As far as business goes, the rundown shop on R.T. Nagar’s 5th main road does pretty well for itself. While almost all of its revenue comes from selling cigarettes, mints, fizzy drinks and cheap candy to college students, its success has much to do with its two gregarious shop boys. Not a day over thirteen, the two boys moved to Bangalore from Allahabad two years ago to live with their uncle. Eventually they ended up working in this dingy, ramshackle establishment. Leaning against the cracked shop window, one of them looks at me suspiciously, while his companion explains why the two of them are not at school at this early hour in the afternoon.
“What’s the point? We didn’t want to stay in school. We make money here,” Chottu, the older of the two says, before rushing off to open up another carton of cigarettes for an approaching group of customers.
The two boys represent the rising statistic of primary school dropouts in the city. The government proudly holds up the Sarva Shiksha Abiyan, its flagship programme to “ensure that every child below 14 is in school by 2010,” as one of its big success stories. However, it quite often neglects to mention the high numbers of class six and seven students who do not graduate from government schools. While the programme reaches its deadline this year, over 50 percent of upper primary students quit school, according to Nafees Unnisa, the headmistress of a government school in Frazer Town.
“The parents are the biggest cause for dropouts in the public school system,” says Annapurna, who teaches at the primary school in Cox Town. “Most of the kids we get are from very poor families. Their parents are daily wage workers and work all day. They hardly have time to keep an eye on their children and make sure they attend school,” she says, as she writes the alphabet on a little girl’s dog-eared ruled notebook.
Other teachers seem to mirror the same opinion.
“A lot of parents do not have the time to get their kids ready for school. Education is given any importance in most families who live in slums,” says Unnisa. “If anything, they would rather their children contributed to the household by making a few extra rupees.”
Are there no systems in place to check truancy in our public schools, then?
“No, hardly any. We teachers are expected to make sure kids stay in school, most of the time,” Unnisa replies. “The second we even bring up punishments for missing school, we can be sure that those children will never come back to class,” she adds.
A rising number of children, Unnisa tells me, are lured by the easy money they can make from small jobs in shops and hotels. The children often tell her that if they were paid a hundred rupees to go to school, they would “gladly come every day.” But the prospects of making a living on the streets seems much more viable to them.
“They only think in the short term,” Unnisa adds, “they don’t see how getting an education is the only way to come up in life.”
Usha works as a maid in the three houses in Bangalore East’s more affluent neighborhoods. Until recently, she hardly had the time to make sure that her 5-year-old son, Joshua, went to school. Her husband, who she refers to as a “wastrel,” spends his day “drinking cheap liquor and playing carrom board” while she cleans toilets and clears garages from six in the morning to four in the evening.
At the SSA director’s office on Nrupathanga Road, I am turned away despite having made an appointment, because I cannot just “troop in, asking about something as big as the SSA.” Also, I am asked to submit my questions in advance at the office, so answers can be prepared for them. However, I quite serendipitously get another interesting perspective on dropout rates, while sitting in the office’s waiting room.
“It is the teachers who are responsible for most problems in the public school system,” says Manikandan, a graduate from the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), whose company makes teaching material for private and public schools across the country.
“Most teachers are disinterested in improving teaching methods or putting in any work to hold the students’ interest,” he says. “That is why schemes like the ‘Nalli Kalli’ receive such a bad response.”
The scheme he refers to is the Nalli Kalli or the “Joyful Learning scheme,” an innovative teaching method that uses teaching material (cards, charts and other instructional tools) to help the students learn better. Unicef India calls the scheme a bid to “help retain children in school and bring in those who are not attending school.” The programme was meant only for students from classes one and two, but has included class three students as of the current school year.
However, it seems to be having the opposite effect.
“The children are hardly interested in this type of learning,” says Annapurna, “it is one of the biggest problems for us teachers.”
According to her, one in every seven children from grades one and two has dropped out of school over the last year. She attributes this to a curriculum that includes these schemes.
