Prolog: I am taking a bit of a break from the History series because i need to do some more research. Myself, NK Sreedhar and Priya Raju are actually working on the Farmer/Sproat/Witzel paper to try and disprove it.  It appears Parpola has not done a good job of disproving the paper.

Myself, Priya Raju and a group of about 20 volunteers have adopted a Corporation School near our office. We volunteer our time to teach the students computing, english speaking etc. The Program Manager for this CSR initiative in our company is Archana Raghuram. For non-Indian readers, a Corporation School is the equivalent of a Public School in the USA. But the similarities stop there. In India, most children attending Corporation Schools come from disadvantaged backgrounds.

The first few sessions with the school, that we have completed so far, have been very illuminating about the challenges primary/secondary schools face in India. This school is part of a school system that targets 192 million children in 1.1 million habitations.  This is just to give you a sense for the staggering size and complexity of anything in India due to our sheer population.

We found the children very enthusiastic about the program and surprisingly the teachers also are very supportive.  I happened to spend about an hour with the Head Master (Principal) of the school one-on-one and i was blown away by the sense of community involvement he displayed.  He told me a few things that made me revise my view of India’s politicians and I am sure you will agree that is not likely to be an everyday occurrence in India.

Sarva Siksha Abhiyaan(SSA) [Universal Primary Education]

The first thing he said was that about 5-6 years ago during the AB Vajpayee BJP Government days, he was made part of the ambitious Sarva Siksha Abhiyaan program. Till then he was a regular 9-5 teacher and after being a part of the program he is now a reformed man who constantly thinks about the community issues he is dealing with and that education has to be seen in the context of the community his school’s students are from. For instance, most students of this school come from disadvantaged backrounds – they are children of daily wage construction workers, menial workers, petty shop workers etc. Most of the parents are themselves illiterate making these students, first generation entrants to the school system. Female students face significant hurdles due to being forced out of the school system in the 9th grade due to societal pressures to get them married early or to make them assist their parents in their jobs etc. 

As he explained the situation, it was all becoming painfully clear. He took me outside his office to show a wall which had the goals  of the SSA program:

• All children in school, Education Guarantee Centre, Alternate School, ‘ Back-to-School’ camp by 2003;

• All children complete five years of primary schooling by 2007

• All children complete eight years of elementary schooling by 2010  

• Focus on elementary education of satisfactory quality with emphasis on education for life

• Bridge all gender and social category gaps at primary stage by 2007 and at elementary education level by 2010

• Universal retention by 2010  

You can see just from these goals the nature of the challenge faced by India. I went through the website for this program to further understand the program. Interestingly, the headmaster said that when the Congress government took over, they decided to continue this program. It is typical in India for succeeding governments to repeal/rewind most of the work done by the previous government. The fact that the Congress government did not do that, told me that, we are faced with a set of politicians who are comitted to making a dent on this garguantuan problem cutting across party lines. This is the human face of India’s politicians that is often not seen by us, when all we hear about is how corrupt everyone is.

Noon Meal Program 

As the headmaster started explaining i asked a number of questions. One of the programs that has been bothering me is the Noon Meal Scheme (or the Mid-Day Meals Program for School children). I always thought that this was yet another way for politicians to line up their pockets and giving poor quality food to the children. This is the perception i had even though i had read reports in the Western media about how good this program is for retaining children in school.

The headmaster then told me how the noon meal scheme was created and that blew my mind away – a true example of path-breaking creativity:

In the 1960s, K. Kamaraj, the then Chief Minister (similar to USA’s Governor of a state), was visiting a village and he happened to see a few young kids tending to cows. When he asked them why they were not in school – the boys asked Kamaraj if he will give food if they went to school. Within a few weeks, Kamaraj started what is the world’s first noon-meal program for grades 1 through 5 and later in the 1980s, MG Ramachandran, another Chief Minister, expanded the program to cover 6-12.

The headmaster said that the noon-meal program is one of the principal reasons why students stay back in school. He said that in the villages it has created a massive dent on school dropouts making dropouts almost non-existent.

Overall, SSA and the Noon Meal Programs are the kind of bold and ambitious initiatives we need in India to make poverty non-existent.

Way to go India.