Sreelatha Menon: Test-tube babies

EAR TO THE GROUND

Improvements in existing schools will help girls more than the segregation of the dropouts among them in a common basket called KGBV.

Targeted schemes tend to subject beneficiaries to a treatment akin to guinea pigs. When the targets are girls belonging to the Scheduled Castes, the Scheduled Tribes and the minorities, the schemes assume this shape more than ever.

The latest experiment in uplifting the downtrodden and the excluded is happening in the form of Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidyalayas (KGBVs). The idea is to stop girls from dropping out from schools after Class V. In Bihar and Madhya Pradesh, almost 50 per cent girls decide to call it a day after Class V.

The government, therefore, decided to replicate the tribal boarding school model for girls from SC, ST, OBC (other backward class) and minority communities.

Of course, some girls from the general category, about 25 per cent, would also be allowed in lest the schools resemble ghettos. The idea is to keep 100 girl dropouts in a boarding school from class VI to class VIII. What happens to the girls after that is not the scheme’s concern.

The government had sanctioned 2,180 KGBVs till March, 2007, under the Sarva Siksha Abhiyan (SSA). But there’s a problem. Children who drop out would certainly not be sent to a boarding school by their mostly-illiterate parents unless the government were to kidnap the young ones.

It would have been another matter if boarding facilities were attached to existing schools in the most-backward areas, if ways to make education interesting like exchange programmes, treks and audio-visual teaching methods were introduced in village schools, if the schools were linked with universities, if there were trained teachers, if parents themselves were educated…and the Rudyard Kipling ifs can go on.

The cost of setting up a KGBV for 100 girls is Rs 44 lakh. Surely this amount would have been enough to support such programmes in at least 10 schools, where dropouts could have been accommodated in a lower grade.

Many companies like Adobe and Xanxa have been taking up initiatives to make education interesting and effective. Adobe helps children get involved in making short films on what they learn. The employees of Xanxa and many IT companies act as resource persons in government schools. But all this is still an urban phenomenon.

The KGBVs have bridge courses to help the dropouts prepare for the sixth grade. But they are a replica of the government schools the girls abandon. They have para teachers, unlike the teachers of the Navodaya Vidyalayas, point out educationists Latika Gupta and Krishna Kumar in their recent essay on the working of KGBVs. Another educationist, Vinod Raina, a votary of common schools, says such experiments won’t help.

The Centre could do better than spend its crore, about 7 per cent of the SSA funds, on holding 100 girls hostage in badly funded boarding schools at a fraction of what Navodaya Vidyalayas cost, with no libraries, teachers’ quarters or playfields.

The officialdom’s need to reinvent the wheel compels most of these schemes. The Kothari Commission had several decades ago suggested linking schools with universities and providing incentives to teachers to attract more talent to the profession. If the SSA had meant incentives for carrying out these improvements in existing schools, with or without private participation, maybe it would have meant a new beginning in the true sense for what is handed to children in the name of education.