LAHTORA, India — With the dew just
rising from the fields, dozens of children streamed into the two-room school in
this small, poor village, tucking used rice sacks under their arms to use as
makeshift chairs. So many children streamed in that the newly appointed head
teacher, Rashid Hassan, pored through attendance books for the first two hours
of class and complained bitterly. He had no idea who belonged in which grade.
There was no way he could teach.
Another teacher arrived 90 minutes late. A third did not show up. The most
senior teacher, the only one with a teaching degree, was believed to be on
official government duty preparing voter registration cards. No one could quite
recall when he had last taught.
“When they get older, they’ll curse their teachers,” said Arnab Ghosh, 26, a
social worker trying to help the government improve its schools, as he stared
at clusters of children sitting on the grass outside. “They’ll say, ‘We came
every day and we learned nothing.’ ”
Sixty years after independence, with 40 percent of its population under 18,
India is now confronting the perils of its failure to educate its citizens,
notably the poor. More Indian children are in school than ever before, but the
quality of public schools like this one has sunk to spectacularly low levels,
as government schools have become reserves of children at the very bottom of
India’s social ladder.
The children in this school come from the poorest of families — those who
cannot afford to send away their young to private schools elsewhere, as do most
Indian families with any means.
India has long had a legacy of weak schooling for its young, even as it has
promoted high-quality government-financed universities. But if in the past a
largely poor and agrarian nation could afford to leave millions of its people
illiterate, that is no longer the case. Not only has the roaring economy run
into a shortage of skilled labor, but also the nation’s many new roads, phones
and television sets have fueled new ambitions for economic advancement among
its people — and new expectations for schools to help them achieve it.
That they remain ill equipped to do so is clearly illustrated by an annual
survey, conducted by Pratham, the organization for which Mr. Ghosh works. The
latest survey, conducted across 16,000 villages in 2007 and released Wednesday,
found that while many more children were sitting in class, vast numbers of them
could not read, write or perform basic arithmetic, to say nothing of those who
were not in school at all.
Among children in fifth grade, 4 out of 10 could not read text at the second
grade level, and 7 out of 10 could not subtract. The results reflected a slight
improvement in reading from 2006 and a slight decline in arithmetic; together
they underscored one of the most worrying gaps in India’s prospects for
continued growth.
Education experts debate the reasons for failure. Some point out that
children of illiterate parents are less likely to get help at home; the Pratham
survey shows that the child of a literate woman performs better at school.
Others blame longstanding neglect, insufficient public financing and accountability,
and a lack of motivation among some teachers to pay special attention to poor
children from lower castes.
“Education is a long-term investment,” said Montek Singh Ahluwalia, the
deputy chairman of the Planning Commission and the government’s top policy
czar. “We have neglected it, in my view quite criminally, for an enormously
long period of time.”
Looking for a Way Up
Arguments aside, India is today engaged in an epic experiment to lift up its
schools. Along the way lie many hurdles, and Mr. Ghosh, on his visits to
villages like this one, encounters them all.
The aides who were hired to draw more village children into school complain
that they have not received money to buy educational materials. Or the school
has stopped serving lunch even though sacks of rice are piled in the classroom.
Or parents agree to enroll their son in school, but know that they will soon
send the child away to work. Or worst of all, from Mr. Ghosh’s perspective, all
these stick-thin, bright-eyed children trickle into school every morning and
take back so little.
“They’re coming with some hope of getting something,” Mr. Ghosh muttered.
“It’s our fault we can’t give them anything.”
Even here, the kind of place from which millions of uneducated men and women
have traditionally migrated to cities for work, an appetite for education has
begun to set in. An educated person would not only be more likely to find a
good job, parents here reasoned, but also less likely to be cheated in a bad
one. “I want my children to do something, to advance themselves,” is how
Muhammad Alam Ansari put it. “To do that they must study.”
Education in the new India has become a crucial marker of inequality. Among
the poorest 20 percent of Indian men, half are illiterate, and barely 2 percent
graduate from high school, according to government data. By contrast, among the
richest 20 percent of Indian men, nearly half are high school graduates and
only 2 percent are illiterate.
Just as important, at a time when only one in 10 college-age Indians actually
go to college, higher education has become the most effective way to scale the
golden ladder of the new economy. A recent study by two economists based in
Delhi found that between 1993-94 and 2004-5, college graduates enjoyed pay
raises of 11 percent every year, and illiterates saw their pay rise by roughly
8.5 percent, though from a miserably low base; here in Bihar State, for
instance, a day laborer makes barely more than $1 a day.
“The link between getting your children prepared and being part of this big,
changing India is certainly there in everyone’s minds,” said Rukmini Banerji,
the research director of Pratham. “The question is: What’s the best way to get
there, how much to do, what to do? As a country, I think we are trying to
figure this out.”
