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A neglected constituency

Photo: Rajeev Bhat

Victims of Homo Hierarchicus: Shanno.

On April 9 this year, Ravi Kiran, aged 12, sat squirming in his chair in my friend Indu’s verandah. She had given him an apple: it lay uneaten on his lap, his fingers touching it uncertainly. Murmuring monosyllables in answer to our questions, he stared down at his bandaged foot. He had cut it badly on a rusty piece of iron, hauling construction material in the grounds of a reputed hospital in Chennai. Indu spotted Ravi in the outpatients’ department and complained to the administrative officer about the contractor employing a child.

The contractor was duly chastised, and Ravi was free. Which meant he was out of a job, and at a loose end. He would still get something to eat for the next few days, thanks to his being with his 16-year-old “tenth fail” brother and others in a contingent of labourers brought in from Srikakulam. That job had got him Rs. 85 a day, plus meals. To have cash in hand, and to be free to spend it away from home in the exciting city of Chennai!

Two weeks earlier he had upped and left for Chennai with his brother, right in the middle of writing his class VIII exams. “Why?” asked Indu. He shrugs and says he lost “interess”, using the English word. The teacher in Ravi’s class of 86 had not exactly prepared him for the ordeal of the exams. She probably doesn’t know him as anything but a name, and maybe she doesn’t notice he’s not around any more. The government school’s free midday meals, free uniforms and books, and lacklustre lessons dished out with large doses of patronising by harassed, overworked, and often contemptuous teachers send a clear message: this inferior education is charity, and this is all you’re going to get here.

I bit back a bad question: Could he go back to Srikakulam and do his eighth class over again? First, would a 12-year-old be safe all by himself, on a train? Second, why should he want to be a repeater in a batch of students younger than himself?

“Do you like the work?” I asked, instead. His nod was brief. He thinks work beats school, any day — if a 12-year-old can handle a man’s work. And does not injure himself in an industrial environment which is notoriously unsafe for even adult workers in India. In four years, he’ll have grown somewhat, and can make a Rs. 150 a day as an unskilled construction worker — if he hasn’t fallen off the rickety scaffolding by then. When I asked him what he wants to be when he grows up (cringing inwardly at my own banal but irresistible question), he answered: “A maistri.” If he has the stuff in him to become a mason or an overseer, he might make up to Rs. 500 a day. Silenced for the moment, I watched him staring at his foot….I am not surprised that he looks crest-fallen.

“Didn’t you like your subjects at school — Telegu, Maths, English... social studies?” No “interess”, he said softly, but added… “There is also ‘N.S.’ — Natural Science”, and from the way he said it, I seem to detect a possible “interess”. But not enough to make any kind of impression on a disinterested teacher…Certainly his construction worker father seems to have lost “interess” in investing any more in a chimerical “bright” future for his second son. It was time he joined the real world, like his “tenth fail” brother.

This is a child on whom the school doors have closed forever. I am pretty sure that unless he receives really excellent one-on-one instruction from capable teachers (as any middle or upper class parent will be sure to somehow arrange for his or her underperforming child), as well as quality care and nutrition within the next four or five years, Ravi Kiran will find it terribly difficult to pick up simple language and computational skills. This small migrant worker does not speak or understand Tamil, and is not fluent enough in the so-called link languages of Hindi and English to manage for even half a day on his own on any street in Chennai, let alone on any construction site. Bottom-line survival skills are what he needs, when he approaches labour contractors, boards a bus or a train, buys essentials at provision shops, goes to a doctor…Not to mention when at age eighteen he exercises the glorious privilege of voting in a democracy.

Ravi Kiran.

…On April 21, struggling to write something sensible about Ravi Kiran, I switched on the TV just in time to catch an incredible performance by Goldy Malhotra. The artist-educationist principal of Modern School in Delhi was in the middle of a disciplinarian’s nightmare. Reduced to impotent gesticulation and loud protestations of innocence, she was being harangued by the enraged classmates of 17-year-old Akriti, who died of an asthma attack. That elite school had no first-aid facilities, no doctor on call, and no arrangements to rush her in time to hospital. Instead of offering an unconditional and complete apology Ms. Malhotra came out with a memorial statement: “Akriti hamaari bachchi thi,” she announced mournfully to the assembled media. The very next moment (as yet unrecorded by the print media) she put Akriti in an all too predictable slot: “Academically she was just average.”

