However, the battle is going to be between the ruling YSRCP and TDP with an alliance with Jana Sena. Jagan since the 2014 election was a lone fighter. Chandrabababu, on the other hand, was desperate for alliances ever since the state was bifurcated. In 2014 he won 102 seats in alliance with the BJP and in 2019 he lost very badly to Jagan by winning just 23 seats. Hence now he is desperate for alliance with both Pavan Kalyan and the BJP. This, of course,  shows Babu’s nervousness.

Since he attacked Prime Minister Modi just before the 2019 elections, after their alliance broke, the PM is not even giving him an appointment. His trips to Delhi are proving to be more embarrassing. This election is very crucial for the state because after Jagan came to power with a massive majority of 151 out of 175 seats, he changed the development paradigm of the state in a manner that no other state Government in the last 75 years tried.

JAGAN SHIFTED THE DEVELOPMENT PARADIGM

He shifted the development paradigm from so-called material development of a state to human development by focusing on changing the fundamental structure of school and university education in the state. During the last five years, Jagan took several steps to lay a strong foundation of human development of the state. The first steps that he took were introducing common mediums, English and Telugu, in Government and private schools. This was the most difficult educational reform given the history of the diabolical education system of India. The children of the urban poor and the children of working masses in the agrarian sector were put in an immobile regional language education system by the central and state Governments. The idea of linguistic states created a goose around the neck of state Government schools wherein poor children study. Regional linguistic chauvinism was promoted among the rural masses while the rich put their children in private English medium schools. No Government was allowed to spend good amounts of budget money on school infrastructure, quality teaching, on good food for the poor children whose parents could not afford it. Spending on children for quality education is nothing but spending on human resource development. Discussions in budget sessions of the state assemblies were only on spending money on roads, buildings and occasionally dams. With such investments on material development kickbacks would come to the rulers and middle men. Huge amounts would go into the pockets of contractors.

The Jagan Government changed that model by allocating substantial amounts of budget money for school and university education and also to money transfer schemes to the accounts of the poor children’s parents. This destroyed the middle men role and massive graded cuts by stakeholders in material resource building.

The implication of this shift is that the brokerage system gets weakened. The worry of the opposition parties even if they come to power in 2024 they cannot fully revert to the old pure material resource development model. If Jagan comes back his reforms will deepen where after ten fifteen years a new generation of well educated, confident rural youth will come into the socio-political system. They will not allow an economy that gets used to human resource development changed and also they work for corruption free de-bureaucratized  operations.

The corrupt employees and high end bureaucrats who want to work like ‘civil and police dictators’ at various levels of administration are also unwilling to support this model of development. But certainly the poor rural and urban masses who tasted the money transfer life support the new system. That too getting monitored by village level volunteers on a day to day basis, who are employed by the state for that purpose.

The employment of volunteers to monitor every welfare scheme and help the old and sick get their benefits like old age pensions or rations from Government fare price shops to their doorstep is entirely a novel idea in a democratic administration. Though the middle and high end bureaucrats are unhappy with the volunteer force present in the villages the masses at large are happy. The volunteer in a village is a helping hand to every villager.

Such a model of humanpower development focusing on the schools, colleges has not been tried in any third world country. China, for example, tried with some kind of similar system both in education and health systems. They employed a large number of barefoot doctors. Jagan also created an unparalleled health infrastructure that helped the state in overcoming the Corona crisis with better monitoring systems. The village volunteers did a good job even in the health sector. All these new experiments shocked the contractor class of the nation itself.

The contractor class wants material development but not massive man power development. In my childhood in Telangana the local landlords used to ask the village school teachers not to teach but take salary and be happy at home. Their logic was that if all the village children are educated who will work as child labour around their cattle and who will work as their jeetagandlu (palerlu) after they become adults. At that time landlords saw developing humanpower through education as anti-feudal. Now in AP developing English educated  human power is being seen as an anti-contract capital. Chandrababu is closely linked up to the contract capital and private education sector.

