After school, what?

Despite stunning enrollment and literacy figures, Himachal Pradesh doesn�t offer the educated a future, argues Diptosh Majumdar
 

SARASWATI needs Lakshmi to survive. Education, when delinked from livelihood, cannot ensure its own future.

Having powered its way into record books with nearly 100 per cent enrollment in schools, Himachal Pradesh is facing a crisis. Where are the jobs for the educated? All the encouraging data about reaching education to everybody and applause for the massive government efforts have nothing to do with wealth creation and employment generation in the Himalayan province. Unemployment is mounting. Admitted Sudripto Roy, the state�s former education secretary and now its resident commissioner in Delhi, ��At present, the jobless total around 15 per cent of the population.��

It has indeed been an extraordinary effort over the past two decades, a massive governmental exercise carried out with great sensitivity and innovation, which has almost eradicated the scourge of illiteracy.

Himachal Pradesh was carved out of Punjab in the early 1970s. A separate state called for a separate administration and thousands of government jobs; not just in Shimla, but also in every sub-division and tehsil. Suddenly, there was a great demand for school and college education. Successive governments, irrespective of political leanings, did their best to meet that challenge. The result is one of the finest enrollment figures in the country.

An example of the state�s commitment to education for all is the way it resolved the problem of teaching the children from nomadic Gujjar and Gaddi tribes: by �embedding� a travelling teacher with every group of nomads. Today, only a few itinerant Gaddi families throw up a small number of children who are not going to school.
Himachal Pradesh has also had its share of luck with bureaucratic talent, with some excellent academic administrators taking charge as secretaries of its education department. More than 15 years ago, M M Kaw, who later went on to become the Education Secretary of the country, was the one who really planned out the state�s education perspective. In the last decade, C Balakrishnan�currently joint secretary (planning) in Arjun Singh�s HRD team�introduced key administrative changes as the state�s education secretary. Sudripto Roy carried on with the good work till late last year.

AT first blush, there was no confusion till literacy and enrolment targets had to be met: The first objective was to ensure everybody went to school. But gradually there was talk of quality. At present, questions are being asked why education is not really changing the living standards in the hill province.

Now that there are no vacancies in government jobs, the dynamics of the education movement have suddenly been considerably weakened. In retrospect, education planners say that probably the Himachal experience was not really an ideal one; it should not be replicated elsewhere. Cosy government jobs should never be the focus of an education boom.

As Shimla-based bureaucrats point out, Himachal would have done better to create centres of academic excellence like a Jawaharlal Nehru University or proper professional institutions like an IIT or an IIM or at least a couple of medical and engineering colleges. The state has created too many graduates and even postgraduates in the liberal arts and the general sciences who are unemployable. ��There are simply no jobs,�� said a HP bureaucrat.

He felt there should be better political vision on linking education to the two major industries in the state: tourism and food/fruit processing. ��First generation graduates prefer to be pen-pushers, rather than self-employed entrepreneurs. They will not sweat it out in the open.�� It explains why Himachal has been importing labour from other states not just for construction sites but even for its private sector agro-processing farms.

Education has definitely gone a long way in improving the human development and social indices in Himachal Pradesh, but as long as it is not regarded as the first stepping stone towards wealth generation, there will always be the fear of the most backward slipping back to illiteracy. ��We have to find a use for education,�� Roy agreed.

Some bureaucrats felt that at the plus two level itself there should be more interaction between students and industry. The students would know what are the options before them and decide whether they should go in for an ordinary degree or train themselves in a skill that they could apply to make a living.

Another area where the lack of foresight shows is education in English. Since the quality leaves much to be desired, it explains why the BPO trade has not spread to Himachal. The non-existent computer infrastructure and lack of government interest did nothing to woo the BPO business.

A Himachal civil servant agreed, ��Himachal has to move on to the more advanced stage of education, which will generate a greater degree of creativity and wealth creation.��

But a way has to be found for Himachal to move into next gear. It will be a shame if some much effort comes to naught and Himachal Pradesh remains immersed in its educated mediocrity.
 

Building blocks
Manraj Grewal

IT was the Public Report on Basic Education in India (PROBE) by Anuradha De and Jean Dreze, a honorary professor in the Delhi School of Economics, in 1999 that first brought to light the spectacular success of schooling in the hill state of Himachal Pradesh.

The HP Human Development Report 2002 records how the state, which had one of the lowest literacy levels (4.8 per cent) in the 1950s, emerged as the fifth most literate state of India in 1991, and now stands next only to Kerala in this field.

But when it comes to universalising education at the level of primary schools, the state is arguably the tops in the country with an enrollment rate of 98.7 per cent, and an unmatched access to primary schools despite its hilly terrain.

The dropout rate, too, is one of the lowest in the country, at two per cent, while the student: teacher ratio stands at a handsome 23:1.

