The children are about to follow the parents – as they are born of illiterate parents forming a vast class of Indian illiterate, somnolent society. As our integral part of society, this class spends nights in the murkiness of huts and slums. A grotesque persona of another Indian – to form an uncivilized massed of developing country. With them along us, we economic reform advocates have compunction about ground realities.
While for our developing country, visualizing vision 2020, is daunted by this mass of children, who are currently in the age group of 5- 10 (supposed to be in class I – V), and by the year 2020, they will form the youth aged 18 to 23. Govt. policies of Sarva Siksha Abhiyan (SSA) as planned in the communiqué, if implemented properly, will make some difference by that time – I am sure.
Evidently as I have seen my last home trip, the managing the Abhiyan is a challenge with the available man-power and additional contractual positions. When the locally elected persons serve voluntarily in the school governing body, the concerted execution of the program was thought to be smooth. Worth to add is, currently financial assistance available in these programs, with transparency, hence details need not secluded, seems far better, compared to trifle funds available earlier for doing so.
As the are funds available and given the nature of planned spending, brings sometimes management problems, when govt. bodies gets embroiled with locally elected management representative bodies. The challenges arises, when these representatives, from ‘quota’s turn out logically blunt/twisted. At this situations, there requires not being martinet, but authoritativeness and skillful manoeuvering of surreal meeting situations.
At the ground level, still the manual trumpery documentation and accounting process is underway in these programs. And this is really time and productive time consuming. These most of the bland junk of paper-works forms the heap in the govt. offices, that needs to be cleaned fast. Otherwise just paper works are not supposed to deliver a fecund SSA.
The assiduity of the teacher’s efforts as chain link between policies on paper – the beneficiary children – funds and pedagogues may show some results in near future.