Enterprises of great pith and moment launched to transform the world’s largest population of children and youth were proclaimed, analysed and discussed threadbare, to little avail. Although in the new millennium, the needs and rights of the country’s 450 million child citizens are receiving greater attention, they remain the world’s most malnourished, under-educated and under-protected children. Dilip Thakore & Summiya Yasmeen report THE INTERREGNUM OF 15 years (1999-2014) since EducationWorld was modestly launched into the dark and uncharted waters of Indian education with the mission statement to “build the pressure of public opinion to make education the #1 item on the national agenda,” has been a history of great failures and small successes. Enterprises of great pith and moment launched to transform the world’s largest population of children and youth — the unintended consequence of the failure of the family planning programmes of the first three decades after independence, but glibly translated into a demographic dividend — were proclaimed, debated, analysed and discussed threadbare. But to little avail. Although in the new millennium the needs and rights of the country’s 450 million child citizens have started receiving greater attention, this massive cohort of vulnerable under-18s remains the world’s most malnourished, undereducated, under-protected and under-developed children. Even though the country’s myopic political leaders and establishment and a self-centred middle class don’t seem to care, the pathetic condition of the country’s 550 million children and youth augurs ill for the future. Almost 47 percent of children under age five suffer moderate to severe malnutrition and danger of brain damage and stunting because the country’s 1.4 million Central government-sponsored anganwadis (child care and nutrition centres) can provide for only half of them. Moreover, vitally important early childhood education was a blindspot of the country’s educationists and central planners for over six decades until last September. Teaching-learning outcomes and conditions in the country’s 1.20 million (mainly state) government schools defined by lack of drinking water, electricity, toilets, multi-grade teaching in single classrooms and mass teacher truancy (1.25 million teachers of government primaries are absent every day) are so abysmal that of the 230 million children who are in primary schools at the beginning of each academic year, over 40 percent drop out and only 51 million complete secondary education of whom a mere 26 million enter institutions of higher education. Nor is the general quality of education dispensed by India’s 37,000 colleges and 735 universities — some of them of more than 150 years’ vintage — much to write home about. According to a 2005 McKinsey World Institute-Nasscom study, 85 percent of liberal arts and 75 percent of India’s engineering graduates are unfit for employment in multinational companies. Perhaps the only inspirational stories in post-independence India’s education development history — and particularly of the new millennium — are from the country’s non government organisations (NGOs) and 80,000 (200,000 according to the Union HRD ministry which enumerates the kindergarten, primary, upper primary, secondary and higher secondary sections of composite schools as separate units) private schools, 7,000…
