Dismal schooling in Rajasthan

In the Sunday Magazine of The Hindu, yet another depressing article on primary schooling in India. Filmmaker Umesh Aggarwal's new film "Divided Colours of a Nation" takes us, as Kalpana Sharma tells us,

to a rural school in Barmer, Rajasthan. There are just two teachers for five classes. One of them is also the principal. On the day the filmmaker goes to the school, neither of the two teachers is present and only 25 out of the 188 students are at school. Not far away in a Bhil village, he goes to a government school. There are 90 students in Standards I to V but only one teacher. Yet another school on the Indo-Pak border in Rajasthan is deserted at 12.30 p.m. There are no children and the only teacher has been missing for eight days. Little wonder then that 50 per cent of students in Rajasthan have failed the Standard 10 examination in the last 10 years.

While this is the situation in distant villages, things were not very different in a government school not far from the national capital. Here, there were 18 classes, but nine had no teachers. Half way through the term, the children still had not received their textbooks.

I wonder what language the Bhil children were being taught in. Probably Rajasthani (or one of the langauges of that cluster). Almost certainly, the medium of instruction was not Bhili - or any of the related languages of the Bhil language group. The 2001 census tells us that there are 9.58 million speakers of Bhili. And Ethnologue reports: "Literacy rate in first language: 1% to 5%. Literacy rate in second language: 10%."

Literacy and Mother-tongue medium education

September 8 is International Literacy Day. The Wikipedia article tells us that "Some 774 million adults lack minimum literacy skills; one in five adults is still not literate and two-thirds of them are women; 72.1 million children are out-of-school and many more attend irregularly or drop out."

I blogged (in Esperanto) about this in April this year. An article had then just appeared in The Guardian which I drew upon. Grim stuff.

Unesco's focus this year is on Literacy and Health: "For instance, a study conducted in 32 countries shows that women with secondary education are five times more likely to be informed about HIV/AIDS than women who are illiterate. Another example: the rate of infant mortality is higher when the mother can neither read nor write."

Amazingly enough, neither the article in The Guardian, nor the Unesco release even mention mother-tongue medium education (MTME). It's not as if MTME's role is unknown - as the Universal Esperanto Association declares:

It has been shown in many large-scale studies in several countries that if indigenous and minority children have their education mainly using their own languages as the teaching language for the first 6-8 years (with good teaching of the dominant language as a second language, given by bilingual teachers), their general school achievement is better and they learn the dominant language better than if their teaching is through the medium of the dominant language.

So, the research is all there, and indeed, has been there for some time - see "Mother tongue first: Children's right to learn in their own languages". Similarly, UNDP's Human Development Report of 2004 tells us that of the children in sub-Saharan Africa who go to school, only 13% have access to mother-tongue medium education. That percentage for indigenous peoples in India is practically zero.

The 38% of India's adivasis who are literate (including the 14% literate adivasi women), can read only in the main regional language.