Now the state, whose primary schooling is oft-quoted as a success story by Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, is determined to achieve cent per cent enrollment by the end of 2005 with the Education Guarantee Scheme, under which it is setting up mobile and cluster schools, the former for the itinerant communities and the latter for students of construction workers, labourers, et al.

Chief Minister Virbhadra Singh says the schooling revolution in the state has taken place mainly due to the missionary zeal with which every successive state government has pursued primary education. The state spends around 16 to 17 per cent of its Plan budget on education. At Rs 215, its per capita expenditure on education, according to 1995-96 data, is also much higher than Punjab (153), Haryana (127), Uttar Pradesh (71) and the national average of 137.

In his report, Dreze attributes the success to a combination of factors, including state initiatives taken to promote schooling, the egalitarian, gender bias-free society in the hills, and a community that sets great store by education.

With these factors remaining constant, it�s one revolution that shows no signs of flagging.
 

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Class Palace

From the bottom of the literacy heap five decades ago to Himalayan heights, education is writing a new chapter in Himachal Pradesh. Manraj Grewal finds out the score.
 

I DYLLIC. The word cartwheels in the head on the skid-slide-jump way down to the Kathleeghat Primary Centre School in Solan district. Perched on a ledge amid a straggly carpet of green, the gleaming white building is an apt metaphor for the state of primary education in Himachal: It is shining.

And unlike the subject of the devalued electoral slogan of 2004, the shine here extends beyond the surface.
 
A class in progress under a tree behind the school falters a little with the intrusion: A last-minute revision takes the backseat for the brief while. ��It�s for the last exam,�� explains Sunita Sharma, a teacher.

That�s why this school, with a strength of 11 children�Class I has just one little boy called Ashish�and three teachers, is all abuzz though the bird calls still manage to drown the voices of the children.

Set up on land donated by a Kathleeghat family in the early �50s, this school became a �centre school� in 1980, when the government decided to bring five to six primary schools under its care. Since then, centre schools across the state not only conduct annual exams for the schools it governs, but also disburses salaries.

Which is why one gets to meet zonal kabaddi champ Vipul Sharma at Kathleeghat even though he is from the Basha school. The boy with ruddy cheeks leaves his teachers smiling as he reels out the correct answers to an off-the-cuff GK quiz.

��Independent primary schools (or schools in small clusters of four or five) have benefited not only the students, who get individual attention, but also junior basic teachers, who can now look forward to promotion as centre heads and block primary officers,�� says the greying Jagdish Sharma, head of the centre school in Basha, also in Solan district.

��It�s just one of the series of primary education initiatives undertaken by successive state chief ministers with missionary zeal,�� says B N Nenta, director of primary education in Himachal Pradesh. The state spends 16 per cent of its Plan expenditure on education, and the ��schooling revolution�� in hill country wowed none other than Nobel laureate Amartya Sen and author of the Public Report on Basic Education (PROBE) Jean Dreze.

Schools multiply
TRAWL the Himachal countryside, and a primary school crops up every few kilometres, each one boasting not only well-kempt clasrooms but also a healthy student-teacher ratio of 25:1, or even lower, all for a handsome fee of Rs 2 a month.

Neelam Chauhan, a teacher at the Dhyarighat primary school, recalls that the first visible signs of change appeared in the early �90s, when schools began to proliferate. ��Earlier, there was one school for seven to eight villages, now there�s one after every kilometre or two.��

It is the fallout of a 1993 policy decision, which decreed that no child should have to walk for more than 1.5 km in the hills and 2 km in the plains to reach his school.

Besides jacking up the enrollment rate to a handsome 98.7 per cent, this also brought down the dropout rate from 33 per cent in 1994-95 to two per cent in 2003. Keen to pull this down to zero, the government has decided that no student with an attendance of over 80 per cent should be flunked till Class III.

The education department has also spiced up teaching by introducing co-curricular activities, a la private schools. ��Come Saturday and the last two periods are devoted to Bal Sabha, in which the students get to sing, dance, and even stage plays,�� says Hemlata Sharma, a teacher at the Shoghi primary school, showing off a long line of trophies her students have won at zonal-level competitions.

This is not all. All too aware of the challenge posed by private primary schools, the Virbhadra Government has now introduced English from Class I, instead of Class IV, where it used to be taught first earlier. Hemlata, who herself graduated from the prestigious St Bede�s in Shimla, says it�s made their schools much more attractive to English-centric parents.

Ambika Chauhan, a young teacher at the Shoghi primary centre school in Shimla district, knows this only too well: It�s the one subject that comes up for eager discussion at the weekly Mother Teacher Association (MTA) meetings. Unlike other states which have Parent Teacher Associations (PTA), Himachal has MTA which, experts believe, is a key to its schooling success. At Shoghi, they have even begun collecting an MTA fund with a contribution of Rs 5 from every mother. ��Later, we�ll decide how to use the money for upgrading the school,�� says Ambika.

