, and predictable.
Or else he expounds on a topic completely alien to the existential experience of the students. His
task is to "fill" the students with the contents of his narration— contents which are detached from
reality, disconnected from the totality that engendered them and could give them significance.
Words are emptied of their concreteness and become a hollow, alienated, and alienating verbosity.”

8. But the future is not as bleak as it seems. Our schools have made sure that even if the short-
lived knowledge given to the students has no significance in their lives, the bags which carry
these books of knowledge will at least get them a weight-lifter’s job for their survival. It
comes as no surprise that there are schools where a teacher was absent for 23 years without
being noticed! And of course they were paid all these years while elsewhere, some kids
struggle to meet their basic needs in life. Indeed, the current statistics of India’s educational
under-performance are startling. Out of all the Asian countries, India has the fourth lowest
literacy rates at 74%, with Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh trailing slightly behind; this
becomes even more staggering when compared to Sri Lanka’s 98% literacy rate
achievements.
Good teachers connect by respecting individuality and personal space. Effective mentors
display immense faith in the potential of their students. They inherently believe every child is
capable of greatness in his/her own right. They see their role as being one that unravels this
potential. Such teacher’s value uniqueness, the fact that each child has a different view of the
world, each child may process information differently, each child is an independent mind.
They engage in discussions, they debate, they have dialogues and in doing so make every
viewpoint heard and valued. So, viewed rightly, teaching as a profession offers wide
opportunities for a person to grow and become self-aware. Other findings of student
accomplishments in primary school mainly sourced from Pratham Foundation’s Annual
Status of Education Report (ASER 2014), point to even greater gaps:
Only half of all children aged 8-11 years enrolled in a government school are able to
read a simple paragraph with three sentences.
Less than half (43%) of these children are able to subtract a two-digit number
from another two-digit number.
Only 37% of children enrolled in class 4 and 5 can read fluently.
Less than half (45%) are able to divide 20 by 5.

9. Only 16% of class 4 pupils can master measurement of the length of a pencil with a
ruler.
Only 22% of class 6 students could understand that crumbling paper does not alter
its weight.
Reading and math skills of class 4 students in India’s top schools are below the
international average.
Roadmap for Educational Reform:
These outcomes point to an ineffective, unaccountable system that is in dire need of reform.
It is not easy to transform such crumbling and complex issues overnight. It will, in fact, take
years. But first, we must stop pretending that India is heading in the right direction, because
cities like Mumbai, Bangalore, Pune, Delhi and others produce educated and skilled youth.
But to think of this progress as India’s incredible achievements in education is turning a blind
eye to vast prevalence of educational inadequacy in the country.
The basic structure of education in our country is based on competition for grades. Children
are constantly under pressure to excel, which inadvertently pits one student against the
other, creating divisions and tensions among them. They end up giving more value to
success and failure than to interpersonal relationships.

10. Grades have an inevitable moral code attached to them. Imagine you have guests at home;
the second thing they want to know about you when you are introduced to them, only after
perhaps your name, is the percentage you acquired or your rank in class. Studious means
principled. Failure means worthless. This is what the society has finally converged into – an
entity weighing and judging worth by its overvalued, discriminatory and biased method of
grading. Now the question is, why do the majority chose the rat race or the race to the
bottom? However debilitating and baseless, this is still the short-cut. This is the safer way; the
escape. The ready-to-solve questions make it appear as the safer way of education – mug it
up, vomit, forget.
A system that feeds young minds with the idea that defeats and failures of others is personal
success. A student who competes for decades in the name of education, to be better than
the rest of the class, and frowns upon those who ‘fail’, would obviously not be educated to
be a part of a community that lays its foundations on mutual harmony.
The most severe form of stratification pervades among the illiterates and literates followed
by the ascending order of educational qualifications constructed by the sector of education.
Stratification becomes a mechanism of control and regulation of abilities, distribution of
occupation and persistence of social fabric. However, this differentiation also brings about
insecurity, envy and inferiority complex among the actors.

