The Hindu : Opinion / Editorials : ON UNCONSCIONABLE DROPOUT RATES

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Friday, Feb 25, 2005

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ON UNCONSCIONABLE DROPOUT RATES

AT A TIME when there is a great deal of buzz about India taking off as a "knowledge-based economy and society," Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's admission that the dropout rate in schools continues to be "unacceptably high" is honest recognition that, in 57 years of Independence, the socio-political system has failed to ensure that at least a majority of children between the ages of 6 and 14 are in school — instead of making up the world's largest child labour force. If 53 and 34 per cent of children enrolled in Class I do not complete Class VIII and Class V respectively, this is powerful evidence of the inability of the Indian state and democratic system to come up with ways and means meaningfully to implement Article 21(A) of the Constitution, which confers on the citizen the fundamental right to free and compulsory education between ages 6 and 14. It is ironical that Dr. Singh should speak of "a political consensus in favour of this right in our country" nearly six decades after the 1950 Constitution, through a high-sounding but wholly non-binding provision (Article 45), "directed" the state to "provide, within a period of ten years from the commencement of this Constitution, for free and compulsory education for all children until they complete the age of fourteen years."

The cess introduced last year to fund the `Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan' programme is certainly a significant step forward. However, political India needs to move towards a deeper conceptual appreciation of the imperative of compulsory and free school education — if the goal of universal elementary education is to be reached in the conceivable future. In his exhaustive work on child labour, literacy, and school education in India, the political scientist Myron Weiner asserted the virtue of the state enforcing compulsory schooling by law and in a framework that rejects societal biases and hierarchical factors, which deprive large sections of classes and castes of the right to be educated. The current discussion on the draft Bill of the Union Human Resource Development Ministry on free and compulsory elementary education gains importance because it requires parents and guardians to enrol their children in recognised schools and ensure that they attend them regularly. (Tamil Nadu already has a law towards this end.)

Such a far-going legal change at the national level would put tremendous pressure on the supply side — the glaring weaknesses of which the Prime Minister highlighted when he spoke of "the lack of adequate facilities, large-scale absenteeism of teachers, and inadequate supervision by local authorities." It would require the state to put its money — and other ways and means — where its mouth is. It would mean the Centre, the States, and panchayati raj institutions together guarantee the infrastructural and teaching facilities and the learning environment so vital to the realisation of the right and duty encapsulated in Articles 21(A) and 45. In their path-breaking work on development and social opportunity, Nobel laureate Amartya Sen and his collaborator Jean Dreze frame basic education as a mass political issue and emphasise the intrinsic as well as the instrumental role of education in the development process as a whole. Such an expansion of social opportunity by providing decent, quality education to all must go hand in hand with a scheme that compels school attendance. Given the long history of failed attempts at `universalising' elementary education, the Prime Minister needs to evolve a concrete proposal that goes beyond voluntarism and schemes such as the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, and enthuses and obliges truant authorities to fall in line with his "iron law of development" — "there is not one modern economy in the world today that does not have a literacy rate of at least 80 per cent."

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