She added, “If we wait another 5 or 10 years, you are going to lose millions
of children.”
Money From the State
India has lately begun investing in education. Public spending on schools
has steadily increased over the last few years, and the government now proposes
to triple its financial commitment over the next five years. At present,
education spending is about 4 percent of the gross domestic product. Every
village with more than 1,000 residents has a primary school. There is money for
free lunch every day.
Even in a state like Bihar, which had an estimated population of 83 million
in 2001 and where schools are in particularly bad shape, the scale of the
effort is staggering. In the last year or so, 100,000 new teachers have been
hired. Unemployed villagers are paid to recruit children who have never been to
school. A village education committee has been created, in theory to keep the
school and its principal accountable to the community. And buckets of money
have been thrown at education, to buy swings and benches, to paint classrooms,
even to put up fences around the campus to keep children from running away.
And yet, as Lahtora shows, good intentions can become terribly complicated
on the ground.
At the moment, the village was not lacking for money for its school. The
state had committed $15,000 to construct a new school building, $900 for a new
kitchen and $400 for new school benches. But only some of the money had
arrived, so no construction had started, and the school committee chairman said
he was not sure how much local officials might demand in bribes. The chairman’s
friend from a neighboring village said $750 had been demanded of his village
committee in exchange for building permits.
The chairman here also happens to be the head teacher’s uncle, making the
idea of accountability additionally complicated. One parent told Mr. Ghosh that
their complaints fell on deaf ears: the teachers were connected to powerful
people in the community.
It is a common refrain in a country where teaching jobs are a powerful
instrument of political patronage.
The school’s drinking-water tap had stopped working long ago, like 30
percent of schools nationwide, according to the Pratham survey. Despite the
extra money, the toilet was broken, as was the case in nearly half of all
schools nationwide.
Thankfully, there was a heap of rice in one corner of the classroom,
provisions for the savory rice porridge that is one of the main draws of
government schools. Except that Mr. Hassan, the head teacher, said the rice was
not officially reflected in his books, and therefore he had not served lunch
for the last week.
What about the money that comes from the state to buy eggs and other
provisions for lunch, Mr. Ghosh asked? That too remained unspent, Mr. Hassan
explained, because there was no rice to serve them with — at least not in his
record books.
(Analysts of government antipoverty programs say rice can be a tempting side
income for unscrupulous school officials; food meant for the poor in general, though
not at this particular village school, is sometimes found diverted and sold on
the private market, but one of the brighter findings of the Pratham survey was
that free meals were served in over 90 percent of schools.)
Mr. Ghosh went from befuddled to exasperated. “You have rice. You have
money. You prefer that kids don’t eat?” he asked.
Mr. Hassan shook his head. He said he could only cook what rice was in his
records, or cook this rice if a senior government officer instructed him to do
so. Mr. Ghosh went on to point out that one of the aides had shown up more than
an hour late, and then with a crying baby in her arms. Two teachers were
altogether absent. Even Mr. Hassan, Mr. Ghosh added, had pulled up a half-hour
late.
“You’re the head of this school,” Mr. Ghosh told him. “Only you can improve
this school.”
Mr. Hassan fired back: “What are you talking about? For the last 25 years
this school wasn’t running at all.”
New Plans, Old Attitudes
Mr. Ghosh could not dispute that. There were times when the school doors did
not open. One father, an agricultural laborer, said he had tried a few times to
enroll his children but gave up after the former principal demanded money. Many
parents in this largely Muslim village chose Islamic schools because they were
seen to offer better discipline.
Others saw no need to send their children to school at all.
Mr. Ghosh, too, went to government schools, in a small town in neighboring
West Bengal state, which is only slightly better off than here. But if he dared
skip class, he recalled, he would be thrashed by his father, a public school
principal. The children of this village, he knew, would not be so lucky. “When
I first started coming here,” Mr. Ghosh recalled, parents “would ask me, ‘What
are you going to give me? Your porridge isn’t enough. Because if I send my
child to herd a buffalo, at least he’ll make 3 rupees.’ ” Three rupees is
less than 10 cents.
One morning Mr. Ghosh reached the mud-and-thatch compound of Mohammed Zakir,
a migrant laborer who goes to work in Delhi each year. Mr. Zakir’s son, Farooq,
about 10 years old, was going to school for the first time this week. And as
Mr. Zakir saw it, that was fine until Farooq turned 14, the legal age for
employment, when he too would have to go work in Delhi. Keeping children in
school through their teenage years, the father said flatly, was not a luxury
the family could afford.
Walking out of the Zakir family compound, Mr. Ghosh looked utterly worn out.
“If I don’t get this child in school,” he said, “then his child in turn won’t
go to school.”