Education Push Yields Little for India's Poor

Somini Sengupta reports from Lahtora, a small village in West Bengal, on the abysmal state of government schooling in India. Sengupta visited a school in this impoverished rural area, one lacking in every aspect of modern education. Teachers who showed up, if at all, came late. The only teacher with a degree in the village never taught, but still was on the government payroll. The lucky students had rice sacks to sit on, while the others simply sat in the grass through the two hours of roll call. The head teacher, Rashid Hassan, had no idea which grades children were in. The children did not have materials provided for them and none of them were in a position to buy some themselves. Even the government’s new lunch program is failing. The program is for one hot meal a day for each student, and was designed specifically for poor areas such as Lahtora. In Hassan’s classroom, rice was piled in a corner, untouched. Hassan claimed that he could not serve it because it was unofficially given to the school. Sengupta reports that this might also be linked to the enormous problem of bribery in these small villages.
Education is a huge problem for India. 40% of India’s population is under the age of 18, and this should be a huge source of progress for the country. However, among the porrest 20 percent of Indian men, only half are literate, and not even two percent graduates from high school. In a survey of 16,000 villages in 2007, released Wednesday, found that “vast numbers of [children] could not read, write, or perform basic arithmetic”. 4 out of 10 fifth grade children cannot read at a second grade level, while 7 out of 10 of those children could not subtract. Sengupta argues that “if in the bast a largely poor and agrarian nation could afford to leave millions of its people illiterate, that is no longer the case. Not only has the roaring economy run into a shortage of skilled labor, but also the nation’s many new roads, phones, and television sets have fueled new ambitions for economic advancement among its people – and new expectations for schools to help them achieve it”.

To see the new york times' picture slideshow of the Lahtora school, click here: http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/01/17/world/20080117india_index.html.