SUNLIGHT AND OTHER FEARS

The Importance of School Education

Francis Bacon has observed that the child’s fear of the dark is ‘increased with tales’. He was drawing some kind of analogy here with people’s exaggerated fear of death—the comparison occurs in a grim essay called ‘Of Death’. Unfortunately, invented tales are not needed to drive fear into the minds of a great many children in the world. Fear of not just the dark night, but also of the sunlit day. There is much to fear in a day that begins without a meal, without a friendly school to go to along with other children, without relief from illnesses and maladies that are constantly present in a precarious childhood, and, not least, without anything much to look forward to in the future.  Nothing brings out the poverty of India today as much as the state of many-indeed most-of our children.

The tragedy in all this lies not only in the bleakness of the real world in which Indian children live, but also in the fact that these deprivations are not hard to overcome, even within the means that India now has. Our children remain in the dire state in which they are mainly because of the lack of political and social engagement, not because of the lack of resources.

The Underfed and Undernourished
Consider the hunger of Indian children. Even though the famines of the British Empire disappeared rapidly enough in India with Independence, India’s overall record in eliminating hunger and undernutrition, particularly of children, is quite terrible. Not only is there persistent recurrence of severe hunger in particular regions, but more amazingly, there is a dreadful prevalence of endemic hunger across much of India. Indeed Indian children do far worse in this respect than do children even in famine-ridden Sub-Saharan Africa (as has been well discussed by Peter Svedberg.1 Judged in terms of the usual standards of retardation in weight for age, the proportion of undernourished children in Africa is 20 to 40 per cent, whereas the percentage of undernourished Indian children is a gigantic 40 to 60 per cent. General undernourishment—what is sometimes called protein-energy malnutrition--is nearly twice as high in India as in Sub-Saharan Africa.

And yet, India has continued to amass extraordinarily large stocks of food grains in the central government’s reserve. In 1998 the stock was around 18 million tons, which is just around the official ‘buffer stock’ norms that are adequate for protecting India from the vicissitudes of nature. However, since then the stocks have climbed and climbed, hovering between 50 and 70 million tons--food enough to fill sacks of grain that would stretch more than one million kilometers, taking us to the moon and back, and then some more. The stocks exceed 1 ton of food grains for every family below the poverty line. There is, of course, no plan to give it to them.

The government, we know, spends a very large sum of money to subsidize food prices. But to cut a long story short, subsidies can be used either to keep producer prices high (that is having elevated sale prices for the farmers who sell food to the government), or to make consumer prices low (reducing the prices at which the indigent Indian buyers can afford to buy food and feed themselves and their children). Political pressure of the farmers favours the former and they certainly have much more clout than the indigent consumers-and hungry Indian children-have (or can even dream of). The consequent regime of high food prices in general (that is, high procurement prices and high sale prices, even thought the latter are lower than the former) both expands procurement and depresses demand.

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The odd price system, while generating a massive supply of food, also keeps the eager hands of Indian children away from the food. Stocks accumulate and remain large, and much of the ‘food subsidy’ goes to meet the cost of maintaining a massively large stock of food grains, with a gigantic food administration.

A thorough overhaul of India’s food policy is needed right now, with hard-headed economic assessment of costs and benefits, including the unequal toll of placating farmers and also of bearing the cost of carrying unnecessarily large food stocks from one year to the next. That assessment must also include a humane understanding of why Indian children fear the morning light, with another hungry day to come.

The Unschooled and the Overlooked
What about schooling? India has many more children out of school than any other country. These statistics may not be seen as significant by some who would point to the fact that India is a large country. And so indeed it is. But China is larger still, with a much smaller-indeed a relatively tiny-number of children out of school. Also, even in proportionate terms, India does not do very much better than Africa in getting a high proportion of children to school. Bangladesh, which was much behind India, has been overtaking India recently.

Of course, the official statistics of school administration can provide some immediate comfort, since they claim that very few Indian children are unregistered in school. But these official statistics have never been reliable: the schools have built-in incentives to exaggerate school registration and to inflate attendance even more (by confounding registration with attendance, for example). Independent findings, such as the Census of India, or the National Sample Survey, still show that a significantly large proportion-about one out of five of Indian children are not in school on a normal day. The regional pattern shows great asymmetry here, with nearly all children at school in states such as Kerala or Himachal Pradesh, while in other states like Uttar Pradesh or Rajasthan, a very high proportion of children are not there at all.