11. Grades divide the society into classes, a social structure, similar to distinctions based on
caste. A hierarchy is formed among students and they are divided between class strata, on
the basis of academic performance. This discrimination has resulted into an immense amount
of pressure from a very young age.
There are swords hanging upon a child to score high, and then there is cut throat
competition, the fear of which culminates into hard work, and not the curiosity to attain
knowledge. This system introduces comparison and competition at a very young age. Even
parents want high scores like 90% or above from their children. Sometimes children are not
able to cope with the pressure and try to commit suicide. The suicide rates have increased
manifold in the last few years owing to the ever- increasing pressure to perform the best,
consequently, leading to stress becoming usual for children. Talent and curiosity are sought
to be crushed at every level. There is no space for personal growth. If an academician wants
to go into the area of research, one has to be prepared for a future of limited means.
Parents have a general tendency to condemn anything off-academic. This is because the
Indian parents believe in visible results. Also, there is a blatant parent hierarchy that they
need to manage. There is also a parallel pressure with the pressure of grades; which is that of
living up to expectations. One is made to realize the need to study and bring home money
because one has been invested upon.
In the race to justify the one size fits all philosophy, we have moved away from allowing the
children to make mistakes and infuse creativity in learning. Bill Ayers, an Elementary
Education Theorist said,
“Standardized tests can’t measure initiative, creativity, imagination, conceptual thinking,
curiosity, effort, irony, judgment, commitment, nuance, good will, ethical reflection, or a host of
other valuable dispositions and attributes. What they can measure and count are isolated skills,
specific facts and function, content knowledge, the least interesting and least significant aspects
of learning.”
The first thing that any organization that you go to work for asks is, to ‘unlearn what you
have learned’. What is the use of such education? Why would you want to waste your
parents’ money if the only thing it can buy you is a degree and not practical knowledge?
Standardized tests are a very good tool to measure a very narrow type of intelligence. The
over emphasis on this and everyone-happy attitude will churn out robotic individuals scoring
low on the values required to sail through the rigors of life’s challenges. Test makers have a
done a wonderful job of selling these to the entire educational system, starting right from
primary schooling.
“The fact is that given the challenges we face, education doesn’t need to be reformed – it needs
to be transformed. The key to this transformation is not to standardize education, but to
personalize it, to build achievement on discovering the individual talents of each child, to put
students in an environment where they want to learn and where they can naturally discover
their true passions.”

12. It was Albert Einstein who quoted:
“If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid”.
Einstein also quoted:
‘The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One
cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the
marvellous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this
mystery every day. Never lose a holy curiosity.’’
It is high time that we change our focus from grade oriented to learning oriented education.
We need to give our students better reasons for education other than grades. Apart from the
awareness that we do not need grades; we have to engage students and to motivate them to
learn. Research has shown that when the curriculum is engaging, that is, teaching is made
more interactive and students are given more practical classes and hands-on experience,
students who are not graded perform at the same level as students who are graded.
But this would happen only when an era will come where students would be able to opt for a
career of their choice and when opportunities will eventually outnumber the students. But till
that time, examinations are only a necessary evil and we cannot afford to abandon this as
this helps us all in developing a faith in the system that provides a scope to withstand the
interference of influence and power.
Revival of Humanities and Social Sciences:
The society expects every other boy and girl to either be an engineer or a doctor and most
recently a chartered accountant (CA). There is absolutely nothing wrong with being an
engineer or a doctor or a historian or an anthropologist or a stock broker. The point is, we
need to stop denigrating professions, stop comparing IQ levels. Stop putting other people
down in general; stop thinking that I happen to belong to a much hyped stream of education
than the other.
“beta tum toh ache student ho, fir arts kyu le rahe ho”
“arts field me koi career nahi hai”
“ache students ke liye science stream hi sahi hai”
“mann lagakar padhai karo, wrna arts lena pdega”
“itne ache number lane par agar arts loge toh log kya kahenge”
These are not famous quotes from the yellow pages of wise philosophers, but very
profoundly quoted by those who claim to be so. If the student is bright, he/she must study
science. If the student is weak, humanities and social sciences would serve them best.
If the bright student is a girl, she will have to deal with biology and if that bright student
happens to be the boy, he cannot insult his intelligence by taking up anything besides
technology and engineering. These are not my words, but the common understanding of the
society in general or rather should I say, the stereotypes attached with the division of
subjects where:

