A shocking abuse of power was reported on December 5, 2021 in Uttar Pradesh’s Muzaffarnagar, where two school principals allegedly drugged and molested as many as 17 Class 10 girls. What makes this crime worse is that while the incident occurred on November 18, police did not register complaints until the intervention of local BJP MLA Pramod Utwal on Sunday.

According to local news reports, Surya Dev Public School Principal Yogesh Chauhan took the girls from Bhopa village to the Guru Gobind Singh International Academy in Kamhera village under the pretense of conducting a “practical exam”. The private school Principal and other accused Arjun Singh were also present there.

Chauhan told the students to spend the night in the school claiming that the exam was to take place the following day. During the stay, the girls made khichdi for themselves but the accused threw away the same, and instead served a khichdi laced with drugs. After the girls passed out, the two men allegedly sexually assaulted the children, said the FIR report.

According to The Print, the girls were threatened that they would be marked failed in exams and their families would be killed, if they reported the incident. Nonetheless, the girls informed their parents days later, and approached the Purkazi police station to lodge a complaint.

Yet it wasn’t until Utwal intervened in the incident that police authorities jumped into action. The two accused were booked for sedation, molestation and relevant sections of the POCSO Act. Further, authorities suspended the station-house officer of Purkazi station.

प्रेस न्यूज:-
बेटियों के सम्मान में विधायक जी मैदान में
पुरकाजी के गांव कम्हेड़ा में बेटियों के साथ किए गए छेड़छाड़ प्रकरण को पुलिस महकमे ने दबाने की भरपूर कोसिस की
लेकिन पुरकाजी विधानसभा के विधायक प्रमोद उटवाल ने पुलिस प्रशासन को आइना दिखाकर बता दिया pic.twitter.com/SIlofvafe0

— Pramod Utwal (@UtwalPramod) December 6, 2021

Utwal told News18 that the “police station tried its best to suppress the matter. The girl students who were victimised are financially weak.”

Speaking to local papers, parents revealed that Chauhan’s school does not have high school recognition. Chauhan informed the parents that the relevant area for the practical exam was too far away. They sent their children with Chauhan although there were no boys in the group or female supervisor. According to The Times of India, there are 14 boys in the same class.

Meanwhile, SSP Muzaffarnagar Abhishek Yadav said that five teams were constituted, including SOG and Crime Branch authorities when the incident was received.

Related:

Bombay court convicts man for sexual harassment in one of the shortest trials!
Workers Front files petition against UP gov’t shutting down women’s helpline

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Average enrolment in government schools–where teachers are paid, on average, salaries that are four times those in China–declined from 122 to 108 students per school over five years, while it rose from 202 to 208 in private schools, according to this March 2017 research paper by Geeta Gandhi Kingdon, professor of education and international development at the Institute of Education, London.
 
Yet, 65% of all school-going children in 20 states, about 113 million, continue to get their education from government schools, according to District Information System for Education (DISE) and education ministry data.
 
Why are students opting out of India’s government schools, which educate the poorest and most vulnerable students until the age of 14 for free, and migrating to fee-charging private institutions in such large numbers?
 
The study, which uses DISE data, traced this student migration to the belief among parents that private schools offer better value for money and better teaching than government schools. Multiple evaluations after controlling for students’ home backgrounds indicate that “children’s learning levels in private schools are no worse than, and in many studies better than, those in government schools”, said Gandhi.
 
Despite the Rs 1.16 lakh crore ($17.7 billion) spent on Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA)–the national programme for universal elementary education–the quality of learning declined between 2009 and 2014, IndiaSpend reported in March 2016.  
 
Less than one in five elementary school teachers in India are trained, IndiaSpend reported in May 2015. In Delhi, India’s capital city and its richest state, by per capita income, half of all government-school teachers are hired on temporary contracts. These teachers are likely to be less motivated and accountable than teachers with full-time jobs, we reported in January 2017.
 
Fewer cheap private schools in states where govt schools function well
 
At the primary level, 58.7% of Indians cite “better environment for learning” as a major factor for opting for private schools, IndiaSpend reported in May 2016.
 
However, the preference for private school education and the differences in learning outcomes of private and government schools vary between states. For instance, in 2015-16, in Uttar Pradesh, over 50% of children studied in private schools, while in Bihar, less than 4% of children attended private schools, according to DISE data.
 

