Elementary, Mr Rane

When education ministers were falling out noisily in the capital over big ideological questions, one person, at least, seemed to have his eye on the basics. It was good to find Education Minister Dattaji Rane focussing on universal elementary education. After Kerala, the next State to achieve high levels of literacy ought to have been Maharashtra with its history of social equality movements, literary traditions and one of the country's more able bureaucracies. However, Maharashtra has not shown as much determination to lick illiteracy as have Tamil Nadu and even tiny Himachal Pradesh in recent years. Politicians here are second to none when it comes to setting up medical and engineering colleges and very adept at passing the buck when it comes to primary schools. The reasons are obvious. Village schools do not create clout and cash the way district colleges do. So is Rane a different kind of politician? Not that different, it turns out. His chief concern in New Delhi was a higher central allocation forprimary education. Not only has he asked the Centre for a whopping Rs2100 crore, he wants it to fund a national elementary education mission as well. But Rane should not expect the cash-strapped Centre to bail out cash-strapped Maharashtra. He would be wiser to concentrate instead on Maharashtra-specific ways of delivering good elementary schooling and enrolling more children. The State's existing resources can be used better. At present, expenditure on an expanding education bureaucracy is growing faster than expenditure on school buildings, teachers and teaching materials. The way to ensure that funds for elementary education are not diverted for other purposes is to allocate them directly to panchayats and gram sabhas. Secondly, some at least of new investment in primary education can come about by re-ordering priorities. For example, school buildings can be funded from the Employment Guarantee Scheme which is intended to create productive rural assets. More money will not do children any good unless itgoes to the right places and into the right programmes. If Rane is aware of all this, he shows no sign of it.

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