“Also, we have to take a combined Nalli Kalli class, for grades one, two and three. That makes the class strength very large and it is difficult to control those classes,” she adds. “The children cannot get individual attention.”
Manikandan though, is critical of the teachers’ attitudes.
“The teachers have to break out of their mould,” he says, “They have to be trained well enough for this scheme to work. It involves a lot of creative play from the teachers, and most of them just are not up for thinking out of the box. It involves extra effort, and they think they are not being paid enough for it.”
In comparison, Manikandan points out that the material he sells to private schools, like the Montessori kindergartens, seems to produce great results.
“These ideas of education through creative play work extremely well in the private schools,” he says, “so clearly, the issue is about the facilitators, not the students.”
Combining age groups for these classes is a good thing, according to Manikandan, because it “brings about interaction between the different age groups, which has positive effects on learning.”
However, over the course of our waiting-room conversation, we eventually come around to discussing another problem that has become synonymous with bureaucracy in India: Corruption.
“All these schemes are implemented with our tax payer rupees, but nobody knows where it goes,” Manikandan says. “Even with my contract with the SSA office, I’m sure at least fifty percent of the money that was allotted to the project has already found its way into bureaucrats’ pockets.”
This issue seems to run common with most schools in the city.
“The government fails to provide the schools with adequate funds,” says Rahmathulla Khan, the secretary of the HSIS community development trust, a charitable organization that adopts and funds inner city schools. “The money goes through several channels before it reaches the headmistress of the school.”
“These schemes are no good because they only promise things. To get a school painted, we have to run around a lot. And most of the money is eaten up by the government contractors. The government and their suppliers work hand in glove.”
Also, the SSA seems to just about provide the essentials for school children, and these are not enough.
“See, they only provide one set of school uniform for the school children,” Khan says. “How can the children wear the same uniform all the time? And then we complain about dropout rates!”
“It isn’t like the SSA is completely unaware of all these issues,” says Manikandan, “but they do very little about them anyway.”
After being turned away from the director’s office, I manage to get a quick word with another SSA official, D. Venkateshiah, the joint director of programme implementation.
“The SSA has worked well and changed many lives,” says the affable director, who offers me a cup of coffee in his cabin, which is decked with pictures of happy schoolchildren, who seem to bear witness to the SSA’s effectiveness.
“We have streamlined education and provided a lot of infrastructure to the schools. They were in a pathetic state before we took them up, with no toilets or furniture.”
In the light of this glowering report, how then, does he view the dropout rate?
“The dropout rate was much worse before, it is not as bad as before,” he replies.
He admits though, that funds are still a problem for state education system.
“Our teachers are paid much less, than the teachers in other states like Tamil Nadu. Still, we manage to keep the system going,” Venkateshiah says, between dictating a quick letter to his secretary.
The Nalli Kalli scheme, he accepts, still has teething problems
“The scheme has been implemented across all our schools only recently. Yes, of course, there are problems. But it will take time before we are able to get it working with perfection.”
Meanwhile, the only solution to the problems of the government schools seems to be greater community participation.
“Before we adopted the school in Frazer Town, they had no toilets or drinking water,” says Khan, was set up in the memory of Haji Sir Ismail Sait, an entrepreneur and community leader from the colonial times. “The students were required to do the janitor’s work in the school yard every day. Now, we have service staff to clean the school.”
“We now provide the students with everything, from wholesome nutritious meals to uniforms and notebooks. This is the only way to ensure equal opportunity in our society. The citizens have to involve in the process.”
Joshua, Usha’s son, is now in the first standard at a private school. One of the houses, at which she works at, funds her son’s education entirely. The school is not too far away from the neighborhood she works in, so she can keep an eye on him. Looking sharp in his red school shirt, with his knee length socks and shiny black shoes, he salutes at me before running down the street to catch his school bus. At about the same time however, Chottus across the city wake up after a hard night’s sleep on a dirty shop floor to a mad rush of college students, who need their morning cigarette.
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