It was sometime after 2002. Dr APJ Abdul Kalam had become the President of India. I was still the Chief Minister of Nagaland. Readers of this piece would be frowning upon my use of ‘still’ in the previous sentence. It was because that was my fourth term as Chief Minister!
We received the President as per protocol; and when he found the first opportunity, he told me that he wanted to go to the most backward village of the State to see the school there. So, I selected one of the most backward areas of Nagaland, the village being in one of the remotest corners of the State. He did not wait. He was almost impatient and restless to reach there. We started, the President, I and some senior officers as well as people’s representatives.
We reached the village and he went straight to the school. He interacted with the students and teachers for hours. He had questions, some plain and simple, and some real peculiar which seemed ordinarily extraordinary. In the beginning, the students were overawed by the enormity of the occasion. However, as seconds rolled into minutes and minutes into hours, the students, younger and older, were somehow trapped into believing that they were NOT interacting with the President of India, rather they were with a friend, a very intimate and learned one! During the session, ideas were exchanged, intricate questions raised and answered.
As we were coming back from that area, he expressed his desire that now he would like to see one model village school. So, I took him to one that was being managed by the villagers themselves through a village council. I would briefly explain to my readers why the villagers were entrusted with the job in the first place.
There were reports from remote areas that the teachers were not coming to the schools regularly; student attendance rates were fabricated; cases of dropout were never reported; and whatever little funds allocated gobbled up by corrupt local Government employees. So, many schools were their skeletons. School houses (buildings) were colourless plaster-less semi-ruined structures. And even if they wanted to improve the scenario, the villagers could do nothing. It was against this backdrop that I had initiated one bold step to stem the rot. There was an announcement from my Government that villagers would be given the responsibility of managing schools in their villages/locality. The Government would do that in a phased manner. However, villages which wanted to be part of the initiative would submit a proposal. To cut a long story short, many rural schools were adopted by themselves. Villagers were told that they would be accountable for any mismanagement; and if their children did not go to school, the loss was theirs. There was provision also that funds would also be provided to the village councils for improvement of infrastructure and work would be carried out by person or persons chosen by the villagers. I had called it the “communitisation” of schools.
Here, Dr Kalam was impressed the most. As a man who had never forgotten his roots, he could instantly realise the import of this initiative and was of the opinion that this arrangement should be replicated elsewhere in Nagaland and in other remote tribal areas of the country because he believed that mismanagement, official apathy, lack of interest from the local people were the reason that affected our school education, both at primary and secondary levels. Of course, there was great improvement in Nagaland’s schools. That day Dr Kalam spent again more than an hour in that model school, talking to students, teachers and members of village councils. He was visibly glad to see that the village council comprised a teachers’ representative, a parents’ representative, a village representative and a Government official. It was a sort of check and balance way of ensuring student attendance, teachers’ presence, quality work for infrastructure and overall improvement.
Therefore when I became the Governor of Goa, Dr Kalam had the same advice for me. “Why do not you replicate your Nagaland school experiment hereIJ” he had asked. He knew being the Governor; I could not do much as there was an elected Government was there. Yet after some days when there was President’s Rule in Goa, I had genuinely wished to replicate my Nagaland type “communitisation” of schools. But then I had so little time and I was so busy otherwise! Now, I am happy that almost similar arrangements are done in many States. Dr Kalam must have been happy. However, when I see that even village committees are not careful about their responsibility, I am saddened and know, so would have been Dr Kalam.
Thank you Dr Kalam, a born teacher. That you breathed your last in one academic institution indicates only one thing. It was not a coincidence.
(Dr Jamir is the Governor of Odisha)
