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Madhya pradesh's radical guarantee scheme is spreading education at minimal cost to remote villages and tribal pockets. " It was difficult for us to believe we could have a school in our midst after all these years. And just for the asking," says a bemused Rama Pitha Solanki, an elder of Varthia Phalia (tribal settlement) of Moghrikheda village in Khargone district. Yet, since July the incredible has been happening in hamlet of Madhya Pradesh (MP). Schools have begun functioning in at least 12,598 habitations with the launch of the state's education guarantee scheme (EGS) ,a radical yet simple plan to take schooling to hitherto to unserved areas, especially in the tribal belt. |
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All that the community has to do this list 25 children needing schooling (40 in the case of non-tribals) and arrange for a building or space for learning. Provided there's no formal learning facility within a kilometer, the government guarantees that within 90 days it will line up a trained teacher and supply free teaching and learning materials. The EGS intervention, launched in January this year, has proved so popular that a surprised officialdom is still waiting to catch its breath as demands pour in.
The statistics are impressive. Already, over 300,000 pupils have been mopped up by the EGS as thousands of schools have sprung up in hitherto unlettered territory. Be warned, however, that these are not your conventional schools. In Varthia Phalia ,the EGS center- officials are careful to make the distinction- functions out of Rama Pitha's thatched house most days, or in the courtyard behind the cowshed at other times. It has 32 children in the five -six age group under the watchful eye of a youngster who has just passed high school and is the 'trained ' guruji. There are textbooks, at least enough to share among the students and a set of teaching-learning materials(TLM),the same as is used in formal schools to attain the officially prescribed minimum levels of learning with Amar Singh Solanki, the guruji. The facilities, though, vary widely as does the keenness of the teacher and the taught. In Segaon, Sapna Mishra, an economics graduate, is doing her best to keep a dozen unkempt and poorly clothed children interested in the alphabet. An abandoned forest guard's house offers more solid premises but there are no books in sight and only a handful of the children are equipped with slate and chalk. A few kilometers away, the open air schooling Boodhgaon Phalia has dispersed by mid afternoon because the guruji has been called out for sowing work on his farm. EGS, expected to evolve gradually into multigrade primary schools, is admittedly not the perfect solution to the absence of schooling facilities. But, in a country where large chunks of the population do not have a nodding acquaintance with formal learning, the scheme offers the promise of universalising primary education. Points out R.Gopalakrishnan, a senior official coordinating the scheme." While the union government is merely adding to its wish list by planning to make primary education a fundamental right, MP has found the means to make this right a reality." A great deal of the EGS success stems from its sensitivity to tribal demography. Suraj Damor, additional collector of Khargone, the district that has notched up the highest number of new schools (1,420) ,says tribals live in scattered and distant phalias ( ormajras and tolias ) within a village. Thus, even if a school is operating in the village some of the settlements are too far away to take advantage of the facility. Seldar Patel, chairman of the Zila parishad, explains why the EGS is a godsend:" We Adivasis tend to live in separate settlements and we keep moving for any or no reason at all. In Kabri, for instance, there are 24 phalias. So the EGS is a great scheme for our people" The enthusiasm is evident down the line ,from Badri Nath Pandit, assistant director (education) of the district panchayat , to Harelal Madhurkar, block education officer of Sendhwa tehsil who has about 150 villages under his charge. Pandit a former headmaster with three decades in education behind him, describes EGS as " the most promising initiative so far, open to the last misuse". In MP, where the outreach of schooling facilities is just about 75% the EGS has added a new dimension to the question of access. Explains Amita Sharma ,director of the government's Rajiv Gandhi Shiksha Mission (RGSM) which has formulated the scheme." It's a specific intervention postulated on community demand for education. By making this the initial premise for access, the problem ceases to be one of supply and is transformed into a demand side issue" The mission had, in a door to door campaign last year identified around 20000 habitations not served by any educational facility. The result: the EGS was so formulated as to address the chronic problems besetting primary education: low enrolment coupled with high dropout rates, lack of accountability among teachers and poor community control over the school. The accountability factor is programmed into the EGS by interlinking all the issues. The guruji ,for one has it ensure that attendance never falls below 20 students; otherwise there is the immediate risk of finances being cut off, not to mention loss of job. For another, the community cannot relax its guardianship without compromising the interests of the children. It is not only responsible for nominating a local person as the guruji but also for monitoring his or her performance .Referring to the missing teacher of Boodhgaon Phalia, Sardar Tarole, member of the Moghrikheda gram panchayat declares: "the panchayat will change the guruji if he doesn't come back. The children must not suffer. Officials are hoping that once the government proves its commitment by providing the learning opportunity, the local community will provide the necessary dynamism to take the EGS forward. In remote tribal hamlets of Rajnandgaon and interior villages of Panna points out the RGSM, the local people had in a previous experiment justified such confidence by building log cabins and brick kiosks to house their children's school. What the state contributes to the EGS is the salary of the guruji- a paltry Rs. 500 per month at the moment- and the expense of training, no more than Rs. 400 for one session. Factoring in the cost of the TLM and textbooks, which in any case are provided free to scheduled caste and tribal children, and an annual contingency fund of Rs.850, an EGS center is budgeted to cost no more than Rs.8500.Compared with this , a new primary school accounts for as much as Rs. 31600 , apart from the heavy capital expenditure on a building .Between these two extremes is the non formal education (NFE) center run by the union government to provide flexibility in the education system. Such centers entail expenditure of Rs.10,625. Its pared-to-the-bone funding , however raises the question whether the EGS would not be compromising on quality in its efforts to reach primary education to all. Gopalakrishnan and Sharma are confident that there are adequate safeguards. They say efforts are under way to use funds from the District Primary Education Programme to set up resource centers for the EGS at two levels to ensure that the initiative does not atrophy for want of support. To broaden the EGS base and tap additional sources of funding , the MP government is moving for the closure of non-functional NFE centers in the state. NFE, by all accounts is the most ill conceived of the center's efforts to bridge the chasm in education. Of the 3,0000 centers in MP, nearly 70% are not functioning and MP calculates that this could garner Rs.25 crore for the EGS if the center agrees to the diversion. But in New Delhi, the education ministry is yet to endorse the MP initiative as officials are waiting for the political establishment to declare education a fundamental right. Experts, however have remarked on the workable alternative the EGS offers because it is community driven. Yash Pal former chairman of the university Grants commission who has a passionate interest in education, says: We are far from being able to provide universal primary education to our people. Even if we were to open many more schools of the type we have now, the situation will not alter in any significant manner. What is needed are drastic changes in the teaching learning system and in the relation of the school to the community in which is located." According to the latest World Bank study (March 1997) India now has six million children in the 6-10 age group. Attending primary school and another 32 million are not. MP is therefore, going all out to open opportunities on a mass scale. But there is a nagging worry that in its rush to make up for the lost decades, the state might find itself chasing numbers with scant regard for the content. And there are warnings close at hand of the pitfalls ahead: Jamli Primary school for instance. A few miles from a couple of new EGS centers in Moghrikheda, this school that was opened in 1955 offers a cautionary tale. About 85 listless students sit amidst the debris of a system that has crumbled in every sense .Peeling plaster a leaking roof, yellowed charts along with a torn cloth blackboard reflect the indifference of the authorities to what passes for education. The register shows a high absentee rate. This is what the EGS has to avoid if it is to keep a new generation in school for the entire course. The bright eyes and the enthusiastic responses of Radhika Dayaram in Segaon and five year old kalma in Varthia Phalia is a sign that things may be changing in the country side MP will have to guarantee it remains that way. | |