By IPS Correspondents
NEW DELHI, Feb 5 1998 (IPS)

As Indian politicians tilt quixotically over the building of a temple at a disputed site or banning cow slaughter, the dismal state of primary education remains a secondary issue in elections next month.

India’s Constitution provides for free education to all children up to the age of 14 but 50 years after Independence, half of India’s 900 million people remain illiterate, forming the largest pool of unlettered people in the world.

“The intentions of the Constitution were systematically sabotaged by politicians who allowed millions of children from socially deprived classes to turn into labourers,” says Professor Anil Sadagopal of the Maulana Azad Centre for Elementary and Social Education at the University of Delhi.

But UNESCO Director General, Frederico Mayor, a tireless campaigner for universal primary education in India, is confident that things can only improve from now on. “With liberalisation people are going to demand education,” he said on a visit to India last week.

Mayor told IPS that a good beginning had been made with plans to step up budgetary allocation for primary education to 6 percent of GDP by the year 2005. Even the present 4 percent is substantial, he said.

“I have been reassured that there can be no going back on commitments by whatever government succeeds after the elections,” Mayor said, after meetings with Indian President K.R. Narayanan, Prime Minister Inder Kumar Gujral and various other concerned Indian leaders.

India, said Mayor, now has a good statistical system in place which allows the Central government to monitor the progress of education in the different states. Primary education is a state subject which accounts for disparate development. “You have both good and bad examples,” Mayor said.

While Kerala state has the literacy levels of any developed country, the states of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Orissa have levels lower than most African countries. On the whole, about a fourth of all rural boys and a half of all rural girls are not in schools but work in the fields as labourers.

Mayor toured one of the worst examples, Rajasthan state, where literacy levels are an abysmal 38 percent and where the ‘Lok Jumbish’ (People’s Movement) begun by a retired bureaucrat, Anil Bordia, runs a house-to-house programme to get children into schools.

Essentially a people’s movement for the universalisation of primary education, ‘Lok Jumbish’ which is supported by UNESCO, bypasses bureaucratic structures to get to the root of illiteracy and now covers 3,900 village in Rajasthan.

“In the village of Akhato, where literacy is barely 29 percent, I saw 90 percent enrollment achieved in a space of three to four years as result of the Lok Jumbish programme — this is cause for optimism,” Mayor said.

Instead of waiting for government statistics, ‘Lok Jumbish’ carries out its own “literacy mapping” by plastering each house in the village with a cloth poster marked with different coloured dots representing male and female children and indicating whether they were going to school or not.

The real lesson to be learned from Akhato village is that literacy programmes can succeed if they are sensitive to the needs of the people, he said, pointing to how ‘Lok Jumbish’, recognising that the village was 65 percent Muslim, adopted Urdu rather than Hindi as the medium of instruction.

“In India it is essential to identify different approaches to literacy and primary education depending on the background, culture and religion of each group being addressed,” Mayor observed.

Increasingly, it is non-governmental initiatives such as the ‘Lok Jumbish’ which have been able to get around the minefield of conflicting social, religious and gender perceptions which have hampered the universalisation of education in India.

According to Mayor the only reason people have not yet begun protesting violently at the appalling indifference to primary education is because “India is still suffused with Gandhian non-violence.”

But if Gandhi’s ideal of non-violence prevails, his views on universal education for all children has certainly been ignored. As far back as 1946 a conference at Wardha chaired by Gandhi himself had recommended universal education regardless of caste, creed and gender.

“After independence politicians took advantage of the fact that the Constitution mentioned universal education as a directive principle rather than a fundamental right,” Professor Sadagopal said.

An important all-India project that Professor Sadagopal is himself involved in is the “Lokshala” or people’s school which, like the ‘Lok Jumbish’ in Rajasthan, encourages disadvantaged groups to stand up and intervene in the running of the failed government school system.

“We tell the communities we deal with that politicians and bureaucrats will not bring about changes in educational policy until people demand them — but first they need to know what exactly to demand,” he said.

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