If Jagan wins in this election of 2024 this model will deepen its roots and nobody will be able to change it in AP. That will also influence the national education system.

JAGAN’S NEW GOVERNMENT SCHOOL SYSTEM

For the first time in Indian electoral history, school education has become the central electoral battle. Jagan made the re-positioned Government school education his key agenda to counter his predecessor Chandrababu Naidu’s love for private school education with a clearly divided medium of instruction—English in private and Telugu in Government sector– and also school infrastructure. During his chief ministership both in the united Andhra Pradesh and in the first five years of bifurcated Andhra Pradesh Babu encouraged a massive chain of private box schools up to 12th grade—Narayana and Srichaitanya and others—across the state. These box schools are run in roadside apartments without any open space around the building. They became an educational business mafia by manipulatively drawing thousands of  rural and urban students into high schools and intermediate ( in a system of 10-2) colleges by charging a lakh and above fee per year. The parental struggle for sending children to these box schools became like an educational drug addiction.

They also established residential systems by collecting much more money tucking them in small apartment rooms. They turned boys and girls into mugging machines without allowing them any scope for physical exercise, sports and games and also outside human interaction. They deployed a method of huge propaganda about their achievements of ranks both in print and digital media through massive advertisements.

Chandrababu made the biggest private education mafia leader of that system, Narayana, who came from his own Kamma caste, as cabinet minister in his first cabinet in just bifurcated Andhra Pradesh.  To break this education business Jagan put in his 2019 election manifesto that if he comes to power he will make all Government schools English medium and with improved infrastructure. He won that election with a massive majority of 151 seats out of 175 seats. Chandrababu got just 23 seats.

After the Jagan school education model came into force half of private schools are empty. That is a big worry of  this mafia.

By this election time in 2024 the school education reform of AP has reached to a level where Jagan made his educational achievement as the main campaign issue. He is now mobilizing the parents of school and college-going students as an election force to counter Babu’s alliance and Amaravathi centered campaign.

The idea of development does not just include physical resources for already existing human beings. It includes the human development of just born children and also the people who will be born in future. The physical resources once built will get worn out in a very short time. But the knowledge base that humans acquire continues from generation to generation. It spreads from region to region, nation to nation. In modern times the discoveries by humans in the realm of knowledge benefit every human being on the earth. Jagan repeatedly says that the most valued property that “I give to the poor families is world class English medium education free in Government schools”.

The written word that humans developed preserved the knowledge and skills of people will be used by humans for thousands of years. The modern education system helped the process of preservation of knowledge for a longer time than any other physical structure that humans have built in history.

At a time the temple construction was the agenda of Modi Government Jagan made school construction as his plank of vote mobilization. If he wins the election in coming months English medium education school construction will become a national issue. If he loses this experiment will be defeated Babu and Pavan Kalyan are likely to revert the education system back to private corporate loot model. Let us wait and see.

Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd is a political theorist, social activist and author of many books.

Courtesy: Counter Current

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“The National Education Policy 2019 (NEP) proposed by the Modi government is going to ruin the education system in India. The proposals are made without understanding the realities in India. Moreover, it will corporatise the education system. In addition, the government is trying to centralise and communalise it. Also, it will make higher education inaccessible for the marginalised sections,” said Professor Venkatesh Athreya while talking to NewsClick.

Courtesy: Newsclick.in

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The narrative around the DBT is easy to sell as the ruling government claims to have transferred benefits with reduced corruption in many of the centrally sponsored schemes. But is the same model applicable in the field of education? At least the research disagrees with this logic. A study conducted in 2018 in East Delhi with 800 households in low-income neighbourhoods finds no or negative impact of such transfers/vouchers in the learning level of the students. The results of the study are consistent with the studies conducted prior to this study. Suggestion by the author is feeble as it ignores the socio-political realities surrounding the education system. The problem of our primary schooling is because of the different type of schools for children from different types of backgrounds, thus differentiating childhood based on their socio-economic backgrounds.  

