Ten-year-old Sagar Chand may be the most pampered student in the country. The work at his school doesn’t begin till he arrives, even as his teachers wait for him patiently every morning. When he does reach school, a teacher attends to him while a helper prepares his food. During recess he partakes of the mid-day meal, even goes home to meet his parents.

This unique educational institution is the Government Primary School at Naktara in Shimla district of Himachal Pradesh, and the special treatment being meted out to Chand springs from the fear that if he leaves, the school will be forced to shut down. “We will not let our school, which opened way back in 1966, close,” says Gaitri Sharma, the teacher at Naktara.

Incredibly enough, the school at Naktara is not the only one of its kind. Several have been shut down because its students shifted elsewhere—as in the government school at Dhar Dochi—often because of lack of teachers and infrastructure. Consequently, the students are not even equipped with basic skills of reading and writing. The ground reality is stark enough to puncture Himachal Pradesh’s claims of high literacy and its ambitious plans of providing good quality primary and higher education.

The Annual Status of Education Report 2006 (ASER) facilitated by Pratham, an NGO, on behalf of the state government found that nearly 60 per cent of Class III students do not know how to read, write or solve simple arithmetic problems and only half the students in Class IV can read textbooks. By the time they reach Class V, they fail to achieve proficiency in the subjects being taught.

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