India Rising: Tales from a Changing Nation (29 page)

Jayaraj approaches a low-hung brick building amid a row of squalid shacks. The cramped, single-room structure houses another of Care and Share’s literacy centres. Inside, a gaggle of obedient three- and four-year-olds is studiously repeating the alphabet. Our arrival sparks a frisson of excitement. Space is limited. We stand at the door. I take some photos. The children squeal. And then we take our leave.

At the next stop, we tarry longer. NSC Bose Nagar is likewise located on the city’s fringes. An older, low-rise version of Bombay colony, the neighbourhood has the advantage of being bounded by open fields on one side. The school, regrettably, is on the other. Hedged by an open sewer and the main trunk road into town, its three classrooms are, to my surprise, a haven of orderliness and calm.

Again, class is under way. The alphabet and days of the week are written in red chalk on the blackboard. The children sit at individual desks, watching the teacher and then, as soon as she turns, whispering and giggling among themselves. A girl of about five, with gap teeth and blue bows in her hair, is instructed to come to the front. The teacher scribbles a short ditty on the board. She is instructed to repeat it.

‘Butterfly, butterfly, where did you go?’ the girl recites in a nervous but clear voice. ‘House in the garden. Dancing, dancing.’ The other pupils stand up and collectively shake their hips. The teacher compliments the girl, who proudly walks back to her seat.

Since it is an English lesson, Jayaraj invites me to address the
class. I say a little about myself: where I’m from, my age and how many brothers and sisters I have. They look at me blankly, forty faces of total incomprehension.

Undeterred, my guide for the day asks if I have any questions for the teacher. ‘Why does she feel teaching is important?’ I ask. She too stares at me with the same blank expression. I ask again, slower this time. Still not understanding me, she turns to Jayaraj in search of help. The two converse in Telugu for a moment. ‘With more information,’ he repeats back to me, ‘the children can develop themselves.’ The teacher nods in affirmation.

Education and development. Back in Gadchiroli district, Charandas had made the same connection. That the two men should concur is perhaps not so surprising. The notion that learning opens horizons and provides fresh opportunities is the basic premise of most education systems. The poor understand that as quickly as anyone.

The conclusion to our visit proves as much. In a small classroom at the rear of the school, a group of young women is attending a tailoring class. Most have children in the school. Surisetti has two – a child of four, and another of five. She is twenty. She quit school on getting married, at the age of fourteen. Her husband works in an aluminium factory, earning one hundred and fifty rupees per day. Surisetti hopes tailoring will add an extra fifty to the tally. It’s the limit of her aspiration. Yet for her children, her hopes know no bounds. She would like to see them both become doctors.

Big ambitions are by no means limited to parents. A few days later, at a residential school run by Care and Share in the countryside, I’d meet eighteen-year-old Sasha. He has no parents, or none he can count on. His mother died when he was he was ten. His father abandoned him shortly afterwards. They’d been travelling by train from their native Gujarat. Pulling into Hyderabad station, his father had sent him off to buy water. When Sasha returned to the platform, the train had gone. His father had gone with it. He waited for three days for him to return. He never did. Speaking only Urdu and partially sighted, Sasha found his way to
Vijayawada, where Care and Share took him in. He’s now fluent in Telugu, Hindi and English. A successful cataract operation had also restored his sight to normal. He wanted to go on to study medicine. His heart’s desire, he’d tell me, is to become an eye surgeon.

Care and Share does everything it can to facilitate such ambitions. It encourages all its sponsored students to go on to further education. In doing so, they are already breaking the mould. Three in four literate Indians never go beyond school matriculation. For reasons of financial pragmatism and – to an extent – academic reality, most of the charity’s school leavers end up on courses that are relatively short, comparatively inexpensive and highly vocational. That’s to say, easy tickets into the job market.

For male students, this translates to trades such as plumbing, car mechanics and gas-fitting. The more academically minded might be pushed towards a degree in mechanical engineering, metallurgy or technical laboratory studies. As for female students, they typically fall into one of two streams: teaching or nursing. The gifted might find their way on to an accountancy or computer science course. Such examples, however, remain the exception.

