An Interview with Anita Rampal Anita Rampal and Elaine Unterhalter discussed the main themes of ...

14 Pages·2014·0.32 MB·English

An Interview with Anita Rampal
Anita Rampal and Elaine Unterhalter discussed the main themes of the book in April 2014.
EU: You have been working in education and international development for many years and
you’ve seen the area change. Could you tell us how you became involved in this work, some of
your experiences and what you see as some of the major shifts over the period?
AR: From the mid 70s to late 80s I was involved in a science education programme for rural schools
in Madhya Pradesh. Many of us involved were scientists and at the time I was doing my PhD in
Physics at the University of Delhi. The programme’s purpose was to try to make science a more
interesting and accessible subject in schools, where it may have been very poorly resourced, as well
as making it meaningful and relevant at a local level. The programme was then supported by two
village based voluntary groups. In general, the 70s was a period that saw a surge in voluntarism.
People with professional degrees and training were looking to see how they could contribute to the
issue of development. It was a big movement which encompassed people from numerous
educational backgrounds, particularly from the sciences and engineering, who were ready to devote
themselves to rural development. For many of us this was a new area. Most of us, especially in the
sciences, had been educated in a format that conceived of the country almost entirely through its
urban areas, so for us it was a very different exposure, of understanding diverse social realities.
After 1975 I was doing my PhD as well as engaging with this programme, which also involved some
of my teachers. We often found that we were conducting more exciting physics in this rural context,
because the network, and the group of scientists within it, was organised in a personal and
democratic manner, unlike universities where supervisors can be intimidating. When we engaged
with development work we found even the physics more engaging.
A senior colleague of mine from the physics department, who encouraged us to join this rural
programme, became my husband many years later - Vinod Raina - who tragically passed away
recently, till the very end pursuing his mission for the Right to Education. During the 70s he was
involved in student politics and viewed education and development within a broader political
context.
In the 80s I joined the Faculty of Education at Jamia Millia Islamia in Delhi. The vice-chancellor of the
University knew of my work in rural areas and requested that I engage directly with issues of
restructuring education at Jamia, where a large proportion of the student body came from very
disadvantaged Muslim backgrounds. It was a smaller university and I thoroughly enjoyed the few
years that I worked there, also developing and teaching new courses on ‘science and society’ and the
history and sociology of science. I had deliberately stayed on in India for my research, unlike the
majority my colleagues working in theoretical physics, many of whom had gone on to the United
States. We were then being offered very good fellowships and the most inspiring of my physics
teachers had come back from the US to strengthen science education here. Many returning
academics had close contacts with very good physicists; my own supervisor had worked with a Nobel
Prize winner. This link was inspiring and exciting and it was tempting to go to the US, but I decided to
remain in India, because I did not see physics as occupying my whole life – it was going to be a part
of my life.
Later I was awarded a Nehru Fellowship at Teen Murti House to work on education and national
development, where I chose to review what we had been doing as part of the extremely innovative
Hoshangabad Science Teaching Programme (HSTP) for rural schools[1]. It was the first time in our
country that voluntary groups and professional scientists had collaborated in a participatory
curriculum development exercise. Moreover, the state government had given us space in the
development of the curriculum - including textbooks, low cost experiments with a kit for every
classroom, an open book examination system, intensive teacher education programmes, both
annually and in weekly block level meetings, something that had never happened before in India.
The ramifications of this have been tremendous and much of education reform in our country has
taken inspiration from those early efforts in the 70s and 80s. The National Curriculum Framework
2005, and before that efforts at decentralised planning and implementation at the block and cluster
level, also built on a lot of our experiences that had been gained from this school project in Madhya
Pradesh.
At this time (around 1990) I was beginning to engage more actively with the international
community of development and education practitioners. I had been reviewing our own work in
science education and was also beginning to get involved in the National Literacy Campaign. I had
been associated with the People’s Science Movement (PSM), which had just collaborated with the
central government to conduct a participatory literacy campaign, inspired by the Freirean approach
of Latin American literacy campaigns, offering to set up a separate NGO called the Bharat Gyan
Vigyan Samiti (BGVS).The Rajiv Gandhi government with Sam Pitroda had initially proposed the
literacy mission within its vision of ‘technology missions’, but our network - of which the Kerala
Shastra Sahitya Parishad (KSSP) was a leading member and which had worked in science
popularisation and policies on environment, resisting the Silent Valley Dam - instead negotiated a
people-centred approach. Even in a state like Kerala, where education was to a large extent
universalised, though there were still questions about quality and relevance, a campaign in the
Ernakulam district had shown that literacy could be linked to local development through a purely
voluntary campaign. The PSM network thus managed successfully to convince the government and
its Ministry of the campaign model and some leading officials were themselves keen to understand
literacy and education from an empowering perspective.
