Columns: Fifth Column

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India Today, March 15, 1999
March 15, 1999

FIFTH COLUMN
ABC of India's Future

Why does the Government give primary education low priority?

By Tavleen Singh

As someone who believes fundamentally that India will be a developed country only if we manage to make every Indian literate, I seize any chance to bring up the subject. This time it is the finance minister's budget and its criminal neglect of primary education that gives me my chance. Yashwant Sinha is not unusual in this. On the contrary he has behaved as every Indian finance minister has done since Independence: treated primary education with the peculiar mixture of contempt and tokenism that has made us one of the most illiterate countries in the world.

Let me first give you some statistics. There are 13 districts in India in which more than 85 per cent of the women are illiterate and they are all in Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Orissa and Uttar Pradesh. The two with the most abysmal record, Barmer and Jalore (more than 92 per cent), are in Rajasthan. The point I seek to make is that we know everything we already need to know about the scale of our literacy problem. We also know exactly which districts need special attention. So why are successive governments in Delhi so completely incapable of formulating policies that will deal specifically with these problem districts?

Surely when we know from the United Nations Development Programme's latest report on India that it is likely to take 92 years to achieve universal literacy in Uttar Pradesh and 121 years in Bihar -- while Kerala has already got there -- then should we expect some emergency measures in states where the problem is acute?

If you ask these questions in Delhi's corridors of power you are likely to be told that the reason why no Union government has been able to do much is because education is a state subject. It is a silly excuse because, as the most recent exercise in Bihar proves, Delhi rarely hesitates to intervene when it thinks a state government is incapable of handling things on its own.

The states in which these 13 districts lie have proved themselves incapable of dealing with what is already an educational emergency. The Centre must intervene and it does not even need to dismiss the state governments to do so. What it does need though is a proper education minister at the head of an education ministry that is not also dealing with sports, women's welfare, culture, archaeology and God only knows what. The Human Resources Development Ministry (instead of education ministry) was one of Rajiv Gandhi's most illiterate ideas. Why are we persisting with it?

It is because we continue to not have an Education Ministry at the Centre that primary education remains an area of scandalous neglect. Sinha's budget allots it Rs 3,034.95 crore, Rs 254 crore more than the previous year, while giving secondary and university education Rs 1,136.69 crore, an increase of an almost similar amount at Rs 213 crore. This despite the fact that everyone in the Government, including the prime minister, tells us they recognise the vital importance of primary education.

If we had a proper education minister (and if we had the good fortune not to have a Murli Manohar Joshi) he would already have come up with a policy that sought to privatise university education so that the Government could concentrate on primary schools. Perhaps he might even have managed to give us some idea of how the country's 13 most illiterate districts were going to be helped.

It has been said before but it needs to be repeated ad nauseam that literacy is the key to development, healthcare and jobs. Above all, it is the key to population control. It has been proved over and over that literate women tend to have fewer babies. To drive through states like Uttar Pradesh and Bihar is to understand in all its horror the extent of our population problem. In village after village you see that it is the poorest, most illiterate women who have the most children.

The conditions in which these women and children live are often worse than those in which the village's animals live. This in a country in which many are still basking in the radioactive glow of our nuclear tests. There is something sickening about India going into the 21st century as a nuclear power but also with the largest number of illiterate people. Isn't it possible to shame our political leaders into doing something?

All those other ideas about mid-day meal programmes and education guarantee schemes can be implemented in double measure. Wherever it seems the state governments cannot cope, the Centre must step in. If Rabri Devi's government could be dismissed because it failed to protect the lives of the poorest of the poor, then why shouldn't it be possible to intervene when a state government fails to empower the poorest of the poor? There can be no empowerment -- such a fashionable word these days -- without literacy.

Once there is a scheme in place for our 13 most illiterate districts it could be extended to other districts with similar problems. These are almost entirely in the Hindi heartland.

First and foremost though, we need an education ministry in Delhi. The prime minister needs to put his best man in charge of this ministry and should personally monitor his performance. Unless something drastic is done immediately, we may as well reconcile ourselves to entering the next millennium as a country that -- despite its proud nuclear status -- will really be quite irrelevant to the world.

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