In that sense, Korlaiah represents a model case for the charity. A year or so older than Surisetti, Korlaiah is one of a small band of new graduates that Care and Share has helped finance through college. At Jayaraj’s request, he and his fellow students are waiting promptly at the school gate. We all file into the principal’s empty office.

Korlaiah is the first to share his story. He is medium-height and dark-skinned, with a strawberry-shaped mark to the left of his mouth and the wispiest of moustaches. I ask him about his background. The youngest of five siblings, he moved to Vijayawada with his family fifteen years ago. ‘We migrated because we had no land in our village, so we faced many problems to get food.’ At first, the family lived as ‘roadside dwellers’. For five years, home was a shack on the banks of the Eluru irrigation canal. Then the government relocated them, here to NSC Bose Nagar. It’s better, he says. They don’t pay rent.

Not that their struggles are over. I ask if his parents work. His father is ‘old’, he explains. His mother works in the market, selling vegetables. Neither, he adds, is literate. And his siblings? His sisters are married off. Both brothers work as cleaners in a hotel. Of the five, he is the only one to be educated. Giovanni Aliani, his Italian sponsor, funded him through school and college. He’s recently finished a three-year diploma in electronics and communication, he informs me proudly.

I enquire about his future. Does he have a job? Finding employment is difficult, he admits. For the moment, he works as a book-keeper at a small printing firm. He hopes to find a position with an engineering firm soon. He’s submitted an application to a local electronics manufacturer that specialises in making digital meters. He found the opening advertised in the newspaper. He’s also put his name into the ballot for Indian Railways. As yet, he’s received no word back from either.

If possible, Korlaiah would like to stay close to his parents. He has a duty to care for them, he says. But he must face facts. ‘There are very few jobs here in Vijayawada.’ To join a good firm, he’ll probably have to relocate to a larger city such as Hyderabad, Chennai or Visakhapatnam. All his fellow graduates face a similar predicament.

Education is clearly no panacea for the poverty trap. The deficiencies of the school system are partly to blame. India is getting better at churning out graduates, the statistics show, but levels of ‘employability’ remain low. Despite India’s economic growth, the labour market itself remains tough. Even for those with strong vocational training like Korlaiah, openings are few and far between, especially in India’s smaller towns and cities. Nor do poorer graduates typically have the necessary connections to squeeze a foot in the door. The prejudices of Old India have not entirely disappeared either. Caste, gender, the very poverty they are trying to overcome: all result in job applications sometimes going unreturned.

That said, there’s no denying that the prospects are far better for those with an education than for those without. Schooling,
more than anything, represents the fundamental difference between Jivan and Charandas. It explains the desperation of Guravaiah to see Care and Share take on his children. As for Korlaiah, if he must go to another city to find work, it’ll represent an entirely different type of urban migration to the luckless journey his parents faced.

Education is transformative, without doubt. But who are the educators and what are they saying?

As I near the end of my journey, the question strikes me as a critical one. New India remains only partially built. In many quarters, it remains just an idea, a hope of something better. It will fall to the ‘democratic dividend’ – the five hundred and more million youngsters under twenty-five – to construct the final edifice.

That a New India will emerge is beyond doubt. India will and must change. The forces pushing it are too strong to resist. But the style and shape of that new country still hangs in the balance. The spirit of the New must still overcome the stubbornness of the Old. Only with the right architects will that happen.

 In search of such change-makers, I hop on a train across the country to Pune – a city so full of schools and colleges, it’s nicknamed the ‘Oxford of the East’.

I arrive at Lt V. B. Gogate School during morning break. A deluge of playing children fills the central courtyard. Their feet hammer on the paved surface with the thud, thud, thud of heavy rain on a windowpane.

I make my way to the first floor of the main, L-shaped teaching block. Painted slogans accompany me up the wide spiral staircase. Several have religious overtones. ‘God hath made us all equal,’ reads one. ‘Man proposes, God disposes,’ says the next, a reminder that the divine might be generous but that he’s no walkover. My favourite appears towards the top of the stairs. ‘Look before you leap.’ It’s wise advice, I think, as I peer over the balcony to the scurrying pupils below.