The campaign had sought to question the very notion of education being a top-down model of
knowledge transmission. The literacy campaign also addressed questions of how to bring in different
kinds of knowledge, how to make education participatory, how to relate people’s disadvantages
with their agency, to collectively work for development. It was not meant to be a campaign only for
those who were non-literate, but a campaign for the whole community. It sought to engage the
whole community through all its capabilities and all its resources to address those who had been
deprived of literacy and other social provisions, to collectively work for transformative action.
EU: How do these experiences speak to the chapters in this book?
AR: The chapter on adult education comments on India and countries of sub Saharan Africa, as
where “the stagnating number of illiterate men and women is attributed to population increase,
which has cancelled any gains in reducing illiterate numbers”, thus endorsing the problematic
instrumental perspective of ‘eradicating illiteracy’, while also pitting ‘population increase’ of the
‘illiterates’ against the gains of ‘development’, without interrogating either of these concepts and
the relationship between social development, women’s empowerment and fertility rates. Our
experiences problematised this relationship.
The decade of the 90s was a very significant time in literacy and development, because for the first
time we engaged in decentralised curriculum development[2], including the use of indigenous
languages as decided by different districts, and in relating education to work. As the chapter on skills
indicates, there have been different views about the definition of ‘skill’ and vocational education in
different contexts. The legacy of the Gandhian model of Basic Education, developed as part of India’s
anti-colonial freedom struggle, had called for ‘education for life, through life’ using a productive craft
– weaving, carpentry, agriculture, or pottery, etc. - as the medium of interdisciplinary hands-on
learning. It also attempted to interrogate the traditional caste system that stigmatised the low castes
and their vocations.
Much later, the issue of locally-based curriculum development at the primary level was taken up by
the District Primary Education Programme (DPEP). However, the model of education as a people’s
campaign, as the name Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) implied (‘abhiyan’ means campaign), did not
incorporate the campaign spirit. It was more a bureaucratic, top-driven, government programme for
elementary schooling, as part of India’s response to EFA, which tried to emulate the literacy
campaign when in fact that campaign had been thwarted and bureaucratised, through focus on
imposed targets, individual testing and tardy processes of approval and funding. The chapter on EFA
looks at how this process happened in other countries.
My personal engagement with our own (HSTP) science programme led me to look at the literate
traditions of science within oral cultures and to escape from the dominant discourses surrounding
knowledge, language and literacy. This led me to write a paper called ‘A Possible Orality for
Science?’[3]. I had often found the discourse of international science education journals extremely
constraining. They didn’t understand where I was coming from or the cultural context in which we
talked about a teacher, a learner or even science. The article in Interchange got a very good
response. I had people from different disciplines responding to some of the questions I had raised,
also people from countries who were trying to reform science education through an STS (science-
technology-society) approach[4], whilst also keeping in mind indigenous communities. This
resonates with the experiences described in the chapter on post development and with the
questions raised in the chapter on indigenous languages.
During the literacy campaign, even though that was the decade of structural adjustment and saw the
introduction of neo-liberal policies, we were happy that the Ministry and all the groups working in
this programme withstood all sorts of advances made by funding agencies. There was no
international funding, no external agency directing or setting targets. As the programme expanded it
did tend to have pressures of producing demonstrable outcomes and a lot of officials who came in
later didn’t look at it in the same way. Gradually there were questions raised about voluntarism and
calls for instituting salary for these unpaid volunteers. Despite these pressures the 90s still showed
that in the most difficult areas of low literacy and low female participation, more women
participated as learners and even volunteers and the decade showed tremendous increase in literacy
figures.
