'Shiksha sahayaks' scheme bears fruit

BACK TO SCHOOL PART - I

The government's network of schools might be wide in its spread, but it has failed to deliver the goods, study after study has shown.

The Sarva Siksha Abhiyan, the government's universal education programme, sought to address the problem by appointing para-teachers or teaching assistants in large numbers "" less qualified (trained for a month instead of two years) but willing to work on a lower salary.

Most experts said they would not make any difference. Business Standard reporters travelled to the interiors of three states "" Orissa, Chhattisgarh and Andhra Pradesh "" to find the truth.

Babuna Mahanta, a student in the first standard of Nodal ME School, Malda, a remote village in the Keonjhar district of Orissa, had never travelled in a locomotive nor ever seen one. So, when his teacher, Bijay Kumar Dash, told him about trains while teaching him alphabets, Mahanta had no clue what it was.

Till one day Dash brought a toy train to the classroom and explained to his students how it ran on a rail track.

Babuna now knows that a train is something which runs on two parallel bars of iron and carries people and goods from one place to another. He aspires to travel in it one day.

Dash, to be sure, is not a fully-trained teacher. In fact, he has just studied till the higher secondary level.

Subashini Pradhan left school after class X. Still, she teaches no fewer than 268 students in Hatidanda primary school in the Kaniha block in Anugul, using pictures and natural objects as tools. Both Dash and Pradhan say they have seen an improvement in the communication skills of their students even since they joined in 2005.

These two are part of the 119,000-strong army of para-teachers, or 'shiksha sahayaks' Orissa has created in the last two years to teach up to the seventh standard in state-owned primary schools. To put it in perspective, there were 95,512 regular teachers in the 47,841 primary schools in the state as on March 31, 2007.

Anybody who is a matriculate is eligible for the job. They are paid Rs 2,000 a month and received training for a month before being sent to their current assignments. The state has spent Rs 29 crore on training shiksha sahayaks like Dash and Pradhan.

The Orissa Primary Education Project Authority has appointed master trainers who give 30-day Jagruti (awakening) training to the shiksha sahayaks. To help the state in the initiative, the state got Rs 335 crore in 2005-06 and Rs 635 crore in 2006-07 from the Centre under the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan.

From this academic session, the authority has also introduced multilingual education for tribal children and different material is being prepared for them. About 200 schools have been included on a pilot basis.

The scheme has won some support. "Para-teachers are serving a purpose as no one else is often willing to work in villages. It is true children deserve well-trained teachers. But it is also true that they need an educated adult to teach them," said Madhav Chavan, founder of NGO Pratham.

However, some shiksha sahayaks felt they don't get enough time to utilise the skills learnt under this programme in the classrooms. As routine works take up most of their time, they are not able to use innovative learning practices to develop the various faculties of their students.

The government had launched the Sarva Siksha Abhijan in 2001-02 to impart high quality elementary education to all children in the 6-14 age group by 2010. There is still a chance that it might just happen.