Devangshu Datta: Getting the 'three Rs' right

Cheap domestic labour is high on my list of reasons for preferring to live in India. I dislike cleaning loos and washing clothes, and I would rather not cook. In a First World country, I would spend at least 20 hours a week on these chores.

The flip side to life in a semi-democracy, with cheap, semi-feudal labour, is that one must strive to be a good semi-feudal zamindar. Or else, there’s a high churn rate, and the need to deal with a constant stream of sullen insolence from the semi-serfs.

So, we finance repairs to the maid’s leaking jhuggi, and give her paid leave. We’ve helped her get a cell phone, a bank account and a metro card. We’ve upgraded her skill sets to ensure the safe, unsupervised operation of microwaves, vacuum cleaners and washing machines. And, we teach her two boys, the 3Rs.

The last act of enlightened despotism ensures stickiness of employment. It also offers me some anecdotal insight into the ground realities and future implications of the Right to Education Act (RTE), 2009.

The Delhi government passed a similar law earlier, and started implementation about three years ago. Since then, private schools in Delhi have admitted a quota of students from lower-income groups. The government pays around Rs 13,000 for each child per annum to the schools, less than a fifth of the normal fees.

This is like a voucher system. In lieu of trying to fix a broken public education system and failing, RTE offers at least some children access to better education. It would scale more easily if the multiple barriers against opening new, recognised private schools were lowered.

Three years ago, my maid’s boys were in class I and class III, in a government school. They both possess normal intelligence. But they could barely print their own names in Devanagari. Neither knew the algorithms of written addition and subtraction. Their comprehension skills and fluency improved when encouraged to read. Both easily grasped the idea of “carrying over numbers”.

When they won the lottery (literally!) and joined a decent private school, they hit new barriers. Their language skills were way behind their peers. Apparently, they were the butt of jokes. Their mother, a semi-literate widow, was intimidated in interactions with teachers and fee-paying parents.

She (and presumably, others from the “quota”) had to contend with the following arguments. Her boys would never catch up. They were resented since they held back others. They would inevitably get ideas above their station and want expensive clothes and smartphones. They would then develop complexes and take to crime.

Those arguments are, in some measure, likely to be true. Whites expressed similar thoughts in the Southern USA of the 1960s, and in South Africa in the 1990s, when contemplating desegregation.

Here, the primary differentiator is income, not colour. But South African and American people of colour had, and continue to have, much lower incomes and higher crime rates, compared to whites. Many leaders, including the two blokes currently running those two nations, are also infected with ideas above their station.

The boys I teach are not geniuses. They will not emulate Ambedkar, King, Mandela or Obama. But they are now academically in the upper third of their respective classes. They are not the butt of jokes. They do have ideas “beyond their station”. Neither wants to be my serf, as and when their mother retires.

Other kids from similar backgrounds will do more or less well under RTE. It will depend on factors like IQ, parental ambitions, drive, quality of local private schooling, and so on. What saddens me is the thought that, if RTE works and scales up, I may be reduced to washing my clothes and cleaning my loos, in my declining years.

devangshu@gmail.com