The Hindu Business Line : Early Childhood Care and Education

The sooner the Centre and States realise the importance of universal elementary education, the faster can a new development model be created for India, based on the blend of technical skill, superior knowledge and a population of literate Indians.

Like millions of others deprived of primary education, this child too cannot afford to go to school... The sooner the Centre and States realise the importance of universal elementary education, the faster can a new development model be created for India.

IN the light of the euphoria surrounding the Indian economy now, nobody likes to be reminded of the less flattering standards of living of a large section of the population.

The country has always been a land of contrasts, which are at times too stark to be ignored. No wonder the Union Minister for Communications and Disinvestment, Mr Arun Shourie, took pride in highlighting through the newspaper he served years ago India's knowledge power and the supremacy it maintains in information technology and IT-enabled services.

The Finance Minister, Mr Jaswant Singh, waxes eloquent on the economy's sound fundamentals, exemplified in the remarkable rally in the stock market, the hefty foreign exchange reserves and a GDP target that may turn out to be even better than the 8.4 per cent for the second quarter of 2003-04 fiscal. .

However, development also pertains to how well poverty is attacked, how educational opportunities are provided to the under-privileged, how social infrastructure is beefed up and physical infrastructure is improved. Unfortunately, the country's record is dismal in these areas.

The media, which takes every opportunity to wax eloquent on economic performance, should not lose sight of the larger picture, particularly when the picture must capture the gross satisfaction quotient of the people and not just GDP.

Viewed against this backdrop, the Indian media missed the coverage of a crucial meeting held in the third week of December in Egypt, where Education Ministers from a group of nine highly populated countries (E-9) — Bangladesh, Brazil, China, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Nigeria and Pakistan — assembled for three days under the Unesco umbrella to review the headway made in the goal of Education for All (EFA).

The EFA concept was unfurled in Delhi in 1993, but the progress towards its fulfilment is far from satisfactory. Though the nine countries account for more than 50 per cent of the world population and 53 per cent of the world's school-going children, the EFA is particularly for Egypt, India, Indonesia, Nigeria and Pakistan.

The Union Human Resource Development Minister, Dr Murli Manohar Joshi, and the Member, Planning Commission, Dr K. Venkatasubramanian, and other senior officials attended the Cairo conclave.

The important outcome of the meeting was that India has accepted the Unesco model of beginning preparatory education at the age of three for a child. This path-breaking development is likely to usher in progress if substantial funds are found to take due care of all those left out of the system. This is because economists the world over have been highlighting the significance of education since the time of Adam Smith, who deemed acquisition of skills through education and study as a form of capital.

David Ricardo and Thomas Malthus considered education as a means to inculcate habits that would lead to slower population growth, while Alfred Marshall set store by education as a tool for enhancing industrial efficiency.

Indubitably, the most tangible impact of education is to increase one's own income and productivity, and it is small wonder that classical economists celebrated education as a productivity-increasing mechanism.

Today, India's supremacy in knowledge-intensive operations bears ample testimony to the success of adopting a science-based and technology-savvy syllabus at the tertiary level of education in the past when state-funding and relatively easy fee structures enabled many to graduate out of the portals of higher learning centres with skills.

Though India did produce a Nobel laureate like Prof Amartya Sen, who extols the virtues of primary education as the sure-fire route to progress, the state of primary schooling, leave alone preparatory schooling, today presents a pathetic picture.

While nursery and primary education have become centres for raking in the moolah with middle- and lower middle-class people spending their earnings on the so-called public schools, the state of the poor is quite unenviable.

Governments, both at the Centre and in the States, particularly the latter, do not allocate sufficient funds to attract good talent and dedicated teaching staff to draw the poor.

They also do not have enough provisions for mid-day meal schemes which at least encourage poor parents to send their children to spend time usefully. It is a cruel contrast that India boasts of cruising on the information super-highway, while the nation's poor children spend most of their time on the street, when they should be in schools for want of opportunities and lack of proper nourishment.

No doubt, Parliament ratified the Free and Compulsory Education for Children Bill last year, making education a fundamental right. But mere enshrining of rights alone will not bring in the desired results unless the authorities, particularly in the States, address the problem with earnestness.

In India, primary education has, since Independence, meant the 6-14 age group and not below it. But the Unesco model addresses the crucial role of Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) in the 0-6 age group as a significant input, duly making up for early environmental deprivations at home by creating a stimulating milieu for the child.

According to Dr Venkatasubramanian, India's readiness to follow the Unesco model of ECCE is a significant step in improving the potential of the country's human resource.

Besides facilitating the realisation of the goals of universal elementary education, Dr Venkatasubramanian is sure the ECCE will help prepare children for schooling in terms of getting them used to regularly attending a centre-based programme away from home and imparting to them "certain pre-reading, pre-writing, and pre-number skills concepts and vocabulary which can help them negotiate the primary curriculum better."

Moreover, the formative years of a child have always been singled out for habit formation and brain development.

As the ECCE also addresses the health and nutritional requirements of children, it enables involvement of the girl child, who is often not able to attend school because of mundane chores, such as sibling care, through provision of substitute care for the sibling.

According to Dr Venkatasubramanian, only 19 per cent of children in the 3-6 age group are reported to be actually utilising the benefit of the available ECCE programme, while the proliferation of ECCE centres in the garb of nursery schools in the private sector run by untrained or ill-trained personnel with inadequate facilities and capabilities has kept the benefits beyond the reach of the poor.

Though India has had such schemes as the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS), a centrally-sponsored scheme begun in 1975, its implementation remained sectoral with education component being only one of the six addressed by it. That India is now advancing the cause of the ECCE should be welcomed.

Where funds are a constraint, public-private partnership can be attempted to see that India's teeming population, particularly the sections that deserve state support, get it in ample measure so that the dream of pitch-forking India into the developed nations' league by 2020 can be advanced. The sooner this is realised the better as it would speed up the moulding of the nation.

With coalition governance becoming a reality, the constituent units of the alliance being forged for the forthcoming elections should also declare their unreserved support for the concept of ECCE so that, down the line, the States, which share the major responsibility for spread of primary and pre-school education, act in concert with the Centre in heralding a new development paradigm for India, based on the blend of technical skill, superior knowledge and a population of literate Indians.

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