FRENZIED CAMPAIGNING HAS gripped the southern state of Karnataka (pop. 67 million) where the legislative assembly election for 224 constituencies is scheduled to be held on May 12. For the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which swept to power at the Centre in General Election 2014 and has since won assembly elections in Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh and calls the shots in most states of north India, a win in Karnataka is being regarded as the “gateway to the south”, i.e, the six states of peninsular India where its hindutva message and prime minister Narendra Modi’s magic has failed to work thus far. On the other hand, for the Congress party which won 120 seats in the assembly five years ago, this is the only large state apart from Punjab, where the party is in power. The third major party in the fray is Janata Dal (Secular) led by former prime minister H.D. Deve Gowda which could well emerge as kingmaker with poll surveys predicting a hung assembly.    

Unsurprisingly, the issue of overdue education reforms is missing from the heated public speeches of politicians and leaders of political parties including Rahul Gandhi, Amit Shah and Narendra Modi, who have made more than half a dozen visits to the state during the past two months. Their public addresses to huge rented crowds have centred on caste quotas, minority status for Lingayats and the state’s deteriorating law and order system. But the vital issue of educating Karnataka’s 11 million primary-secondary children is a low priority, if at all.

Unfortunately, while the vast majority of poor parents are insufficiently educated and articulate to press for education reform, and the middle class ensures its children are enroled in the state’s 19,000 private schools, public education in Karnataka has hit rock-bottom. The Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2017, published by the Pratham Education Foundation, a globally respected NGO, reports that a mere 33 percent children in the 14-18 years age group can manage simple division sums and only 56 percent can read simple English sentences. In higher education, only two of the 28 state universities figure in the league table of the Union HRD ministry’s National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) 2018. 

The manifesto of the Congress party, released by the party president Rahul Gandhi, at a rally in the coastal town of Mangalore on April 27, gives short shrift to education promising effective implementation of the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, 2009, and 12 years of free, high-quality K-12 education in government schools, without going into any details. But given the record of the Congress government of Karnataka of the past five years during which there’s been mass migration of children from government to private budget schools and the subsequent shutdown of 2,959 government primaries with less than 10 children, the promise of “quality education” is less than credible.  

At the time of writing this report (April 28), the BJP’s Karnataka manifesto hadn’t been released. Though BJP MLA and party spokesperson C.N. Ashwathnarayan insists that education is a high priority in the party’s draft manifesto, given the BJP’s regressive education policy initiatives in Gujarat and Uttar Pradesh, there’s little expectation within Karnataka’s intelligentsia and academy of any worthwhile education reforms if the BJP forms the next government of Karnataka. 

The utter disinterest of major political parties in reforming the state’s struggling education system has prompted civil society groups to exert pressure on them to address the issue of plunging learning outcomes in public education. The School Development and Monitoring Committee Coordination Forum of Karnataka (estb.2004), comprising members of School Development Monitoring Committees (SDMCs) — established under s.28 of the RTE Act and which includes parents, teachers and elected members of village panchayats — has started an intensive campaign to make education a major issue in the forthcoming assembly election. Forum members are meeting with leaders of political parties in every district and block to demand transformation of government primary-secondaries into high quality neighbourhood schools to provide K-12 education comparable with private schools.

“We are urging people to vote only for candidates committed to reforming government schools. Currently, because of their poor quality, disadvantaged families are forced to spend 40 percent of household incomes on private education. We will press the next government of the state to establish at least one new school in every gram panchayat to provide free, high-quality education on a par with the Central government’s Jawahar Navodaya and Kendriya Vidyalayas, which unfortunately number a mere 594 and 1,100 respectively countrywide. We will insist that whichever party comes to power, the budget allocation for public education is raised to 6 percent of GDP as recommended by the Kothari Commission way back in 1966, and more recently by TSR Subramanian in 2016,” says Dr. V.P. Niranjanaradhya, professor, Centre for Child and the Law of the National Law School of India University, and chief patron of the forum. 

Thus far, SDMCs invested with wide powers under s.28 of the RTE Act to monitor and improve government schools in local and rural areas have not proved effective because they’ve been sabotaged by vested interests. But there is a slim chance that the SDMC Coordination Forum will not only revive them but also upgrade the state’s floundering public school system. 

Sruthy Susan Ullas (Bangalore)