Ashish is behind his desk preparing for the class ahead. His laptop is open with his lesson plan neatly typed out in Word. He’s dressed in a checked work shirt and casual jeans. His squarish jawline frames a set of facial features that are remarkable less for their form than their gentleness. An endearing boyishness has slunk with him into adulthood, a feature he has tried to shake off with a week’s scruffy beard growth.

He spots me at the door. ‘Come in, come in,’ he insists, walking over and shaking my hand warmly. ‘Welcome to my office.’

The last word brings a smile to his lips. Until recently, Ashish worked as a high-flying computer programmer. Every morning, he would trek into Infosys’s plush Pune campus and spend his day quality-testing new versions of Microsoft Windows.

His current surroundings are somewhat different. For starters, his is the only laptop on the premises. There’s no gym facility, no staff canteen and no air-conditioning. There’s not even a water-cooler. The decor perhaps has an edge on his former corporate environment. In place of spreadsheets and Post-it notes, the walls are brightened by a colourful ensemble of children’s artwork and posters depicting body parts, geometrical shapes and collective nouns.

By the door, an attendance sheet contains the names of his Class Four charges. Next to it is a list of classroom etiquette, his equivalent of a corporate Code of Conduct. Rules One to Three: Be on time, Listen to the teacher, Speak in English.

Class Four is happily sat in circles of five or six, noisily devouring chapattis, rice and vegetable snacks from stainless-steel tiffin containers. ‘Hello Sir,’ they shout in unison, as I walk in. ‘Have a nice day.’

Before the bell rings and lessons resume, Ashish provides some background to his class. Most of the pupils are aged between nine and ten. Class numbers are lower than usual. Fifty or sixty to a class is the typical figure. He has sixteen. The small size is a consequence of the school being relatively new, he explains. The younger grades fill up as children join. The kindergarten is now oversubscribed.

As far as income levels go, all the pupils come from uniformly poor homes, the sons and daughters of autorickshaw drivers, office peons, domestic helps and others in similarly low-skilled jobs. A few have parents who run small neighbourhood shops. Ten of the sixteen classify under the government’s reservation quota for scheduled castes and tribes. That exempts them from the municipal school’s administrative levy of one hundred and fifty rupees per month.

Several in his class face learning difficulties. Ashish indicates a girl sitting in a group by the window. She is staring at the wall. Her long limbs mark her out as older. ‘She’s thirteen,’ the form teacher says. ‘She’s been thrown out of her three previous schools.’ Others have to deal with troubled home lives. Ashish has three children who he knows suffer regular domestic violence. One of them, Ashvaraj, has a habit of attacking the other pupils. He’s even punched Ashish in the past.

Another boy, with an alcoholic father, frequently turns up to school with bruises. Other times, he just doesn’t come at all. The same is true for Vaishnavi, he says, pointing to a pretty girl across the room. ‘Her father beats her regularly.’ She’s dressed in pink. It’s her birthday.

Seeing us watching, she gets up and comes over. With the sweetest of gap-toothed smiles, she presents me with two Cadbury Eclair sweets. They’re warm from being in her pocket all morning. I thank her and feel a lump rise in my throat.

A teacher pops his head in. There’s a parents’ meeting that afternoon. Does Ashish know when it starts? ‘Five p.m., I think,’ he tells him. He turns back to me. The parents are just concerned whether the children’s school-books are filled in, he says resignedly. ‘It’s a shame, but most can’t relate to what we’re doing in the classroom.’ That’s a stumbling block for some. Like Basuraj, for example. Ashish reckons him one of the brightest students in the class. But both his parents are illiterate. ‘They can’t even write their names.’ Like a well-kept secret, therefore, Basuraj’s education goes no further than these four walls.

The bell goes and the children slowly filter back to their desk.
I find a seat in the last row, beside an open window. The sound of gears clanking and car horns honking drifts up from the road outside. There’s no hint of a breeze.

