East or west, government schools are the same!

In India, Government schools are synonymous to lack of everything a normal school should have: Teachers, classrooms, drinking water, toilet, desk and benches, books, the works!

I’ve been writing about the government schools in Andhra Pradesh ever since we started the EFF project. For a quick recap, it’s here, here, here and here.

As I read this story in Express India, it’s a déjà vu moment for me.

Due to lack of infrastructure, students are made to either sit in the verandah or outside the classrooms, irrespective of the weather — rain, heat or cold.

The pictures below are students of Rasoolpura Government School Hyderabad diligently taking a test in the veranda of their school.



Despite the absolute negligence by the government towards the school, the students are blessed with an organization called Bhumi--a group of young individuals who have revived the school and have given it a fresh lease of life. In two years, apart from other necessities, they have even managed to built enough classrooms for all the students-- Thanks to organizations like Panterra Networks (formerly Pandora Networks--where I worked last) who in their own way contribute to make this change easier.

Next time around when I visit the school, i'll see a different picture. Literally.

Red Cross School girls...

This afternoon I took the engineers to the school to examine the room where the Virtual Classroom technology will be deployed. As they got busy discussing the logistics and stuff I went out and took some pictures of the girls. Not just the uniform but they are bright in every way!




The 7 graders--the girl in glasses (front) stood first in the previous year...this morning she read out a poem in Hindi and translated bits and pieces of it in English for the non Hindi speaking audience :)
The lower graders waiting for their parents to pick them up.

I lifted the red schoolbag just to get a feel of how heavy they were and goodness me!They were as heavy as a ten kilo rice bag!

Buying guava from a fruit seller through the grill of the school gate.

It's 2pm and they are dying to go home but the gate is locked and will be opened only after the long bell is rung :)

NCERT textbooks now just a click away!

The NCERT (National Council of Educational Training and Research) textbooks are finally available online. I’ve been looking forward to this launch ever since the department made the announcement last year.

I did have my own share of running around last academic session searching for textbooks which turned sour at times out of sheer desperation and displeasure. I cannot understand how, year after year, textbooks are available very late—well after the start of the academic year—and never after the first month of sale. That’s never enough for students. Shortage of textbooks continues to be a major problem for schools in India.

However, with the textbooks being made available online, life will get a little easier. If this facility is utilized well and classes are planned systematically, it might even lessen the burden of carrying heavy school bags for students.

Most importantly, students and teachers can now turn to the Internet while the government and publishers take their own time getting the books to children. I still do worry about students who do not have access to the Internet or use the State syllabus. But for now at least I’m contented with the fact that my students will no longer suffer even if they study in a government school—they will now have the best learning resources available to them not just school textbooks.

You can read or download the books from NCERT and here.

Me thinks...

While the A.P Government has decided that English is the way to go for all schools, we have people like Dr. J Abdul Kalam the former President of India, who seem to think just the other way round. On his recent trip to Aligarh Muslim University, he said that mother tongue languages should be used in schools for learning. In his words:

"Education should be imparted in mother tongue up to 10th standard as it promotes creativity and sharpens intellect immensely”.

He says English should instead be used for Higher and Technical education. While I’m tempted to agree when I see it coming from something like him—who started life like any other typical village boy, studied in a village School, in mother tongue and so on---but went on to become a great scientist and the President of India. But when I think of the larger picture, I’m not so sure. It is definitely a given that no matter where you study, in what medium, as long as you have the zest to excel, you can succeed. We have heard many stories about similar people achieving great heights in life out of scratch.

But leaving all that aside, if we consider the scenario today where there are over 3.1 million graduates stepping fresh out of college every year, there isn’t much choice but to be the very best. And I believe apart from being an expert in your subject matter, knowing English (the language used for communication around the world) and being able to carry yourself with confidence will take you a long way.

I wouldn’t say the A.P government made a great move, (they could have managed it far better) but at the same time I do think that it is crucial for students to learn to speak English in school. We’ve tried to achieve this for decades, unsuccessfully. Maybe English as the medium of instruction will help. It’s worth a try, anyway.

School bags on wheels

This morning as I stood on the balcony sipping my morning cuppa chai, I saw this young school girl dressed in her school uniform pulling a trolley bag down the road towards a car that was parked a minute away. On closer inspection, I noticed that the trolley was actually a regular school bag, with wheels and a pull-handle. This scene reminded me of an article featured just two days back on the 14th June in the Times of India “Now school carry books on trolleys”

Much has been written about the heavy school bags already, so I don’t need to delve into the issue again. In fact, some time back I wrote about the Chandigarh Government’s plan of doing away with textbooks and thus with heavy school bags. I don’t know how far the plan is being implemented, but here, in Hyderabad, it looks as if the students will have resort to carts and trolleys to lighten the burden, since the authorities haven’t even recognized excessively heavy schoolbags as a problem to be addressed.

SSC to CBSE syllabus in A.P Government School

I had a meeting with the Red Cross officials this morning and as I waited for them to turn up, I noticed a group of unfamiliar students dressed in their own attire seated in a corner of the corridor. I was told that these were newly admitted students, all in grade VI, part of the recently announced plan of the Govt. of A.P. They are the ones who will be using the CBSE syllabus and will be taught in English medium.

The department on Tuesday issued an order introducing English as the medium of instruction with CBSE syllabus from class VI in 6,500 select schools, covering over 250,000 students.

The move is part of the World Bank-aided Strengthening and Universalisation of Quality and Access to Secondary Schools (SUCCESS) project.

