Rendezvous with Kallar

Sorry to disappoint you but this is not the title of David Dhawan’s upcoming movie. Very recently, Himachal Pradesh was adjudged the best state in the whole country on the basis of the progress it has made in the areas of, hold your breath – Primary Education, Primary Health and Fastest Mover state in Consumer Market. When I read it in the newspaper, I almost fainted.

While it may be totally a coincidence that both centre and state is ruled by the same political outfit, it is no coincidence that it is the first two areas where there are gaping holes in what is on the ground. I can’t talk much about the third and last one, because it is quite subjective and there is no absolute minimum which can be established and agreed upon easily.

Most of the government schools, in the region I am working, do not have sufficient teachers, those who are there, are not trained properly and lack motivation to teach students. While the state government has secured the award by piggy-backing an irrational and nonsensical education policy which dictates that every child in primary school will be taken all the way to eighth standard irrespective of performance, it would be very interesting to see how these kids perform at higher education levels. May be, by the time, first set of students come out of such system, government will make another draconian policy to take them all the way to 10+2. Or, by that time, the current government will no longer be there to bear the brunt of such stupid policy.

The least I say about the primary health the better we all will be. The villages where I am working have no support for primary health services. It seems that by combining Irrigation and Public Health department into one, government has assumed that its work is done and now it can sit back and relax and enjoy the rewards. The fact that a tehsil town like Ghumarwin gets brown murky water when it rains, should tell everyone how serious the government is about the health of its citizens. The fact that most of the hand-pumps, installed by IPH department, deliver water with Arsenic speaks volumes about how concerned local government is.

May be the evaluating agency should bother to check facts and try to separate hype from reality. But then, India is famous for its ambiguity – here, what you see doesn’t happen and what no one sees does actually happen.

// posted by amAUzed @ 7:56 AM 3 comments