The Hindu Business Line : A place in Indian sun for the poor and bright

If the government is truly interested in the poor, rather than the ill-conceived reservation policy in education, it would stream students. It can be a multi-stage selection with a set of Feeder Schools. This would, besides levelling the field, guarantee bright poor children a place under the Indian sun, says P. V. INDIRESAN.

The Government's Reservation Policy is considered to be a case of TINA — There Is No Alternative. As pointed out in the previous article, TINA is a logical myth: Almost certainly, There Is Always An Alternative (TIAA).

The alternative we need to the Reservation Policy should be one that helps the poor. Even in the capital city of Delhi a majority of Standard VIII children in state schools cannot perform tasks that should be normal for Standard II children.

In reality, quality education has been all but privatised. As private schools are expensive, quality education is not available to the poor. Hence, it is no more likely that, in the future, India will get from poor families an Abdul Kalam or a Manmohan Singh.

Multi-stage selection

Competition is a good remedy for this situation. Intelligent poor children will benefit greatly if schools — whether state-run or private — are forced to compete to get them.

Identification of capable students is beset with two kinds of errors: One, the deserving may be left out; two, the undeserving may be let in. Errors increase when the number of aspirants is large.

A shallow selection — one out of two or three — works well. When aspirants are many, this rule can still be followed by adopting multi-stage selections. Then, consider the following scheme for admission to elite colleges.

As a first step, these colleges prepare a shortlist of manageable size. They do not prepare the list themselves; they outsource the task to "Feeder Schools".

This process is extended further. Higher Secondary Feeder Schools identify their own second-level Feeder Schools at the Secondary School level.

Secondary schools do the same with middle schools, which in turn organise their own set of Feeder Schools at the primary level.

We now have a four-stage selection for admission to institutions such as the IIT. At each stage, the selection is one out of two or three, which is eminently manageable and reliable.

This system will help the poor. If the small number of elite colleges had prepared the shortlist themselves, nationwide coaching institutions will proliferate (as they are doing now).

Aid the Poor

Children from backward areas will then be pushed out of the race by the more fortunate ones in big cities. With multi-stage outsourcing, Feeder Schools can be many, in thousands.

They can be spread across the length and breadth of the country, each with its own quota. Then, children from backward districts can climb into prestigious colleges in four easy steps — instead of facing an impossibly high barrier as they do now.

When the shortlisting is outsourced to Feeder Schools, they acquire prestige. That prestige itself inculcates pride; improves quality of teaching. If competition is introduced among them, quality is virtually assured.

Competition can be imposed in two ways. One, every district (every tehsil at the first stage) is offered a quota for the number of students it can shortlist based on the number of its students who do well subsequently.

Two, the selected students from each district are given a choice of two-three schools to join.

Then, at each stage, the Feeder Schools come under pressure from both the institution to which they send their students and from the students themselves. They have no choice but be good.

There are in the country around 50,000 higher secondary schools. Of them, not even a thousand are good enough to send their students regularly to elite colleges.

Such successful schools will naturally be the first choice for Feeder Schools. They may be supplemented by a few more in those backward districts where such quality schools do not exist.

Creating Scholars

As Feeder Schools have the authority to decide which of their students should be sent upwards, they can concentrate on teaching students to become good scholars instead of coaching them to become automatons for managing a one-off entrance examination.

Further, the stress on admission is pushed downwards to the primary school level. That fact is yet another boon. As matters stand, well-to-do students get 12 years of preferred coaching in expensive, well-appointed schools. The not-so-deserving rich gain so much advantage that the deserving poor are left out. When the competition starts at the primary school level, the rich lose most of that advantage.

On this issue, I have written earlier about the real life experience of England. Till the 1960s, England streamed students at age eleven: bright ones were sent to Grammar Schools and the others to Secondary Modern Schools. In a fit of socialism, concerned about late developers being left out, the streaming was halted: all students were sent to Comprehensive Schools.

It is now evident that this socialist theory is wrong. With good and not-so-good students clubbed together, Comprehensive Schools were compelled to dumb down their standards. As a result, rich parents opted out of government schools and sent their children to expensive `Public Schools'.

According to The Economist, by the year 2002, of the top 100 schools in England, only three were government-run Comprehensive Schools — at positions 97, 98 and 100; all others were private schools which served only the rich.

The consequences are there to see. In England, currently, most of those, who reach the top of their professions, are from rich families. Prior to 1990s, products of Grammar Schools reached top positions with a healthy mix of the rich and the not-rich. In India too, the poor have no more much hope of reaching top positions.

Hence, if our government is truly interested in the poor, it would stream students at an early age. However, instead of a one-off selection the way England did, it can adopt multi-stage selections in the manner I have suggested.

Most poor in our country cannot afford to educate their children even if it is free.

Hence, parents of poor bright children should be given enough financial support to enable them to educate their children.

Farm and School

In his Education Commission report, Prof Radhakrishnan suggested that every school should have an attached farm where parents of poor children may be given employment. The idea was not found practical.

However, if the suggestion is amended to "parents of bright poor children" and is restricted to Feeder Schools, the scheme can become feasible. Then, no more than ten-thousand special schools will need this facility; a few hundred acres of dedicated farms per tehsil should suffice to admit a hundred thousand poor bright children every year. That may not be easy, but is manageable.

Public Private Partnership may be invoked to support this scheme. Corporate houses are keen to invest in commercial farming. They may be encouraged to do so provided they employ parents of bright children who get into Feeder Schools. As no well-to-do parent will accept the job of a farmhand, that programme will automatically help the poor and exclude the non-poor.

Abraham Lincoln said no nation can survive half slave, half free. Same way India will not survive if half the people are included and the other half is excluded. The current reservation policy excludes half the population both on the basis of income and on the basis of caste.

Let us remove that handicap at least for the poor and search for an alternative that will guarantee bright poor children a place under the Indian sun.

(Concluded)

(The author is a former Director of IIT Madras. Response may be sent to: indiresan@gmail.com)

(This is 191st in the Vision 2020 series. The previous article was published on December 25, 2006.)