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स्वच्छ रखने हों शहर तो कचरा फैलाने पर लगाना होगा कर

जमीनी हकीकत

सुनीता नारायण

हम जानते हैं कि हमारे समक्ष कचरे की एक गंभीर समस्या मौजूद है। मगर एक बात हम अच्छी तरह नहीं जानते कि कचरा निपटान के लिए सही तकनीक तलाशना समस्या नहीं है। समस्या उस तकनीक को ऐसे तंत्र के साथ जोडऩे से जुड़ी है, जिसमें घरेलू स्तर पर पृथक्करण हो जाए ताकि कचरा जमीन पर न फैले और उसे शोधित कर उसका पुन: उपयोग किया जा सके। 

नेपाल से रिश्तों में खटास हमारी खामियों का नतीजा

Revoke this life sentence: To give the urban poor a leg up, arrest the catastrophe unfolding in municipal schools

John Kurrien

The quality of education imparted in our urban municipal elementary schools is abysmal. Unless standards of instruction and learning are significantly enhanced, life chances of children of the urban lower middle class and poor, who attend these schools, will continue to be bleak.

An Educational Initiatives study of 35,000 Class 2, 4 and 6 students in 300 municipal schools in 30 towns of 5 states, indicated that more than two-thirds of Class 4 children were unable to divide 20 by 5. More than half of Class 2 students could not match an alphabet letter with its sound – a skill mastered by most children attending an average private pre-primary school.

Instruction in most municipal schools is also extremely limited in quality and scope. Apart from mindless teaching of languages and mathematics from prescribed textbooks, and a smattering of science and social studies, little is done by way of art and craft and extracurricular activities.

It is therefore not surprising that municipal schools have witnessed a dramatic decrease in enrolment in the last 3 decades, despite providing their students with free textbooks, midday meals and other student entitlements. Private school enrolment has increased, and almost two-thirds of all our elementary school-going children in urban India are now enrolled in private schools.

What needs to be done? First and foremost, we must ensure that most children acquire basic reading, writing and mathematics skills, with a focus on providing a strong foundation in Classes 1 and 2. Since the vast majority of older students in Classes 3-8 are also woefully deficient in these skills, an extensive and continuous programme of remedial education is equally important.

Since most municipal schools teach in the regional languages, critical to their very survival is a special focus on the acquisition of basic proficiency in English. Unless this is done, many parents will continue to opt for private, low cost English medium options. Finally, municipal schools must actually try to educate children by providing a rich curriculum, including extracurricular activities and sports, as visualised in the 2005 National Curriculum Framework.

None of these changes can be implemented unless municipal shift schools become full-time schools. Municipal school students attend morning or afternoon shift schools, with two or more of these schools occupying the same building. Consequently, they receive far less actual instructional time than students attending neighbouring full-time private schools, or rural government schools in the same state.

Due to both legitimate and illegitimate reasons, even the 3-4 hours of daily instruction time received by students in municipal shift schools is a gross overestimate. This limited instructional time – an institutionalised inequality – also blatantly violates the RTE Act norms of 800 hours of instruction for Classes 1-5 and 1,000 hours for Classes 6-8.

One more reform needs to be undertaken. Since most municipal schools do not have secondary sections (Classes 9-10), anxious parents either opt for private schools in Class 1 or withdraw their children later before completing Class 8. According to Nalini Juneja of NUEPA, it is the growing parental aspirations for their children acquiring a secondary school certificate that may also be contributing to the precipitous decline in municipal school enrolment.

The municipal school of the future should therefore be a full-time composite school from kindergarten to Class 10. The limited instructional hours of currently functioning municipal shift schools cannot improve foundational skills in languages and mathematics, nor provide systematic remedial education and also accommodate other curricular and extracurricular activities.

Without full-time schooling, good quality education is not even remotely possible. This is why well-intentioned and ambitious efforts like the revamping of Delhi government elementary shift schools by the Aam Aadmi Party to make them better than private schools, is merely wishful thinking.

Full-time composite municipal schools would also be needed if India is to meet its commitment that all its children will complete secondary education by 2030 – one of the 17 Global Goals of the Sustainable Development Agenda. By 2031, 600 million people or 40% of the population will live in urban India. Without political will and an exponential increase in human and financial resources, we will be unable to implement this commitment to providing quality secondary education for all.

Merely implementing some limited ad hoc school expansion and pedagogic improvements would condemn many lower middle class and poor parents to choose between sentencing their children to life in free municipal schools, or to make extraordinary sacrifices to enroll them in low fee charging private schools. Unfortunately, many of the latter are merely substandard teaching shops.

Compelling urban parents to choose between these two extremely undesirable options reflects the dismal failure of the state to provide free quality education in accordance with the RTE Act. Only free and full-time good quality municipal schools with preprimary and secondary sections will reverse the significant outward migration of students to private schools, and also improve their life chances.

Mere tinkering at improving an unjust, legally and pedagogically indefensible system of municipal elementary schools run in part-time shifts will neither contribute to social mobility and inclusive growth, nor prevent its continuing rapid deterioration and eventual extinction.

Why industry must take initiative to end vilification

Stop vilifying India Inc, cries Assocham, in the wake of public angst over mounting bad loans and belligerent wilful defaulters. Assocham has a point. However, it is no use playing victim. The real challenge is to accept the systemic nature of the problem and work for change. It most certainly is not the case that all promoters and industry in general are parasites living off the fat of the land through crony connections with the powers that be. Nor are they blameless babes in the woods.

The reality is that most projects have inflated costs, which make for larger-than-warranted debt and erode the viability of the project from the word go. Why are project costs routinely inflated? Because they need to be and because they can be. They need to be because the cost of obtaining all clearances, removing administrative roadblocks and securing the protection of the state against sabotage by rivals, criminals and vandals is at least a quarter of the project itself. The bulk of this excess amount is handed over to politicians, who use the proceeds ostensibly to finance politics but also to build their own personal fortunes. If the project developer has to pony up this amount, he has to inflate costs to take out money from the project. Once project costs are inflated, the temptation is high to inflate them a bit more so that the promoter too can enrich himself from the project’s implementation. Banks oblige with excessive credit because, one, their politicalbureaucratic masters have told them to. Two, other banks finance similar projects with similar debt loading. And three, some bankers get a share of what is siphoned off in this manner.

It is high time these sordid truths got discussed in polite company. Political funding has to become transparent. Infrastructure projects must be funded by the bond market, so that multiple agencies vet their costs and viability and not just a closed group of bankers. Banks must be insulated from neta-babu interference. Bankers’ pay must go up significantly but get linked to the quality of the assets they originate. Do this, to end vilification.