Sreelatha Menon: The school at the doorstep

Gyanshalas are emerging as competition to govt schools in two states

Gyanshalas are fast emerging as competition to government schools in two states, providing quality education at low cost

For some children in this country, a school is a room in the neighbourhood where a teacher tells them a story every day. They don’t go to school in a bus like other children. The school almost comes to their doorsteps.

They do three work-sheets every day, there is no homework, no uniforms, and no heavy bags. By the time they pass the fifth grade, they are able to read and write and do maths better than their counterparts in government and private schools. They are students of 350 gyanshalas in Ahmedabad, 70 in Patna and 15 in Biharsharif. Soon, such schools will come up in Ranchi, Raipur, Kanpur and Varanasi.

The government spends about Rs 9,000 per student in its schools. The gyanshalas spend just Rs 1,800.

Pankaj Jain, an alumnus of IIM-Ahmedabad, started these schools early this decade. He created a curriculum, hired boys and girls who had finished Class XII in the localities he planned to set up his classes and trained them, or rather re-educated them, in the fine art of imparting education.

The first of these classes began in Ahmedabad. There are 350 such institutions today. Each gyanshala starts from grade one and as the children finish their first year, the second classroom starts, then the third, the fourth and the fifth.

The classes are walking distance from the students’ homes. As Jain says: “In primary education, access is important. If the child has to even cross a road, he is likely to drop out.”

He was inspired by many models across the world, especially Bangladesh, which is ahead of India in most human development parameters. He found that there were three main problems with the Indian system. First, schools are not able to ensure quality education on a large scale. There can be one or ten good schools but the moment the numbers go up, the quality goes down, he says.

The second problem, he says, is that in poor families, parents are unable to provide support and children are on their own. So, Jain says, teaching and curriculum has to be self-sufficient, giving cent per cent nourishment as far as education is concerned.

The third problem is lack of a low-cost delivery system. He said even if the government were to spend 6 per cent of the gross domestic product on education, it can’t spend more than Rs 5,000 per child. He said he tried to address these three issues at the same time and found his model.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology studied the model in 2004 and found gyanshala students performing better than the students in government schools. In gyanshalas, which work in two shifts, education is cheap. The teachers are paid Rs 2,000-2,500 for working two shifts. Each shift is three hours.

The Gujarat government is impressed by the model and has been funding 70 per cent of the total cost. It soon plans to bear the total expense of the project. Ditto with the Bihar government. Gyanshala is all set to roll out 15 schools in Biharsharif. It is also talking to the Uttar Pradesh government and plans to open schools in Kanpur and Varanasi. Jain says that to be sustainable, it must be a competition for other schools.

With three state governments patronising it, he is close to it.