I also took up a part-time honorary assignment as director of the National Literacy Resource Centre
in Mussoorie, at the National Academy of Administration, which is the apex body that trains all our
bureaucrats. I took it up because the government wanted me to facilitate the programme and build
it into part of their training, to understand what a participatory programme of development could
achieve. The district networks of volunteers have continued to be effective in the Right to Education,
in health programmes, the Polio Eradication Programme. Many subsequent programmes conducted
as campaigns have taken from this legacy and often the same people have also been involved. But
unfortunately the national literacy mission lost its course.
Jomtien was a very exciting juncture for EFA with a call for an expanded vision for education and not
in the narrow terms of learning and competencies that had been dominant until that time. Our
government decided that EFA only applied to primary education, so the commitment to look at
education for all was abandoned. Some of the chapters point out how this happened in other
countries as well.
The term ‘Basic Education’ actually stands for Gandhian education, which is still relevant for us
today, in terms of looking towards a more democratic education system that links work with
education and does not build hierarchies of knowledge and skills – between those viewed as
academically ‘more able’ and ‘less able’ - something that is happening more and more today. In the
last few years we’ve had a National Knowledge Commission which looked at knowledge in a
problematic manner, divorced from the rich bodies of knowledge of artisans or those in the
unorganised sector. We also had a National Skill Development Mission which looked at skills in very
different ways and tried to engage with the industry but had no education component in it. This
divorce has become much more marked in the last decade and EFA has not been enabled to draw
upon the legacy of our own country which had looked at education through productive work in the
50s. Such ‘Basic Schools’ had not been allowed to flourish later than that, because the middle class
had its own interests in terms of getting jobs, viewing productive work and locations as being tied to
caste and social stigmas. That’s why free and compulsory elementary education, though in our
constitution, was never given any political or financial commitment. It’s only as late as 2010 that a
Right to Education Act was brought in.
EU: Can you talk about some of the political mobilisation that led to the Right for Education Act?
AR: What happened in the late 90s and early 2000s was that DPEP got a lot of financial support from
funding agencies. There were international pressures for EFA which, in a way, were good in terms of
pressurising all actors to make education inclusive, but were also problematic because the target-
setting was damaging to the way that our system works. It also allowed the government and the
foreign funding agencies to impose their own perspectives, leading to a lack of recognition of equity
linked to quality[5], and the need for good teachers with a systematised teacher-development
model. Some of the chapters show similar trends elsewhere. What happened here was that central
funds were allocated to different states, for para teachers [6] and low paid contractual teachers,
and also what was termed ‘alternative education’, which was a euphemism for low-cost provisions
of schooling without proper infrastructure. The whole question of quality was compromised in the
effort to produce high rates of enrolment and that’s when the struggle for RTE (Right to Education)
again gained a lot of momentum.
In 1999 we wrote the Public Report on Basic Education[7] with Jean Dreze and got media attention
when it was launched by Amartya Sen, in order to push for a Right to Education Act which by then
was almost being shelved. A lot of people were trying to show that, while the government was
producing high enrolments, the education system was becoming more and more discriminatory and
segregated with one type of school for the poor and another for the privileged, even within the
government system. A lot of this stratification has happened in the last two decades. When we were
growing up there was a mixed population in government schools and my own husband, Vinod Raina,
who is remembered today as one of the main architects of the Right to Education Act, studied in
such a government school. In our generation we played with children from all kinds of backgrounds
and different socio-economic groups. Parks and other public areas were mixed spaces. Today that is
not happening; rather, discrimination and distrust against the poor and disadvantaged is growing.
Even though it is true that there are inequalities of location, there are more and more inequalities
which are being exacerbated by the schooling system. A lot of the poor now feel that ordinary
government schools have become abandoned places, so they push to get their children into private
schools. India is being touted as a big market for low-cost schools for the poor. The chapter on
economic growth mentions some studies which defend these private schools, but it is important to
critique those studies. I was on the Steering Committee for Elementary Education and Literacy for
the twelfth plan of the Planning Commission, and the only study which was brought before this
committee was one that showed that teacher qualifications don’t have an impact on learners’
achievements. This was questioned. Moreover, there’s an increasing tendency to look at (and
assess) learning in a narrow and reductionist form, one which tries to say that only basic literacy and
numeracy is required.
