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Community
effort lacking in WB-funded programme in India
By Ranjit Dev Raj,
Inter Press Service |
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 NEW
DELHI, Mar 10 (IPS) - Of the many criticisms that India's World
Bank-funded District Education Programme (DPEP) has endured
what sticks is poor encouragement of community effort. |
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Started in 1994, the first phase of DPEP covered 42 districts
in seven states but has spread to 163 districts in 14 of India's
16 major states in its current third phase. |
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| Recommendations
following a joint-review last year, under the Bank's Ward Heneveld,
and representatives of UNICEF and the British and Netherlands
governments emphasised continuance of efforts to develop community
participation. |
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According
to K. Venkatasubramanian, educationist and member of the country's
Planning Commission, universal public education (UPE) should
ideally be a people's initiative rather than a government
programme.
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| '''The
government may provide the leadership and perhaps the money
but the initiative should come from the public and become a
mass movement,'' Venkatasubramanian said. |
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A DPEP workshop on community participation held last year in
Bangalore, capital of southern Karnataka state, itself brought
forth a round of opinions which confirmed the need for better
community mobilisation. |
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| ''There
is a general tendency in all development sectors to treat people
as beneficiaries -- masses to whom certain welfare oriented
benefits are to be given by those who know better, control economic
resources and have access to information,'' said Anita Kaul,
DPEP project director in Karnataka. |
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| She
said the mobilisation process needed to place confidence in
the people so that they could define and access the kind of
education they needed. |
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| Other
officials such as Mrinal Gohain and Bhupen Das from Assam in
India's north-east complained that the traditional relationship
between schools and communities had actually weakened as a result
of government programmes. |
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''Community participation in DPEP is a new experience
for primary education in the country and the process has been
a slow and complex one,'' admitted Sujaya Krishnan, under secretary
in the central Human Resources Development Ministry. |
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| Krishan
said the ministry's response has been to foster creation of
village education committees (VECs) which have been delegated
some powers, functions and resources in the districts where
DPEP is operational. |
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| But
according to the Public Report on Basic education (PROBE) in
India brought out last year by Delhi University's Centre for
Development Economics, most VECs were ineffective because they
were formed in a ''top-down manner based on government directives
rather than any felt need of the community.'' |
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| Independent
educational experts such as Vinod Raina believe that it is virtually
impossible for large, centralised and externally-funded programmes
such as the DPEP to foster true community participation. |
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| ''In
many of the districts where the programme is functional the
DPEP culture is completely alien and actually negates the spirit
of volunteerism or even the modest use of resources,'' Raina
said. |
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| Raina
pins blame on DPEP's heavy reliance on a private consultant
called the Educational Consultants India Limited, (EdCil) which
pays its consultants high salaries that government institutions
cannot afford. |
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| ''These
consultants, many of them without even a nodding acquaintance
of rural-based school education or pedagogy and child development
criss-cross the country to provide resource support to state
education departments,'' Raina said.' |
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| According
to Raina, with the government embarking on a policy of borrowing
massive external funds for primary education rather than mobilise
its own resources, the problem was bound to grow. |
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| One
argument in favour of setting up the externally funded DPEP
was that it would be immune to political and bureaucratic interference
but experience has belied this. |
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| What,
in fact, happened was that a whole new bureau was created in
the central ministry which has resulted in the fracturing of
primary education into two blocks -- one based on internal and
the other on external funding. |
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| Worse,
the DPEP which envisaged ''decentralised grassroots micro-level
planning'' crowded out well-established community- based efforts
towards UPE such as the well-known Lok Jumbish programme in
western Rajasthan and Eklavya in central Madhya Pradesh. |
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| The
results were sometimes ludicrous. In Madhya Pradesh districts
were told to have uniform expenditure for the seven- year project
-- about ten million dollars each although Indian districts
differ greatly in size and features. |
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| And
that when DPEP, as the name itself implies, calls for close
district-level planning with local staff identifying local needs
and approaches and preparing its own plan rather than one foisted
from above. |
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| According
to Raina, a major failure of DPEP is that it has not promoted
alternative mechanisms and decentralised process for quality
improvement but actually follows the structure of the discredited
National Council of Education Research and Training (NCERT).. |
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| ''Educational
expertise is sought to be concentrated and allowed to trickle
into the field and participatory functioning becomes a mere
token under an overarching attitude,'' he said. |
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| The
result has been the abysmal achievement nationwide in levels
of learning by children who had access to schools as confirmed
by surveys done for DPEP by the NCERT. |
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| Even
in southern Kerala, which has achieved near universal access
and retention, achievement levels were low and there was massive
wastage in attempting to create literacy among children. |
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| The
PROBE report says that the general tendency is for communities
to accept conditions in government schools but records several
dramatic examples of community resistance to inertia. |
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| For
example, early last year, the children of a remote region of
western Maharashtra state trekked 66 kms over hilly terrain
to the town of Nasik to complain to authorities of a headteacher
who came in only on weekends, and the lack of drinking water.. |
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| This
article is free of copyright restrictions and can be reproduced
provided that Inter Press Service is credited. |
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