Prerna girls were invited to perform a musical presentation at the book launch of Poetry of Purpose, a book coauthored by Mick Minard and Dr. Shashi Gogate. Poetry of Purpose is a portrait of women leaders of India and features Dr. Urvashi Sahni’s as one of the leaders.

Authored by
Dr. Urvashi Sahni
President and Chief Executive Officer
Study Hall Educational Foundation

The Delhi high courts verdict upholding the conviction of former chief minister of Haryana O.P. Chautala and others complicit with him in recruiting 3000 teachers after false interviews is very very heartening! Perhaps there is a ray of hope for the broken government school system. Pratham’s ASER report has been showing us every year, that children in our primary schools are NOT learning! Less than 50 % of Grade 5 children can read a Grade 2 text. They are not learning because the teachers do not attend school and when they do they teach for less than half the time they are there. What is even more shocking, this is no secret to the department, but they do nothing about it. To quote Justice Siddharth Mridul who said in his judgement that teachers who are “inducted through patronage, nepotism and corruption cannot morally, be higher than the methods that produced it and be free from the sins of its own origin.” Thank you sir! This is exactly the point. The poor performance of our children is not a pedagogical issue to be fixed by more teacher training, it is a governance issue, a corruption issue, which can only be fixed by stern action of the kind taken by the courts. No government has been successful in ensuring that teachers attend regularly and teach their students! The whole school system has been shamelessly politicised and corrupted. The only achievement of the government school system with over 300 billion rupees spent on it, seems to be the employment of over a million teachers. That these teachers deliver no results seems to be of no interest to the Government. Even a 10 years jail sentence is too little for the double defrauding that has happened! Firstly the tax payer has been defrauded by a misuse of her hard earned tax money, but even sadder and more criminal is the defrauding of innocent children, who have the right to an education.

Unless we demonstrate a strong political will by paying attention to the corruption of the school system and the entire education machinery – the administrative staff, the teachers and the politicians, ALL criminally complicit in defrauding India’s children by their apathy, neglect and corrupt commissions and omissions, the country is headed for disaster. More than 70% children are served by the government school system or so they should be. Right now all studies tell us that only a small fraction (42%) of the children who enrol in Grade 1 finish high school.

Governments are terrified of the teacher unions, who threaten to withdraw political support if any action is taken against the teachers. So they do nothing even though they know that a large number of teachers do not attend school even though they are paid very well! I have spoken to IAS officers to ministers and even Chief Ministers. None of them have an answer to this problem! Like with everything else, everyone seems to have given up in the face of corruption. Just something we have to live with? I think not.

The failed school system must either deliver, or stop pretending. The right to education is an empty promise when there is no political will to take the necessary steps needed to fulfil it. When politicians are more interested in the votes teachers will deliver than the children whose learning they should be nurturing, when teachers are more concerned about secure, permanent jobs, with very little accountability than the work they are being paid for, when the administrative staff has no interest in the children and their learning, so taken up are they with teacher transfers and postings, then why are we surprised that our children are failing? The question to ask though, is WHO IS FAILING -THE CHILDREN OR OUR SCHOOL SYSTEM? For how long will a rotted, corrupt system stand and continue the pretence of educating our children?

This article was also published in Hindustan Times News Paper, Lucknow Edition