The Hindu Business Line : Still educating Kerala

Last fortnight, the National University of Educational Planning and Administration (NUEPA) released a report on the Composite Education Development Index to track the progress of Indian States in providing universal elementary education to its children. The NUEPA exercise sought to rank the States on the basis of their performance at the primary and upper primary levels of education in terms of access, infrastructure, teachers and outcomes.

Not surprisingly, Kerala ranked first and Bihar last in the list of 35 States and Union Territories. Leading the class are Kerala, Delhi, Tamil Nadu, Puducherry, Chandigarh, Karnataka, Himachal Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Mizoram and Lakshadweep.

THE LAGGARDS

The worst performers are Bihar, Jharkhand, Arunachal Pradesh, West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh and Assam. Bihar and Uttar Pradesh are the two States that remain in the ward of the other sickly northern States, collectively termed the BIMARU (an acronym for Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh) States.

If Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh have been able to break the shackles of poor performance, it is because they have been trying to follow Kerala's early efforts in the educational field.

At a recent convention organised by the West Bengal Primary Teachers' Association, a union of primary teachers in West Bengal, Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen reiterated how social and human development indicators such as life expectancy and infant mortality depend on the spread of primary education. Comparing West Bengal and Kerala, Prof Sen pointed to how, from the very beginning, the anti-upper caste movement in Kerala was based on the idea of education being the only vehicle that could transport the movement to success.

Kerala today reports a higher life expectancy than China, and an infant mortality rate as low as 12 per thousand, as against 28 in China.

Amartya Sen sees this as a direct result of the great leap to privatisation that had come with China's dramatic economic growth. The lessons to be drawn extend beyond the realm of education.

Prof Sen points to how post-revolution China had made dramatic improvements in public health, with an increase in life expectancy from 35 to 68 years by 1979, the year the Chinese economic reforms began.

Since then, though, China has not been able to do as well as Kerala. Public health insurance for Chinese citizens, which stood at 100 per cent in 1979, had come down to 20 per cent.

Prof Sen also cited the example of Japan and the United States as well as various European countries where public expenditure on education and healthcare had preceded the introduction of reforms aimed at economic expansion.

As the developmental and industrial history of Kerala has shown, there cannot be any facile equation of economic growth with improvement in public health, as Prof Sen says. Education and political direction do matter for the enhancement of public health.

CLASSICAL METHOD

As Kerala's experience demonstrates, the solution lies in the classical method of a greater amount of government investment in both education and healthcare, an end to the neglect of women, and a more collaborative engagement with various civil society organisations, including trade unions and mass movements.

As long as the State can hold on to its standards in primary education and continue to push for universal primary education for its citizens, Kerala can hope to further solidify its firmaments for a sound developmental future. Whether that alone will do is, needless to add, a very moot point, given the pressing need for an industrial rejuvenation. Yet, as Prof Sen has shown with the case of a highly industrialised China, pure economic growth that ignores the development of human capabilities can never be lasting.

The writer can be contacted at kgkumar@gmail.com