5000 – 208 – 3.4. These are the number of children under five who die every day-hour-minute of malnutrition and malnutrition related disease. These diseases have fancy names: Kwashiorkor, Marasmus etc and the signs of malnutrition are many from moon and simian faces to dry eyes and bleeding gums; from enamel mottling teeth and brittle light hair to wasted muscles and skeletal deformities; from distended abdomen to poor memory. Next time you stop at a red light and a beggar child raps at your car window with his hand extended just look up and you will see some of all of these signs. Malnutrition also weakens the immunity of the child and thus s/he is likely to get infections and water related diseases. The children die of such diseases because they are map nourished.

One child dies every 17 seconds. Imagine how many will in the time it takes you to read this post. But I guess it will still seem surreal to the likes of us because we know this cannot happen to our love ones. So a statistic that should send us in a rage does not because we look at it dispassionately and remain unperturbed.

But this statistic, the one that SCREAMS at us at one child dies every 17 second because of being malnourished should actually make us hang our heads in shame and express our anger as this would not have happened if Government programmes that are three decades old and have been  paid by each one of us, had run properly. I am referring to the Anganwadi programme under the ICDS scheme.

This week a leading magazine runs an article titled Dying Malnourished In The IT Hub! It exposes how the outrageous way in which the ICDS programme runs in Bangalore. The article refers to death of three children six months ago that had led to a huge public uproar, forcing the state government to promise measures to ensure that no child in the city dies from inadequate nutrition in the future.

You guessed right: nothing has changed on the ground. The Anganwadis (creches) that are supposed to play a crucial role in combatting malnutrition are in an abysmal state. According to activists mid-day meals were not served in any of the anganwadis in Bengaluru for three months from January to March.

The article runs us through the action plan that had been drawn in the light of the outrage. One of the decisions was to open 40 anganwadis.  Nine months after the meeting, not a single anganwadi has been opened by the state. Not even a building has come up. Responding to a Right to Information (RTI) query, ministry officials said that they are still in the process of recruiting teachers for the anganwadis. The minister was unavailable for comment.

How do you react do this. I am speechless.

The question that comes to mind is that if food was not served where did the money go. What is interesting to note is that in spite of a Supreme Court judgement pointing out that that the involvement of private players as middlemen in food distribution schemes is a violation of the law and add that such initiatives have led to disastrous results, including corruption, the mining giant Vedanta was given the responsibility to distribute mid-day meals to 2 lakh children in four districts. Recently  the government decided to involve private companies in mid-day meal distribution in three more district. And to add insult to injury in 2012, a probe by the Karnataka Lokayukta had revealed that officials of the women and child development department were syphoning off funds meant for mid-day meals in connivance with the contractor, a company called Christy Friedgram Industry.

What do you call humans who feed on starving children!

I have often written about this issue and am writing once more because that is the only weapon I have. We have a new Government at the helm and it is promising to rectify matters but it is no easy task. How do you stop those who have tasted blood. And even with all the goodwill in the world a man and his team, however honest and motivated cannot handle the rot alone.

It is for us to take up the cudgels on behalf of these poor children and lend them our voice. There are anganwadis in every area so as concerned citizens why not visit them and ensure they work. We have the skills required and the persona that makes us heard. But will we do it or keeping on avoiding the eye of the beggar child every time we stop at a red light.

53% is the number of households who defecate in the open in India. This is according to a World Bank study. So about 300 million women have no access to toilets. The two young teenagers who were gang raped and hung on a mango tree had stepped out of their homes to relieve themselves. This is probably the only time women step out of their homes alone and thus become easy prey to sexual predators. One of the village women revealed candidly that Men go out in the day, so women can go only early in the morning or late at night.

The likes of us cannot even begin to imagine what life can be without access to a toilet. I remember a friend of mine, who was spearheading a nutrition programme for pregnant and lactating mothers, being told by the very group that she was targeting, that they would not alter their eating pattern in anyway as they had ‘trained’ their bodies to be in sync with the 3 to 4 am slot the women of their village were given to defecate in the field.

That was just an aparte.

Let us go back to the link between rapes and lack of toilet facilities. Maybe a sensible thing would be to initiate a massive time bound programme to ensure that every home has access to a safe toilet 24/7/365!  A community led Total Sanitation Campaign is in existence since 1999 but it seems as always to have been lost in translation.