Average… A damning word, in our democracy! Pardon me, Ms. Malhotra, your slip is showing. The word “average” does not begin to approach the utter intellectual mediocrity of the methods by which children are branded in our schools. The common people are all just average! Akriti’s grade point average was used to put her down in life, and is now used as a shroud to wrap up her very memory. That she was not a school topper defines her! Do only the so-called “best” and “brightest” ( judged by our abysmally mediocre educationists) deserve to live?

And Shanno — why did that 11-year-old in class II of a municipal school in Delhi die on April on 17? For being “just average”? Not good enough to sit inside the school with the other children, because she was irregular, because she failed to recite the full English alphabet string? An expert took a look at her handwriting in her notebook, announced that she was dyslexic and observed loftily that teachers in government schools don’t know how to deal with it. Does this imply that private schools are staffed with certified B.Eds who know all about learning disabilities? Should we hand over even more of our government schools (and their prime real estate) to the private school lobby?

Shanno’s autopsy, they say, does not rule out epilepsy. Her classmates have said that she was made to crouch like a chicken, with bricks on her back, in the hot sun. It’s entirely possible for anybody to throw a fit, in such circumstances. Maybe it didn’t happen like that…but what did happen?

Heads will roll, said somebody sternly, when Akriti died. A sad and barbaric act, said somebody else, when Shanno died. The average Indian child is just not cute enough, not “brilliant” enough to hold our attention. His/her “progress report” with red marks of cruelty, brutally unfair competition , and plain deprivation just cannot grab you as a “human interest” story any more. It’s a reality show that’s less easy to swallow than the putrid lies, the poisonous hate speeches, and the syrupy soap operas screaming for attention from the small screen. This small, stunted India does not outgrow, it just outwears, like hand-me-down tee shirts, generations of slogans like Garibi Hatao, Roti Kapda aur Makaan, India Shining, Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan, Education for All, Common Minimum Programme, Vande Mataram… Clad in ragged reminders of unfulfilled promises, it carries our loads, builds our high-rises, sweats in our workshops and factories and homes, lays our roads, cooks our food at every fast-food joint, plucks at our sleeve at every traffic intersection.

Akriti.

The questions will not go away: Is Ravi Kiran a stake-holder in this Republic where he cannot vote, cannot be educated till the tenth standard, but can and must, and actually has girded up his loins to work by the sweat of his brow, like an adult? Why is it that physical, manual work is not valued, except in market terms? Why is this small human body not given the opportunity to grow and to eventually create wealth for its own survival, as much as for others?

In these coming elections, no one is interested in talking about labour safety, child rights and welfare, and government schools. The Indian mind — Homo Hierarchicus, as Louis Dumont called it — likes to separate all these issues, to pickle them in fine words, bottle them up separately, and shelve them indefinitely. Not one politician has voiced these concerns of millions of “average” Indians, or committed himself or herself to building a common school system, based on equity and quality. Who remembers today that the Indian Constitution was amended seven years ago, to make education from 6 to 14 a Fundamental Right? A Right to Education Act to implement this right has been pending in Parliament. Few are aware of an ongoing, passionate struggle by a handful of far-seeing educationists like Anil Sadgopal, S.S.Rajagopalan, and Shantha Sinha to extend this right to all children from zero to 18 years of age.

The response to Ravi’s lack of “interess”, Akriti’s being “just average”, and Shanno’s failure to recite her abcds, together casts a pitiless light on our civilisational habit of dehumanising, of making outcastes out of the most vulnerable among us. It does not take a Ph.D. in sociology to know that human children take 18 full years to reach maturity. That they do not thrive, they do not survive, they actually die when they are not nurtured, protected, educated. And cherished.

When I glanced back at Ravi Kiran’s face, after wallowing in my own armchair despair, he was shyly biting into the apple. Indu had been chatting with him about “N.S.” and cricket, and he was smiling a little.

By April 25, he had disappeared. No prizes for guessing, but could it possibly be that the contractor has sent him away to work on another construction site? Ravi Kiran is one of many such outcastes in another metropolitan paracheri. Out of sight, out of mind.

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