With the government failing to fulfil its obligation to provide free and compulsory education, any help from the corporate groups in this direction should be welcome.
Karnataka is today seeing widespread protests against reports that the government has handed over 50,000 of its schools to the Azim Premji Foundation. Some see it ironical in the context of the ongoing commemoration of the 1857 Uprising.
But a visit to Delhi's municipality schools can be a wonder cure for all the outrage evoked at the idea of private schools and proposed education coupons. The municipal schools there are more like educational ghettos for the children of the poor.
The conditions are no better in villages. Sample any village school on the outskirts of Gwalior. Every school has Sarva Siksha Abhiyan written prominently outside. Inside there will be seldom more than one teacher attending to around 80 to 100 students of various classes at the same time. But what is more shocking is that a fourth of the teachers in government schools are untrained. Worse, many of them have not studied beyond eighth grade.
There are 6,014 primary schools in the country, which don't have a single teacher, according to the seventh All-India School Education Survey conducted by the National Council of Education Research and Training in collaboration with state governments and National Informatics Centre.
So should the government schools take the plunge and passively let themselves be handed over to corporate groups as has been reported from Karnataka recently? Will that ensure the implementation of the right to free and compulsory education?
Access to "sarkari khichdi" alone does not transform schools into places of education. Trained and dedicated teachers are as necessary.
Besides, private schools have played a major role in education in the past. In Kerala, which has almost universal enrolment and hardly any dropouts, the number of government schools is 4,490 as against 7,305 private aided schools and 515 private unaided schools. So, neither the role of private sector can be dismissed nor can that of the government, which is supposed to be the custodian of the right to education.
And what has been the contribution of the present government at the Centre? There has been a grand law - the Right to Free and Compulsory Education Act, preceded and followed by words, words, words, as the Bard would have put it.
The Central Advisory Board of Education told the government in 2005 that it would need to increase the outlay for education by Rs 10,000 crore (Rs 100 billion) in 2006-07 to be able to fulfil targets under the right to education Act. But the increase was from Rs 22,434 crore (Rs 224.34 billion) to a mere Rs 28,110 crore (Rs 281.1 billion).
There were more words in the Common Minimum Programme: "The UPA government pledges to raise public spending in education to at least 6 per cent of the GDP with at least half of this amount being spent on primary and secondary sectors." The total allocation is still at 3.2 per cent.
The CABE had envisaged funding of 6 per cent of the GDP to provide the Kendriya Vidyalaya model of schooling for anyone who wanted it. But what has been given are a lakh-and-a-half teachers every year for the whole country, with minimum qualification and minimum salaries.
With the Centre so blatantly flouting its Constitutional obligations, states are doing their best in the situation. Private enterprise is being encouraged.
In Mumbai, the municipality has decided to enter into a partnership with a private group to run schools.
In Rajasthan, an MoU has been sighed with the Confederation of Indian Industries and private companies. Something is always better than nothing.