In 2016, in Kerala, the proportion of children (aged 11-14) enrolled in government schools increased from 40.6% in 2014 to 49.9%. In Gujarat too, it increased, from 79.2% in 2014 to 86%, according to the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2016 data. ASER is a learning assessment of children in rural India.
 
In Punjab, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka, government schools outperformed private schools in reading skills in local languages, once household and parental characteristics were controlled for, according to a state-wise analysis in ASER 2014.
 
In Kerala and Tamil Nadu, where government schools were better than private schools to start with, learning outcomes improved between 2011 and 2014, once other factors were accounted for.
 
States with better-functioning government schools have more elite–that is, more expensive–private schools because there is no market here for the ‘low-fee’ budget private schools that have been sprouting across the country, Gandhi’s study said.
 
This explains why in poorer states, such as Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and Orissa, about 70% to 85% of children studying in private unaided schools pay less than Rs 500 per month as school fees. Up to 80% of private schools in India are ‘low’ fee schools when benchmarked against per capita and daily wagers’ incomes, the data show.
 
It must, however, be pointed out that ASER 2016 has shown small improvements in learning outcomes in government schools. Over 25% of children in grade III could at least read a grade II level text in 2016, up from 23.6% in 2014. The proportion of children in grade III who could subtract increased from 25.4% in 2014 to 27.7% in 2016, IndiaSpend reported in January 2017.
 
Private schools up 35%, government schools by 1%
 
In 2016, for the first time in 10 years, private-school enrolment did not increase in rural areas–it fell from 30.8% in 2014 to 30.5% in 2016, according to the ASER 2016 report. But this has not stemmed the growth of private schools nationwide.
 
Between 2010-11 and 2015-16, the number of private schools grew 35%–from 0.22 million in 2010-11 to 0.30 million in 2015-16–while the number of government schools grew 1%, from 1.03 million to 1.04 million. Section 6 of the Right To Education Act 2009 legally obligates states to create more government schools.
 

 
Tiny (with 20 or fewer students) and small (with 50 or fewer students) government schools are being abandoned, according to Gandhi. In the five years considered by the study, the number of tiny government schools rose 52% and small ones by 33.7%. As many as 5,044 government schools had no students in 2015-16, up 14% from 4,435 in 2010-11.
 
The migration out of government schools has left many unviable, with high per-pupil expenditure, and low value-for-money from public education expenditure. About 24,000 government schools across Rajasthan, Maharashtra and Chhattisgarh have closed, according to the study.
 
West Bengal witnessed a 280% rise in tiny schools–more than any other state–followed by Madhya Pradesh (225%) and Jharkhand (131%). However, Bihar bucked the national trend by reporting a 98% decrease in tiny schools.
 

Govt teachers in India earn four times China salaries but don’t perform as well
 
India’s government teachers earn more than not just their counterparts in private schools but also in other countries, Gandhi’s analysis shows.
 
Despite being paid at least four times the salaries of teachers in China (in terms of multiples of their respective per capita incomes), the performance of Indian teachers judged in terms of their students’ learning levels, has been poor in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) test in 2009, with India ranking 73rd and China ranking 2nd, among 74 countries.
 
PISA is a worldwide study by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in member and non-member nations of 15-year-old school pupils’ scholastic performance on mathematics, science, and reading.
 
Up to 80% of India’s public expenditure on education is spent on teachers–salaries, training and learning material, according to a six-state report. Teacher salaries in of teachers in Uttar Pradesh are four to five times India’s per capita gross domestic product (GDP) and more than 15 times the state’s, according to a 2013 analysis by Amartya Sen and Jean Dreze. This is much higher than the salaries paid to teachers in OECD countries and India’s neighbours.
 

Source: Analysis by Amartya Sen & Jean Dreze, quoted by Geeta Gandhi Kingdon here (Table 14, page 26)
 
“This suggests the need to link future teacher salary increases to the degree of teachers’ acceptance of greater accountability, rather than across-the board increases irrespective of performance or accountability,” said Gandhi.
 
The reason private schools get away with paying their teachers less, argued Gandhi, is because of the “bureaucratically-set high ‘minimum wage’, which may also be influenced by political pulls and pressures and be responsive to lobbying by strong government school teacher unions”. Also, she added, the private education sector offers salaries based on market factors of demand and supply–and given that there is a 10.5% graduate unemployment rate in India, jobless graduates are willing to settle for low salaries in private schools.
 