Ashish claps his hands and brings the class to order. ‘Who knows which heats faster, water or sand?’ No one responds. He repeats the question. A couple of hands go up. The answers are divided. The ex-computer programmer takes two glasses from his desk – one full of water, the other brimming with sand – and places them on the window sill. ‘Let’s wait till the end of class and then we’ll see.’

Returning to the front, Ashish picks up a piece of chalk. ‘Fractions,’ he says, writing the word in capitals along the top of the blackboard. ‘Who remembers from the last class what an improper fraction is?’

The next half an hour or so is occupied with going over the rudiments of numerators and denominators. Ashish starts with numbers. 3/4 + 6/4 = 9/4 = 2 ¼. The class watch him, at first with interest and then with varyingly decreasing levels of attention.

He switches to apples in the hope of re-engaging them. Soon the board is covered in drawings of apples, interspersed with ‘+’, ‘=’ and ‘/’ signs. Some of the class show evidence of comprehension. Basuraj, for instance, is carefully copying down Ashish’s pomaceous examples in his notebook. Others appear less enchanted by the mathematics of divisible fruit. Nilambari, the girl with learning problems, has returned to staring at the wall.

Ashvaraj, meanwhile, appears to have fainted. Vaishnavi volunteers one of her Eclairs. Under the rush of sugar, her classmate gradually revives. He’d gone through break without a snack. Ashish tells him to remind his mother to always prepare his tiffin. Then he instructs the class to open their textbooks to Chapter Six and to attempt the questions on the final page. As they set to work, he goes over to Nilambari and repeats the fundamentals of what he’s just taught.

Ashish is one of a hundred or so Teach for India fellows. Based on an innovative programme first piloted in the United States, Teach for India encourages young professionals to take
time out of their careers to try their hand in the classroom. The scheme is sold to their companies as an opportunity to equip their high-potential graduates in soft skills such as communication and leadership. A roster of leading firms has bought in. Some, like ICICI Bank and the Indian Premier League sponsor HDFC, even provide paid sabbaticals to their volunteers.

Teach for India’s purpose is to breathe some new life and fresh thinking into the country’s education system. Narrowing the educational gulf between rich and poor is the programme’s most immediate goal. Integrating well-educated professionals into the school system will, the theory runs, improve instruction in the basics.

The scheme’s organisers have a more strategic aspiration too. By focusing on the top crop of young managers, they’re setting their sights on influencing India’s long-term educational standards. Today’s volunteers, it’s hoped, will become tomorrow’s leaders.

As far as the first part of that equation goes, Ashish is doing his best. He concentrates particularly on improving Maths and English. A poor understanding of both subjects is the main cause of students like his flunking their Board exams, which await them in a couple of years. Although ostensibly an English-medium school, none of Ashish’s Marathi-speaking class could read or write a word of the language when he took over at the beginning of the year. Now their notebooks are lined with Roman-shaped consonants and joined-up diphthongs. After school, he runs extra classes for students struggling with pronunciation and spelling. Aside from that, he’s conscientious in setting homework and diligent in marking it. He tries to find interesting ways to teach the syllabus than simply reading straight from the textbook.

He’s making progress. On the wall is a list of promises. Each pupil has written a personal pledge. Rohan, for instance, has promised to ‘do writing properly’. Manish has given his word to ‘listen to my what teacher say listen to them’. Ashvari, meanwhile, has committed to ‘come to school every day’. Tacked on to the end are the words ‘. . . and on time’.

Beyond basic arithmetic and grammar, Ashish has a second goal for the sixteen pre-adolescents under his instruction: Exposure. It’s a word he uses frequently and liberally. He means it in its broadest sense: exposure to new ideas, to alternative viewpoints, to different careers, to the numerous possibilities out there. Exposure to life in general, beyond the bounds of a menial job in a hard-up corner of town.

