DEVELOPMENT-INDIA: IT Hub Works on Education for Its Children

By Keya Acharya Reprint | | Print |

Keya Acharya

BANGALORE, India, Feb 20 2003 (IPS) - India’s southern state of Karnataka is known more for its capital city and global information technology hub, Bangalore, than for its 1.5 million children who are not in schools.

But this week, the state government launched an ambitious programme called ‘From Labour to Learning’, aimed at getting all children aged six to 14 years old into the state’s elementary education system.

Karnataka’s chief minister S M Krishna is confident that all of the state’s children who are not in school will be roped in by the end of this year.

The idea closely follows the example of neighbouring Andhra Pradesh state, which has successfully collaborated with voluntary agencies to pull child labourers into mainstream schools and has made it state policy.

Approximately half of India’s at least 220 million children aged six to 14 are out of school, and 60 percent of them are girls. The Ministry of Labour estimates that of 17 million working children in India, 2 million are engaged in hazardous occupations.

In a country with close to 50 percent illiteracy, especially in its northern region, it has taken 55 years after independence from British rule for India’s government to realise the importance of free, compulsory basic education for all its children.

The country is now awaiting the President’s assent to the 93rd Amendment to India’s Constitution, passed by Parliament in May 2002, making compulsory, free education for those aged six to 14 the state’s responsibility and a child’s legal right.

The amendment comes about largely through the efforts of a network called the National Alliance for the Fundamental Right to Education (NAFRE), spearheaded in 1997 by an organisation called Child Rights and You (CRY) into a coalition of some 2,000 grassroots organisations in 15 of India’s 26 federal states.

NAFRE works on what is popularly called ‘universalisation of elementary education’.

"Making education a legally fundamental right will ensure the education sector gets the minimum 6 percent of GDP, as laid out in national policies and by all political parties,” says Justice B Jeevan Reddy, chairman of the Law Commission of India and NAFRE adviser.

The budgetary allocations for education however are far from policy directives, comprising just 2.7 percent of GDP with a promise of trying to raise the amount to 3 percent in the next allocation.

The government meanwhile has taken a 2 billion dollar loan from the World Bank’s International Development Association to help implement its universal elementary education policy, called ‘Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan’. Repayment is over 50 years with soft interest charges.

The scheme, meant to set up 10,700 primary schools and 62,000 non-formal education projects countrywide, has evoked criticism from NAFRE. It claims that only 10 million has been disbursed of the 100 million annually promised to the project by the government in the Financial Memorandum presented to Parliament for considering the 93rd Amendment.

Non-government groups also aver that the 93rd Amendment has overlooked government responsibility to the below-six and 14 to 18 age group, since 18 is the legal age of attainment to adulthood in India.

NAFRE is now demanding equitable education for all children as well as a shift from present-day regional divides through a common school system, where the curriculum will be the same for all schools, whether ‘rich’ or ‘poor’, with rural schools set up in collaboration with the government but community-held and monitored.

Politically opposed though NAFRE sounds, a majority of its members work in the field training government teachers, funding child-development projects or running schools.

Child You, a group that is a co-founder of NAFRE, for instance, supports 283 initiatives across 2,882 villages and 712 urban slums in 16 states, in areas as diverse as training ‘Gram Panchayats’, India’s decentralised village administration system, to provide maternal and child health awareness in society.

"We look at increasing overall awareness in the community even whilst focusing on the child’s right to education", says Regina Thomas, director of the southern region of CRY.

A positive example of this is 20-year-old Anees Fatima, who lives 160 kilometres away from Bangalore but long distances daily to attend teacher-training classes with dreams of becoming a government teacher.

Anees, who belongs to India’s Muslim minority community, says most parents are nervous about sending their girls on such distances. "If it’s a boy, then no problem,” she grins.

But Anees’s father, a government bus driver, father of five girls and three boys, had, very unusually, said the choice was hers. She attributes this mindset to the atmosphere of schooling and education in her village.

Meantime, Bangalore’s giant software companies such as Wipro and Infosys Technologies are also chipping in to help eradicate illiteracy in Karnataka – in order to follow the example of adjacent Kerala state, which achieved universal primary education several years ago.