Tea with BS: Rukmini Banerji is a picture of hope during difficult times

Banerji, recently awarded the highest education accolade, is a picture of hope in a difficult time, says Ritwik Sharma

It’s easy to embrace pessimism around school education for children in a world disrupted by Covid-19, what with a lonely cloistered life thrust on them with the “luxury” of digital learning available only for a privileged class. That is not remotely the case with Rukmini Banerji, a recent awardee of the 2021 Yidan Prize for Education Development.

The chief executive of Pratham, an NGO that has done stellar work towards improving children’s education in India for nearly three decades, is a refreshing optimist with a bagful of stories that challenge the typical Indian obsession with school learning.

I am meeting her on Zoom over tea one afternoon, as she is at her Pune home and I am in New Delhi. Her two sons live abroad, and she shuttles between Pune and New Delhi interspersed with frequent travel across India that she has resumed lately.

At 61, she has to go back a long way to talk about her early years, laughs Banerji, who is dressed in an azure kurta and white-and-blue printed dupatta and is bubbling with energy.

Born to academics Meenakshi and Sujit Mukherjee in Patna, she graduated in economics from St Stephen’s College in Delhi and spent a year in Delhi School of Economics before heading for Oxford University as a Rhodes scholar. She only modestly mentions in passing that she was “a standard student” who was always interested in something applied rather than pure academia.

So she chooses to recount her days as a doctoral student at the University of Chicago in the 1980s that sowed the seeds of her future journey with Pratham.

The university was closely involved with Chicago city, where she also worked as a research assistant testing a new syllabus for a school math project. She found it interesting that despite being an Indian citizen, she could vote in a school election as a resident of the area. “People were very involved in how their public schools ran. In America, the local property tax funds the public school and it goes up or down depending on the school’s performance,” she says.

She volunteered for several years at a school, teaching 6-8 standard students. After doing her PhD in 1991, she worked briefly with the Spencer Foundation, which funds education research. She came to Delhi, and over three years did a study in the resettlement colonies of Ambedkar Nagar as her parents helped babysit her two young sons.

Finally, in 1996 she returned to India and began to work with Pratham in Mum­bai after being introduced to its founders, Madhav Chavan and Farida Lambay.

Among the first things she did was carry out a study in a few schools in Andheri East, focusing on math. The results weren't encouraging. Her colleagues sent a report to the municipal commissioner. “And within 10 days, a massive math programme was started in Mumbai. So I was hooked, and I felt this is the space to be in.”

The Yidan prize has recognised Pratham and Banerji’s seminal work that includes the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) survey that was started in 2005. The reports have mapped literacy and numeracy gaps among Indian schoolchildren. And to fill the gaps — which is at the core of its agenda — Pratham’s Teaching at the Right Level (TaRL) programme engages with schools and communities to offer basic reading and arithmetic skills and ensure no children are left behind.

When I ask her about the transition in goals from enrolment to learning, Banerji recalls that there was a big push to universalise education and send children to school from the mid-1990s to 2000. Pratham itself was initially focused on urban areas, starting with Mumbai.

The NGO's approach has been to identify gaps, understand them and develop solutions in a systematic and inclusive manner. When she joined, it ran 150 “balwadis” (pre-schools). These went up to 3,500 in two years. In 1999-2000, the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab founders and the Nobel Prize winning husband-wife duo of Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo got associated with Pratham.

“We were beginning to shift from enrolment as a big issue to the fact that kids were in school but things were not what they should be like.”

The ASER tool came out of the effort to say that “if reading or basic arithmetic is a problem, then how do I break it down to help you?” Two decades ago, Banerji was grappling with these intricacies that are viewed as foundational literacy and numeracy, and are a big part of the new National Education Policy (NEP).

Pratham’s focus remains primary education, particularly 3 to 5 standards. In Banerji’s view, the NEP puts a much bigger focus on building this basic foundation than the previous curriculum-based approach. The problem with the conventional approach, she points out, is that it forces teachers to finish syllabi. “We are deeply tied to curricula and it is very age- and grade-specific. At age 6, if you didn’t do what you were expected to, implicitly you are just left behind.”

Nationally, even in 2018, the ASER data showed that 70 per cent children were left behind in the first two years as only 30 per cent in Class III were in grade level. Children have to be freed from the tyranny of the curriculum and met at their own individual level, she stresses. “Curriculum is just a means to an end. The end should be the ability of a child to think, read and make up her own mind.”

At Banerji’s room, I spot a few colourful sheets of paper in the background pasted on a wall almirah. The colourful sketches are the handiwork of a niece’s daughter, a couple of other children, and one doodled by Banerji herself during Zoom meetings.

We return to our conver­sation and what better remin­ders of the pandemic than virtual meetings. On the impact on education, Banerji takes a broad view and says that it has made people realise the constraints of delivering learning in only one way — school and exam-based.

Pratham, too, learned much. It sent hundreds of thousands of daily SMS and messages on WhatsApp to parents and shaped content where the whole family could participate.

She explains that an SMS quizzing a child about a triangle would make parents tell her to look up the textbook. “But if I ask how many buckets of water you used yesterday at home, you’d get massive feedback from everyone. The bucket question is also adding to your math ability, and more directly.”

Pratham also ran campaigns in August-September to encourage teaching at the right level to be done by youths acr­oss over 10,000 villages and urban slums. “We should strengthen school effort with this. If we go back to the old ways, the entire crisis (caused by the pandemic) would have been wasted,” she says.

The NGO has an open-source website, prathamopenschool.org, which has shareable content. “In Pratham we have begun to think of learning in three buckets,” she says.

I ask her about the intervention of edtech companies that have blossomed during the pandemic as digital became a prerequisite.

In her opinion, a lot of them are targeting curricular teaching in a technologically advanced way, rather than using technology as a trigger to do things that one otherwise couldn’t do. “What is the combination of social structure, activity, content, technology and delivery that is best? I think that is a huge field waiting to be worked on. I don’t see edtech companies making that effort.”

We have long sipped our chai and talked for more than an hour. I ask her about her other passions, besides work. She reveals that she likes to cook and is a kattar (hardcore) non-vegetarian who loves mishti (sweets).

She also writes a fortnightly column in a Hindi daily, and authors stories for children.

Stories make a big difference, she says. It’s a credo for Pratham and herself. They are the best way to impart lessons for life, one would agree.