On Saturday, thousands of officials and teachers will fan out across Maharashtra to count – and mark with indelible ink – all children out of school. Each enumerator has been assigned 100 households to cover within the day. They will also have to check the status of toilets in each house they cover.
Maharashtra has an estimated 1.45 lakh children out of school between the ages of six and 13. This survey, which is essentially supposed to be a head count, will confirm the accuracy of this figure.
The survey gathered some controversy even before it got underway, with a public interest litigation challenging the use of indelible ink pending in the High Court. The PIL raises concerns that the use of indelible ink to mark children who are out of school might cause them an unnecessary stigma.
At a hearing on July 1, the court did not stay the survey.
Charges denied
Nand Kumar, Principal Secretary at the Department of School Education and Sports, maintains that surveyors will use indelible ink only because of logistics and rubbished claims that using indelible ink could be unethical.
“Do people get stigmatised when they go to vote?” he asked. “Learning, like voting, is also a matter of pride. We want to ensure children go to school and we are marking only those who do not go. A child enumerated at Andheri station within an hour comes to CST and again could get enumerated. We want to avoid this.”
Sachin Desai, a petitioner in the PIL, disagreed with Kumar. “This is not a matter of pride, who is literate and who is not,” he said. “They will be singling out children who do not go to school. That is discriminatory and unconstitutional.”
Desai added: “The administration is not child-friendly and Maharashtra is not a small state. It is densely populated over a huge area. One can imagine in what harsh conditions this survey will be conducted.”
Out of school but educated
Some of Desai’s concerns arise from his affiliation with the National Institute of Open Schooling, which provides an alternative to recognised government schooling. Desai runs an institution that provides vocational learning to underprivileged children.
NIOS’s programmes target school dropouts, neo-literates, marginalised groups and out of school children to provide a basic education, often vocational in nature. Organisations associated with it are often not registered as schools.
Desai worries that among those marked by enumerators will be a small but significant number of “out of school” children who are either home schooled or study under an open schooling system.
“We are not against the survey, but we think they should have applied some scientific method instead of doing it in a rush,” he said. “Nothing can emerge from a one-day survey.”
For now, Desai says, he and his associates will monitor the survey closely for evidence of misconduct that they might be able to use in their case against the state.
Jhatpat and other surveys
This is not the first time Maharashtra has attempted to count children out of school. In 2007, it conducted what officials at the state informally call the jhatpat (hasty) survey. The survey was conducted in every part of Maharashtra except the municipal region of greater Mumbai, said PR Pawar, now a deputy director at the government's flagship Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan universal education programme, who was then posted in Navi Mumbai.
“In that survey, we got students in the 8th and 9th standard to help us count children as they would know who was not attending school,” he said. The students, who were trained a few weeks before the survey happened, were remunerated for their efforts. No indelible ink was used then.
“Surveys are more difficult in urban than rural areas,” Pawar pointed out. “In villages, at least everyone knows who the children are. But in cities, it is difficult to trace them.”
The Union Ministry of Human Resource Development also regularly conducts out of school surveys across India, assisted by the Social and Rural Research Institute at IMRB International, a consultancy firm. These surveys, however, are not counts, but based on samples that are then scaled up to estimate the number of children out of school.
The field work for even this sample survey is conducted over several months, not as the one on Saturday will be, over a single day.
Tracking children
This survey is only a blip in the state’s larger schemes for monitoring school children. Later in July, Maharashtra will begin an ambitious series of tests across the state that will assess the level of learning of each child enrolled in schools. This will be the first of three tests that will be conducted each year.
The state will track the results of all children through a computerised database and identify the weak areas that need more inputs. It will also push for Aadhar enrolment at this point to better monitor children’s results.
“I am cool now because soon we will be able to survey every child by name,” Kumar said. “Teachers say that this child is in school, NGOs say that he isn’t. The computer enrolment ends that debate.”
We welcome your comments at
letters@scroll.in.
Maharashtra has an estimated 1.45 lakh children out of school between the ages of six and 13. This survey, which is essentially supposed to be a head count, will confirm the accuracy of this figure.
The survey gathered some controversy even before it got underway, with a public interest litigation challenging the use of indelible ink pending in the High Court. The PIL raises concerns that the use of indelible ink to mark children who are out of school might cause them an unnecessary stigma.
At a hearing on July 1, the court did not stay the survey.
Charges denied
Nand Kumar, Principal Secretary at the Department of School Education and Sports, maintains that surveyors will use indelible ink only because of logistics and rubbished claims that using indelible ink could be unethical.
“Do people get stigmatised when they go to vote?” he asked. “Learning, like voting, is also a matter of pride. We want to ensure children go to school and we are marking only those who do not go. A child enumerated at Andheri station within an hour comes to CST and again could get enumerated. We want to avoid this.”
Sachin Desai, a petitioner in the PIL, disagreed with Kumar. “This is not a matter of pride, who is literate and who is not,” he said. “They will be singling out children who do not go to school. That is discriminatory and unconstitutional.”
Desai added: “The administration is not child-friendly and Maharashtra is not a small state. It is densely populated over a huge area. One can imagine in what harsh conditions this survey will be conducted.”
Out of school but educated
Some of Desai’s concerns arise from his affiliation with the National Institute of Open Schooling, which provides an alternative to recognised government schooling. Desai runs an institution that provides vocational learning to underprivileged children.
NIOS’s programmes target school dropouts, neo-literates, marginalised groups and out of school children to provide a basic education, often vocational in nature. Organisations associated with it are often not registered as schools.
Desai worries that among those marked by enumerators will be a small but significant number of “out of school” children who are either home schooled or study under an open schooling system.
“We are not against the survey, but we think they should have applied some scientific method instead of doing it in a rush,” he said. “Nothing can emerge from a one-day survey.”
For now, Desai says, he and his associates will monitor the survey closely for evidence of misconduct that they might be able to use in their case against the state.
Jhatpat and other surveys
This is not the first time Maharashtra has attempted to count children out of school. In 2007, it conducted what officials at the state informally call the jhatpat (hasty) survey. The survey was conducted in every part of Maharashtra except the municipal region of greater Mumbai, said PR Pawar, now a deputy director at the government's flagship Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan universal education programme, who was then posted in Navi Mumbai.
“In that survey, we got students in the 8th and 9th standard to help us count children as they would know who was not attending school,” he said. The students, who were trained a few weeks before the survey happened, were remunerated for their efforts. No indelible ink was used then.
“Surveys are more difficult in urban than rural areas,” Pawar pointed out. “In villages, at least everyone knows who the children are. But in cities, it is difficult to trace them.”
The Union Ministry of Human Resource Development also regularly conducts out of school surveys across India, assisted by the Social and Rural Research Institute at IMRB International, a consultancy firm. These surveys, however, are not counts, but based on samples that are then scaled up to estimate the number of children out of school.
The field work for even this sample survey is conducted over several months, not as the one on Saturday will be, over a single day.
Tracking children
This survey is only a blip in the state’s larger schemes for monitoring school children. Later in July, Maharashtra will begin an ambitious series of tests across the state that will assess the level of learning of each child enrolled in schools. This will be the first of three tests that will be conducted each year.
The state will track the results of all children through a computerised database and identify the weak areas that need more inputs. It will also push for Aadhar enrolment at this point to better monitor children’s results.
“I am cool now because soon we will be able to survey every child by name,” Kumar said. “Teachers say that this child is in school, NGOs say that he isn’t. The computer enrolment ends that debate.”