Ashish’s passion for expanding his pupils’ perspectives is partly a reaction to the blinkered education that he himself received. Although not affluent, his own background is much more advantaged than those of Lt V. B. Gogate School’s Class Four. His father enjoyed a comparatively comfortable career with India’s National Thermal Power Corporation. The state-run firm has a tie-up with the country’s best private schools, so Ashish was educated at an on-site affiliate of the prestigious Delhi Public School. He graduated with honours, but not with any real sense of the world around him.

That was partly the fault of his location. His father worked in Vindhyanagar, home to Asia’s largest coal-mine and situated in the remote tribal state of Madhya Pradesh. Ashish had made a few brief trips to visit family in Lucknow and Varanasi, but otherwise knew little of the country at large. Life on the company’s compound was safe and closeted. He never once competed against another school in sports and crime was more or less unheard of.

It was in the classroom where he felt the keenest sense of confinement. Engineer or doctor? The orientation of his entire learning was a choice between the two. Ashish opted for the former and, like Sunny, spent a year studying to crack the entrance exam for the Indian Institute of Technology. He got through the first round but not the second, so ended up going to a well-respected state engineering college instead. It wasn’t until he was into his mid-twenties that he gave any thought to what he himself might want from life. By that stage, he was five years into a lucrative career with Infosys.

Exposure is the reason why he leaves his laptop open during recess. He actively wants his pupils to tinker with it. In class, he
uses it to show them photographs and videos as well. Anything to spark their imaginations. In the same spirit, he’s also invited some of his graduate friends to come in and talk about their jobs. A former classmate who works at a power plant in Indore was the first to visit. The children wanted to know how he didn’t get electric shocks all the time. Ashish has a policeman, air hostess and fashion designer lined up for future talks.

Ashish leaves Nilambari and strolls around the room. He looks over the shoulders of his students and checks the equations in their exercise books. He congratulates some and corrects others. After five minutes, he tells them to close their books. ‘Your homework for tomorrow is to finish the questions, okay?’ The class groans in protest.

Then he walks over to the window and takes the two glasses from the sill. He puts them on Tejas’s desk. ‘Which is warmer?’ The boy tentatively touches the contents of each glass. ‘Water, sir?’ he answers, with an almost visible question mark. Ashish congratulates him on a correct answer and then explains the science behind it. Tomorrow, he tells them, they will discover which of the two materials cools fastest.

He turns to me. ‘Before we finish, I would like to invite our guest to come to the front. I am sure you have lots of questions for him. Who wants to start?’

I make my way to the front of the class. For the next ten minutes, I field an array of quickfire questions, from where I live and what I do through to my preferred cartoon and my favourite god. Ashish then passes the baton to me. Ask whatever you like, he says. How many of you know about computers? All the hands go up. How many of you know how to use a computer? Three hands go up. In each case, one or other of their parents received a hand-me-down machine from the offices where they work.

Thinking of Ashish’s efforts to broaden their horizons, I ask about his former employer. Who’s heard of Infosys? About half the class puts up their hands. Closer inquiry reveals that they are all thinking of a nearby college with the same name. Ashish explains that Infosys is of one of India’s most successful firms. ‘It’s
a company that works with computers.’ They receive the information without expression. For children whose direct experience of the job market is almost exclusively manual, perhaps the notion remains too abstract. Still, I like to think that his explanation has sown the seed of an idea.

I try another line. A poster on the classroom wall describes various jobs. I ask who would like to be an astronaut, one of the featured options. Most of the boys put up their hands. A teacher? Another good spread. A rickshaw driver? Not a single raised hand. The idea of following in their fathers’ footsteps clearly does not appeal. Businessman? This time, not a hand stays down, boys and girls.

Ashish calls time. Reminding them about their homework, he adds that there will be a science test tomorrow. ‘No one to be absent, heh. Now off you go. Class dismissed.’

We’d arranged to have lunch after class in a nearby restaurant. Before we leave, I ask if I can meet the principal. Ashish had previously mentioned the possibility of a brief interview with her. Now he doesn’t seem so keen. ‘I am not sure if she’ll agree,’ he says. Then he backtracks and suggests we at least pass by her office and see if she’s in.