13. The interest of student – does not matter, has no relevance at all!
The ambition of student – has to be monetary profits, the more the better!
The aptitude required for a particular subject – is all about marks, the higher the better!
In tandem with our chauvinistic society, an option always open for the girl is marriage.
However, the male’s primary interest is earning a living for his family. With the promise of
secured jobs and placement after graduating from an engineering college, the male student
is plagued more intensively to relinquish all his personal interests for earning quick money.
After all, one does not want to be doing what they love and be homeless. India has
numerous languages, a rich historical, ethnic and cultural background and so can offer a
number of course in humanities and social sciences to Indian as well as foreign students. But
this is not happening as the subject is not being encouraged the way it needs to be.
Every day we come to know about the new institutes like IITs, IIMs and AIIMSs being
founded but how many of us actually know about the best humanities and social sciences
institutes in India. It seems even the government is oblivious to the importance of studying
humanities and social sciences and so promotes only Science and technology related
subjects.
Through exploration of the humanities and social sciences, we learn how to think creatively
and critically, to reason, and to ask questions. In science, mathematics and engineering
classes, one is given facts, answers, knowledge, and truth. The professors say, “This is how
things are.” They give you certainty. The humanities and social sciences give you uncertainty,
doubt and skepticism. The humanities and social sciences are subversive. They undermine
and question the claims of all authorities, whether political, religious or scientific. They do not
just correct your wrong pair of glasses via which you look at the world but also provide you
multiple lenses with multiple perceptions.
Humanities and social sciences make you question absolutely anything, even science. Here, I
am not making a point that Science is anywhere less important or humanities and social
sciences are more constructive. But I am arguing against the mindset that categorizes
Humanities and social sciences (or any subject for that matter) as ‘easy’.
But many students realize this baseless ground of differentiation so late in their lives that
they end up dwindling in science classes even if they had skill and ability for music, sports,
arts or anything ‘non-technical’. Life is tragically belittled and constricted into a form of
existence that involves the satisfaction of blunt material pleasures. No wonder aesthetic and
finer senses are almost on the verge of extinction.
The flip side of this coin bears an ugly image. This frantic chase behind the science stream
has conversely made the Arts; if not so much the commerce stream, an abode of the
mediocre. Quite ironically, even students who later pursue literature or other such courses,
take up science, since that seems to evaluate the actual potential of a student. The future
pivot, though not often desired, is still permitted. But Humanities and social sciences in the
+2 level is tantamount to sinning. Since subjects offered in the stream requires nothing but
mindless learning, heaps of sighs are heaved when a student is fated such.

14. This trend has slaughtered cognitive skills. Subjects such as history, literature, political
science, and economics require much more than plain learning. They are subjects that tease
the grey cells continually, if studied in their true spirits. Wouldn’t we be rootless individuals
without an ample knowledge of history? The world would crumble without economics!
Literature is the spiritual essence of human existence, a vital force behind this mundane life.
The quest for knowledge has completely disappeared with the emergence of this career-
centric education. The popular argument is that a student of humanities and social sciences
does not get the varied career options easily available for a science student.
Though there is some practical truth attached to this statement, its meaning is wholly
exaggerated. I believe that if one loves a particular field, one is bound to succeed with
proper enterprise. If a writer is forced to work in an IT company or, an IT official is forced to
comment on Shakespeare’s poetry, the outcome is quite understandable. So, the basic
failure of our society lies here. There is no recognition of individual potential. Mass mentality
and inclinations are acknowledged. Since the crowd studies science, the individual must
comply.
Everyone is engaged in a blind scramble for a space in the bandwagon, jealously watching its
leaders. But what everyone fails to notice is that millions are simply trampled under this
bandwagon. They bleed to death or live in misery. This is reminiscent of our ancient caste
system, where a particular caste was branded as honourable or dishonourable, thus
undermining the potentials of the individuals who comprised it.
Thus, their vocations were the inherited means for survival. We are moving, once again, into
this system. It would not be too shocking to witness a future where a class of science-
educated aristocracy would emerge, who would assert special rights claiming more
intelligence and potential than the remaining lot who were fated to study something else.
Can you imagine where the writer or the poet would exist in such a society?
The problem lies in the way we view education. We do not perceive subjects as something
worth to learn from but rather see it as stock market where we invest our credentials to get
the profits. But at the same time, we fail to realize that the market is changing every day.Let
us look at some facts and figures. Wide gender based disparities exist in the education sector
in the country. For every 100 boys enrolled in secondary education, there are about 81 girls
enrolled.
According to UNESCO’s recent report titled ‘Education for All Global Monitoring Report 2014’,
90 per cent of children from poor families in India remain illiterate despite completing four
years of school education. These raise some serious questions about the nature of the
knowledge being imparted. Also, The Human Rights Watch came out with a report in April,
2014 called ‘They Say We’re Dirty: Denying an Education to India’s Marginalized’ which
points at heavy discrimination faced by students who belong to certain marginalized
communities such as Dalits, Muslims, etc. The common understanding of the school as a
level playing field fails completely. Apart from this, there is an increased privatization of
education over the past few decades.

