 |
| Prof. Anil Sadgopal with Prof. Ramakrishna Ramaswamy (VC, UoH) |
Prof. G. Hargopal introduced the speaker as a very important
personality in taking forward the movement to ensure quality education for all
and described him as a person with very rare combination of philosophical
disposition and conviction for great social change.
Prof. Sadgopal started his lecture with presenting his
experience in his last engagement with the Govt. on preparing the Right to
Education Bill. He submitted that the Govt. had not been willing to discuss
about private schools on the ground that they don’t get any grants from the
Govt. He rejects this proposition and argues that the Govt. does monitor liquor
shops, taxi and auto-rikshaws and other many such entities even though they are
not funded by the Govt as that is concerned with citizen’s welfare. He
maintained that in his 10 months engagement during this period, the Govt.
didn’t take any of his points. According to him, Right to Education (RTE) act
in its current form doesn’t stand for enabling people to claim their
constitutional entitlements but it is more to satisfy neo-liberal attacks on
the country.
The preamble to the Constitution of India unfolds the entire
vision of education for building citizenry for a “Sovereign, Socialist,
Secular, Democratic Republic” which would play a crucial role in the struggle
for “Justice, Liberty, Equality and Fraternity” for all sections of society.
Article 45 (now amended) of the Directive Principles of State Policy (Part IV)
of the Constitution of India, directed the state to provide free and compulsory
education to all children upto 14 years of age, including those below six years
of age, within 10 years of the commencement of the Constitution- a direction
the state has completely failed to fulfill till date. Supreme Court of India, in its two successive
judgments in 1992 and 1993 held that Part III (Fundamental Rights) of the
Constitution has to be read in “harmonious construction” with Part IV
(Directive Principles of State Policy) and that the Fundamental Rights provide
the means to achieve the goals enunciated in the Directive Principles. This
historic judgment significantly enhanced the power and scope of the
Constitution. The same judgements also held that the Right to Education does
not stop at the age of 14 years i.e. at Class VIII but continues well beyond to
include higher education as well as long as it is “within the limits of
[state’s] economic capacity and development”.
Post the Supreme Court judgment, many committees were formed
to deal with this situation under successive governments from 1993 and 86th
Constitutional Amendment took place in 2002 which inserted the article 21A
namely, Right to education:
“21A. The State shall provide free and compulsory education
to all children of the age of six to fourteen years in such manner as the State
may, by law, determine.”
Prof. Sadgopal criticized the conditionality put in this
article itself and emphasized that this only helped in preparing base to
support the systematic neo-liberal attacks on our education system.
Today, it’s very important for a child to complete 12 years
of education as without completing this level he/she can neither go for any
modern job nor he/she can go for higher education. Eight years of education for
children for 6 – 14 years age group under the provision of the Right to
Education act doesn’t bring much hope. Out of the children enrolled in Std. I,
only 6% tribals, 8% dalits, 9% minorities and 10% OBC students are able to
complete Std. XII. It’s primarily due to incomplete vision of education that
even after six decades, we’ve not been able to ensure Right to Education in
true sense.
Under structural adjustment conditionalities, as dictated by
World Bank- IMF, public expenditure as percentage of the GDP on education,
poverty elimination, health services etc have gone down in successive years,
these basic entitlements are getting converted into services and are
systematically being commoditised as
tradable goods in the global market. Despite people’s resistance, several
neo-liberal agendas in education are being implemented:
Children below six years of age are being denied of
nutrition, health support, security and pre-primary education and thereby the
entire pre-primary sector is being handed over into private hands.
Infrastructure standards and teacher-related norms for the
majority of children in the age group of 6 to 18 years with respect to their
Right to elementary and secondary education are being diluted and the farcical
RTE Act legitimizes this move.
All public funded higher education institutions have seen
systematic budget cut in successive years and have been asked to find other
ways of financing. As a result, many self-financed courses have been
introduced; the fee collected is not only supposed to take care of the
particular course but should also contribute to meet other expenditure of the
University. The Govt. is on march to destroy the public education system and
replace it with private players; the access to higher education is being
significantly restricted to very selected section of the society. There are six
higher education Bills that are pending in parliament to build the legal
structure for WTO-GATS agenda.
Public Private Partnership (PPP) is the latest mahamantra of
neo-liberalism wherein public funds are being transferred to private hands
under the pretext of resource crunch and inability of the state to provide quality
education, the ‘quality’ being determined by the market and not the needs of
social development.
The curriculum and pedagogy are being designed to sub-serve
the neo-liberal model of development with a view to build a slavish workforce
for the global market, rather than building citizenry in accordance with the
Preamble.
The state’s claim of inclusion is misleading as the state
first excludes the vast majority and then includes a handful to meet the
market’s requirement of workforce.
The manner in which Delhi University’s Four-Year
Undergraduate programme was imposed during the previous academic year is just a
window into the dismantling of the public higher education system awaiting us,
to be replaced by private colleges and universities.
We never recognised the effectiveness of providing education
in our mother tongues. It would have led to a very inclusive picture if a fully
empowered National Translation Commission would have been instituted in 1960
with full financial support to translate best educational resources at all
levels of education in various Indian regional languages. This would have
ensured a much better sense to appreciate diversity in unity that India stands
for. There is no problem in learning English in a school where medium of instruction
is not English; except in South Asian region, all parts of the world prefer
teaching in their own native language.
The neo-liberal policy framework is in total contradiction
with the aims and objectives of the Constitution. The conception of ‘social democracy’
combined with ‘social justice’ and ‘social welfare’, as articulated in the
Preamble and provided for in Part III and IV and further strengthened by the
Schedule VIII of languages, face the risk of being diluted, distorted and
finally dismantled if neo-liberalism is allowed to decide destiny of India. The
same Constitution which was dubbed for decades after independence as a
bourgeois Constitution, and not without some justice, has now become a powerful
instrument for building people’s resistance against the neo-liberal assault,
thereby retrieve the idea of sovereign, socialist, democratic republic.
While concluding Prof. Sadgopal recalled noted poet
Gurujaada Appa Rao’s lines:
“A country means not merely its earth, the country means its
people.”
The lecture was presided over by Prof. Ramakrishna
Ramaswamy, Vice Chancellor, UoH.
I had prepared this article originally for the UoH Herald.
It's posted here: http://uohherald.commuoh.in/the-constitutional-vision-of-education-vs-neo-liberal-assault-on-india/
No comments:
Post a Comment