Geeta Gandhi repeats the gross mistake of not keeping the child at the centre of education policy and misses out on the importance of equity, accessibility, quality and affordability to let children have equal opportunity. She fails to mention and so does NEP, that the only model which has succeeded in achieving universalisation of primary education around the world is the Common School System which is run, funded and regulated by government and in India is a 1968 Kothari Commission recommendation. Geeta Gandhi thinks government cannot play all the roles of policy maker, operator, assessor and regulator of schools. However, it is the same government which runs good quality Kendriya and Navodaya Vidyalayas and world class higher educational institutions like IITs, IIMs, AIIMSs, IISERs and various NLUs. Hence by advancing a flawed logic she is trying to belittle the public schools.Around 65 percent children still attend public schools and to propose a solution which only focuses on the population which is ready to make a shift to private schools will be naive at multiple levels. Deeper look at her suggestion also raises fundamental questions about the author’s interest in pushing the interest of the private schools and catering to the interest of only privileged children. In fact, the private schools can be directly held responsible for the deterioration in quality of government schools as slowly the children of ruling elites made a switch from government to private schools. Another important piece of information missing from Geeta Gandhi’s article and NEP is the 2015 Allahabad High Court judgement of Justice Sudhir Agrawal which sought to make it mandatory for everyone receiving a government salary to send their children to government schools. Implementation of this judgement, to which the Uttar Pradesh government has turned a blind eye so far, could be a step in the direction of moving towards common school system and an effective remedy to the learning crisis that Geeta Gandhi is alluding to in her article. But this will wean away significant section of her clients.

Except for some elite urban schools, most private schools, especially in rural areas, are known to run mass copying rackets. Students can pass their Board examinations in exchange for a certain sum of money which is divided between the school management and the education department officials. The NEP too ignores this widespread phenomenon, especially in north India, and avoids making any suggestion for elimination of this aberration.

Geeta Gandhi is an advocate of DBT. Then why is her school not admitting children under section 12(1)(c) of the Right to Education Act 2009 which offers at least 25% seats for free education from classes I to VIII to children of disadvantaged groups and weaker sections with their fees to be paid by the government directly to the school? Segregation in the current schooling system is conspicuous. To deal with same, abovementioned section was provided for in the RTE Act at the entry-level. Even a simple Google search on violation of the RTE Act brings it to the notice that her own school has not been admitting children under this provision. CMS has admitted 13 children because of a court order in 2015-16 and two on its own in 2018-19 out of 31, 55, 296 and 270 admissions ordered by the basic education department in 2015-16, 2016-17, 2017-18 and 2018-19, respectively, implying a compliance of only 2.3% of the admission orders. And these number of admissions ordered are nowhere near the standard 25% prescribed by the law. Curiously Geeta Gandhi talks about unaccountability of the public schools in her article! If CMS would have honoured all the abovementioned admissions it would have gained Rs. 35,20,800 as direct transfer from the government in the academic year 2018-19 towards the fees of these children. Hence it is clear that it is not really the DBT that CMS is interested in. It simply doesn’t want underprivileged children to sit beside the children from elite class. It is crass discrimination against the poor.

There are other egregious examples of unaccountability behaviour of CMS. Some of its branches are being run illegally without certificates of land from revenue department and no objection certificates from education department on encroached lands. There are pending demolition orders against its Indira Nagar and Mahanagar branches and a court case pending against its Jopling Road branch for the last over 25 years. CMS was running an illegal bank from its Chowk branch offering 12-13% interest on deposits. While the public schools may be laggards when it comes to quality of teaching-learning, competitive schools like CMS create undue pressure on students leading to suicides at times. Asmi Yadav of class IX of Gomti Nagar  branch committed suicide on 12 February 2019 because of unreasonable academic demands of CMS. One reason for abrasive competitiveness in private schools is the infiltration of these schools by coaching institutions and CMS is no exception to this. The NEP doesn’t offer any convincing solution to the menace of coaching institutions.

There is probably no government school which is run with so many violations of rules and laws as CMS branches.

