School closures and mergers - Report

A report on School Closures and Mergers (PDF 4.5 MB) in India argues that tens of thousands of government schools in three states are being arbitrarily closed down and merged, causing immense hardship to children and their families. Poor girl children, and children with disabilities are the most severely affected, often dropping out of school altogether. The Save the Children report (not yet on their website, as of August 2017) studies the implementation and impact of policies of school closures and mergers in Telangana, Odisha, and Rajasthan.

Among its findings are that:

• the policies are being haphazardly and arbitrarily implemented (Chapter 3)
• no consultation with the community; nor any guidance to the community regarding alternatives (Chapter 7)
• "Closures are both a cause and a consequence of the process of privatisation of schooling in educationally advanced districts and urban centres." (p. xi; see also Chapter 11)
• "the mergers have only disrupted teaching-learning activities and perhaps further degraded the quality of education" (p. 50)
• the closures and mergers impact more severely the economically underprivileged (Chapters 8 and 10)
• serious impact on gender equality: "girls will be much more vulnerable to be married off earlier than before" (p. xi; see also Chapter 10.2)
• these closures and mergers are a violation of various provisions of the Right to Education Act (Chapter 12)

The Report also documents cases of resistance. Regarding Rajasthan we are told that "about 384 schools were re-started due to the pressures from community members and political parties and representatives, thus making the total number of schools closed 14,673" (p. 69, Annexure 4, footnote 34).

The Report concludes in its section on "Issues and Recommendations for Advocacy" that the issue of school closures and mergers needs to be more widely known and better understood by the various stakeholders.

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%."