As I have often held we are masters at quick fix solutions and crisis management and once again this is what seems to be happening once again. Even before one could say Jack Robinson, a leading NGO working on sanitation has ‘decided’ to  construct toilets in all the houses of Katra Shahadatganj village of Baduan, where two sisters were allegedly gangraped and murdered last week while they went to relieve themselves in fields. I wonder how many rapes it has taken for them to decide to take such action and above all why the previous Governments have not given this critical problem the attention it needed. It is estimated that India needs 120 million toilets. Time to address this with urgency.

It is said that 60% of the rapes in the state of UP where the horrific crime occurred. We have smart statistics and even quote them but what have we done about the issue. You would not believe me but many of the project why children who live in slums like the one in the picture do not have access to toilets. The ‘water tank’ you see in the picture is empty. It was the water tank atop a community toilet that must have once been inaugurated with much fanfare and lauded as an achievement, and then abandoned as it had got the initiator the brownie points sought. The families in the area use the railway tracks or any kind of privacy they can conjure. This is South Delhi.

Today Shining India cuts a sorry figure across the world. The US stated : it is “horrified” at reports of sexual violence and murders in India! The UN Chief is  appalled by the brutal rape and gruesome murder of two teenaged women in India who had ventured out because they did not have access to a toilet.

How many times are we going to hand our heads in shame and then get on with our lives.

An interesting article in today’s newspaper sums up the situation spot on. it states: So instead of flinching, keep looking for clues to how dalits are seen by far too many ‘other village folks’ in those upsetting photographs until you are horrified enough to do something about it. I wonder howling it will take in a scenario where those at the helm quip ‘boys will be boys’ not realising that such words travel faster than light and what may have bees said on the spur of the moment within a contact – the now jaded excuse of every politician who says an inanity – and become a reflection on us all and compelled the United Nations Secretary General to state: We say no to the dismissive, destructive attitude of ‘Boys will be boys’. Together, we can empower more people to understand that violence against women degrades us all. It is very shameful for us Indians to have to hear this, when we as a collective conscience should have been the ones to cry out loud.

So we will build toilets in a frenzy that will soon peter out. But let me ask you whether you really believe that building toilets will stop predators from prowling. They will simply have to look elsewhere. We cannot keep all likely to be raped  women shut in a country where you can be raped at 70  years of age or if you are a few months old!

You do not want rape to happen than build toilets and lock every female – from birth to death – away! I have a better solution kills us all, and then live and grow old till the last man standing. End of the story

If you are raped it is always your fault. In the city it is your clothes, your life style etc that incites rape and in the villages it is your caste, as is that gives the feudal lord and his kiln the right to ravage you. In the article mentioned above and aptly entitled Until we recognise caste atrocities for what they are, they will continue unabated as in Badaun, the author looks at the horrific scene from the likes of us’s point of view and says While we take in the contents of these photographs — of the two teenage girls who were raped and then left hanging from a tree last week in Katra Shadat Ganj village in Uttar Pradesh’s Badaun district — we also quietly take in a different set of information: so these are dalits in a UP village in 2014 India. Our brain searches and fails to find any distinguishing feature to mark it as a gathering of dalits. So this is how dalits look like, we tell ourselves.

True we may sort of connect with the short dress, smoking and drinking view but a girl like the one hanging on the tree does quite tick as to us caste remains a vague notion that happens in some other world! As the author states What the display in Badaun underlines is caste not just as demographic pie charts or identifiable target groups for social welfare programmes, but also as an all-too-visible bar code for higher castes in vast swathes of our sovereign socialist secular democratic republic to identify prey. Whether we like it or not, this dehumanising tradition thrives in many parts of our land.

Many of my colleagues belong are Dalits and believe you me, they have qualities that I have rarely found in the supposed high castes! Yet they tell me how even today in their villages they are not aloud to draw water from the main village well; they have to get off their bicycle when they passed in front of the house of a high caster person; they cannot smoke in front of any person of a higher caste; their wedding parties with horse, band and music can only happen outside the village. After they hanse danced and frolicked, the music stops, the groom gets of his horse and the wedding party moved quietly across the village to the house of the bride. No wonder many now chose to have their weddings in the city by hiring wedding halls and playing their music to their heart’s content!

