Better study, or else ...

Source:C P SURENDRAN,TOI.Apr 3, 2010, 10.59am IST




The Right to Education Act, which is supposed to benefit close to one crore children is a bit of a paradox laced with the usual, well-intentioned, celebratory Indian cruelty. Celebratory because the accompanying self congratulatory applause drowns the gastronomic rumblings of the millions that the Act is meant to benefit.

Right to education was among the six fundamental rights guaranteed by the Constitution. The new Act makes education enforceable in law. It is a moot point what the letter of the law can do in a situation that encourages its total breakdown in spirit.

There are laws, for example, the 1986 Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act, which prohibits children under 14 years from being employed in “hazardous occupations”. That hasn’t prevented boys and girls from working in quarries or explosive industries like firecrackers.

If charitable Acts and humanitarian laws could in regular bouts of Mosaic fervour command away injustice, over three million Indian kids won’t be still living off the streets; or, 150 million children would not continue to work as bonded labourers. The law is law. It is not dal-chawal. In the short run at least, gut and gruel come before maths and science.

Long ago, in Kerala, when this writer was, — improbable as it might seem — a child, his object of grudging admiration was a hardy community school in a village in Palghat where his relatively poorer-off cousins were enrolled. Their father was a Zamorin scion who had given away his considerable wealth to the communist movement and fallen on lean days. The school fortunately had a mid-day meal scheme, mostly rice mixed in powder-milk. And the cousins didn’t miss a day in school. Their teachers made sense not necessarily because they were A-league gurus, but because the beast in the belly had ceased to growl.

The regime of the beast spreads far and wide. The World Bank estimates that India ranks second in the world with regard to the number of children underfed and malnourished. The prevalence of underweight children in India is among the highest in the world, and is nearly double that of sub-Saharan Africa. Most children who do not go to school or become drop outs — a little over one-third of all children who enrol in grade one reach grade eight — do so, because the act of acquiring wisdom in a class room could end up killing them. They are infinitely better off working, begging or stealing. They see in education extermination by starvation. And, instinctively, they have preferred life to learning.

If reports are anything to go by, the free and compulsory Act talks of new schools, more teachers and infrastructure, and quota system in private schools. The finance commission has allocated Rs 25,000 crore to the states for implementing the Act. The school management committee or the local authority will be empowered to identify out-of-school children and admit them in classes. From now on, it’s either school or jail. Sort of.

If all this will eventually translate into sadistic teachers, overzealous village sarpanches or even a socially-minded cop or two scouring the countryside with cane or worse in hand for truants hiding away in the bushes, do not be surprised. ‘Free and compulsory’ has that ominous ring to it, the unmistakable gleanings of a proto-police raj.

That the Act gives no thought to food, which ought to be an integral part of any sustainable act of learning, is a failing. Nor does it mention monetary reward to parents for sending their wards to school. Why would parents want to take children off work and cut their already meagre family incomes?

For all the easy and obvious goodness that the Education Act envisages, in the absence of social and economic cushions, school could come to many as a torture camp — which in very many cases it already is thanks to primitive teaching methods and callous staff.

Surely, if education is compulsory for children no matter what their debilitating background is, why not make, say, health compulsory? In future, every child will be healthy, or else. Applause.