In the last decade we, meaning a large network of people working from a progressive and
humanistic perspective towards a transformative approach to education, have seen that we could
make a major contribution to the National Curriculum Framework (NCF) 2005 and to the new
textbooks that followed (I was the Chairperson of the National Council of Educational Research and
Training (NCERT) Textbook Development Teams at the Primary Stage.) NCF 2005 followed a social
constructivist approach supported by the Ministry, locating the learner’s knowledge in culture, while
also critically empathising with others in diverse cultural contexts. It also demonstrated how
learners bring with them various dispositions, world-views and knowledge which is often dismissed
by schools. Grassroots organisations exerted pressure, because even though the government had
amended the Constitution in 2002, it had not enacted the law and was telling individual states that
they could introduce their own State Education Acts. Many movements worked concertedly and,
due to the strength of the mobilisation, the government relented and eventually brought in the RTE
Act. Still there were a lot of struggles even after the Act; the private school lobbies contested it in
court, which took up millions of rupees, claiming that the Act interfered with their freedom to run
their schools. Luckily the Supreme Court took a very strong stand and supported the Act, stating that
this clause[8] was really to strengthen the social fabric of democracy, that it would help to bring
children from different backgrounds together and that this is a shared responsibility for anyone who
works in education because, in this country, education cannot legally be run for profit. It is another
matter how the implementation will be ensured, one doesn’t know how serious governments are
and there are tensions between state and central governments.
EU: You’ve dealt with a lot of the themes of the book: you’ve dealt with the theme of practice,
policy and social activism; and the theme of inequalities, including public-private inequality and
the inequalities around non-inclusive state provision. I think that there was this huge promise
associated with Indian independence but that in reality there’s been a struggle to get the state to
deliver. Nevertheless, the stories you tell of having access to the state and social-activists having
access to the state-
AR: Yes, constantly there is this engagement. That’s why the groups I have worked with, the
networks, BGVS and the network of the People’s Science Movement, consciously engage with the
state. We did not set up our own schools; we engaged and pushed for policy to improve public
provisioning. One of the basic criteria of the groups in our movement was that we remain a secular
organisation and that we do not accept foreign funds.
The chapter on religion raises a number of issues which I do not necessarily agree with. In the
context of multicultural developing countries where religion has played a contested role in the
shaping of dominant ‘national’ or sectarian identities and continues to be used for polarisation,
secular education is closely tied to a democratic vision for a just and humane society. For instance, in
India, various religious denominations run schools that are recognised and affiliated to Boards of
Secondary Education, where they may conduct optional sessions on religious education or value
education. There has been a prolonged national debate on compulsory ‘value education’ which
invariably gets linked to religious education, calling for the infusion of values in education to counter
the perceived ‘decline of traditional values in society’. Progressive educationists have resisted the
introduction of separate subjects (even on issues of human rights, etc.), and instead have integrated
across the curriculum critical understandings of democratic and secular values as enshrined in the
Constitution, while also highlighting that education is never ‘value free’, dominated by the values of
selection, segregation and individualistic competition, now even more aggressively promoted by the
market. Moreover, unrecognised or private schools run by religious organisations which use their
own curricular materials have raised concerns over the highly divisive content of education that
promotes intolerance, reinforces stereotyping and leads to further segregation of children. Despite
calls for a national Textbook Council, regulatory mechanisms at the state or central levels have not
been found to be effective in dealing with such matters, which are not necessarily academic but
dictated more by partisan political affiliations.
EU: Could we talk a little bit about the issue of development assistance? The way you’ve outlined
it, the social activist groups you were working with in India, foreign funds are associated with top-
down approaches and lead to the loss of connection with popular mobilisation, but for us in
Europe, or the US, requiring our governments, which have made money out of colonialism and the
unequal global economy, to meet their commitments in relation to aid and development
assistance - that’s been quite an important political move. But we also have found that though we
struggle for aid, when it is given it often becomes very technocratic and it’s hard to keep it moving
in a direction that is inclusive and equality oriented. Could you make some comments about how
you’ve seen the question of aid from India and how you might see it playing out in other countries
around the world?
AR: A lot of NGOs have engaged with different agencies even though my NGO did not. For instance,
a lot of the NGOs worked with Norad and with Scandinavian aid agencies as they found that they