Indian Express
Sunday, July 07, 2002
 
 
A Lesson in Education
 
 
Hexagonal classrooms, DIY attendance charts and fruit-shaped blackboards bring down drop-out rates in primary schools across Uttar Pradesh
 
 
Amit Sharma
 
 
 Lucknow A group of children, all students of class IV, are busy marking a chart, when one screams out: ‘‘I have got full marks!’’ What eight-year-old Shaleen means is she has notched up a ‘present’ mark for all the days of the month. And though she doesn’t know it, she is part of the reason why the drop-out rate of girls has fallen from nearly 60 per cent in 1991 to 30 per cent in the last academic session in Hardoi district, Uttar Pradesh.

Credit for the success goes partly to the motivational attendance chart Shaleen had been filling up. The chart, hung up in a corner of the room, is what the children head for as soon as they enter the school. They mark themselves present, and then go to their seats.

‘‘Because of innovative ideas like the DIY presence chart, cost-effective and child-friendly school buildings, well-equipped school libraries, learning corners and wall newspapers, the drop-out rate has been brought down to a very large extent,’’ says Vrinda Swarup, director of the Uttar Pradesh Education-For-All Project Board. The Board’s chief responsibility is thorough supervision of World Bank projects in the primary education sector.

The World Bank-aided multi-phased District Primary Education Programme (DPEP), which was launched in 1997, currently ensures primary education for nearly 2.7 crore children in the 6-11 age group in 11,000 primary schools across the state. Of the total Rs 904 crore released by the World Bank, Rs 828 crore has been spent.

The World Bank had advised that initially, the programme cover villages where the female literacy rate was below the national average of 39.2 per cent as computed in the 1991 census. At that time, the rural literacy rate in Uttar Pradesh was 19.02 per cent; this increased to 25.3 per cent by 2001.

Of the 11,000 schools run under the project, nearly 7,000 operate from new cost-effective, yet attractive, buildings conceptualised and developed by local people with local materials under Board supervision.

The buildings have red trap bond walls, exposed brick masonry and local stone slab roofing. Because few villages have power, the buildings are designed to stay warm in winter and cool in summer, almost in the pattern of historical monuments. Other interesting features of the buildings are the hexagonal classrooms, which have been determined to be more conducive to group learning than regular squares or rectangles, and blackboards in the shape of animals, fruits and geometrical figures. The schools are also fitted out with slides and swings crafted from used tyres as well as games like Ludo and Snakes and Ladders.

So successful have the innovations proved that the Uttar Pradesh government issued a GO in 1999, suggesting that all primary schools in the state — a total of 88,684 — follow the model structure and facilities. Even private schools in urban pockets in Lucknow have adopted some of these designs.