In Kozhikode, Kerala “India’s most literate state” a tripartite public-private partnership between an MLA, municipal corporation and the Faizal & Shabana Foundation (estb. 2012) offers an inspirational model for the revival of India’s failing government schools ONE OF THE GREAT paradoxes of post-independence India™s national development effort is the sustained neglect of 1.20 million government primary-secondary schools which dispense rock-bottom quality education to over 140 million of the country™s 230 million children who will be in school at the start of the new academic year this month. The consequence of continuous neglect of government schools defined by crumbling buildings, furniture-less classrooms, garbage-strewn compounds, filthy toilets and chronic teacher absenteeism, is that although public primary education is provided free of charge and in most cases with a free mid-day meal, 40 percent of the country™s school-going children are in 200,000 ˜recognised™ private and estimated 400,000 officially unrecognised ” and technically illegal ” budget schools which have mushroomed in slums and backward communities in urban and rural India. The people™s verdict is unambiguous: even households near the base of the country™s iniquitous socio-economic hierarchy ” and it™s pertinent to note that almost one-third of the population lives below the poverty line ” prefer fees-levying private to free government schools for their children. Behind these bewildering statistics is a story of continuous failure of successive governments at the Centre and in the states to develop India™s abundant human capital during the past 67 years since the country wrested political independence from foreign rule and began its tryst with destiny. The consequence of the education ” particularly public primary education ” blindspot is that currently one-fourth of the country™s people (over 300 million citizens) are comprehensively illiterate, and twice that number is at best functionally literate and a drag on the national development effort. Unsurprisingly on almost every parameter of national development ” learning outcomes, health, nutrition, productivity, infrastructure, per capita power consumption ” contemporary India is among the bottom-ranked in the comity of the world™s 195 nation states. Logic and reason would dictate that the top priority of the grandiosely titled Union ministry of human resource development (HRD) at the Centre and the education ministries of India™s 29 state governments and five Union territories, should be improvement and upgradation of government schools. Instead, for the past six decades their efforts have been focused upon shackling the growth and proliferation of private schools, colleges and universities to prevent œcommercialisation of education, the bugbear of the establishment, the Supreme Court of India included. Nowhere is the failure of the Indian state more tragic than in its failure to provide universal quality education to its children. A striking way of thinking about the quality crisis in government schools is to look at the flight to private schools and ask: ˜What does it say about the quality of the product (government schools), when you can™t even give it away for free?™ queried Dr. Karthik Murlidharan, professor of economics at the University of California, in an essay written…
