AN UNFINISHED MISSION : THE ROAD
 AHEAD
 

UEE by 2001 AD is a daunting task but it is a mission to which the nation pledged itself when India made its "tryst with destiny" forty-six years ago. It is a legacy of the freedom struggle, a dream cherished by Gopalakrishna Gokhale, Mahatma Gandhi and the Founding Fathers of the Constitution. Ever since planning began, India has been striving towards universalising of elementary education. Though the goal is still full of challenges, to miss what has been accomplished, in terms of spread of institutions,participation and equalisation of educational opportunities, is to "consider not the beam in thine own eye".

The nation as a whole must keep on striving to complete the mission and erase what Mahatma Gandhi once called a national shame and curse.

National Will

The elementary education system has to bring into its fold areas and social strata more difficult to reach;what is ahead is a marathon race along a tortuous path strewn with socioeconomic barriers and impediments. That business as usual would not do is the moral of successful Total Literacy Campaigns. It is not the State apparatus alone but the whole civil society that needs to be mobilised for the cause of UEE.

Perhaps the greatest challenge before the country today as it strives to universalise primary education lies in this area of perceptional change. The common perception that the government alone must bear the sole responsibility for providing education needs to change. While the Union and the State governments have their full share of responsibilities, in the final analysis, it is people's involvement in educational reconstruction which will make the crucial difference in meeting the challenge of universalizing primary education in India. While the task and the challenges that confront India are formidable and daunting, they are achievable. The onus of action now rests both individually and collectively on teachers and educators, NGOs, the industrial sector, other sectors, the media, politicians, panchayat leaders, grassroots workers, on each

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and everyone. A grand alliance - an interactive combination of local, voluntary and state initiatives coupled with an assortment of productive, result oriented approaches and strategies holds the key to universalisation of primary education in India. That grand alliance needs to be sustained at least for a decade or so,if UEE in its entirety - access, retention and attainment - is to be achieved. Herein lies the challenge. As the experience with the Indian economy has shown, an overarching crisis can provide a fillip to reform. The failure to achieve UEE is no less a crisis - the adverse impacts on demography,productivity and status of women and disadvantaged groups are too well known to bear repetetion - but it is a crisis with a difference, a silent crisis lacking the immediacy of a default on international committments and as such devoid of that momentum to spur action. Therefore the National Will to achieve UEE has to be periodically renewed so that it does not flag and shrivel.

Holistic View Needed

Educational administration has long tended to be too pre-occupied with provision of facilities -- schools, school buildings and appointments of teachers to the neglect of the processes required to make the system work. There is enough empirical evidence on the mismatch between access and enrolment and to cast doubts on the pro- priety of this institutional pre-occupation.

This is said not to belittle the importance of such facilities to schools but to emphasize that the construction of school buildings and lower pupil teacher ratios are not the be all and end all of UEE. The education system, the state and the civil society at large should internalise a broader functional view of education, a view which conceives education as a dynamic,cumulative lifelong process,encompassing a wide diversity of learning opportunities,applying to all people, but laying stress on girls,children and youth, particularly those belonging to the disadvantaged groups. Strategies are needed to bring about the perceptional change. Innovation and dissemination are important components of any such strategy. Nothing can bring about the percep- tional changes faster than the development and dissemination of viable and scalable models of non-formal education. Regional and

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international cooperation can facilitate innovation and dissemination.

Financial Resources

The importance of financial resources cannot be exaggerated. As the economy is reformed, as state intervention gets re-focused and as public expenditure is restructured more budgetary resources will flow to education, particularly to universalisation of elementary education. To this end educational reform needs to be fitted into the "architecture that our (economic) reforms seek to create". The Prime- Minister has already stated at the EFA Summit that the country was determined to achieve the goal of allocation of six per cent GNP for education during the Ninth Five Year Plan.

Management

While economic liberalization and the consequent financial restructuring can be expected to facilitate greater resource flow to education far more difficult is the management of change. The system, as of now, barely works and hardly discharges even the routine functions effectively. There is hardly any accountability. To transform such a system to one which can take on the unfinished task of UEE with elan and a new mindset is no mean task. There is no better way to ensure accountability than an awakened and "demanding" community, for the creation of which the 73rd and 74th Constitution Amendments hold great promise.

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