Yoginder Sikand: India - Crisis In Rural Education
India is home to the largest number of illiterate people in the world. Although it is claimed that literacy rates in the country are rapidly increasing, vast numbers of Indians who are officially counted as ‘literate’ are hardly so in the true sense of the term. The Indian educational system, especially sectors that cater to the rural poor, continues to be plagued with a host of enormous problems. So I have discovered in the last few weeks working as a volunteer English teacher in a private school in a remote village in Arunachal Pradesh, which is considered to be one of the most ‘backward’ parts of India.
Most of the inhabitants of this area are small or marginal farmers. Others supplement their meagre income by laboring in other people’s fields, fishing, collecting and selling jungle produce and firewood, making cane mats and baskets, and weaving cloth. There are a few private schools in this poverty-stricken area, and the rest are government-run. The villagers’ enthusiasm for educating their children is deeply touching. Almost every child is enrolled in school. They all want to learn English, to do well in their studies, to go on to college (if their parents can afford it), and then hope to get a well-paying job. It is difficult for most village folk to get a secure, well-paying government job, and so many of them aspire for some sort of private-sector employment. Education for such students is a means to rescue themselves from stark poverty at home, from backbreaking work in the forests and fields. Most students I’ve interacted with want to work outside their villages, even outside their state, because they feel that their prospects here are limited. Higher education, for them, is a means to migrate to the ‘big city’ in order to fulfill their dreams—the dreams that the serials, movies and advertisements that they watch on television have sold them. Yet, few actually make it ‘big’.
Most parents cannot afford the fees of the relatively more expensive and supposedly somewhat better private-run schools, and so the vast majority of students in the area are forced to study in poor quality government schools. In some schools, as elsewhere in India, teacher absenteeism is as much a problem as is students’ skipping classes. Some government schools are miserably over-crowded with students and are also grossly under-staffed. The main government school in the area has some three hundred students in Class X alone. In this school, there are well over a hundred students in a single classroom, making it virtually impossible for teachers to give proper attention to individual students. Not surprisingly, almost all students from families who can afford it have to take private tuition classes after school hours, which is a major additional investment for their parents.
Not all villages in the area have schools, however. Children in some villages without a school have to cycle or walk a considerable distance, through narrow muddy paths and wading across streams, in order to reach the nearest village that has a school. There are just four secondary schools and one higher secondary school in the entire area, and these cater to almost three dozen villages, where several hundred families live. Only a few students in the area manage to make it to college if they manage to study till the higher secondary level.