We certainly need to build many more schools. Also, we have to run them much better. These are serious needs. But the alleged lack of interest of parents in educating their children (particularly girls), which is often mentioned as a difficulty, is nothing quite like that. That alleged ‘fact is, of course, the oldest chestnut around, but all the probing empirical studies of this presumed phenomenon have brought out its falsity. The picture comes through particularly clear in the most extensive study of Indian schooling problems done by the PROBE team (involving Jean Dreze, Anita Rampal, and many other dedicated investigators), and published in 1999.2 It appears that not only do nearly all parents-across the regions-want their children (including girls) to go to school, but also a very high proportion (often more than 80 per cent of parents) want to make it obligatory for parents to send children to school (if a reliable school exists in the neighbourhood). This applies not only to those regions in which most children do go to schools, but also in those areas where children are very often not in school: the explanation of non-attendance has to be sought elsewhere.

The regional studies have also tended to confirm a similar picture. The first educational reports of the Pratichi Trust, which I was privileged to set up with the help of the Nobel award, also show how overwhelmingly anxious the parents in the surveyed region (mostly in West Bengal) are to send children-including girls-to school.

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The wrong diagnosis of parent reluctance is very unfortunate for several distinct reasons. The first is the long history of using this false diagnosis as an excuse that is given by governments to explain away their failure to do the duties of a decent state: a failure that is-more than any other factor-responsible for the problems of Indian school education in general and of girls' education in particular. Over the decades since Independence, one government after another-at the Centre and in the states-have referred to the alleged reluctance of parents as one big reason for the failure to get children, especially girls, to school. But as the PROBE report and indeed all other field studies bring out, there is very little general reluctance of parents to send all children-girls as well as boys-to school.

The explanation of non-attendance lies mainly elsewhere. The absence of schools that are conveniently close and proximate is one reason. Further, if having more schools is a crucial policy issue, so is generating the confidence of parents that their children, especially girls, would be safe in school (while the parents may be away at work in various activities, from tilling land to carrying merchandise). Many of these schools are single-teacher schools, and the absenteeism of teachers is quite high in some areas, so that the parents cannot be sure, in many cases, that there would be someone to look after their children through the day. This can be a particularly serious fear in the case of girl children. To overlook the real and legitimate concern of parents, and to blame instead the nastiness of parents, is a good way of adding a little insult to much injury.

Further, many schools have no lavatory facilities at all. Some do not have rooms either. In understanding why there is some parental reluctance to send their children to school in specific cases--even when in general the parents insist that they would like to send their children, including girls, to school-it is important not just to count the existence of schools, but also to go into the running of schools, involving physical facilities as well as teacher participation.

When I was a student myself, trying to learn some economics at Presidency College in Calcutta, I remember joining movements of school teachers who demanded some increase in their woefully low salaries. That was fifty years ago. With the new pay awards for public servants, the salaries of school teachers have risen enormously. Indeed, if one compares the relative differential between school teachers salaries and the earnings of agricultural labourers, the differential in favour of the former has grown by leaps and bounds, and is now absolutely enormous. Some commentators object to raising this issue of relative pay: why should this comparison in particular be made? This is a good riposte, and there are indeed many other comparisons that can also be instructive. The immediate relevance of the teacher-labourer differential arises, however, from an economic consideration, and no less importantly, a fundamental social concern.

The economic issue relates to the cost of educating the children of the Indian underdog in rural as well as urban areas. The fact that in so called 'alternative' schools--such as Sishu Siksha Kendras (SSKs) in West Bengal--it is possible to get qualified teachers with the same educational credentials at a fraction of the standard school teachers' salary in the public sector, indicates how the cost of educating the children of the Indian illiterate masses has been artificially raised. While there is much to be happy about in the fact that Indian school teachers now get a fine salary, the cost implications of expanding the reach of the school system also have to be taken into account.

Not surprisingly, many states (including West Bengal, Madhya Pradesh, and others) have gone increasingly in the direction of expanding 'alternative' schools, rather than having standard schools. The Pratichi Trust reports indicate that these alternative SSKs do no worse than standard schools. There may be some comfort in that (and the dedication of SSK teachers is often exemplary), but the alternative route cannot be a long-term solution, given the limited facilities of these alternative schools and the difficulty of expecting that the alternative system, with its ad hoc structure, can really become the principal mainstream for educating Indian school children.

