How Much Of A Model Is The Gujarat Model ?

 BY R.K.MISRA

Fallacies, more than facts, pilot politics.

Gujarat has been upheld as the national model.  The future rests on the fulcrum of child education and health. How much of a model is this model on these two indices?

Take the case of ‘Shaala Praveshotsav’  introduced by Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi in 2003 with the motto that no child shall be deprived of going to school.  At the launch of the enrolment ‘festival’ for class one, the entire bureaucracy, chief minister and his cabinet colleagues included , fan out statewide to give effect to this dictum. Last year even vice-chancellors of state universities were roped into the process and this year it was held from June 12 to 14. Officialdom declared it a success what with 46,600 government nominees visiting 27,368 primary schools in 27 districts overseeing 2.30 lakh children, get admission in class-1 and 9,77,513 children admitted into kindergarten.

According to Education minister Dr. Kuber Dindor the number of schools scoring less than 50 per cent three years ago had decreased by 11 per cent this year while the number of schools scoring more than 50 per cent had increased from 23885 to 28946.

Mutual back slapping and chest thumping notwithstanding, the damper came  days later when the report submitted by one of the IAS officers, Dhaval Patel who visited   six schools in tribal areas leaked out. The report was a damning indictment of the state of education affairs in these schools. Many of them in class eight could neither add single-digit numbers  nor read a word in Gujarati, their effort confined to alphabet- by- alphabet stutter-stammer reading. The officer classified the education level of  students as ‘very poor’ and the teachers response as inadequate.

Interestingly, the education minister also holds the tribal  development portfolio and by his own admission is also from a  tribal area. His response on the report to the press:” I have learnt  of the observations , have sought a report and will thereafter move to correct the shortcomings.” As happens with officialdom, all stops are being pulled out to find  who leaked the report !

In the run up to the Gujarat elections last year an aggressive Arvind Kejriwal led AAP  had pitted his government’s model schools against the Gujarat model  after reports appeared that over 700  government primary schools in PM’s home state functioned under a single teacher and 8500 of them under two teachers. There are 33,348 government run primary schools in Gujarat. The government thereafter announced   a Rs 10,000 crore World Bank aided ‘Mission School of Excellence’ project to upgrade government schools.

The Annual Status of Education Report(ASER),2022 for rural areas released early this year by Pratham Foundation  was warning enough for the Gujarat government but seems to have gone unheeded. Patel’s report was  a confirmation of ASER findings for rural areas of the state. It had reported a 20 percentage point decline in class 8 where only 52 per cent of students in government schools could read class 2 level basic text. In 2028 this figure stood at 72 per cent. It represented  the steepest decline across all states. The number of class five students who could read class 2 level basic text  also fell from 57 per cent in 2018 to 33.9 per cent in 2022. However the redeeming factor  between pre and post-Covid situation was the rise in number of children attending government schools ,up from 85.66 per cent in 2018 to 90.9 per cent in 2022.

The main reason for the dismal state of school education affairs is largely because  of over 28,000 teacher vacancies in government schools. As per official admission in the Gujarat Assembly in March 2022- 16,318 teachers and 1028 principals posts were vacant in primary schools, the secondary and higher secondary schools accounted for the remaining. The situation seemed no better in the state’s principal city, Ahmedabad. Government schools were short of  396 primary teachers while granted schools fell short by 68 teachers. In granted  secondary and higher secondary schools the shortage was  396 and 434 respectively.

 All this despite the fact that large scale recruitment of teachers was done under the head of ‘vidya-sahayaks’ at paltry wages for five years under promise of regularization thereafter. The Supreme Court had slammed this Modi government scheme .’How do you bring such policies when there is Article 21A. These ‘shiksha-sahayaks’ are ‘Shiksha-shatrus’ and explain why they are being paid just Rs 2500/-“, the bench had observed while pointing out that a populist principality cannot spoil the future of the country. The emoluments were raised thereafter.

 No wonder the state education department has  now decided to discontinue the practice of appointing visiting teachers in grant-in-aid schools and instead recruit 26,500 ‘Gyan Sahayaks’ or assistant teachers on a fixed pay. Fifteen thousand assistant teachers will be hired for primary schools with a monthly salary of Rs 21,000, and 11,500 of them for  secondary(Rs 24,000 per month) and higher secondary schools(26,000 per month) besides 5075 ‘khel sahayaks’( Rs 21,000 per month) as per a notification issued recently.

Statistics irritate but are essential to punctuate facts. It was riding astride the Gujarat model that  chief minister Narendra Modi rode to power in India. Amongst the critical components of the model was schooling and child health.

According to the National Family Health Survey or NFHS-5 report of 2019-20, about 39.97 per cent of children under the age of five in Gujarat are malnourished, which is the second highest in the country, after Bihar. Gujarat also has the fourth-highest number of stunted and wasted children in the country, it notes.

Moving from schools to colleges. The status report as per official statistics made available up to last year in Gujarat. Half of teaching posts in granted colleges in the state are vacant. Give or take a minor percentage, there are 285 granted colleges with a sanctioned  strength of 335 but only 206 vacancies have been filled. Three districts have no government colleges. There are no arts science or commerce government colleges in Vadodara, Morbi and Mahisagar districts, Dangs bordering Maharashtra has no granted colleges. Three hundred posts of class one officers are vacant in  engineering colleges of the state,298 posts for class 3 officers.

As things stand eight government universities in Gujarat were without a fulltime vice-chancellor for good off one to two years. Until last year 16 government universities in Gujarat nine were helmed  by in-charge VCs, political proximity being an important criteria. In March 2022, the apex court quashed the appointment of  Sardar Patel University VC Shirish Kulkarni ,for lack of teaching experience to hold the post and hauled the Gujarat government over the coals for not complying with UGC regulations sending a message that officialdom could ignore only at its own cost.

 Like statistics, all models are exposed but it’s the covered ones that tell tales !

http://epaper.lokmat.com/lokmattimes/main-editions/Nagpur%20Main/2023-07-11/6

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