Ending Centuries of Illiteracy

The people in this hamlet of rice paddies and mud do not know what year it is, they cannot name the country they live in, and they are demanding an end to their ignorance.

In October, in a document scratched out by one of the village’s only literate men and signed with residents’ thumbprints, the villagers took up the unprecedented offer of the state’s chief minister to provide a teacher and books within 90 days to any village that requested them.

“We are all waiting for our school,” said Prem Singh, standing in the darkness with a lantern near his face.

Singh and the villagers of Khajourtola are the latest enrollees in a social revolution that is sweeping the Indian countryside and bringing education to villages whose inhabitants have led lives of almost total isolation. Begun nearly three years ago here in Madhya Pradesh, a sprawling and impoverished state of 80 million people, the “education guarantee” program has created 21,000 schools--a pace of about 20 a day--in the most remote villages.

It’s education at its most basic: Children study in mud huts, next to bean fields, under the open sky. The teachers, drawn from the villages, often have received little formal schooling themselves. Many students are the sons and daughters of the social pariahs in India known as the “untouchables.” A large number are girls--historically deprived of education in India--going to school for the first time.

“I don’t want to be a thumb-stamper,” said Sunita Kumari, a 9-year-old girl in the remote low-caste village of Ganeshpura, using a term to describe people who cannot write their name. “I want to stay in school as long as I can.”

Madhya Pradesh’s village schools have spread so fast and created such a stir that two other states have decided to send an identical message to their illiterate villagers: Demand a school and we’ll give you one. Rajasthan state has created 11,000 makeshift schools since April; Uttar Pradesh, population 140 million, is just getting started. The World Bank and European Union, encouraged by the effort’s success, have agreed to help fund schools in the three states.

The small group of Indian bureaucrats and politicians that dreamed up the program believes that it has found a way to provide basic education to the villages of India, where the population of 350 million constitutes the world’s largest pool of illiterate people.

The program’s backers believe that the lack of universal education in India has been one of the main obstacles to the country’s attempts to modernize. They say the goal is to break long-held traditions of caste and gender, which for centuries have made the schooling of girls and the impoverished among the lowest national priorities.

“Somewhere along the line, India got off the track,” said Digvijay Singh, the chief minister of Madhya Pradesh and the driving force behind the village schools. “We decided that if we put a teacher in every village, everything else would take care of itself.”

Some Experts Worry About the Teachers

Yet for all the enthusiasm inspired by the experiment, some experts worry that the village schools may become a shoddy replacement for more formal education. Their chief concern is the teachers: village men and women, often with little schooling, who are trained in a mere 20 days. The big test for the schools, the experts say, will come soon, when the first village children enter the equivalent of fourth grade.

“My guess is that the teachers won’t be able to do the higher-level classes,” said Jacob Aikara, a professor of education at the Tata Institute in Bombay. “They just don’t know enough.”

When he launched the program in 1997, Chief Minister Singh faced a situation in Madhya Pradesh that was at once catastrophic and common throughout northern India: More than half the state’s people over the age of 6 could not read. In some areas, female literacy was unknown. Numerous studies condemned the government-run primary schools, where teachers often failed to show up for class. Worse, there were no schools at all in about a third of the state’s 73,000 hamlets. That left nearly 1 million village children for whom schools were out of reach.

Singh, an elected official who wanted quick results, hit on a radical idea: Instead of relying on the state’s education bureaucracy, he created a parallel system answerable to him. Instead of waiting for schools to be built, Singh decided that the students could initially get along without them. To fight teacher absenteeism, Singh decided to give preference to people who lived in the villages, even if they didn’t have much schooling. To force parents to get involved, they would have to demand the school--and eventually help build it.

“If we waited for the government to build a school in every village, we would wait forever,” said K. Gopalakrishnan, an aide to Singh and one of the founders of the program.

The most novel aspect of the plan is its preference for hiring villagers as teachers, even if they have as few as 10 years of schooling. In ordinary state-run schools, most teachers have a college diploma, but those assigned to small villages quite often continue to live in cities and regularly fail to show up for classes.

Singh decided that the trade-off was worth it: He would hire less-educated teachers but teachers who had a stake in what they were doing.

“You don’t need a master’s degree to teach this,” Singh said.

In early 1997, the leaders of Madhya Pradesh sent notices to every panchayat--the boards governing India’s 500,000 villages. They offered to put a teacher and books within 90 days into any village that demanded a school. The only requirements were that the village have at least 40 children--25 for villages inhabited by one of India’s indigenous tribes--and that the students live at least half a mile away from any other school.

The result: In the first year, more than 10,000 villages stepped forward to demand teachers and books.

“We were overwhelmed,” said Amita Sharma, another of the program’s creators.

