In mid-March, several dailies in Bangalore headlined the poignant story of little Lakshmi Naikode (9), who fled her home and Kannada-medium government primary school last November to realise her dream of studying in an English-medium ‘convent’ school. Three days after she had unsuccessfully knocked on the doors of several private schools for admission, Lakhsmi was rescued from the mean streets of the city and returned to her dirt-poor parents who live in a makeshift home, from where she goes to a Kannada-medium government primary. But English-medium education had captured her imagination and she stubbornly declined to attend the free-of-charge government school. Fortunately for this determined girl child, her story caught the interest of the Times of India which front-paged it, eliciting widespread empathy for her in the garden-turned-garbage city. Almost six months later, Lakshmi’s dream has come true with the city’s Indus International School — ranked the country’s # 1 international school in the EducationWorld India School Rankings 2012 — agreeing to admit her into class III of its parallel, high-quality English-medium community primary-secondary sited within its campus. According to a more recent front-page report in ToI (March 16) “little Lakshmi’s life has taken a swift and happy leap”. Although ex facie this is a human interest story with a happy ending for which the ToI claims credit, it raises several critical issues about the liberal middle class and official (state government) mindset in 21st century India. First, the entire story has been written from the perspective of the obligation imposed by s. 12 (1) (c) of the Right to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, 2009 upon all private schools to reserve a 25 percent quota for poor neighbourhood children in class I and retain them until class VIII. Under the Act, the government is obliged to reimburse private schools the quantum of expense incurred per child in its own primary schools. However, the impact of this historic provision of the RTE Act has been diluted by a Supreme Court judgement delivered last April, which exempts linguistic and/or religious minority schools from this obligation. With almost all of Bangalore’s top-ranked private schools claiming minority status, entry into them has become problematic for children from poor households. But the true villains of Indian education are not private school promoters exercising their constitutional right to establish and administer schools of their choice, but inept education ministry officials who have failed and neglected to reform and upgrade deficient government primaries which have transformed into child-hostile hell-holes where universally-prized English language learning is unavailable, teachers — if they bother to show up at all — who don’t teach, and infrastructure and learning are in lamentably short supply. Liberals in academia and the media seem to have written off the country’s 1.28 million publicly-funded government schools as beyond reform and redemption. This is an irresponsible and dangerous assumption because for every little Lakshmi admitted into a private school haven, there are millions who can’t be similarly accommodated and are condemned to languish in state-funded…