India spends only 4.6% of its Gross Domestic Product on education whereas Kothari Commission recommendation and a global standard spent by other countries is 6%. To argue to not increase India’s expenditure on education is a prescription to deny large number of underprivileged children especially from rural areas any decent quality of education or any education at all. By quoting average figures of pupil-teacher ratio or the expenditure per pupil Geeta Gandhi is masking the large number of schools where a single teacher may be handling more than one class simultaneously in her classroom in complete violation of norms of pupil-teacher ratio under the RTE Act.

Geeta Gandhi Kingdom’s attempt to defend the indefensible in the garb of an academic have come a cropper. She cannot be in London and Lucknow at the same time, ideologically speaking.
 

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Taken without context, the term ‘autonomy’ is generally associated with positive, progressive, even empowering connotations — with meanings ranging from freedom to self-government.

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Central universities that will be granted autonomy are Jawaharlal Nehru University, Aligarh Muslim University, Banaras Hindu University, the University of Hyderabad and the English and Foreign Languages University. Apart from that, state universities like Jadavpur University, Andhra University, Algappa University etc. will also be granted autonomy.

Responding to this announcement, the Academics for Action and Development (AAD) said in a press release today, “The announcement by the Minister of HRD granting of autonomy to 62 universities and colleges, which includes five central universities also, represents the government’s unilateral policy for privatisation of existing public-funded institutions. AAD strongly opposes the announcement made by the Minister, which will deprive the SC, ST, OBC and poor students from these universities and colleges and contractualisation of the teachers therein.”
 
The full press release can be read below:
 
ACADEMICS FOR ACTION & DEVELOPMENT (AAD)
*Press Release* 
 
The announcement by the Minister of HRD granting of autonomy to 62 universities and colleges, which includes five central universities also, represents the government’s unilateral policy for privatisation of existing public-funded institutions. AAD strongly opposes the announcement made by the Minister, which will deprive the SC, ST, OBC and poor students from these universities and colleges and contractualisation of the teachers therein.
 
In the garb of this autonomy and freedom to open new departments/courses in self-financing mode, the present courses run by the universities and the colleges are going to be decimated. The freedom is infact a trap for self-destruction. The UGC regulations under which this autonomy has been granted, provides:
 
1. All universities and colleges are to be graded in categories I/II/III.
2. The institutions with NAAC score of more than 3.5 or NIRF ranking upto first 50 are marked in Category I.
3. The institutions with NAAC score between 3.25 and 3.5 or NIRF ranking between 51 to 100 are to be in Category II.
4. The remaining institutions are to be in Category III.
5. The central universities under category I are to get Autonomy without any expert committee visit. Such institutions can run their own departments/syllabi but in a self-financing mode.
6. The board of management will decide the variable salary and service conditions of individuals.
7. The board of management will be free to appoint foreign faculty upto 20℅ at negotiable lucrative salary and admit foreign students upto 20%.
8. In the name of autonomy the existing institutions will be transformed into teaching shops running market-friendly courses through their off campus branches and distance education outlets.
9. The so-called autonomous institutions will have market oriented fee structure with the amount soaring up to lakhs as documented in these regulations, where the non-returnable processing fees is Rs. 10000 if a student withdraws after having taken admission.
 
What is most unfortunate is that no discussion was held with the stakeholders, the teachers, non-teaching staff and students who will be adversely affected by the government’s brazen agenda of privatisation of the higher education. Such a serious decision was taken without any discussion with the teacher associations of these universities and FEDCUTA. 
AAD strongly opposes this decision of the MHRD-UGC and appeals to the MHRD to take this draconian decision back as it would lead to the exploitation of teachers, non-teaching staff and students. 
 
Press Secretary
Richa Raj/SBN Tiwary/Chittaranjan Kumar/Ashok/Rajesh Jha

 
https://www.sabrangindia.in/article/delhi-university-teachers-begin-5-day-strike-against-government%E2%80%99s-move-privatise
 

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Courtesy: Newsclick.in

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