In a corner of eastern India’s Kolkata city is a school that is giving its students the confidence to face the future.
More than half of the 68 students at the Swamiji Vidyapeeth Primary School in the working-class Bowbazaar area are children of commercial sex workers, and it was not until the government launched its Universal Education Campaign that it really took off.
The school was established four decades ago. But it took the government’s flagship education programme—Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA), or education for all—to get children from the brothels nearby to come there.
The social stigma and the fear of ostracism kept mothers from enrolling their children till the SSA intervened with regular counselling, interaction and awareness drives.
Just like education is more than just the three Rs, India’s ambitious education for all campaign is a success story that goes beyond mere statistics—giving millions of children not just the chance to read and write but a stab at a new life.
From opening new schools to encouraging private institutions to join in and bringing together internationals aid agencies, the programme has given more than 180 million children a chance at an educated life, a good career and confidence to face the odds.It also pointed out that access to primary schooling has increased to the extent that nearly 98 per cent of the country’s children (of school-going age) have a primary school within a kilometre of their home and the number of out of school children has fallen significantly to 7.5 million in 2007, from 32 million in 2001-02.
Much of this can be attributed to the SSA which, since its launch in 2001-02, has been not only trying to deliver its objective of universal elementary education but also bridging the socio-cultural and gender gaps in the country of over one billion people.
This it does by including in its ambit specific focus on the girl child and skills like computer education, so necessary in the rapidly evolving tech world of today.
In the budget of the last two years (2007-08, 2008-09), the government has allocated over Rs 262 billion (US $6 billion) for universalising elementary education to achieve the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of universal primary education.
The MDG by the United Nations calls for universalisation of primary education by 2015, a target that the Indian government wants to achieve five years in advance.