All Maya, Joshi’s ‘strides’ invisible

We have decided that by 2010, every Indian child will get education up to class eight. We have launched Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (Education for All Campaign) to achieve this goal.’’

Then, follows a lis of things that the NDA Government claims to have achieved ‘‘in partnership with states, local bodies and the community’’ in the last three years.

These are an expenditure of Rs 7571 crore on the ‘‘universalisation’’ of elementary education; the setting up of 31,000 new primary and upper primary schools with 80,000 more teachers; 21,219 new school buildings, 23,490 new classrooms, 47,000 toilets and 24,000 drinking water facilities sanctioned for this year; 13 lakh teachers provided Rs 500 grant for ‘‘developing teaching learning material’’ annually for the past three years and another 22 lakhs in the current year; 5 lakh primary teachers trained annually for the past three years and another 7.22 lakhs this year; 4 lakh primary schools given Rs 2000 for improving their facilities and another 6 lakh schools this year; over 15 lakh members of community organisations trained to ensure community participation in education with another 6.86 lakhs up for training this year.

Finally, we have free textbooks for Scheduled Caste and Tribe children and Rs 5000 provided for school building upkeep under the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan.

My reason for giving you the full list is because if you glance through it even casually the thing that should strike you is how thinly the HRD ministry spreads its money on the ground. The end result can only be tokenism and not a serious effort to ensure that all Indian children are literate by 2010. It is the same tokenism that you see in last month’s budget which dismisses education in a single paragraph of high-minded eloquence.

‘‘Education is the central vein of our ‘life-time concerns’. Therefore, at the level of the citizen taxpayers, as a first step, education expenses up to Rs 12,000 per child for two children will be made eligible for rebate under Section 88 of the Income Tax Act.’’

When you remember that we need to double our education budget to even begin to deal with our problems you see how feeble this ‘‘first step’’ is. It was with the idea of seeing how policies like the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan translate into reality that I went on my tour of UP schools last week. My journey began in the village of Badalpur where Mayawati went to her first school and ended in the village of Saifayi where Mulayam Singh Yadav comes from and where he has now built two schools.

Badalpur is on the edge of suburban Delhi but remains a village with the usual filthy drains, flies, uncollected garbage and narrow alleys. At the end of one of these alleys is a locked, blue-washed house which local people identify as the house in which Mayawati was born.

A man called Rajpal Singh, who said he was Mayawati’s cousin, told us that nobody used the house any more and that the Chief Minister was building herself a big, new house on the outskirts of the village.

Although she was only two when her family moved to Delhi, Mayawati seems to feel enough of a connection with Badalpur to have bequeathed it the Kumari Mayawati Rajkiya Kanya Inter College, which she opened when she was last chief minister in 1997. It now has 700 students to whom it provides free tuition.

But, because there is not enough money to maintain it, the building looks grubby and dank and teachers admit that they cannot dream of such things as computers and other teaching aids.

On its grounds is Badalpur 1, an elementary school which Mayawati is believed to have briefly attended.

The school now has 172 children on its rolls but that day there would have been no more than 50 in attendance. One of the two lady teachers said this was ‘‘marriage season’’ when attendance always dropped off.

The older children sat on strips of gunny sack in the verandah and the smaller ones on the bare floor in the single classroom — a bleak, unfurnished space with unpainted walls. The only furniture in the whole school was a single table and chair at which the teacher sat and occasionally looked up from to take notice of what the children were doing.

‘‘They’ve had their lesson,’’ she said, ‘‘they are now revising it and I have to finish these voters lists.’’

Why was she finishing voters’ lists during school hours? Because that is what the government told her to do. There was always something or the other they had to do which had nothing to do with school work, sometimes it was voters’ lists and sometimes polio drops. What to do? They were employed by the government so they could hardly refuse to do these tasks. The teachers came from nearby Ghaziabad and seemed not just indifferent to the children in their charge but were almost contemptuous of them.

‘‘These lower-caste children,’’ one said, ‘‘they hardly come to school and sometimes we have to go to their homes to bring them here. They are not interested in anything except collecting their scholarship money and the three kilos of wheat they get every month.’’

The wheat is distributed as part of the midday meal scheme and the scholarships — Rs 300 a year — are specifically for Dalit and Muslim children.

There was not much of an atmosphere of learning at Mayawati’s old school but by the time I ended my journey in Mulayam’s village I had started thinking of it as one of the best schools in UP. The children had books and a roof over their heads and teachers and, by the standards of Uttar Pradesh, which is second only to Bihar in terms of illiteracy, that is a lot.