In mid-March, several dailies in Bangalore headlined the poignant story of little Lakshmi Naikode (9), who fled her home and Kannada-medium government primary school last November to realise her dream of studying in an English-medium ‘convent’ school. Three days after she had unsuccessfully knocked on the doors of several private schools for admission, Lakhsmi was rescued from the mean streets of the city and returned to her dirt-poor parents who live in a makeshift home, from where she goes to a Kannada-medium government primary. But English-medium education had captured her imagination and she stubbornly declined to attend the free-of-charge government school.

Fortunately for this determined girl child, her story caught the interest of the Times of India which front-paged it, eliciting widespread empathy for her in the garden-turned-garbage city. Almost six months later, Lakshmi’s dream has come true with the city’s Indus International School — ranked the country’s # 1 international school in the EducationWorld India School Rankings 2012 — agreeing to admit her into class III of its parallel, high-quality English-medium community primary-secondary sited within its campus. According to a more recent front-page report in ToI (March 16) “little Lakshmi’s life has taken a swift and happy leap”.

Although ex facie this is a human interest story with a happy ending for which the ToI claims credit, it raises several critical issues about the liberal middle class and official (state government) mindset in 21st century India. First, the entire story has been written from the perspective of the obligation imposed by s. 12 (1) (c) of the Right to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, 2009 upon all private schools to reserve a 25 percent quota for poor neighbourhood children in class I and retain them until class VIII. Under the Act, the government is obliged to reimburse private schools the quantum of expense incurred per child in its own primary schools.

However, the impact of this historic provision of the RTE Act has been diluted by a Supreme Court judgement delivered last April, which exempts linguistic and/or religious minority schools from this obligation. With almost all of Bangalore’s top-ranked private schools claiming minority status, entry into them has become problematic for children from poor households. But the true villains of Indian education are not private school promoters exercising their constitutional right to establish and administer schools of their choice, but inept education ministry officials who have failed and neglected to reform and upgrade deficient government primaries which have transformed into child-hostile hell-holes where universally-prized English language learning is unavailable, teachers — if they bother to show up at all — who don’t teach, and infrastructure and learning are in lamentably short supply.

Liberals in academia and the media seem to have written off the country’s 1.28 million publicly-funded government schools as beyond reform and redemption. This is an irresponsible and dangerous assumption because for every little Lakshmi admitted into a private school haven, there are millions who can’t be similarly accommodated and are condemned to languish in state-funded schools neglected by government and society.  

Independent India’s shameful sanitation neglect

An eerie silence has descended upon the nation and intelligentsia following a shocking op-ed page article in The Hindu (March 14) authored by Dan Spears, a Princeton University Ph D student and visiting researcher at the Delhi School of Economics. In a 1,000-plus word essay, Spears highlights the shameful truth that “according to the 2011 census, 53 percent of households (in India) do not use any kind of toilet or latrine”, and correlates this fact with the reality that the majority of India’s children are stunted and most height-challenged worldwide. Pervasive inadequacy of toilets and privies releases germs into the environment which “over the long term cause changes in the tissues of their (children’s) intestines that prevent the absorption and use of nutrients in food,” writes Spears.

Spears’ research study and its conclusions are a devastating indictment of post-independence India’s national development effort masterminded by the Soviet-inspired Planning Commission’s skewed priorities. The father of the nation and leader of India’s freedom struggle Mahatma Gandhi accorded highest importance to sanitation and hygiene and practiced it in his ashrams countrywide. But for some strange reason his message of investing in the health and education of India’s children wasn’t heeded by Nehruvian socialists. With vast resources poured into inefficient public sector enterprises managed by business-illiterate bureaucrats to build dams and factories, the “temples of modern India” which never generated the surpluses promised for investment in the social sector (education, health and skills development), the modest upward mobility aspirations of an entire generation of  midnight’s children have been wiped out. And as Spears’ study indicates, even the next generation has been condemned to stunted growth and unhealthy lives.

Regrettably little wisdom or learning seems to have dawned within the learning-proof, complacent leaders of the Congress party and the Indian establishment, about the vital importance of health, hygiene and sanitation for national development. In the Union Budget 2013-14, despite only 43.5 percent and 47 percent of the population being served by tap water and formal toilet facilities respectively, the total allocation of the Union ministry for drinking water and sanitation is Rs.15,260 crore, equivalent to 0.91 percent of the total budget and 0.13 of GDP. Against this, non-plan or revenue expenditure (interest and debt servicing, defence, subsidies, government servants’ salaries etc) will consume 67 percent of the total budgeted expenditure of the Central government this year.

Community health and sanitation which should have been accorded high importance in the national development effort during the 65 years since independence, has lagged far behind, and the message of the Mahatma has been lost in the process. Spears deserves the thanks of the nation for highlighting the logical linkage between ubiquitous insanitary conditions and children’s health and well-being. But it’s shameful that this glaring deficiency of the national development effort has had to be identified by a foreign scholar.