Little reason for India to celebrate this Children’s Day

Rakesh Mani

• Last Updated: November 11. 2009 12:38AM UAE / November 10. 2009 8:38PM GMT

For decades, India has celebrated Jawaharlal Nehru’s birthday, November 14, as Children’s Day. The day is supposed to remind each of us of our commitment to the welfare and inalienable rights of children. Its annual commemoration, however, does not extend beyond some events at school and sermons on “Chacha” Nehru’s love for children.

Nehru was a mishmash of many influences, in his own words, “a curious combination of West and East, out of place everywhere and at home nowhere”. If India stands united today, it is largely thanks to Nehru’s role as a nurturer of Indian democracy and his legacy as a great constitutional democrat. Because it is India’s pluralist, secular and democratic constitution – pieced together by Nehru and his team – that glues the country together despite its diversity and rampant provincialism.

Today, our appreciation of his historic role has been somewhat tarnished by the fact that his daughter, Indira Gandhi, undermined many of the democratic institutions he built. But anyone in doubt of Nehru’s contribution to Indian democracy need only look around at India’s neighbours – Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal – and their democratic frameworks.

But while Nehru’s legacy is praiseworthy in many respects, it runs into serious trouble when the debate turns to primary education. The sorry state of children’s affairs in today’s India is enough to make one look at “Chacha” Nehru with a somewhat sceptical eye. There is so little attention given to the incontrovertible right of a child to enjoy good health, education and a nutritious diet.

Reports from international organisations such as Unicef and the World Bank have roundly criticised the abject failure of governance in health and education that has left Indian children among the most disadvantaged in the world. According to recent statistics, some two million children younger than five years old die every year in India. That’s one every 15 seconds which, shamefully, is the highest rate in the world.

Instead of singing hosannas to Nehru and his love for children, what we need to be thinking about this Children’s Day is how we can get our society of adults to be held accountable for the treatment of its youngest citizens.

Nehru, an arch proponent of modernisation, made a decision in the early 1950s to build out India’s higher education platform to compete technologically in the Cold War era, which resulted in primary and secondary education being largely ignored. The country focused instead on building institutions that could produce more engineers, scientists and doctors. But even this legacy is an open question.

India’s best higher education institutions may be good feeder schools for prestigious programmes abroad, but the ability of graduates to compete globally still remains in doubt. Leaving aside a few elite schools, India’s universities are still not globally recognised. Only a handful rank among the best in the world, and none of these are full-fledged universities.

The maturity and progress of a nation depends on the character of its education system. But even with a Nehruvian focus on higher education, India still faces severe shortages of skilled manpower in areas such as health, aviation and engineering. While India faces a severe shortage of skilled labour, unemployed science graduates can be found under every brick. Forget about having them find jobs in a globalised economy; these graduates aren’t of a high enough calibre to compete in the Indian economy.

These are hurried times, and few people pause to consider the ambiguous nature of their personal contribution, or lack thereof, to Indian children or even the real significance of Children’s Day.

How, then, do we see Children’s Day? We’re quite possibly in the worst of situation at the moment – more than one of every three children who begin primary school will drop out before 5th grade. World Bank statistics show that fewer than 40 per cent of Indian adolescents are attending secondary school.

The Right to Education Bill is being trumpeted as India’s great solution. Alas, it is only a sketchy blueprint that has yet to be implemented effectively. The most credible efforts in the world of primary education today seem to be coming from NGOs or in private education. The explosion of private schools and tutorial classes across income levels tells us that the Indian populace is crying out for a more robust primary and secondary education system.

For a country like India, where almost 40 per cent of the population is below the age of 15, this makes for a disturbing long-term trend. And globally, 25 per cent of the entire workforce will be Indian in about 20 years – so be sure that the quality of education Indian children are receiving today is going to impact us all in the near future.

The severity of the education crisis demands a paradigm shift in the way we view and treat the health and education of young children in India. Let’s hope that this Children’s Day, that debate will begin.

Rakesh Mani is a 2009 Teach For India fellow