India today faces massive chronic problems on several fronts—poverty, unemployment, malnutrition and skyrocketing prices of proper healthcare are just a few. How are they to be solved? Some well-minded people think they can be addressed by providing good education to the people. In principle, I agree.
It’s not a new idea. In his treatise on statecraft, The Republic, Greek philosopher Plato said, “With a good system of education, every improvement is possible. If education is neglected, it matters very little what else the state does.” Others, including many thinkers in India, have held a similar line.
The problem, however, is in ensuring a good system of education for the masses. Leave aside the few good private schools—which often charge exorbitant fees that are out of reach for the vast majority—and the rest are in a dilapidated state. Clearly, education in India is in a rut.
The reasons are not far from hand. For one, as scandals are unearthed state after state, it’s clear that teachers are often appointed to public schools not on merit, but by giving bribes. The result is that a large number of them are incompetent or not motivated enough.
Even in the national capital, government schools have been in a terrible condition for long, as was pointed out by the Delhi High Court in 2014. The court noted dilapidated furniture, broken desks and shortage of books, classrooms, washrooms and playgrounds. Some of these problems were addressed in the decade since 2015. But without an update on their status, what can we make of the outcome? Moreover, what about the schools in the satellite cities of Noida, Faridabad and Ghaziabad?
Recently, a government high school building in Mehra village of Madhya Pradesh’s Narsinghpur district was found to be in danger of collapse. Severe soil erosion from a nearby river had weakened its foundation, leaving the 15-year-old structure hanging precariously and the floors visibly sinking, putting the lives of the schoolchildren in peril. After appeals to the authorities remained unheeded, a US-based private non-profit came forward to help.
A few years back, I went to meet an old friend in his village, Manjhanpur in Allahabad district, where he is a farmer. I asked one of his grandsons who had just passed class 7 to bring his maths textbook. When I asked him to solve some simple problems from it, he failed at first. But when I showed him how, the bright boy picked up the method right away and quickly solved other similar problems.
We know that the biennial ASER survey gives us a picture of the share of schoolchildren across India trailing their years on subjects like maths. But what did this boy’s quick pick-up tell us about his school?
Curious about it, I asked him if his teacher had gone over those exercises. He replied, “Master saheb thekedaari karne lage hain, aur doosre master saheb school aate nahi hain” (The maths teacher has become a contractor, and the other teacher rarely comes to the school).
This was not an aberration. It’s the plight of a substantial share of schools in our country, particularly in rural areas, where the majority of Indians still live.
There are other reasons for such persistent problems. When I was a judge at the Allahabad High Court (1991-2004), I had once visited CAV Inter College, which was considered a good high-school in the city. In one section of a class, I noticed 300 students. I asked the principal how could there be so many when the rules permitted only 40? He said, ‘‘There’s pressure from politicians and officials to take in so many.”
For imparting good education, personal attention needs to be given by the teacher to students. From my own school days at Prayagraj, I remember being assigned homework that had to be submitted in a day or two. The class teacher would take the copies home, where he scrutinised them closely and brought them back the next day to point out every mistake. Teaching is a painstaking job that, if we are improve the quality of education, cannot be merely treated as any other profession. Such attention is impossible in a class of 300.
Parents’ focus on getting better education for their children—which they know isn’t available at the school—has forced them to give in to the tuition racket. Real education is imparted, mostly by the same school teacher, at his home; the school is just a formality. Of course, not all parents can afford paying for it. This again creates a socio-economic barrier to good education at scale.
This is not even to dwell on the mass copying or official glitches that lead to cancellation of exams year after year, destroying young Indians’ futures. There is a protest going on right now at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar against such grave issues.
To change all this would require a huge resources at all levels of governance. The focus of our political leaders of all stripes is not to improve education, but to win elections by any means. Except launching schemes and paying lip service, hardly anyone seems seriously interested in improving the system.
In my opinion, this amounts to nothing less than a collapse of the system. The constitutional remedies have exhausted themselves and become like pitiable scarecrows. What do the fundamental rights to freedom of speech and expression, liberty and equality mean for a poor and unemployed Indian who cannot get his or her child educated for a better tomorrow? Nothing.
To those who say the system can be reformed, I say that though some buildings can repaired, others—like the school building in Madhya Pradesh—are so dilapidated that their foundations need to built afresh. Indian education today is like the second kind of building. It needs a revolution, not incremental reforms in education. In other words, the solution to our country’s huge socio-economic problems lies outside the constitutional framework, not within.
One can’t predict now how this will come about, or who will be its leaders. But historical experience shows that when a country is in a heaving crisis, as India is today, nature throws up great leaders. Seventeenth-century England, 18th-century France and 19th-century Russia all witnessed such churns. Cromwell, Robespierre and Lenin were little known in their countries before the revolutions. I am confident that such patriots will rise in India, too.
Justice Markandey Katju | Former Judge, Supreme Court of India
(Views are personal)