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The big little marchers
For the residents of India, those who live in Bharat seem very far away. Yet, every now and then there comes a tale from the hinterland that the well-fed in metropolitan centres can learn from. One such was carried in The Indian Express recently. It concerned 23 tribal children, aged between 10 and 12, who walked 66 km from a remote tribal village to Nashik in order to complain to the Tribal Development Commission about their school, its absentee headmaster, its missing teachers and its sadistic watchman. The journey was a particularly arduous one but the desire of these children of the Peth Taluka Residential Ashram School for better schooling was so manifest that nothing else mattered, not the terrors of the jungles, or the sores on the feet, not even the possible wrath of the authorities. The episode revealed that the perception that a more productive life is only possible through education has a much wider currency than is generally acknowledged.While the protesters from Peth taluka met with a modicumof success thanks to their long march, many others in rural India are not as fortunate. Despite all efforts to recognise education as a child's fundamental right, enrollment into primary schools is far from satisfactory and only 62 per cent of primary school children reached fifth standard during 1990-94. In Sri Lanka, in contrast, the figure was 92 per cent. Yet, in all the noises made from public platforms in this season of political campaigning, there seemed very little time for issues such as this because politicians were so busy attacking each other. True, the manifesto of every major political party did make the usual token references to ``free elementary education'', but there just is no public debate on the issue worth the name. The new government that will soon be sworn in at the Centre will not be able to dodge the issue much longer. For one thing, there is the draft constitutional amendment on compulsory education, that the United Front had said it would push through in December. With thegovernment went that pious intention as well. If this amendment has to become law and get translated subsequently into reality it would, according to some estimates, require the government to double its current investment in primary education from 1.8 per cent to 3.5 per cent of GDP. There are also obvious areas of darkness in the education map of the country which need urgent correction. Take the clear difference between urban and rural literacy levels -- rural literacy is estimated to be as low as 36 per cent. This is not surprising given that in states like Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, almost one-fourth of the children don't make it to the classroom. There is a national consensus on the right of every child to receive eight years of free education. There is a demand from many marginalised communities, as the long marchers of Peth taluka demonstrated, for functioning schools. It's time these two social phenomena are recognised by those who seek to govern this country. Copyright © 1998 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
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