2 posts tagged “india”
Education in India is a topic I often find myself writing about. It's probably because of all the places I have worked, and all the poverty I have seen from the Mississippi Delta in the United States to rural Niger to the favelas of Brazil, India has made the most impact on me, personally.
I wish I could say that I roll up my sleeves and get my hands dirty, a modern-day Mother Theresa (minus the Catholicism, overwhelming sense of duty, purity of heart, and nun stuff of course), but in reality, my work is hard to explain. "Evaluating programs and policies in order to eventually contribute to systemic change" doesn't sound quite as fulfilling as, say, "feeding hungry people" or "teaching poor children how to read." But I do what I can, and try to learn something about the world, the country, the people, and myself.
India is in the news a lot these days. The cover of TIME last year described "India, Inc." The New York Times article and video I linked the other day pointed out that the booming economy will stall unless the workforce of India changes. First and foremost among this is educating its children. The top schools and students in India are among the best in the world. The rest are not even close.
The NYT piece highlighted rural poverty. India also has significant urban poverty: the fabled slums known the world over and covered in such recent books as Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters by Robert Neuwirth and Planet of Slums by Mike Davis.
Urban poverty in India, specifically Mumbai, is the focus of a feature in the May 2007 National Geographic Magazine. The community of Dharavi, one of Mumabai's slum pockets that is a city in itself, is focused on. It is considered prime real estate by politicians and developers who want to shift its 1 million residents to high rise projects and raize the slum so it can be redeveloped for the growing middle class and more affluent residents.
Further on in the magazine is a section called How You Can Help that highlights two Indian non-governmental organizations (NGOs) working in slums.
One of the organizations featured is Pratham, an organization that is working in 21 states across India to improve the sobering illiteracy and primary school completion rates of the country's children. In the course of my work, I've been given the privilege of spending time in some of these so-called slum communities in Bangalore, Hyderabad, and Pune, and working with some of the leaders and implementers in the Pratham network including the Akshara Foundation in Bangalore and Pratham Hyderabad.
As an evaluator, I guess I am supposed to be objective. However, I am always impressed by the passion and dedication of all the people and organizations I have "evaluated" over the years, and even those who aren't superstars have still accomplished important things in their communities. I think it's really important to acknowlege that, because really, the idea of being "evaluated" will always conjure up the picture of a pencil pusher who operates on a deficit model: find out what people are doing wrong and make sure their mom, their boss, and their funder knows about it! That's not what I'm about, and it's not what evaluation should be about.
Even with my glass-is-half-full attitude, I just can't say enough about Pratham and their work. They keep things to a fundamental level.
-Find out how many children can't read
-Train teachers in a methodology that will show them how to read
-Assess students regularly for progress, so you know if they can read now.
Repeat as necessary.
That's it. I've been a part of such complicated development projects with a million objectives and sophisticated models and millions upon millions of dollars in equipment and infrastructure. This isn't one of them.
It can be implemented in government schools or in a clearing under a tree.
I don't mean to oversimplify things. There's a lot more that goes into it, from pre-school to access to books to adapting to each city's languages and unique culture. It's hard work, what this oragnization does, from the very top level of building political will to the very logistical challenges posed by delivering millions of storycards to students every day. Not to mention the sheer scope of that needs to be done. If 40% of the nation's children can't read to grade level...in a country of more than a billion people... that's almost unfathomable to many here.
I wrote an article on my experiences in India for my university's alumni magazine. It's not yet online, although I have the hard copy right here. In it, I recount hearing children in these slums speak of becoming engineers, doctors, lawyers, and astronauts, and how hard the road will be for them when simply learning to read is such an obstacle for many. I concluded the piece by saying: "Who says they won't succeed? India is changing at a pace unfathomable to many who live here. Maybe these children will flourish in ways we can't begin to imagine."
If they do, it will be in large part due to oragnizations like Pratham.
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photos copyright Caryn Sweeney, 2006. Do not reproduce without permission.
In Its Match With China, India Penalizes Its Own Team. Paid content (sorry).
The above article by Nicholas Kristof starts:
"India is stirring after many centuries of torpor, and it has a chance of ending this century as the capital of the world, the most important nation on earth. You see up-and-coming cities like Hyderabad or Ahmedabad, and it’s easy to believe that India will eventually surpass China.
But here in rural Bihar state in northern India, there’s no economic miracle to be seen. And it’s difficult to see how India can emerge on top unless it takes advantage of its greatest untapped resource: its rural population..."
The author then continues:
"So in the middle of this century, India will still be held back by its failure to educate, feed and vaccinate its children today. This failure will haunt India for many decades to come. Sure, China has many similar problems, with growing gaps between rich and poor and an interior that is being left far behind. But rural Chinese schools provide a basic education, including solid math and science skills."
I've had the privilege to spend time in both Indian and Chinese schools, and the author here makes a tremendous point. The two countries don't even compare. You can't even compare many urban Indian schools to rural Chinese schools.
However, I think the point is very well-made. There is room in India for rapid-scale improvements, made not because the government or the party makes it happen, but because it makes good business sense, and the intellectual brain power, capacity, competitive dirve, market, and political will exists in-country to make it happen. Which is not to say China doesn't have it, but in my opinion (as a civilian, not in my professional capacity), China's development is hampered by hierarchy and acceptance of an inability to change that is part of living in a country where censorship abounds, mistrust and xenophobia isn't challenged, and voicing dissent is punishable.
It's easy for folks over on my side of the globe to see India and China and shrug and say "two countries," like they would list, say, France and Germany.
However, when we talk of the potential of India and China, we are talking about countries that are starting to get a sense of what would happen if they harnass the resources they have, which at the moment is roughly 2.5 BILLION people.
Billion. That's a lotta million. (tm) Cameron Crowe.
That's a workforce that can certainly bring some of the old guard of the world powers to their knees. And when these countries do overtake some of the current super economic-powers... who will they work with? The relics of former colonizers (with whom they still do share some strong ties)? Or...Africa? South America?
Like they say...shift happens.
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photos (c) Caryn Sweeney, 2006. Do not reproduce. (on the top: community class in the middle of Hyderabad, India. On the bottom: rural impoverished school in Du An, China, outside of Nanning)
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