Will increasing spending help? Unlikely
 
A common suggestion is increasing India’s spending on education. In 2015-16, Indian central government spending on school and higher education was less than other BRICS countries–India spent 3% of its GDP on education, compared to Russia (3.8%), China (4.2%), Brazil (5.2%), and South Africa (6.9%), IndiaSpend reported in January 2017.
 
However, increased government spending in education is not enough to improve educational outcomes. Between 2006 and 2013, public expenditure on school education increased from 2.2% to 2.68% of the GDP. But India’s education policy must be thoroughly revised to put in place better accountability and monitoring mechanisms to exploit the gains of increase in fiscal outlays on education, this January 2017 Mint column argued.
 
Public private partnership (PPP) model may be the solution, Gandhi argued, combining the best of both worlds–public sector funding and private resources for education.
 
“Given the tattered state of govt schooling in the country, the first best option–government as producer and also funder of elementary education–is not viable because the reform of the sector is not politically feasible (vested interests, eg teacher unions, will oppose any efficiency and accountability-raising measures),” Gandhi told IndiaSpend in an email interview. “Therefore, perhaps, a well-designed PPP (model) would be the best. But the devil is in the design of the PPP–there are some good models around the world.”
 
Before choosing any particular form of educational PPP, India must study these different designs and their relevance/applicability/adaptability, and must also pilot test the chosen models before scaling up any novel intervention, Gandhi suggested in her paper.
 

 
(Saha is an MA Gender and Development student at Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex.)
 
 

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On the occasion of the country today celebrating the 126^th Birth Anniversary of the architect of Indian Constitution Baba Saheb B. R. Ambedkar, a great personality who has for his whole life fought against social injustice in the society, the communication urges the Modi government that, “The best tribute to him would be that your Government should immediately abolish all kind of discriminatory public funded schools and convert them into common schools. It would also be the right time for your Government to enact Central Legislation on lines of Allahabad High Court judgment mandating all public servants to send their children to public funded schools.”
 
The letter to the central minister states that,

“You are aware of the fact that the unaided private schools are exploiting the hapless parents by subjecting them to unjustified and arbitrary fee hike and other charges and thereby openly indulging in commercialisation of Education which is legally impermissible.
 
“Parents and students of unaided private schools have been nationwide agitating. 5 States, namely, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra and Rajasthan, Punjab and Gujarat have so far enacted legislations regulating fee in unaided private schools. These legislations are not uniform but certainly a step forward to protect parents from the exploitation. There is a crying need of a robust Central Legislation to check commercialisation in unaided private schools.
 
“You are also aware of the fact that barring few public funded exclusive schools, all most all other public funded schools in the country are not performing well, resulting in wide-spread unrest among the masses. Despite the fact that the Constitution talks of an egalitarian society, we have discriminatory system of public funded schools in our country. It is unfortunate, that the Governments in power, instead of abolishing such discriminatory public funded schools, have been encouraging the same by adopting various dubious methods. “
 
The letter also points out that the “Supreme Court in recent decisions has excluded the minority schools (both aided and unaided) from the purview of the RTE Act, 2009 referring to the provisions of the Constitution. It is well known fact that the unaided minority schools are indulging in all kind of malpractices and commercialisation in Education. It is also important to note that all children constitute one class qua school education and therefore, it would be unjust to discriminate them on the basis of minority and non minority schools. There is, therefore, need of amendment in the Constitution to bring all minority schools within the ambit of the Right to Education.”
 
Among the specific demands placed before the government by the AIPA are:
1.    Central Government should enact national law on lines of Allahabad High Court judgment mandating all public servants to send their children to public funded schools.
2.    Central Government should enact central law regulating fee and other charges in unaided private schools in the country. Such law should also give minimum of 50 ℅ representation to the parents and teachers in the managing committee of such unaided private schools.         
3.    Central Government should enact a central legislation on the lines of existing provisions of Section 10 (1) of Delhi School Education Act, 1973 mandating all unaided private schools in the country to pay to their employees including teachers salary and other benefits not less than what is provided to their counter parts working in the schools run by the State.
4.     Central Government should amend the Constitution of India so as to bring all minority schools in the country within the ambit of right to education for all intents and purposes.  
5.     Central Government should amend Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act , 2009 ( RTE Act, 2009) (i) extending the benefit under Section 12 (1) (c) to the EWS /DG students to complete their schooling up to class 12th instead of class 8th and (ii) school education should be completely free.

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