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Business Commentary/ Dilip Thakore

Licence-language lords kill corporate initiatives in education sector

Even as electoral politics makes headlines, behind the scenes, India's politicians are playing a deadly game that could further deteriorate the nation's already fragile school education system.

Statistics bear testimony to the open, horrifying and uninterrupted neglect of post-Independence India's school system.

An estimated 100 million children enroll in the nation's 600,000 primary schools. Sixty per cent of them drop out before making it to class V. Hardly surprising.

Almost one-third of the nation's primary schools have only one teacher; 38 per cent have only one instructional room; one-third don't have a blackboard; over 50 per cent don't offer drinking water and 85 per cent don't have toilet facilities.

Mid-day meals are a rarity and corporal punishment is the rule rather than the exception. Little wonder, almost two-thirds of the nation's youngest and most vulnerable citizens never make it to middle school. Little wonder also that 48 per cent of India's population -- almost 450 million people -- are comprehensively illiterate and that in the millennium year, 50 per cent of the world's illiterates will be Indian citizens!

Post-Independence India's annual outlay for education has never exceeded 4 per cent of GDP against the 6 to 7 per cent in the industrial nations and world average of 5 per cent. Yet unfazed by such humiliating statistics, the political class is recklessly changing syllabi and insisting upon state languages as the media of instruction in primary schools.

Thus in the BJP-ruled states, scholars of dubious repute are busy rewriting history textbooks from the Hindutva perspective even while playing havoc with facts. Moreover, in spite of children already struggling to learn three languages in school, there is a proposal to force them to also learn the 'root language' of Sanskrit.

But the unkindest cut of them all is the imposition of the state or regional language as the medium of instruction in primary schools.

In fiscal 1997-98, the state government of Karnataka received 325 applications from education trusts, corporates and entrepreneurs to construct and run primary / secondary schools. Despite the acute shortage of quality schools in the state, not a single application was cleared.

The reason? The applicants were unwilling to offer the Kannada language as the medium of instruction from classes I to IV as per the state government's native language promotion policy.

With the private sector unwilling to promote such schools, the state government takes particular pride in having started 1,450 schools of its own. The trouble is hardly any one wants to send their children to these invariably ramshackle, mal-administered schools. Even the poorest villager prefers to send his children to English medium school. Why? He is aware that the best jobs are bagged by those good at the English language.

Surprisingly, most politicians all over the country don't seem to be aware that since the medium of instruction at the tertiary (university) level is English, it makes good sense to ensure that children become familiar with English in their most impressionable years. Instead, hell-bent upon beating the populist drum of sub-nationalism, they are condemning an entire generation of children to second class citizenship.

Indeed, the state government of Karnataka has promoted a special Kannada Development Authority headed by a commissioner with cabinet rank. He does not commission translations of technical and philosophic great works from around the world into Kannada. Instead, he leads mobs of quasi-literates to force shopkeepers and traders to display their signboards in Kannada and compel government departments to use only Kannada in their communications with the public.

This worthy seems innocent of the knowledge that several departments of the very same government are tying themselves in knots in an attempt to invite foreign investment and promote tourism in the state.

The pain that such misguided sub-nationalism inflicts upon the youth of the nation is incalculable.

Recently, a spokesman of the West Bengal's Communist-led government, which has been in power for over two decades now, admitted that the insistence on Bengali as the medium of instruction in classes I to VII was a grave error. The system has churned out millions of young citizens who are unemployable in the jobs market, he revealed.

Yet the political class as a whole does not seem to have learnt any lessons from the pitiful recantation of the education commissars of Calcutta. Unmindful of the logic of preparing students for the pan-India jobs market, they continue to play havoc with the lives and future of young citizens by imposing under-developed state languages as the media of instruction in the school system.

In Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, the two most populous states of the Indian Union, the education system is in a shambles because of the depredations of the Yadav duo (Mulayam Singh and Laloo Prasad) who have imposed Hindi as the medium of instruction right up to the university level. And in the rest of the country, politicians pride themselves on their anti-English bias even as parents scramble to give their children formal education in English medium schools that will prepare them for the emerging global market.

In the process, a classic demand-supply imbalance is being created by the migration of the licence-permit regime into the education sector. Because they control and administer the public examinations (SSC, ICSE, CBSE) and the universities, state government 'recognition' for schools is vitally necessary.

Students from unrecognised schools are not permitted to write the public examinations. And the certificates of unrecognised schools are not accepted by universities and other institutions which are heavily subsidised by the government.

Thus politicians are able to impose their whims and fancies upon the school system and to blight the future of hundreds of millions of young and vulnerable citizens.

There are undoubtedly several arguments for the promotion of state languages. But insistence upon imposing them as media of instruction is a clear violation of a whole clutch of citizens' fundamental rights. One hopes such governance by the patently ignorant is challenged in the courts -- and soon.

Dilip Thakore

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