‘The Children Are Happier’

A visitor to Ganeshpura, a remote village of approximately 200 people about 90 miles northwest of the state capital, Bhopal, found 46 children sitting beneath a neem tree reciting the Hindi alphabet, singing songs and doing arithmetic. Many of the parents, on break from harvesting soybeans and corn, lingered nearby to watch.

“Our village has changed so much since we got our school,” said Hari Prasad, a white-turbaned old man who doesn’t know his age and who has two grandchildren enrolled in the school. “The children are happier and they are cleaner. Before they wandered aimlessly around the village. Now they are learning things that will help them get jobs.”

The villagers are Dalits, the lowest social class in India’s age-old caste system, which assigns nearly permanent status to every person at birth. Until the school arrived in January, Ganeshpura had almost no contact with the outside world: No electricity or water reaches there, and the nearest road is a two-mile walk. Most of the adults have little sense of time and virtually no knowledge of the world outside.

In the mid-1990s, the state government set up a school here, but the villagers said the teacher, who lived outside town, rarely showed up.

“He came once and gave candy to the children,” said Bandar Ram, whose grandson attends the school. “But he never came to teach.”

During the recent visit, the children of Ganeshpura spent their day in ways similar to Western children in the first years of elementary school. They read simple sentences, drew pictures and recited multiplication tables. Though parents in some villages said they sometimes pulled their children out of school to help them in the fields, the roster in Ganeshpura on this day showed every child present.

“I don’t want to be a farmer and work hard in the fields under the sun all my life,” said Ram Babu Varma, 13, whose father works the land. “My father told me: ‘Go to school. Don’t end up like me.’ ”

Since they began the program, the administrators have found that even the most remote villages usually have one person who can read and write and can teach others. The teachers are often men who, as boys, made the trek on foot to schools in other villages.

In Ganeshpura, the village literate was Ram Swarup Manderia, a mild-mannered 22-year-old with a 12th grade education who was working as a farmer when his fellow villagers demanded a school. Manderia’s son attends the school, and in private conversations, the parents said Manderia almost always shows up. He earns $25 a month.

The parents in Ganeshpura, who are nearly all illiterate, say even their children’s minimal education has helped at home. The children read government notices and wedding invitations to the parents, and do basic math so merchants can’t cheat the families. Bandar Ram says his grandson has put up a calendar at home.

“He shows me the dates,” the villager said. “For the first time, I know when the festivals are.”

Skills Learned at School Are Basic

The skills learned at Ganeshpura’s school are very basic, and many students said they want to continue through grades four and five. Some experts such as Aikara, the Bombay professor, worry that the teachers won’t be ready for them. Gopalakrishnan, the aide to Chief Minister Singh, said he’s betting that the village teachers will prove better than educators in ordinary public schools.

Years ago, the Indian government built a school about a mile from Ganeshpura in the town of Jamonia, but most of the village children never attended. One of the lessons that program’s administrators say they have learned is that many adults in rural areas are reluctant to let their children--particularly the girls--venture far from their villages.

In the case of Ganeshpura, more complicated reasons intruded as well. The village is separated from the Jamonia school by the land of higher-caste farmers who refuse to allow the Dalit children to cross their fields.

India has a long history of neglecting primary education. Today, the country spends about 3.4% of its gross national product on public education, well below the world average. India stood still as many of the countries of East Asia invested heavily in primary education and now are approaching universal literacy.

Recent reforms in India, such as Madhya Pradesh’s education guarantee program, suggest to some experts that the country is changing. Education reforms have taken hold in many states, and the voters apparently like it. In state assembly elections last year, Singh and his Congress Party won a large majority. Many attributed his victory to the popularity of the village schools.

The schools also appear to be eroding long-held beliefs that girls don’t need to be educated. Rural Indian girls have historically been denied educational opportunities, often because they leave home at an early age in arranged marriages to men in other villages. Many parents believe that they have no need to educate the girls since they will be of no economic benefit to them.

In Fakibiza, a remote village in Madhya Pradesh inhabited by the indigenous Baiga tribe, none of the adult women can read. But at the one-room school, begun two years ago under the education guarantee program, girls outnumber boys 23 to 11.

Dev Lal, a father with two young girls, said the family believes that it is even more important for girls to be educated than boys. When his daughters get married, they will probably go to a faraway village to a strange family that might not treat them well.

“After marriage, the girl belongs to the husband’s family--she is their property, and I will have no rights,” Lal said. “If the family tries to exploit one of my daughters, their ability to cope will be strengthened by education.”

On the other side of the state, in the village of Pratapura, another school day came to an end. Like most of the villages in Madhya Pradesh, Pratapura is dominated by Hinduism, whose pantheon contains tens of thousands of gods. Drawing together in a small circle and joining hands, the 41 children began a prayer to Saraswati, the goddess of education.

“O Saraswati, give us knowledge,” the children prayed. “For those who are able to read shall have many opportunities in life. And those who are not will toil in the fields forever.”