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The SSKs are a plausible stopgap solution, but the basic issue of having an adequate number of standard schools-and being able to afford expansion-has to be addressed.The social problem is no less immediate than the economic crunch. The Pratichi Education Report brings out how the parents of children from less privileged families feel neglected and ignored in the running of schools. Absenteeism of teachers is quite high in general, but it is outrageously large when the bulk of the students come from lower class backgrounds, with little income and less social status. There is a big 'class divide' between the poorer children and their families, on the one hand, and the well-paid teachers in the schools, on the other, who-as the studies suggest-often have little time for the underdog children.

The rapid increase in private tuition as a system for supplementing primary education that is offered in school not only shows how inadequate the school system has become, but also how the better-off can escape the penalties of bad schooling by spending money to get additional teaching for their own children. Use of primary tuition for primary school children is virtually unknown outside India and South Asia: I had some difficulty in my conversations last year with educationalists in China in explaining what exactly the phenomenon to which I referred was. They have never heard of primary education through private tuition. The evil of this unusual Indian arrangement consists not only of the inequity that it generates, but also its efficiency implications. Since rich parents do not suffer that much from the low quality of schools, given their ability to remedy the deficiencies through supplementary private tuition, they have far less interest in using their influence to make the schools run better.

The teachers' unions which have been extremely supportive of the teachers' right to a good salary as well as to their independence (and rightly so) must have a big role to play in advancing social justice and equity in India by improving the functioning of primary schools. There is also an important role for institutional reform, which can take the form--it has been suggested by the Pratichi team-of both insisting on having school-based parent-teacher committees (with effective representation of poorer and less privileged parents) and demanding that these committees have an operative voice in the running of schools and even perhaps in the renewal of budgetary allocations. Also, the system of school inspections, now defunct in many states, can be revived in an attempt to make the schools run better. If the hunger of Indian children, on which I commented earlier, is largely due to the inefficiency as well as inequity of public policy, there is a similar issue to be faced in addressing the illiteracy of Indian children.

Plural Benefits of Mid-day Meals

Similar issues can be raised about health care as well as medical delivery to the poorer Indians and to the Indian children who have had the misfortune of being born in less well-off families. Rather than trying to extend the analysis in that direction, let me probe further some of the issues already raised, and devote the rest of the essay to two specific questions about the schooling of Indian children. First, can the problem of hunger and undernourishment be tackled along with school education through such programmes as providing cooked mid-day meals in school? Second, why is schooling so important anyway for the future of Indian children?

Mid-day meals are not an Indian innovation. They have been used for centuries in Europe and elsewhere to make schools more attractive to children and to feed them better. There has been

considerable public agitation lately to make cooked mid-day meals standardly available in all Indian schools. It is to the credit of the Supreme Court of India that it has recently spoken up in favour of the ‘right’ of Indian children not only to go to school, but also to have cooked mid-day meals there.

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Many states in India have argued that they do not have the funds to make this possible. There are indeed financial difficulties that several Indian states actually do face at this time. The big rise in public sector salaries, discussed earlier, which has a much wider coverage than the salaries of schoolteachers specifically, has certainly had a role in contributing to the relative insolvency of some states. To the extent that the Centre can help the states in this respect, there is a need to think about ways and means of cooperation in this tremendously important endeavour.

However, the states must also reexamine their commitments and priorities. Indeed, many states, with the pioneering example of Tamil Nadu, run good programmes of providing mid-day meals. Others, such as Rajasthan, are moving in that direction. There is no basic economic reason why all states cannot do this, if they decide that this is indeed one of their principal priorities. The question that does, however, arise is whether mid-day meals should be seen as being pre-eminently important, so that it acquires the status of an overwhelming priority. That case is not hard to establish. Cooked mid-day meals served in schools provide a number of interrelated and far-reaching benefits.

First, since Indian children suffer from exceptional under-nourishment, the possibility of reducing that deprivation through giving meals to every schoolchild has a strong case based on health grounds. The schools are an excellent point of delivery to those in greatest need. The loss of physical fitness and mental ability due to undernourishment in childhood is a major predicament of the Indian people, and the adversity can be dramatically reduced through school meals.

Second, school meals increase the attractiveness of going to school. It is not surprising that empirical studies have shown that attendance tends to be very favourably influenced by this provision. Feeding, in this sense, complements the effectiveness of the school system.

Third, the attention span of children from the poorer families is often severely restricted by the fact that they come to school in often severely restricted by the fact that they come to school on an empty stomach (the Pratichi team found how common the incidence was). Feeding not only supplements schooling, it can actually contribute to the effectiveness of the process of teaching.