15. There are many benefits that can be accrued if girls were to be educated properly. The most
visible form of emancipation that education offers women would be political and social
awareness. It helps them challenge restrictive gender roles and equips them with better
negotiating capabilities.
With proper education and skill sets they get high paying jobs that would help the young
adolescent girls gain more negotiating power inside and outside their own homes. In India,
family often becomes the seat of inequality where women’s relationships with men inhibit
their mobility and professional success. The media is filled with the overuse of the trope of
the self-sacrificing woman of the house, be it in the form of the mother, sister, wife etc. This
kind of thinking is a direct result of years of gender based conditioning that does not offer
girls a fair chance in the society.
It has been found that the public and state run schools have shocking drop out levels due to
the inadequate infrastructure and poor teaching methods. This has a gendered implication
as well. The girl children are more likely to be pulled out of schools at an early age, due to
the patriarchal reasoning that women belong to the private sphere (read home front) and do
not need education like the male children.
It has been observed that merely holding degrees from prestigious colleges does not
somehow guarantee radical changes for women’s lives in the country. The degrees are used
in the ‘arranged marriage market’ to attract grooms from suitable families, communities and
castes. James Emman Kwegyir Aggrey who was an intellectual, missionary, and teacher from
Ghana who later immigrated to the United States said:
"The surest way to keep people down is to educate the men and neglect the women. If you
educate a man you simply educate an individual, but if you educate a woman, you educate a
whole nation".
Girl Child Education and Women Empowerment:
India’s child sex ratio has fallen abysmally since 1991. In 1991, there were 945 girls for every
1,000 boys. In 2011, there were a mere 918. To address this problem, the new BJP-led
government announced the a new scheme in its first budget presentation in July last year,
with Finance Minister Arun Jaitley allocating Rs 100 crore towards the initiative. On 22
January, 2015 PM Narendra Modi has launched the scheme, grandly called the Beti Bachao
Beti Padhao Yojana, in the hope of breaking that trend. But will it?
Throughout the country and up and down the class-caste ladder the joy of parenthood is
conditioned by the gender of the child. If a boy is born, delight amongst the family; if it’s a
girl, anxiety and disappointment. The sole reason for this is economic; when girls marry
(around 70% of marriages are still arranged in India), the family of the bride is expected to
pay a sum of money to the groom’s family – whether they can afford it or not.

