If India’s K-12 education system hasn’t collapsed completely, its due to the efforts of the country’s private schools and estimated 2 million NGOs engaged in providing direct or supplementary education and health services to millions of children neglected by government schools, hospitals and other institutions: Dilip Thakore & Summiya Yasmeen To say that India’s public school education system is in deep crisis is an understatement. Although there’s a rising mountain of evidence — the Annual Status of Education Reports of the highly-respected Pratham Education Foundation, the mint-fresh National Achievement Survey 2015 of NCERT, and the report of the high-powered T.S.R. Subramanian Committee appointed by the Union human resource development (HRD) ministry to advise the latter on the new National Education Policy, 2016 to cite a few recent reports — governments at the Centre and in the country’s 29 states are neither ready, willing nor able to stem the rot even as inert, time-serving intellectuals who have overrun the country’s academy, are mute spectators. This mountain of evidence is supplemented by reports of international development agencies of the World Bank and United Nations. According to the UNDP’s Human Development Report 2015, only 62.8 percent of India’s population above 15 was literate in the period 2006-13 and only 42 percent of citizens over 25 years has received “at least some secondary education”. And while primary school enrolment in the period 2008-14 averaged a commendable 113 percent, only 69 percent of the secondary education age population was in school and tertiary enrolment is a mere 25 percent. Health indicators are even worse with infant under-5 mortality at 52 per 1,000 live births (cf. 9.6 in Sri Lanka) and the India statistic for children under-5 suffering severe malnutrition averaging a shocking 47.9 percent in the period 2008-13. Open, continuous and uninterrupted neglect of education — specially early childhood and primary education — is rampant in the states where quasi-literate rural politicians with little time or respect for education began to rule the roost immediately after independence, running teacher appointment and transfers, and textbook commissioning and printing rackets with impunity. Education was inserted into the concurrent list of the Constitution which brought it under the jurisdiction of the Centre and states in 1975 during the Emergency, but even so is primarily administered by state politicians who have succeeded in plunging it to unprecedented depths. Over the past 16 years since EducationWorld (estb.1999) was launched with the mission to “build the pressure of public opinion to make education the #1 item on the national agenda”, the accumulated evidence testifying to the pathetic condition of Indian education from KG-Ph D and ways and means of upgrading the country’s schools, colleges and universities to global standards have been exhaustively detailed in this publication (see educationworldonline.net archives). Regrettably, despite it being self-evident and globally proven that provision of quality education by the State and private citizens (‘edupreneurs’) is a non-negotiable prerequisite of national development, your editors have not yet succeeded in arousing sufficient enthusiasm within the establishment or parent…
