Meenakshi Shedde, assistant editor of The Times of India
A school for the rural poor in India’s Andhra Pradesh state.
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India: Population: Source: World Bank and the Government of India |
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It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge. Albert
Einstein, |
To tackle illiteracy,
the Indian government made a U-turn by putting local communities and volunteers at
the helm of the campaign
‘You know,
my daughter has graduated from university and now wants to study for a Master’s degree,”
exclaims Sagar More as tears of pride well up in her eyes at the thought that her
own daughter can dare to dream so big.
More, who is involved in India’s National Literacy Mission as a volunteer with CORO
(Committee of Resource Organizations), is a Dalit. As such, she belongs to the “Scheduled
Castes”—the lowest castes in India. “As an ‘untouchable’, I had to sit one outstretched
arm away from the upper caste girls in my class,” she recalls. “I was constantly
humiliated by the teacher, and dropped out after one year of school. But after becoming
literate through CORO,
I became a volunteer teacher with them.”
When India’s planners acknowledged that development could never really take off as
long as the country was anchored down by illiteracy, a national literacy mission
was initiated in 1988 to impart functional literacy to adults between 15 and 35 years.
It ushered in a radical change of course by emphasizing initiative at the grassroots
level.
Driven by some ten million volunteers, the mission has recorded remarkable progress,
especially in rural areas and amongst women. India’s literacy rate, which was 18
per cent of the total population in 1951, rose from 52 per cent in 1991 to 62 per
cent in 1999. If the present trend continues, India could attain a 75 per cent literacy
rate by the year 2005, well ahead of 2011, as originally forecast.
“The national adult education programme was actually started by the government in
1978, with NGOs assigned barely 10 per cent of the funds,” explains Murlindhar Gode,
former chairman of the Maharashtra State Literacy Commission. “However, it was never
perceived as a people’s programme, and suffered from embezzlement of funds and poor
target achievement. In 1988 the system was turned on its head. An autonomous National
Literacy Mission Authority was established, to which the central government directly
sanctioned funds, by-passing the state governments. District literacy committees
were put at the centre of the programme, receiving 100 per cent of the funds. This
brought it success at the grassroots level.”
These committees are autonomous bodies which report directly to the National Literacy
Mission. Education experts and NGOs are strongly represented on them alongside local
officials. They conduct door-to-door surveys to identify non-literates, organize
mobilization activities, select organizations and volunteers to participate in the
campaign, and develop locally-relevant learning materials while keeping the larger
national canvas and its concerns in view.
“We realized that in order to succeed, literacy had to become a grassroots social
movement, and that is why we put volunteers at the heart of our strategy,” explains
Mr D. R. Parihar, Maharashtra’s deputy secretary of school education. The campaign
is driven by over 10 million unpaid volunteers nationwide—teachers and students from
schools, colleges and universities, public sector employees, housewives, ex-servicemen,
retired government officials and NGO members. Every state has a specialized resource
centre which conducts a two-day training programme for volunteers and provides them
with literacy
materials. “The primers are simple with lots of drawings, written in the local Marathi
language, and about very practical things like purchasing vegetables or bringing
up children,” explains P. Wankhede, an adult education officer in Maharashtra state.
In the Bombay area, CORO was founded when NGOs active in women’s rights and youth
movements and amongst trade unions realized to what extent illiteracy was impeding
their work. “We have never seen literacy as an end, only a means,” says Sujata Khandekar,
CORO’s chief secretary. Khandekar is actually an engineer with the state electricity
board. Because of her interest in literacy issues and the campaign’s national dimension,
she was authorized to work for CORO while continuing to receive pay from her employer.
“Literates must be able to use literacy to enrich their lives—to learn to demand,
to question, to have a commitment to changing their situation. Mere familiarity with
alphabets and counting numbers up to 100 is of no use. Therefore, we also have programmes
for neo-literates relating to savings, legal literacy, social rights, alcoholism
and atrocities against women.”
Through community functions involving popular film stars, plays and television serials,
volunteer teachers are mobilized. “Most of our teaching volunteers are between 15
and 30. They’ve followed about seven years of schooling. We prefer to choose them
from the same community as the learners,” Khandekar points out. “We cover an area
of 1 million people in Bombay—of which 70 per cent live in the slums, including Dharavi,
one of the biggest in Asia.”
One indicator of CORO’s success can be gauged, not from asking students like Sagar
More to count up to 100 or sign her name, but from her assertiveness and confident
smile. She has been transformed from an illiterate woman who was too timid to speak
up even when spoken to into a zealous motivator, a treasurer of the women’s Federation
Credit Society and a librarian in charge of a mobile library. Although Sagar abandoned
her
formal studies after one year, she and her husband, also a Dalit, have ensured that
all their four children have passed the 10th grade.
“I feel so gratified when our learners tackle local civic problems and take social
responsibility for others. I’ve worked for CORO for five years without being paid,
but now they give me a salary of 1,500 rupees ($36) a month,” says More. “Sometimes
they can’t pay even that, but Ambedkar’s idea of educating others through shramdan
(donating labour) means much more to me.” More is referring to Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar,
a Dalit from Maharashtra state who rose to become the architect of India’s constitution.
Throughout his career, he emphasized education and women’s rights and is considered
a pioneering social reformer.
Motivation among the Dalits is especially high. “I found I was more effective when
I made education an emotional issue,” says Vilas Sarmalkar, another volunteer teacher.
“The Dalits really revere Dr Ambedkar. Once, when I was dealing with a family that
was reluctant to come to the class, I asked if I could then take down the portrait
of him that they hung in their house. No, no, they said, horrified, and made sure
they came from the next class on.”
While volunteer teachers show unquestionable commitment to their work, their enthusiasm
could wane in the long run in the absence of monetary benefits for them. “Of course,
education through volunteers makes for financial savings. But the truth is that even
if you have the money, it cannot buy you community participation,” says Parihar.
As CORO’s Khandekar sums it up, an important means of sustaining volunteers’ momentum
is by applauding their efforts in the larger community. “Right now, they are only
local heroes,” she says. “But in fact, they should be everybody’s heroes.”