Under the order, students of classes VI and VII of upper primary schools which are within two kilometre radius of high schools where English would be introduced as medium of teaching would be shifted to the nearby high schools along with teachers and other administrative staff.

While Red Cross Girls’ High School is an English medium school with their own class VI students why the Government ordered the school to have a bunch of girls from here and there, beats me! At the same time, the teachers are already hands full--the amount of attention the students will receive also worries me.

The students are from Telugu and Urdu medium schools, who am told do not even understand a word of English! Among other things, they do not have a classroom for these students and unless the Government fulfills their promise of providing ‘specially trained’ teachers for them, these students will be left even without teachers.

While there are concerns voiced out by academicians, teachers, parents and concerned citizens, this is a first hand experience of the fiasco that has been doing the rounds ever since the Government announced the plan.

School reopens!

After a two months’ long break, students are in school. Every year with June comes a new academic year: one grade up for students, new lessons and perhaps students with newer insights and a stronger zest for a better and fulfilling year.

After last year’s experimental teaching, I will be the official English teacher for the 8th grade students for this academic year. In a week’s time, we will be deploying the Virtual Classroom technology at the Red Cross Government Girls' High School. I’ll be teaching 3 days remotely using our VC and 3 days physically present with them.

How do I feel? Excited, but at the same time, a little nervous. After all, it’s about making a difference to 50 odd girls. And that’s a big responsibility!


I’ve been gearing up for a month now, reading up on teaching techniques, working with our engineers to fix all minor bugs, and getting more features added in our Virtual Classroom application. Emotionally and mentally, I’ve determined not to be disappointed and even when I do, not to give up.

It’s going to be yet another exciting and challenging year. And I need all the good wishes and blessings that you could bestow upon me :)

On bags and baggages

It is generally an undisputed fact that textbooks are indispensable to education, that one can’t learn successfully without them. For example, all through school, for every class I attended, there had to be a textbook opened at my desk. (Some classes could take place, without them—singing and painting—and those subjects felt different, somehow.) To learn, you had to use a textbook, that was the simple rule. In fact, I was once punished for forgetting a textbook at home. And that of course made sense: we could not study, or pass an exam without the textbook—an entire year’s worth of knowledge was in there!

While the importance of textbooks can hardly be disputed, some problems do come up as a result of this dependence. One problem is that both teachers and students in India often tend to believe that textbooks are “enough” and learning from other sources is unnecessary. The second problem is that the combined weight of all the books makes the schoolbag so heavy that forcing little children to carry such bags becomes a form of child abuse and child labor, and certainly an unpleasant way of implementing a human right.

But here is something interesting: the education department in Chandigarh, India set out to solve the “heavy schoolbags” problem, and in the process may also have addressed the first problem!

The department is doing away with bags/textbooks till the 2nd grade after the summer holidays, and plans to keep the higher classes also free of textbooks soon. It seems the education department has already initiated a training program where 50 teachers have been trained on how to teach without textbooks. For all I know, this may lead to a new kind of teaching and learning methodology, where teachers would start experimenting and challenge the creative streak in them.

The move to work without textbooks might just introduce a level of experimentation in teaching and learning, and hopefully make education less of a burden than it tends to be.

Good news from UNESCO

Early last year, while researching on education, I read bundles of reports from UNESCO, UNICEF, EFA etc. The 2005 UNESCO report, while highlighting the phenomenon of the Out-of-School students, called upon us to understand better who they are and what background they are from, to help us design programs for them.

A vibrant organization here in Hyderabad, the MV Foundation takes care of over 2500 schools in A.P. They employ volunteer teachers in these schools and make sure that the dropout rate is controlled. They also rescue child labors, who are often dropouts, rehabilitate them, and prepare them to rejoin school with the help of their specially designed bridge course.

If the number of school dropouts has decreased in recent years, organizations like MVF have had a lot to do with it.. As I read this news from UNESCO, I rejoice with high sounding cymbals.

06-05-2008 - The number of primary-school-age children not in primary or secondary school fell by 2 million worldwide between 2005 and 2006, according to new estimates published by UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS).

The new figures confirm a downward trend: between 1999 and 2006, the number of these children fell from 103 million to 75 million. From a regional perspective, South and West Asia reported the greatest progress. This was mainly due to changes in India, where the number of children out of school fell by over 12 million as participation in primary education significantly improved for girls (accounting for more than 75% of the decrease).

Sub-Saharan Africa also made important strides, with a reduction of 10 million. This was largely the result of progress reported by the Governments of Ethiopia and the United Republic of Tanzania.

Globally, more than one-half of the 75 million out-of-school children are girls. The following countries had 2 million or more children out of school in 2006: Afghanistan, Ethiopia, China, Democratic Republic of Congo, India, Nigeria, Pakistan and Sudan.

These figures are part of the latest release of UIS education statistics for the pre-primary to tertiary levels for the school year ending in 2006. The new data are available in the UIS Data Centre.

Goverment of Madhya Pradesh plans for an extraaa step

The government of Madhya Pradesh plans to increase the working hours in schools from 10am-5pm from the next academic session which is July. This initiative is to improve the performance of the students in schools by increasing the time for each period and perhaps a study period as well. However, many are skeptical about this plan-- educators are concerned because children cannot be forced to learn by keeping them in the school premises. Other concerns are like having to catch up on co-curricular activities. Parents are worried that if students get home only after 5pm, that leaves no room for coaching classes. Or children might end up sleeping late.

Read the news here