'37'

INDIA’S MAN-MAKING EDUCATION : VIVEKANANDA’S DREAM COMES TRUE

Sunit Ghosh *

    Then underlining the need for spreading education among the masses the Swami asked his disciples to "kindle their knowledge with the help of modern science. Teach them (masses) history, geography, science, literature and along with these the profound truth of religion".

    Such a call was, perhaps, necessary. Macaulay’s Minute on Education of February 1835, favouring the teaching of English to Indians, threw open the doors of Western knowledge to the east and greatly influenced India’s social and political life in various ways. But it had also its baneful effects. In the absence of adequate avenues for science and technical education, knowledge in English turned out to be only a device to produce a clinical mindset.

    No dispute was there over the main thrust of Swamiji’s concept of education. Rather, there was a general agreement among the social and political leadership that unless man-making education is imparted it is bound to have a negative impact and a negative education. As Swamiji said, " any training that is based on negation is worse than death".

    The realisation of the underlying truth in similar utterances made by some other great men like Rabindra Nath Tagore and Mahatma Gandhi and Raja Rammohun Roy and Pandit Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar before them has been reflected in the education policy that the Government of India formulated soon after Independence.

`    Enrolment of girls has also made a significant progress. The percentage of girls enrolled is about 44 per cent at the primary stage and about 40 per cent at the upper primary stage. At the same time, a significant decline has been recorded in the rate of dropouts. It is heartening to note that India’s elementary education system is one of the largest in the world with about 17 crore children enrolled in 1996-97 in the 6-14 age group covering about 62 per cent of children in the age group. Of these, about 12 crore children have been enrolled in approximately six lakh primary schools and the other five crore in two lakh upper primary schools. Nearly thirty lakh teachers are employed in about eight lakh primary schools. This works out to about four teachers per school. The District Primary Education Programme gave a new thrust to primary education with a completely new outlook. It takes a holistic view of elementary education, emphasises decentralised management, community mobilisation and district and population-specific planning. The new programme is characterised by its objective, nature and intensity of the planning process, the integration of professional inputs, participation planning, and management. It emphasises capacity-building and a locally-relevant curriculum. A system of concurrent evaluation as well as monitoring of the learners’ activity has been introduced to assess the impact of implementation of the objective of evaluation, retention and achievement.

    So far as adult education is concerned, the target was to make ten crore people literate by 1998-99 and to bring about total literacy by 2005. Since the inception of the National Literacy Mission in 1988 about six crore people have been taught to read and write under the Adult Education Scheme. A total literacy campaign has been launched for about 15 crore people in 442 districts and under post-literacy campaign 230 districts have been covered. Approximately, 61 per cent of the learners under the programme are women; over 22 per cent belong to the Scheduled Castes and 12 per cent to the Scheduled Tribes.

    Taking into account that about half of the country’s population consists of women, special stress has been put on formal and non-formal education of the girl child and on recruitment of rural women as teachers and removal of gender bias in the curriculum. The success of the programme is reflected in the 9.54 per cent decennial growth in women’s literacy (census 1991) which is significantly higher than the corresponding 7.76 per cent for males. Enrolment in higher education, technical and professional streams and in engineering and technology streams has also gone up substantially.

    The scheme for setting up Navodaya Vidyalayas is yet another innovation for free residential education for talented children primarily from the rural areas. At least one-third of the seats is reserved for girls. Admission for children from urban areas is restricted to 25 per cent. At present, the overall percentage of SC/ST students admitted so far is 21 per cent and 12 per cent respectively. The principal aim of the Navodaya Vidyalayas is to provide free education up to plus two level to the talented children in order to develop their full potential and to promote national integration.

    Established in 1961, the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) assists and advises the Government in implementing policies and major programmes in the field of education, especially school education. The Council has taken up revision of secondary level syllabi and text books in collaboration with the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE). Under its National Talent Search Scheme (NTSS), 750 scholarships are awarded every year. The object of the scheme is to identify brilliant students at the end of class ten and financially assist them for obtaining good education at the higher secondary level. The Central Schools affiliated to the CBSE are located in all parts of the country and even abroad giving the Board a pride of place in the field of school education. The underlying idea is to promote national integration through inter-State mobility of students besides helping children of transferable persons to pursue uninterrupted studies.

    For promoting distance education in the country a National Open School was set up by the CBSE in 1989. It imparts secondary stage education through the use of distance teaching techniques for the school dropouts and children who cannot attend formal schools. The school is vested with the power to examine and certify the students registered with it up to pre-degree level. The students are encouraged to take vocational subjects in combination with academic subjects. Admission to various courses of the school reached an all-time high of three lakh in 1998. Open schools will be set up in 15 States during the Ninth Plan.

    Equally impressive has been the progress in the sphere of higher education. There are 237 universities including 39 deemed universities and institutions of national importance. The total number of colleges is approximately 9703 with nearly 61 lakh students and 32 lakh teachers at the end of 1997. Despite the size, it caters to only about five to six per cent of the 17-23 age group. Coordination and determination of standard in higher education is a subject in the Union List and is a special responsibility of the Central Government which is discharged through the University Grants Commission (UGC). The UGC has so far approved 119 autonomous colleges in seven States. For promotion and coordination of research efforts in specialised areas thee are four national agencies at present, namely, the Indian Council of Social Science and Research, the Indian Council of Historical Research, the Indian Council of Philosophical Research and the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies. There are 13 Central Universities all over the country. Among the eight open Universities the Indira Gandhi Open University (IGNOU) has been recognised as the second largest of its kind in the world after the Television University of China. IGNOU, indeed, marks a landmark in the sphere of distance learning.

    These apart, six Indian Institutes of Technology, five Indian Institutes of Management, seventeen Regional Engineering Colleges, the School of Planning and Architecture, the Indian Institute of Science at Bangalore and quite a number of medical colleges and research institutes dot the country providing facilities for higher education and research in their respective disciplines. It is worth mentioning that India has the third largest number of scientific personnel in the world.

    Keeping pace with the fast-growing field of Information Technology (IT), where the sky seems to be the limit so far as employment is concerned, the Government has rightly decided to establish four Indian Institutes of Information Technology at Pune, Bhubaneswar , Hyderabad and Delhi. But of greater significance is the Government’s move to make the country’s education policy IT-compliant. A nine-member Task Force on HRD in Information Technology has been set up to draft a comprehensive national information policy which would seek to establish India’s supremacy in information technology where it has already made its mark outshining even China.

    It is hoped that the new policy, when implemented, would enable India emerge as a global IT power.

* Senior Freelance Journalist