Letter from EditorThere are few everyday sights which are more emotionally uplifting and morale boosting than of well-scrubbed, bright-eyed children setting out for school in the morning. Even if momentarily, one is thrown back in time into remembrance of things past and one‚s own school days. Subconsciously we also connect with the dreams and joie de vivre of generation next. It could be for reasons of ethnic and cultural prejudice, but I experience this mood elevation to a greater degree when I see Indian children on their way to school or in their classrooms, or wherever. Although I have travelled abroad extensively, I have never encountered children as cheerful, friendly and enthusiastic as in this child-hostile society fashioned by the unworthy political heirs of Mahatma Gandhi and Chacha Nehru who truly loved the nation‚s children. Therefore the mood elevation is quickly followed by depression when one visualises the crumbling buildings, crowded classrooms, indifferent teachers and pathetic infrastructure facilities that await them. Yet all this under-provision which is the lot of the great majority of the nation‚s 415 million children (below 18 years of age) would be tolerable if for all their pains and discomfort, school-going children receive minimal education and learn some life skills which would give them a chance to build half-decent lives for themselves and contribute to society. But according to the Annual Status of Education Report 2005 (ASER 2005), a pan-India survey of learning outcomes in primary and upper primary schools in rural India, over half the children who persist with their education (53 percent drop out the nation‚s inhospitable 900,000 primaries before they get to class VIII), can‚t read and grasp simple paragraphs or do elementary subtraction and division sums. This may be acceptable business as usual for Central government politicians and bureaucrats involved in the complex and no doubt stimulating, business of spending and salting away the Rs.1,000 crore-plus per day they squeeze out of the population by way of taxes. But it isn‚t ‚ shouldn‚t be ‚ acceptable to citizens who are paying an estimated Rs. 164 crore daily (Centre plus states) for the education of children in government and aided primaries ‚ in addition to financing the education of their children in private schools. Viewed from the perspective of the future growth and development of the Indian economy, the abysmal learning outcomes of rural primary schools ‚ the overwhelming majority of them government managed ‚ represents a colossal and perhaps unprecedented wastage of human resources. The path-breaking ASER 2005, the first independent nationwide survey of learning outcomes in the nation‚s elementary schools conducted by Pratham, perhaps the country‚s most respectable education NGO, and its implications, is the subject matter of our cover story this Union budget month ‚ a season of taxation. Paradoxically, even as government-dominated primary education is going from bad to worse, private sector secondaries ‚ especially the new genre of much-maligned five-star international schools ‚ are beginning to attract students from around the world and could well transform post-liberalisation India…