Fourth, if school meals are served in the schools in cooked form, rather than students being given so-called ‘dry rations’ the gender bias in distribution within the family is avoided. It also appears that the provisions of meals for school children also has a particularly favourable effect in releasing girls from family work to go to school.

Fifth, the experience of eating together in schools, without differentiation of caste, religion, class, or ethnicity, is also a contribution towards building a more united India. Being schooled together is itself an egalitarian experience, and eating together in schools can add greatly to promoting a non-discriminatory outlook.

As against that, those opposed to the mid-day meals point to several difficulties. The financial one has already been discussed and can certainly be overcome. There may, in addition, be organizational problems, particularly when the chosen food requires very heavy cooking (as seems to be the case with the grains used in Rajasthan), and apparently there is the possibility of illnesses resulting from corners being cut. These organizational problems demand serious investigation and engagement (including further scrutiny of the type of grains to use and

whether less heavily cooked food may be nutritionally better anyway for the children). These problems have been surmounted in many states, and the others can overcome them too.

It is sometimes argued that schooling is concerned with educating, not with feeding, and that teachers do not have to supervise cooking. That argument takes an artificially fragmented view of the lives of children. Indeed, going further, it can be argued that not only the absenteeism of children, but also that of teachers can be reduced if providing regular school meals becomes the standard practice.

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In a school of the traditional type (with no meals), if a teacher does not show up, the children may suffer in the long run (education brings benefits over years, rather than over hours), but there may not be any great immediate discontent, if only because children reasonably enough love playing as well. On the other hand, if a child relies on having a cooked meal at the school, absenteeism has an immediately disquieting effect. The fact that absenteeism of staff at the schools may cause more protests under these circumstances may be an entirely positive influence in making the schools run in a more orderly way. Rather than ‘disrupting’ normal teaching (as is sometimes alleged), providing cooked school meals can add to the effectiveness of teaching through a lowered likelihood of the distressing phenomenon of teacher absenteeism.

What’s the Point of Going to School?

I come now to the last question. What is so special about schooling? There has always been much skepticism about the value of formal school education in India, a scepticism to which even Mahatma Gandhi lent his voice. Indeed, skeptical questions about prioritizing school education are so often asked in India that there is a real contrast here with almost the whole of the rest of the world (from Japan, China, Korea, and Vietnam to France, Britain, USA, Brazil, and Cuba). So, at the risk of labouring the obvious, let me discuss what the point of schooling might be.

Indeed, the importance of school education is truly immense any many-sided. First, illiteracy and innumeracy are major deprivations-profound ‘unfreedoms’-on their own. Not to be able to read, write, and count makes a person less free to have control over one’s own life.

Second, basic education can be very important in helping people to get jobs and to have gainful employment. India has suffered greatly from the neglect of basic education, both in the domestic economy and in the reduced ability of the Indian masses to gain from the opportunities of global commerce. Whenever the educational opportunities have been good in India (like in high-level technical education and specialized skill formation), Indians-with the appropriate educational background-have been able to make superb use of the global facilities, but the need to extend that openness to basic education (and also to spread basic technical skills more widely) remains extremely strong.i India casts envious eyes on the recent economic successes of East and Southeast Asia and sees the opportunities of globalized trade writ large there. These opportunities are indeed enormous, but to make good use of them, basic education of the population can be a greatly facilitating factor. This connection, while always present, is particularly critical in a rapidly globalizing world, in which quality control and production according to strict specification is critically important.

Third, schooling is not only an educational occasion, it is also a social opportunity to come out of one’s home and to meet others, who come from different families, have dissimilar values and have knowledge of disparate walks of life. The discipline of schooling can also provide experiences of a very different kind from what one gets within the family. The education of the school-going child comes not only from the formal lessons, but also from the experience of schooling itself.

i On this and related issues, see Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen, India: Development and Participation (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002).

Fourth, when people are illiterate, their ability to understand and invoke their legal rights can be very limited. This can, for example, be a significant barrier for illiterate women to make use even of the rather limited rights that they do actually have. This was well established many years ago in a pioneering study by Salma Sobhan.i Lack of schooling can directly lead to insecurities by distancing the deprived from the ways and means of countering that deprivation.

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Fifth, illiteracy can also muffle the political voice of the underdog and thus contribute directly to their insecurity. The connection between voice and security can well be very powerful: the observed fact that substantial famines do not occur in democracies is just one illustration of the effectiveness of political voice and participation. The enabling power of basic education in making people more effectively vocal has a significantly protective role and is, thus, central to human security.

