The country’s 594 JNVs are arguably the most valuable legacy of the late prime minister Rajiv Gandhi. These free-of-charge CBSE-affiliated boarding schools are shining beacons of hope offering a small minority of rural students a lifeline to escape the grinding poverty and backwardness of village India – Summiya Yasmeen The 11th Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2016, painstakingly researched and compiled by the globally respected Mumbai-based Pratham Education Foundation (estb.1994) whose 25,000 volunteers tested the learning outcomes of 562,305 primary school children in 589 districts of rural India, yet again presents a bleak picture of primary education in the forgotten rural hinterland, where 69 percent of the nation’s citizenry struggles to make ends meet. According to ASER 2016, less than 50 percent of class V children in rural schools can read class II texts — a situation which has remained unchanged for the past five years. Moreover, the percentage of class V children who can do subtraction sums has declined from 48.5 percent in 2012 to 44.3 percent in 2016, with only 21.1 percent of children able to do simple division sums. Against this bleak scenario of gross neglect of primary schooling in rural India, the country’s 594 Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalayas (JNVs) — free-of-charge class VI-XII co-ed CBSE-affiliated boarding schools established by the Central government — are shining beacons of hope offering a tiny minority of brightest and best rural students a lifeline to escape the grinding poverty and backwardness of village India which seven decades after the nation attained freedom remains “a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow-mindedness and communalism,” as described by Dr. B.R. Ambedkar (1891-1956), prime author of the Constitution of India. JNVs are arguably the most valuable legacy endowed by the late prime minister Rajiv Gandhi upon the neglected rural majority of post-independence India. Although an urban-oriented epicure, in a lucid moment — probably at the behest of then Union human resource development minister P.V. Narasimha Rao — Rajiv enacted legislation to construct at least one JNV in each administrative district of the country to provide free, urban equivalent upper primary to higher secondary boarding school education to children of the rural poor. At that point of time, only 43.57 percent of the population was literate and 56 percent — more than 100 million — children in the age group 5-14 were out of school with 85 million children eking out miserable lives in rural India. The first two experimental JNV schools were constructed in 1985 in Amravati (Maharashtra) and Jhajjar (Haryana) districts by the Navodaya Vidyalaya Samiti, an autonomous body registered by the Central government under the Societies Registration Act, 1860. Encouraged by the enthusiastic response to this rural schooling initiative, the National Policy on Education 1986 proposed and the Seventh Plan (1987-1992) formalised the construction of at least one JNV in all of the country’s rural districts, subject to state governments providing 30 acres of land free of charge for hosting the Centrally-funded class VI-XII JNVs. “The mandate of JNVs is…
