Primary education in India

I am trying to develop a business model for an NGO, whose focus would be on primary education. In the process i came across facts related to primary education in india. Some of the facts that caught my attention were, the number of school drop outs, child labor and female literacy rate. Such many more facts took my attention beyong NGOs role. NGOs can supplement the work in the field of primary education, should it take the responsibility of providing primary education to all childrens? Then, why do we have a government.....on a lighter note, with the amount of aid and benefits we are getting from other countries, can India be termed as a "Mother of all NGOs".

Ok, jokes apart!!! lets now get to the business.

At the outset, for a nation as diverse and as sprawling as India, it is definitely a daunting task. But, it is not the reason for absolving itself from the issue.

The Government in the recent years have come out with lots of initiatives to provide primary education.Let me tell you about some initiatives.

1. Initiatives for expanding the provision of primary formal and non-formal education to realise the goal of Universilisation of Elementary Education (UEE).
2. Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan :It primarily focuses on providing education for all.
3. Free and Compulsory Education Bill, 2004 [Revised]:
4. Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidyalaya(KGBV):
5. District Primary Education Program (DPEP):
6. Education cess collection towards primary education

I was pleasantly surprised to see so many schemes that have been started by GOI. But as any Indian citizen i was doubtful about the implementation of these initiatives and wanted to explore the results of some of these initiatives.

I would like to highlight some of my findings on the schemes which were obtained through secondary research from various websites.

1. Center to allocate more funds for education only from next year.

"The funds are not expected to be allocated to the two schemes due to low absorptive capacity of the primary education sector", senior human resources development ministry officials said. Can anybody help me by explaining what does "low absorptive capacity" mean?

2. India ranks 105 out of 127 countries in Unesco education report .

Where does all this lead to.....staggering number of school drop-outs....probably the number of illiterates in our country now would out number the population 25 years back.

I am not trying to paint a bad picture on the initiatives taken by the government, but trying to stress on the fact that we need more...more...more...and more attention.

I feel that GOI should do a lot more in imparting primary education. But, i feel i can contribute something to this cause in a small way. This idea gave me focus to developing a business proposal for a primary education knowledge center...... call it by what ever name you want to. My idea is to develop a new model of school, attractive and easily accessible to the needy children. The model should be flexible enough to be implemented in any part of the country.

I believe and hope, i am not the only soul having such feelings about the sorry state of primary education in India. Anybody, who share my belief can contribute in their own way.

My focus is on providing education to those children, who are forced to work to support their family or to those who have been denied the oppurtunity of attending schools due to financial constraints.

My proposal is based on the answers to some of these basic questions:

1. What should be taught?
2. How should we teach?
3. How to motivate the children?
4. Creativity in Education!!

The questions mentioned here cover only a part of the study. Another important issue is making these instituions financially self sustaining. This is one of the most important aspect of the model to make the initiative sustainiable. Hence, it becomes imperative to develop a revenue model for the proposed school.

(to be continued....)