Civil Service Bytes

The fancily named ‘Right to Free and Compulsory Education Act (2009)’ is a classic case study in the shortsightedness of the previous UPA government and a sobering lesson in how long the repercussions of bad policy can last. It is also a reminder, in a time when the NDA government is under siege, as to why Prime Minister Modi’s pro-development platform is important and must be supported. The RTE, as the law is popularly called, was a classic from the  Congress  playbook – find a popular problem (in this case, the failure of the government to run state schools properly), hatch a grandiose but poorly thought through scheme, and dump the burden onto the private sector. This was done repeatedly without a proper assessment of the scheme’s vulnerability to corruption and challenges to implementation. For all the grand pro-poor speak of the Congress leaders right from Indira to Rahul, it remains that decades of Indian socialism under the Congress has failed to provide a properly ...

In the midst of gloom over the upcoming global recession, India is described as a rare bright spot, the ‘last BRIC standing’ as Brazil, China and Russia slip into recession. For India, economists are still predicting growth over  7 per cent in 2016, thanks to low oil prices and reliance on domestic markets. There are reasons however, that I would be more cautious about, particularly about our optimism over India’s long-term growth. And one area that especially concerns me is the state of our education. Progress in education is foundational – critical for a nation to build a skilled workforce, and also to help people improve their livelihoods as a country grows. Nehru was a visionary on higher education, building premier institutes of higher learning and research, including the IISc, IITs and IIMs.  However, he didn’t see primary education as a priority due to the limited resources early governments had, and his focus on science and research based industries. It was in 1986...

Sociologist and writer Andre Beteille once pointed out that the very idea of ‘equality of opportunity’ is a recent one, an outcome of the liberal movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. And in a country long divided by caste and class, it has not been an easy idea to implement. The Indian government’s success in making this Constitutional promise a reality, particularly through its education efforts, has been limited. As  I observed in the previous blog , the quality of our public schools remains one of India’s great challenges. Addressing this requires more than increased budget allocations. We need to re-evaluate our approaches in school regulation, teaching, and success metrics in the light of declining learning outcomes across the country. Potential solutions are not hard to find, but are yet to scale up. Some successful reforms have already been tried out in parts of India. For instance, public schools are more effective when school management was decentralise...

Education is a desirable quality among elected leaders, but making it compulsory to contest polls raises questions. Preet Singh, 62, has never been to school, has never cleared an exam. And, yet, he reads six Hindi newspapers a day, lectures his neighbours about their democratic rights and even won an election as a member of a panchayat in 1991. In 1994, after the 73rd amendment to the Constitution mandated 33% reservationfor women in panchayats, Preet Singh got his wife Baladevi to contest as, he confesses, “proxy candidate”. She did so well, he says, that in 1999, she contested on her own steam, and won again. But in the just concluded Haryana panchayat polls, although Singh campaigned vigorously for other candidates, neither he nor his wife could contest. Without their school certificates, they were, by law, ineligible. In September last year, as the previous panchayats’ five-year teure was coming to an end, the Bharatiya Janata Party-ruled Haryana government passed...

Telangana has become the first State to introduce compulsory gender education at the graduate level;  without repeating gender stereotypes in its bilingual textbook titled,  ‘Towards a World of Equals” . The book introduced on a pilot basis in engineering colleges affiliated to the Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University (JNTU-Hyderabad) discusses gender in its composite form without limiting itself to crime against women. The books covers   Information on unacknowledged women writers of Telangana  Problems of sex selection Women’s work in politics and economics Female-centric history Male-female relationships Different strands of women’s movements across the world, Political movements of Afro-American, Caribbean, African, Dalit and minority women. Gender inequality in India  : It refers to health, education, economic and political inequalities between men and women in India. Gender inequalities, and its social causes, i...