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A few days back, I was glancing through the latest Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2012, brought out in January by a high-profile NGO, Pratham. For the last few years, it had been making news, at least in Gujarat – each year, the survey results suggested poor quality of education dogging the state's primary schools. The new survey, interestingly, revealed that, instead of improving, Gujarat's educational standards have actually deteriorated over the last one year.  As compared to 2011, when 79.7 per cent children in classes 1 and 2 could read letters, words and more, in 2012 this percentage went down to 73.The percentage of children of classes 1 and 2 who could recognize numbers 1-9 or more went down from 79 in 2011 to 71.7 in 2012. Things were found to be not very different for children in standards 3 to 5 or 6 to 8. Only a handful of Bimaru states scored better, that too in some sectors – Bihar, Orissa, Jharkhand, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh. When I f...

  This should be an eye-opener for those who have been architects of the Modi government’s much-publicised kanya kelavni show, meant to enroll higher percentage of children, especially girls, in schools, by sending the entire babudom to the rural areas of Gujarat. If details of the latest Annual Survey of Education Report (ASER), put out this January, are any indication, last year, whopping 30.1 per cent girls, in the age-group 15-16, failed to turn up in Gujarat’s rural schools, which was the highest in the country. The report qualifies 30.1 per cent girls as “out of school”, a term used to combine “dropped out” with “never enrolled” children. What is most disconcerting is that none of the 20 states surveyed show such poor performance. Even the so-called Bimaru states are better performers than Gujarat.

A sanitation workers' colony in Ahmedabad  In a glaring revelation, a recent Indian Institute of Management-Ahmedabad (IIM-A) research paper, “An Assessment of Livelihood and Educational Status of Sanitation Workers in Ahmedabad, Gujarat”, by Ashish Mishra, Indraraj Dodiya and  Navdeep Mathur, has found that only 36 per cent of the Valmiki families send their children to school. As for the rest, in order to support their family, “they eventually drop out”. The report further says, “Of these, 48 per cent have joined casual sanitation work and others do cleaning work in houses near their own.”

I have in my hand a fresh study on Gujarat, “Poverty Amidst Prosperity: Essays on the Trajectory of Development in Gujarat.” What struck me while scanning through this book – which has been edited by Prof Atul Sood of the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and contains well-researched papers by 11 others – is Sood’s following statement in the introduction: “Whatever impact and consequences of growth and development that Gujarat has experienced are in a way a precursor for things to come in other parts of India, unless something drastically changes in the policy orientation at the Centre.”  In Sood’s view, the current Gujarat “model”, which other states now want to replicate, is “characterized in terms of deregulation of the domestic economy and greater integration with the global markets.” While some observers may consider this statement as something Gujarat’s ruling elite should be proud of, nearly all scholars who have contributed to the book, without exception, seem to thin...

It was nearly two years ago. A representative of Ahmedabad-based voluntary organization, Pathey, founded by one senior activist-turned-Congress politician, handed over to me during a session of the Gujarat state assembly a four-page folder which said, on the basis of a survey, that Gujarat government topped in transparency index among a group of 10 major states. The state powerdom, obviously, went gaga over it, seeking political gain. The index was based on queries regarding transparency in budget making. The survey was carried out in alliance with New Delhi-based Centre for Budget and Governance Accountability (CBGA). What seemed to provide credence to the survey was, it was sponsored, among others, by Ford Foundation and Oxfam India. Covering budget-making in Gujarat every year after being posted in Gandhinagar in 1997, I wasn’t just amused but irritated, as my interaction with top state guns was just the opposite. Indeed, there was lot of transparency when I began covering Sachivala...

Mohammad Yunus Nobel laureate Mohammad Yunus, the Grameen Bank man from Bangladesh, believes that information and communication technology (ICT) is going to “change the world in the immediate future far more rapidly and fundamentally than any other technology so far in human history.” Writing in the article way back in late 1990s, when ICT was not in fashion, “Poverty Free World: How and When”, he says, “Internet … is spreading at an exponential rate. At its present speed, it is doubling its worldwide use every nine months.” An economist of the highest order, he underlines, “The most attractive aspect of this spread of ICT is that it is not in anyone’s control. Neither government, nor big business, nor anyone of any authority can restrict the flow of information through the Internet. The next best aspect of it is that it is becoming cheaper every day.” Further, he says in the article, which is part of his book “Bankers to the Poor”, first published in 1998 and republished by Pengu...

The Gujarat state assembly elections last month brought back chief minister Narendra Modi to power with a resounding victory. A month has gone by, yet I am left wondering what prompted Modi – in his first speech after the victory, delivered at the BJP headquarters in Ahmedabad – to thank the government staff for overwhelmingly voting for his party. Addressing a jubilant gathering of his supporters, which included a top Congress turncoat, Narhari Amin, Modi dished out a figure of the support he believed he got from the karmacharis – 70 per cent!  This was, indeed, quite in contrast to what a few officials in the chief minister’s office (CMO), as also some senior secretaries, had been telling me all along – that the karmacharis had “generally cast their vote against Modi in the postal ballots.” There were even reports that, at some places, the karmacharis, especially cops, were prevented from posting their ballots. They were told to “perform their duty” instead of voting. When I trie...