Don't Mandalise education

BS OPINION

Combine this with the fact that government-provided education is more expensive and less productive than private sector options, and it is obvious the system needs overhaul.

Earlier this year, a Punjab MLA found that while the state government spends an average of Rs 682 per student per month from middle school onwards, private schools spend between Rs 400 and Rs 500, and their pass percentages are 30-40 per cent better.

Another study, of the latest NSS data, shows expenditure on education by the poorer sections (the bottom 40 per cent of the population) has grown 12.4 times between 1983 and 1999. In other words, with the government's education programme not working, even the poor are looking for alternatives.

But the government's proposed education bill, which plans to make it mandatory that a fifth of the students in private schools must be poor, is no solution. While several school principals in Delhi have endorsed the idea and given examples of how their schools run special classes for the poor, the proposal is not workable on a large scale without distortions.

The completely disparate backgrounds of children in a common milieu could make life difficult for all concerned if such a model is made mandatory. The Delhi government is trying out a more sensible experiment, of 'twinning', where children from government and private schools spend time in each other's schools.

Based on the feedback from both teachers and students, over several years, further action will be decided. Besides, there is the certainty that, as in the case of other quotas-driven markets, there will develop a healthy black market in getting richer students admitted in the quota for the poor!

Which is why a less radical and more workable alternative to the Mandal-type proposal is one that involves improving education standards within the environment in which children from poorer families already study, that is in the government schools.

Tracking the progress of each of its 998 schools on an Intranet, rewarding/punishing schools whose results improve/deteriorate by a certain amount, filling teacher vacancies, and involving NGOs and Resident Welfare Associations in a Bhagidari programme, for instance, has helped the Delhi government-run schools increase their pass percentage for Class X from 39 per cent in 1997-98 to 62 per cent in 2001-02, and from 75 to 83 per cent for Class XII.

Apart from this, there is the possibility of letting well-established private schools take over the buildings of government-run schools, and running them "" experiments could be started in a few areas, to see if this can be done on a large-scale. The biggest hurdle to this course of action, of course, will be the teachers employed in government schools.

And teachers, as everyone knows, are an organised voting bloc everywhere in the world, which is why most governments fear to take them on. But Mandalising education isn't the answer.