Balance the equation
SITTING on a slope, a few hundred yards away from the road to Shimla, the Shoghi school does seem to require some brushing up, though you can see the signs of Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) funds. ��We got a new toilet thanks to it,�� says Ambika.

The girls and Scheduled Caste students have also been given free notebooks and textbooks, though they are yet to get the promised desks and chairs. Inside the dank classrooms, the students sit cross-legged on a red mat, bent double over their answer-sheets.

��We�re told that chairs are on the way,�� says Ambika, who has a touching faith in government schemes. ��They work,�� she smiles, giving you the example of the all-new mid-day meals under SSA.

This, however, is one scheme Ambika and her colleagues find hard to digest. ��It�s a big drain on our time and patience,�� Ambika pulls a face, describing interminable afternoons spent serving pulao or khichdi to unwilling children, many of whom prefer to bring their own tuck boxes.

Interestingly, here, too, woman power has come to the rescue. Take the case of the Kathleeghat school, where the local mahila mandal has pitched in with utensils and a local maid who cooks the food for a paltry Rs 100 a month.

In fact, most villages have a Village Education Committee�usually headed by the pradhan�which plays an active role in running these schools. Vandana Sharma, a teacher at the Premnagar primary school in Sirmaur district, is all praise for pradhan Kalyan Singh, who�s now getting toilets constructed under the SSA.

The pradhan also has the authority to appoint voluntary teachers or sahayak adhyapak, a practice introduced by the government in the �80s to make up for the teacher deficit.

Social science
A LONE voluntary teacher runs the show at the primary school in the Jaypee Institute of Information Technology in Waknaghat. Tucked away in the institute�s temple on a hillside, the state government set up the school this January as part of its Education Guarantee Scheme (EGS), under which it appoints teachers wherever it comes across a cluster of children not going to school. ��The idea is to mop up all the non-schoolgoing children,�� says Nenta.

A visit late in the afternoon finds a frisky bunch of urchins rattling out ikyaasi, byaasi after their harried-looking teacher, Ramesh Dutt Sharma. A former dealer in vegetables, he got this job on contract for a meagre salary of Rs 800 a month. It isn�t easy disciplining this naughty bunch which he�s divided into two classes, but hope of a regular job sustains him.

For the 40-odd children, whose parents are labourers at the Jaypee construction site, the cluster school, as it is called, is godsend. ��They get free books, notebooks, pencil, eraser, lunch... what more can they want,�� asks a pujari of the temple.

Mention this to Nenta, and he reels out two other initiatives launched last year, one for the itinerant communities like the Gaddis, and the other for special children.

��The Integrated Education for Disabled Children (IEDC) helped us zero in on 3,000 special kids, who will now be educated at home,�� says Nenta, who is also very proud of the 50-odd mobile schools, each of which has one teacher who travels with a specified nomadic community.

Vandana Sharma, a teacher at Premnagar government primary school in Sirmaur district, is among those who has done a capsule course for teaching special children. ��We don�t have one in our area, but I am prepared,�� says this pretty woman, who�s a postgraduate in commerce, but is still on contract.

She is not an exception. Most primary school teachers�nearly 50 per cent of them are women�are over-qualified. Kusum Sehgal of Kathleeghat, for instance, is a post-graduate in political science and education. This perhaps explains why absenteeism is not commonplace although a water carrier (read, peon) attributes it to regular inspections by district education officers.

Plus and minus
NONETHLESS, the teachers were present in full strength at all the schools this team visited, though almost everywhere they rued their low numbers. You may think three teachers for 11 students at Kathleeghat is on the higher side, but they let you know that it isn�t a cakewalk, for they have to teach classes I through V.

Most teachers felt they would be able to teach better if the government were to allot one class to a teacher. And this, they contend, can be possible if the government were to combine a couple of schools instead of opening new ones. Frequent transfers�once every three years�are also a grouse.

There are other dissenting notes as well. Subhash Medhapurkar, who runs Sutra, an NGO at Kasauli, rues that the state is laying more stress on quantity than quality. ��It is high time the government addresses Generation II issues�instead of sticking to the old paradigm of taking education to the doorsteps of children�now that the ground realities have changed.��

In the setting sun on the mountains, however, everything looks unchanged. And then we spot a lone woman standing on the roadside. That she is a teacher is evident from her keds, her tote bag, and above all, from her look. We slow down and ask her if she knows the way to the nearest primary school, and she smiles, ��Why, I teach there,�� pointing to a white building atop a bump.

Even in the shadowy light, the slogan painted on its wall says it all: Sab padein, sab badein.

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