16. This is the infamous dowry system, a corrupted illegal method of financial exploitation and
violence that, like much else in this extraordinary country, is sanctified by the waters of
tradition and culture (a manipulated term often employed to maintain prejudicial social
conditioning and resist change), which was banned by the Indian government in 1961. And
yet, like so many liberal legislative statements of intent, the system continues unabated. ‘The
Dowry Prohibition Act’ which makes clear that anyone giving or receiving a dowry faces five
years in prison and a hefty fine, remains unenforced. Due to the fact that girls are seen as an
economic burden and boys a source of income, girl babies have been aborted and murdered
– female infanticide or Gendercide – in their millions in India. The Lancet estimates that
500,000 female foetuses are aborted in India every year. As a result according to the BBC, “an
estimated 25-50 million women in India are ‘missing’, if you compare the proportion of
women in the population with other countries.” Staggeringly, UNICEF believes 10 million
girls, were killed by their parents in the last thirty years.
A complex interrelated series of consequences flows from the social injustices perpetrated
against young women in the 18th century: abortion of female babies; infanticide; trafficking;
forced marriage and a range of sexual abuse – including rape – within the home and the
wider community as well as parental neglect and domestic servitude.
Infanticide – the wilful killing of a child within the first year of its life – is illegal throughout
the world – the British outlawed it in India in 1870, but the practice is widespread (occurring,
the UN estimates in 80% of Indian States) and with the introduction of ultrasound in the
1980s this barbaric crime has only grown. It is illegal for Clinics and Doctors to tell parents
the sex of the child, but many do so; if it’s a girl her fate is uncertain, if it’s a boy – joy and
relief amongst the parents. When infanticide was banned by the colonial government, they
claimed the two chief causes of this inhumane act “were pride and purse. ‘Purse’ referred to
the dowry. ‘Pride’, to pride of the upper castes and tribes that would rather murder female
infants than give them to a rival group [caste or tribe] even in marriage.”
UNICEF states that the killing of baby girls has reached genocidal proportions. It is a practice
that has gone on “in central India for a long time, where mothers were made to feed the
child with salt to kill the girl.” Various other gruesome methods of murder are employed,
many dating back to the 18th Century: stuffing the baby girl’s mouth with a few grains of
coarse paddy causing the child to choke to death is one, poisoning, using organic or
inorganic chemicals, drowning, suffocation, starvation and breaking the spinal cord, as well
as burying the child alive. The criminal act of infanticide must (one feels) be traumatic for the
parents, who faced with a distorted dowry system based on exploitation and greed, see no
choice but to murder their daughters – and in their millions, leading to a serious gender
imbalance in the country, with dreadful consequences.

17. The education sector seems to have taken the biggest blow during the recent budget
restructuring, with massive cuts in fund allocation around the world. Most governments have
shifted focus to primary education, leaving higher education open to the private sector. This
alarming trend of the privatization of higher education has become a serious concern, given
the series of negative ramifications on students, teachers, and societies. Privatization comes
with higher fees, overcrowded schools, under-skilled teachers, and irrelevant training, but no
one really seems to care. I believe that the prevalence of this “bystander culture” has become
one of the greatest threats to our education system.
In the seven months since then, the central government has announced that the BBBP
scheme will be run by the ministries of health, women and child welfare and human resource
development. Further, it will focus on 100 districts with the lowest child sex ratio, and will
predominantly involve social mobilisation and sensitisation campaigns aimed at changing
societal norms on gender. As Modi launches another girl child scheme, here's why previous
initiatives in the area failed The model of conditional cash incentives for protecting the girl
child has not fared very well in India. The Centre would do well to study a Delhi programme
that gives cash incentives to get girls into school but fails to monitor what they actually
learn. It has a dropout rate of 42%.
Over the years, there have been many initiatives across India to promote the girl child and
improve its poor child sex ratio. The schemes have differed in name, but converged in their
general inefficiency.
Previous schemes by the central government and various state governments to tackle
discrimination against the girl child – most of which were launched in the past 10 years –
involved the conditional cash transfer system: families that fulfilled certain conditions for
allowing daughters to live and thrive would be given cash incentives by state agencies. While
launching the BBBP scheme, Modi announced yet another cash transfer for girls called the
Sukanya Samridhi Account. Will it fare better than previous girl child schemes?

