Fully persuaded by the logic that social return per dollar invested in early childhood education is higher than equal investment in K-12 and tertiary education, EducationWorld organised major ECE global conferences in 2010 and 2011. On January 19, the 3rd ECE Global Conference 2013 was staged in Bangalore. Dilip Thakore reports It can be strongly and plausibly argued that the gender crimes stalking the country — highlighted by the vicious rape on December 16 in Delhi of the braveheart 23-year-old physiotherapy intern and her subsequent death in Singapore on December 29 — have a direct connection with the persistent neglect of early childhood education in post-independence India. Although informed opinion within the communities of neurosciences and brain researchers is near unanimous that children’s brains are almost fully developed by age eight, early childhood education (ECE) has remained an area of darkness for Indian educators and academics in the country’s 611 intellectually backward universities. Ditto the omniscient pundits of the Delhi-based Planning Commission who have been entrusted with the task of centrally planning the orderly growth and development of the Indian economy. In particular, the sins of the Planning Commission inspired by the Soviet model in the first rush of blood after the nation attained independence from British rule in 1947 (and of the political class across the spectrum persisting with Central planning), are manifold. Not only did it fail to sufficiently provide for the world’s first national birth control (family planning) programme as a result of which independent India’s population tripled from 350 million in 1950 to 1.2 billion currently, it has compounded this failure by not allocating sufficient resources for elementary education and literacy. While the global average for allocation of resources for education is 5 percent of GDP and developed industrial nations routinely invest 6-7 percent, in post-independence India the national outlay (Centre plus states) has never crossed 4 percent per annum. Even of these meagre annual allocations for education which is a defining feature of India’s pusillanimous national development effort, an average 30 percent is spent on excessively subsidised higher education. Consequently 65 years later, almost 30 percent — over 300 million Indians — are comprehensively illiterate and another 50 percent quasi-literate. Ironically, sustained under-investment in elementary education has not only torpedoed the national family planning programme (because literacy and economic development are the best contraceptives) but has also lumbered the nation with the world’s largest cohorts of under-employed and unemployable youth and adults who are incrementally taking to crime. The cardinal sin of neglecting elementary education has been compounded by the neglect of ECE. Although the Union government’s Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) programme for early childhood care and nutrition of infants and lactating mothers was introduced in 1975, right from the start, anganwadis (child care centres) established under the programme received token rather than adequate annual allocations in the Union budget. For instance the budgetary allocation for the country’s 1.3 million anganwadis in 2012-13 is a mere Rs.15,800 crore for 72 million infants (40 million according…
