Against the depressing backdrop of post-independence India’s educationally short-changed citizens floundering in shallows and misery rooted in learning deprivation, news that the new-genre digital technologies-driven Khan Academy, USA has pitched tent in New Delhi offers hope of a countrywide learning revolution: Dilip Thakore This cover feature is being written on the eve of January 26, when India’s establishment and creamy layer will celebrate the nation’s 67th Republic Day with a grand show of military prowess with a ceremonial regalia march past of specially selected units of the country’s 1 million-plus defence forces. On the day, President Pranab Mukherjee will take the salute from the armed forces, state government flotillas and squads of the National Cadet Corps (NCC). France’s President Francois Hollande whose top priority is to seal a Rs.2,000-crore deal with the government of India to purchase 36 Rafale fighter jets for the Indian Air Force, will be in attendance as chief guest. But for the hundreds, if not thousands of children press-ganged into marching down Rajpath in smart NCC uniforms, Republic Day is unlikely to be an occasion for celebration or pride. Because India’s 480 million children — the world’s largest child population — don’t have a bright future to which they can look forward with confidence. The country’s public education system — particularly early childhood and primary-secondary schooling — which should have been the top development priority of successive governments in New Delhi and the Republic’s 29 states and seven centrally-administered Union territories during the past six decades, is in a shambles. Facts and data about the neglect of public education are as irrefutable as they are shameful and have been repeatedly highlighted in EducationWorld (see cover story ‘Heavy price of education neglect’, EW January/educationworldonline.net archives), and in a small minority of other, publications and NGOs for over a decade. Despite this, the Central and state governments, the establishment and even academia, are blind to the reality that high-quality education — especially early childhood and primary education which builds human capital — is the foundation block of national development. In the Union Budget 2015-16, for the first time in the history of post-independence India the annual outlay for education was slashed from the Rs.82,771 crore budgeted in 2014-15 to Rs.69,075 crore. Moreover the budget for early childhood education was slashed from Rs.18,195 crore to Rs.8,355 crore. Nevertheless, the education sector isn’t a picture of unrelieved gloom. Despite sustained under-investment across the education spectrum in eight detailed but worthless Soviet-style Central five-year-plans formulated with great hype and hoopla during the past six decades, India’s private school system has survived, and even modestly prospered. Currently an estimated 30-40 percent of 230 million school-going children are enrolled in 200,000 private ‘recognised’ schools with a growing number of low-income households preferring to sign up their children in fees-levying private rather than the country’s 1.2 million free-of-charge government schools defined by lack of basic infrastructure, chronic teacher absenteeism and abysmal learning outcomes. It’s a telling indictment of the shabbily-run public education system that an…