18. Roadblock of Bureaucracy and corruption:
Many beneficiaries interviewed for the study complained about bureaucratic hurdles in
availing the cash incentive. Poor families found it difficult to obtain the many registrations
and certificates of proof required to be submitted. Migrant families were often left out
because they did not have domicile certificates.
Many schemes give smaller incentives for the second daughter, sending out the message
that girls are valued differently based on their birth order. The study also found several
instances of incentives being handed out to ineligible candidates.
Just last month, a Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) audit found that the Madhya
Pradesh state government’s Ladli Lakshmi Yojana was riddled with financial irregularities.
The audit found that incentives worth Rs 67 lakh had been issued to ineligible beneficiaries.
"Our daughter has started earning for us from the age of six," a man told me in Hindi as I
helped him fill her admission form for the first grade in the municipal school where I taught.
He was referring to the Delhi government's six-year-old Laadli scheme. Launched in 2008,
the scheme gives parents a cash incentive to send their daughters to school.
It works on a conditional cash transfer system that puts money into a fixed deposit opened in
the girl’s name. The first incentive of Rs 10,000 comes when the girl is born, Rs 11,000 if she
is born in a government hospital. Subsequent instalments of Rs 5,000 each come in when she
is admitted to grades 1, 6 and 9. Once she passes the 10th grade, another Rs 5,000 is
deposited. The final incentive arrives when she is admitted into the 12th grade. By then,
when the girl is about 18 years old, the fixed deposit and interest total nearly Rs 1 lakh.
While launching the scheme, the government claimed it would be a turning point. More girls
would go to school, it said, because families would now view them as assets, not liabilities,
and would not discriminate against them.
But in the two years that I taught in an all-girls municipal school in Delhi, as part of a
teaching fellowship, I saw that while Laadli might have succeeded in getting parents to admit
their girls to primary schools, it failed to keep them in classrooms. Since it was launched, the
Delhi government’s Laadli scheme has had an average dropout rate of nearly 42 percent. Its
fundamental flaw is that it emphasises attendance without monitoring what the girls are
learning. By the time the girls get to secondary school, some of them drop out because of
low learning levels. That’s when they also drop out of the scheme. This scheme might hold
crucial lessons for the Modi government's girl child initiatives, launched on January 22, 2015.
Roadblock of Sanitation and Infrastructure:
Moreover, there is a sharp, direct correlation between sanitation infrastructure in schools and
retention of students in primary schools (shown in the figure above). The Sanitation Metric
used for this analysis is an equi-weighted average of 3 metrics tracked by DISE —
a) % schools with girl's toilets
b) % schools with hand-washing facility near toilets
c) % schools with drinking water facility

19. Sanitation can influence retention in several ways. First, an absence of toilets, particularly for
girls, makes it impossible for them to continue in school. Unlike in homes, alternatives such
as river banks or secluded spots cannot compensate for the absence of a toilet.
Second, sanitation facilities such as toilets and hand-washing have a direct bearing on a
child’s health. Insanitary conditions are the principal cause of ailments such as diarrhoea. And
prolonged illness could eventually lead parents to discontinue their child's education.
Third, there is a clear link between lack of sanitation and malnutrition as has been
conclusively established as part of several research findings. Acute anaemia due to under-
developed absorptive capacity in such children may also lead to students dropping out of
school. This problem could be aggravated as school kitchens under the Mid-Day Meal
Program also suffer due to lack of sanitation and hygiene. On the flip side, sanitation could
have a positive impact on a student’s cognitive and retentive ability, which could motivate
children and their parents to continue with their schooling.
Bottom line: Income without outcome
I wonder whether his government has taken stock of the failures of existing schemes. By
equating a girl’s right to learn with the money she brings home, the Laadli scheme, for
instance, has done little to change the mindset of discrimination. I wish the government had
poured in more thought and not just more money in to its programme, which at the moment
sounds little more than a clever slogan.
To conclude, in a way, women are still left bereft of any real agency with respect to their life
choices. Very recently, a 17-year-old Dalit girl, who belonged to the dhobi community, a low
caste, in Diwan tola village of Patthardewa village in Uttar Pradesh, was set on fire.
According to the police, the four accused who belonged to the Yadav community were angry
because the victim was appearing for the ongoing intermediate school examinations; and
they didn't like that the victim was pursuing her education and decided to punish her and
her family, because they were failing in school every year. The victim was in a critical
condition and was admitted with 70% burn injuries.

20. Another case in point which occurred last year would be the recent murder of a young
female student from DU in New Delhi who eloped with her lover from a different caste. Her
parents disapproved of the match and ended up committing the so called ‘honour killing’.
Interestingly, words like ‘honour’, ’pride’ and ‘shame’ are still attached to women’s bodies
and they are collectively seen as gate keepers of the caste system in the country. One tends
to ask, where is the empowerment exactly?