The much respected M D Nalapat, who was the editor or Mathrubhumi and resident editor of Times of India, has made thought provoking points about Literacy drives and Indian School Education. It is only fair that I reproduce extracts from his article in his own words,
A national trait in India is to start brilliantly but end poorly. This is what has happened to the numerous literacy drives launched by a medley of government and state agencies. With substantial effort, an illiterate is taught to read and write, only to suffer a relapse into illiteracy within a year because as yet there is almost no literature commonly available for neo-literates. Many lack the money to buy any kind of book in the first place, while those agencies that taught them the alphabet move on elsewhere, to "further reduce illiteracy". Unless a follow-up programme lasting at least five years is devised for neo-literates, India will continue to be a country where half the population is alphabetically disadvantaged.
The rot in the schools begins at the point of recruitment. In some parts of the country, more than three-fourths of all school management (including those in the government sector) select teachers after getting a cash bribe from them. The candidate able to pay this may not always be the best, and is usually among the worst-skilled of the applicants. Because the job has been secured for cash and not competence, there is seldom any effort to enforce standards or mandate improvement. Mediocrity reigns, and spreads to the unsuspecting students.
To attend a classroom in India is usually to fall asleep. Classes are conducted in a monotone from notes that are frayed with long use and remain unchanged for decades. Questions are discouraged, and the pupils very soon understand that their teacher anyway knows little of the subject besides what he or she is reading out to them, hence they stay silent. That is, if there are teachers at all. While a few states (in the south and west) have teachers in almost all schools, in other parts of the country about a fifth of government schools remain without teachers for long stretches of time. Often, a single teacher takes multiple classes and several subjects, to the forfeit of quality.
With such a large number of students opting out of the regular school system before long, thanks to a combination of poverty and abysmal teaching, there ought to be a substantial number of vocational courses. Sadly, because of the numerous regulatory hurdles that the education bureaucracy has put in place, less than a fifth of those working while still in their youth have undergone any sort of vocational training. This figure of 20 per cent is optimistic and-as is the case with numerous statistics in India-unsubstantiated by any comprehensive examination of the facts. The actual percentage of those with vocational training may be much less.
In such training as well, it is mediocrity that is taken as the norm. Take the example of nursing. India has several million young ladies who have the innate ability to be excellent nurses, as indeed many are in hospitals across the world. The problem is that the outflow is confined to what gets described as "C" and "D" grade hospitals and other facilities, and locations such as old age homes. The modern hospitals (the "A" and "B" class) do not recruit nurses from India because the training given in the country does not give access to the latest in patient care and in diagnostic and therapeutic equipment.
As yet, neither the government nor the private sector has set up a training facility that can equip India's nurses for jobs in the best hospitals worldwide. Everybody seems satisfied with the suboptimal.
After all, it could be worse! Yes, but it could as well be much better.