But this is the reality of India version 2014. This is happening a few kilometres away from where we live. It is time we took on our responsibilities and dirtied our hands. In 2014 we chose democracy over family rule. It is not enough to celebrate a PM who has risen from the soil, it is time every Indian enjoys the same rights and above all the right to true freedom.

I urge you to listen to the words of this rap. They are heart rendering. Here are a some snippets:

An educational system isn’t worth a great deal if it teaches young people how to make a living but doesn’t teach them how to make a life wrote activist David Suzuki. It makes a lot of sense but to reach there, we in India have a log way to go. At present our system does not even teach children how to make a living, let alone how to make a life. Education today for a large part of India’s children, I mean those born on the wrong side of the fence, is abysmal and practically non-existent. We have first hand knowledge of this as this is what we have been doing for the past decade and a half! Teaching children who attend  State run schools! What is heart breaking and wowing at the same time is to see how easy it is for these kids to catch up and reach the top. A child who may have spent 5 years in school and not learnt to read let alone write properly, needs just a year to come up to the mark. We can barely help a handful.

I saw a TV clip yesterday and it broke my heart.

It is a clip about a school in Bihar where there is a building where 4 schools run, one school in one room! What is heart breaking is to see the children in these images. Far from being unruly or inattentive, they do the best they can in the circumstances and the desire to learn is palpable in the eyes of these children. Shame on us and shame on any Government that allows this to happen. Again and again we seem to be masters at letting down our children. I wonder whether those in power watch such programmes of have a way of finding out the reality on the field. Sadly, it does not seem to be so as even in India’s capital city, conditions in government run schools are pathetic.

I hope our new Minister will look at the realities on the ground and before embarking on sweeping changes, will do something for the immediate. I was perturbed but I guess not shocked to see an article stating that the new Minister wishes to include Ancient Texts in the curriculum. I guess it was to be expected though I would have thought that she being a young mother who has children in school does realise that all is not well in our education system. I would have liked her to audit the ground realities and try and see what could be done to better the plight of the children NOW in school.

I agree that many things need to be reviewed but there are some that need immediate attention. If we go by Suzuki’s words and look at school as a place that does nor just help you make a living but should teach you how to make a life, the onus upon those to whom we have entrusted the responsibility of imparting the right to education now enshrined in our Constitution to our children is huge. I have nothing against teaching ancient texts and for that matter would love seeing our children learning about ancient texts of other civilisations too, but as things stand now the State has not been able to provide even the basic needed to impart quality education. There are schools without teachers, and without desks and drinking water and toilets: the list is endless. Maybe the first task that needs to be done is fix what one can for the children in school now.

We were all taken aback by the results of the Teacher Eligibility Test in 2013 when 1 in every 56 candidate cleared the exam! We are again shocked when we learnt that Indian children ranked 2nd last when tested on their reading, math and science abilities. The only country they beat was Kyrgyzstan. Yet Indian children do exceedingly well when given an enabling environment. This not only the case of Indian children studying abroad but also of Project Why children who study in State run schools and often come to us with huge lacunas, but make these up in a jiffy and stand their own after that. And this I would like to underline is with the help of untrained teachers. Yet these very teachers have the true skills required for children to succeed: patience, love, motivation and commitment. For us every child is a winner and is so treated. It is up to us to find the spark and ignite it. So on a short term I strongly believe that what we need is motivated people who could pull up the children bogged in the system, children who cannot wait.

It is sad that our present education system dos not even teach people to make a living. This is because of internal flaws in the laws that seemed to have been drafted by people who either do not have children, or have forgotten what education is all about. I will again stress the need to rise the pass percentage from 33 to 50% and to put in abeyance the no fail policy till class VIII. This policy can only work if the teachers are committed and proper internal assessments are done. In many state run schools, answers are written on the blackboard and dutifully copied by the students. I can never forget  the stand-offish manner in which a secondary school Principal told me that they only covered 40% of the course as kids could pass with 33! What they do not realise is that by doing this they shut all the doors to higher education as in today’s India you need 99%+ to accede to a  state run University where fees are still affordable. So it becomes imperative for all schools, particularly state run ones to ensure that children get the best education possible and a level playing ground. Now this can happen only by raising the standards of state run schools so that they become an option for middle class parents who I know will welcome this with glee. Only a quality common school system can usher the change we want or pretend to want. As long as political parties will go the ‘vote bank’ way, this is a long time coming.

