Had been to a primary school in a rural area (about 100 km away from Mumbai)... and lots of things I used to take for granted blew up in my face.
The children in this school were from poor families, and its a government school where students don’t have to pay any fees for education (read non middle class school, which i am used to in general).
Most of the students ranging from age 6 to 10 years old, seemed under weight, and in comparison to middle class school students, not exposed or taught much. Many of them had poor pencil grip, were specking in pidgin variety of local language, and quite passive (low achievement need, or not much competitive). It seemed to be such a different world compared to a city school atmosphere.
India as still a third world country (or under-developed) hit me hard enough, I guess. Even though these rural school students also will have a school education certificate, they definitely would be at a great disadvantage if compared with same level middle class private school students. And I could imagine how much influence a school can have the attitude of a person.
Such schools and students would be common all over India. About 50% of the Indians would be as poor as these families from this rural school… and that many children go through such a sub-standard educational training. Can’t imagine what would be the impact of such a poor training and exposure they get and the meaning of ‘discrimination’ bared its fangs at me in those last 2 days.
BPL (below poverty line) is an index used to measure poverty in India. I checked on this and found that, the BPL figure India is somewhere around 26%. (That’s for a population of 1100 million people). The BPL definition is, if the person can spend Rs. 540 a month on food, then he/she is above poverty line. And mostly our national statistics would label a person as above BPL if he/she earns more than Rs. 540 a month, regardless of whether they spend that much amount on food (finding out how much a person spends from overall monthly earnings for food would be much more difficult to obtain).
The above 2 paragraphs contain quite a few hazardous guesses, but even if 25% of population of India (more than 250 million people) live Below poverty line, you can imagine how it would be affecting the progress of the country overall.
1 comment:
yes, it is always disturbing (for want of a better expression) to see the youngest suffer the most... Deprivation comes in many forms and unfortunately we do not even stop to think of it, until it blows up into our faces... A suggestion: maybe you could provide us, ur non-Indian readers, with some sort of basis on which we could compare & better comprehend the BPL index... Btw, poems?
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