Taught neglect and failure in Urdu medium

For all the talk about promoting Urdu, the state of affairs is shocking. The failure percentage of Urdu medium schools in Delhi, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh in Class XII examinations is a staggering 72— the same as the pass percentage of other language medium schools.

In Andhra Pradesh, a quick glance at the results of 19 Urdu-medium Plus Two schools threw up an astonishing pass percentage of zero. In Bihar, the pass percentage struggled towards the 33-per cent mark for Class 12 students. And in neighbouring West Bengal, where the government brags about its attention to Urdu medium education, it inched to 50.

Only Maharashtra stood out with the percentage of students who have made it to undergraduate courses climbing to 64. Said, Feroz Ahmed Bakht, chairman of Friends of Education, who has been painstakingly compiling these countrywide results for the past four years: ‘‘It is a system gone woefully wrong. And no one is paying attention though the trend is there for everyone to see. Urdu-medium schools are far worse off than the usual government school.’’ He argues there is no sectarian reason for this decay and downhill journey. Even under the Shiv Sena regime, Urdu schools have done well in Maharashtra. Dr Hamidullah Bhatt, Director of the National Council for the Promotion of the Urdu Language, which functions under the aegis of the Human Resource Development Ministry, blames the National Council of Education Reserach and Training squarely for the miserable results this year.

‘‘There were no text books based on the changed curriculum. We managed to translate some books from the Hindi and English textbooks which themselves were published quite late. It was a fiasco. Teachers had to fall back on English texts. Impromptu translations had to be done in classrooms,’’ he says. At the historic Anglo Arabic School close to the Ajmeri Gate Chowk in old Delhi, the principal, Akhtar-uz-Zaman cannot agree more. Reclining in his chair, he blames the delayed arrival of text-books for this year’s debacle.

His Maths teacher, Mohammed Qasim recalls how he was translating from English texts in the classroom. ‘‘But they will answer in Urdu. You cannot really prepare them in this haphazard manner.’’ NCERT director J.S.Rajput was not available to respond to the complaints. Anglo Arabic School is the school with alumni like Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, the founder of the Aligarh Muslim University or Maulana Mohammed Qasim Nanautvi, founder of the Deobandh Movement. Today, the posts of ten teachers are lying vacant for years. The children of its former students attend English-medium school.

Says Qasim, the math teacher, ‘‘These are first generation students. Their parents never went to school. The knowledge base of students coming from government primary schools is very poor. Those seeking admission from the madrasas are better-equipped, better-trained’’. He agrees, ‘‘It is our fault as well. Teachers should take more interest.’’ Outsiders say that the Anglo Arabic School has fallen in such bad days that teachers send out students to fetch tea and cigarettes.

The heritage building dating back to the late 17th century is a ramshackle structure. Encroachers occupy a substantial part of its compounds.

It is a game of passing the buck. But as Feroz Bakht, a descendant of Maulana Azad, insists: ‘‘There is no easy solution. Only a meticulously planned collective effort can lift the Urdu schools from the morass they find themselves in.’’