A directive by the Ministry of Human Resources Development (MHRD) — headed by Smriti Irani— to facilitate the telecast of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s address to schoolchildren may not have gone down well with the non-BJP ruled States in the country, but this is not for the first time that school managements in the Congress-ruled Maharashtra have been “directed” to hold events to give the message of the PM to students in educational institutions across the State.
For, even the UPA Government had for two consecutive years – 2011 and 2012 – compelled schools in Maharashtra to organise functions to read out a message from the then Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, on the occasion of the National Education Day— marking the birth anniversary of India’s first Education Minister Maulana Abdul Kalam Azad on November 11.
So much so that the Maharashtra Education Directorate (Primary), Pune, had mandated not just Government-run schools but also the civic and private schools to hold the National Education Day function on November 11, 2012 – which was incidentally a Sunday and a day that came in midst of Diwali holidays for the schools. On that day (November 12, 2012) — the school managements had specially been directed to read out Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s National Education Day message to students at a function held in Government-run, civic schools, aided and unaided primary education educational institutions in the State, in the presence of the elected representatives from municipal and local self-bodies.
The mandate to educational institutions did not end with merely organising the event and reading out the Prime Minister’s message to students, but it also — as a circular in Marathi (issued by the Thane Zilla Parishad on November 6, 2012 a copy of which is available with ‘The Pioneer’) made it obligatory on the part of the headmasters of the educational institutions in question to send a report and photograph (showing institution head reading out of the PM Singh’s message sent to schools along with the circular) taken at the function, to the education department officials concerned.
“Yes. It is true that adhering to the circular issued by Zilla Parishad on November 6 2012, we did organise the National Education Day function on November 11, 2012 despite the day being a Sunday and a day that came in the midst of Diwali holidays. Since it was compulsory for us to organize the function at the school, we hurriedly assembled students and teachers living in the neighbourhood and held a function wherein then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s message was read out. On the occasion, we also explained the contribution of the country’s first Education Minister Maulana Abdul Kalam Azad to the students,” a Principal of a leading private primary-cum-secondary school at Thane told this newspaper on Friday. The Principal in question did not want to be identified for obvious reasons.