Another aberration is the age span for free education: 6 to 14. We all know that the 0 to 6 interval is very important to the child’s growth and learning. Pre school teaches many skills – motor, social, conceptual – that prepare the child to formal schooling. Whereas ‘rich’ kids have literate parents who become their first teachers and are sent to pre schools when they are 36 months, kids from poor homes spend these years on the street, often cared for by a host of people, hearing foul language and  learning poor habits and develop a set of skills that often become a hindrance to their schooling. In many homes they never see a book or newspaper and the only written word they may see is what is printed on boxes and packages. Transiting from forced free spirits to a world of supposed structure is difficult.

True a scheme was mooted more than 3 decades ago which was supposed to run creches where such skills should have been taught. But these are a total failure and need to be re looked at and reinvented. I would urge the new dispensation to include pre school in the free school ambit. That is the beginning but what do you say to a compulsory school system that ends at 14 when the child would be in class VII or VIII. A right to education should mean a right to schooling to the end. 14 makes no sense at all, more so when rather than improve state run schools, the Government has come up with yet another aberration: 25% reservations in all schools for poor kids, what happens to a kid when he reaches the age of 14. Does he leave school, revert to a state run school or have his father rob a bank to pay the high fee. However the reality is that this facility has been hijacked by clever middle class parents so in fact, nothing has changed for the poor children.  

Another flaw in our system is that it presumes that every child should get the same schooling all the way till class XII. With the 33% saga it means that you may have a lot of semi literate kids with a school leaving certificate. Now all kids are not intellectuals and even if they were, the market forces needs other skills that can be taught whilst still in school. It is time we widened the science-commerce- art triad to include vocational skills and even hands on training. A class VIII kid interested in car or bike repairs could begin learning this skill and going to a maintenance centre let us say twice a week so that by the time he finishes school he is ready to join the skilled work force. I hope someone in the corridors that decide the fate of children, think about this. Sadly what we have seen in the past years is scant out of the box thinking.

Children are not and should not be guinea pigs. The CBSE introduced the Formative and Summative Assessment and open book examinations: Some of the main features of Formative assessment are that it is diagnostic and remedial, provides effective feedback to students, allows for the active involvement of students in their own learning, enables teachers to adjust teaching to take account of the results of assessment and recognises the profound influence that assessment has on the motivation and self-esteem of students, both of which are crucial influences in learning. I wonder how many teachers are capable of comprehending this system, let alone using it at all. These can only be successful with well trained teachers and the state run school kids face a double whammy here: uninterested teachers an illiterate parents. Before jumping into new areas it is imperative to ensure that all capabilities to implement them are tested and functional. This is a long term game and not one that can be imposed at the drop of a hat.

Teaching children about ones own culture should not be frowned at, provided it is done in a comprehensive and inclusive manner. All children in the French school system learn that our ancestors the Gauls were good warriors. I did too. But this was in junior classes and as we grew up the curriculum widened and by the end of one’s schooling you had a well rounded education. To give just you just an example which will I hope make my point clear, the French Baccalaureate, when I passed it,  had both a written and an oral exam. The oral exam was to test your ability to think out of the box. History was an oral examination and the curriculum was World War II to present times, in my case 1967. There were no choices, you actually picked a question out of a ‘hat’ and were given 20 minutes to prepare. The question I got was: Had World War II been lost by the allies, what, in your opinion would have been the present economic situation. There is no right or wrong answer. You just needed to defend your point. No matter how much you learn by heart, it will hot help you unless you understand what you learn. In counterpoint to this anecdote, when I wrote my first year Philosophy (Hons) papers in Delhi University, it was replete with ‘I think’ and ‘in my opinion’. I failed! My teacher told me to put all my thoughts in quotes and put a French Philosopher’s name, and I would pass. I did and passed with honours! Get the point.

To teach to make a life and not a living, it is important to help children learn to think for themselves and find their solutions. It is impossible to show them that there is more than one ‘right’ way. Education stands on the famous Delors Pillars of learning:  Learning to Know, Learning to Do, Learning to Live Together, and Learning to Be.

When I look at education in India, I wonder if we even achieve one of them.