Sixth, empirical work in recent years has brought out very clearly how the respect and regard for women’s well-being are strongly influenced by such variables as women’s ability to earn an independent income, to find employment outside the home, to have ownership rights, and to have literacy and be educated participants in decisions within and outside the family. Indeed, even the survival disadvantage of women compared with men in developing countries seems to go down sharply-and may even be eliminated-as progress is made in advancing the agency role of women.ii

The different characteristics that favour a better situation for women (such as women’s earning power, economic role outside the family, female literacy and education, women’s property rights, and so on) may at first sight appear to be rather diverse and disparate, but what they all have in common is their positive contribution in adding force to women’s voice and agency-through greater empowerment. The diverse variables identified in the literature, thus, have a unified strengthening role.

This role is of importance not only for women themselves, but can also have far-reaching impacts on the lives of all through its influence on the forces and organizing principles that govern decisions within the family. There is considerable evidence, for example, that fertility rates tend to go down sharply with greater empowerment of women. This is not surprising, since the lives that are most battered by the frequent bearing and rearing of children are those of young women, and anything that enhances their decisional power and increases the attention that their interests receive tend, in general, to prevent over frequent child bearing. For example, in comparative studies of the different districts within India (done by Mamta Murthi and Jean Dreze), it emerges that women’s education and women’s employment are the two most important influences in reducing fertility rates.iii

There is also much evidence that women’s education and literacy tend to reduce the mortality rates of children. The influence works through many channels, but perhaps most immediately, it works through the importance that mothers typically attach to the welfare of the children, and the opportunity they have, when their agency is respected and empowered, to influence family decisions in that direction. Similarly, women’s empowerment appears to have a strong influence (Murthi and Dreze provide evidence on this too) in reducing the much observed gender-inequality in the survival of children (that is, in reducing the bias against young girls).

These connections between basic education of women and the power of women’s agency are quite central to understanding the contribution of school education to human well-being and freedom. The removal of survival disadvantages of women (and of young girls in particular), the reduction of child mortality (irrespective of gender), and moderating influences on fertility rates are all among the basic issues involved in removing the downside risks that threaten life and dignity, and the schooling of girls can be a critically important vehicle for social change.

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Finally, in addition to the provision of schooling, it is necessary to consider the coverage of education and the curriculum. The issues involved here include the importance of technical skill in our globalizing world, but there are also other matters involved, since schooling can be deeply influential in the identity of a person and the way we see each other. Recently, the perspective of clash of civilizations has gained much currency. What is most immediately divisive in this outlook is not the idea of the inevitability of a clash (that too, but it comes later), but the prior insistence on seeing human beings in terms of one-and exactly one-and exactly one-dimension only. To see people in terms of this allegedly pre-eminent and all-engulfing classification is itself a contribution to political insecurity.

The issue has received attention, if only indirectly, in the context of the role of madras as in the growth of fundamentalism in Pakistan and elsewhere, but there is a danger here from other sources as well, given the way cultural and educational narrowing is being advocated by some political groups in India. Schools texts have also been messed around to exaggerate and embellish a specifically ‘Hindu’ perspective in understanding the history of India. Well-known historical phenomena, important for India’s exceptionally pluralist heritage (from the flourishing of the pre-Indo-European Indus Valley civilization to the absorption of wave after wave of new entrants), are being buried in political attempts to rewrite India’s past. This is an ominous development. The importance of a good, non-sectarian curriculum can be quite central to the role of education in securing a better future for the children of India.

Like food, education is a source of nourishment, Indian children need not have their minds poisoned any more than they need to have their bodies famished, skills neglected, or potentials wasted. We have been shooting ourselves in the foot for a long time now-through our biased food policies, negligent educational efforts, inadequate health arrangements-and now there is also the curricular barbarism in schools that encourages us to shoot ourselves in the other foot. Indian children deserve better than that. They need daylight, nor darkness, nor the fears that ‘increase with tales’.                                                                     

*Amartya Kumar Sen is an Indian economist and philosopher. He has made contributions to welfare economics, social choice theory, economic and social justice, economic theories of famines, and indexes of the measure of well-being of citizens of developing countries. He was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1998 and Bharat Ratna in 1999 for his work in welfare economics. He was also awarded the inaugural Charleston-EFG John Maynard Keynes Prize in recognition of his work on welfare economics in February 2015 during a reception at the Royal Academy in the UK. He is currently the Thomas W. Lamont University Professor and Professor of Economics and Philosophy at Harvard University. He served as the chancellor of Nalanda University

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