Skip to main content

White elephants of governments



There is an amusing report in today’s New Indian Express [Kochi edition, 9 July,2022]. It says that the government schools as well as government-aided schools in Kerala are running short of students. This is not news, really. This has been happening in the state for decades. All the people of Kerala who can afford the fees send their children to private schools for the simple reason that they are English medium and maintain far better standards of education though the teachers there are paid a pittance. This is what amuses me. Those teachers who really slog carry home ridiculous pay packets at the end of the month, while those in the government and aided schools who are paid enormous sums do almost nothing!

I have been living in Kerala now for seven years. My observation is that most government establishments in Kerala do nothing worthwhile. Go to a government office to get some work done and you will feel as if you are a beggar in the state. Government employees in Kerala think they are appointed by none less than God and they carry a divine mandate to harass people like wanton boys do to helpless flies. [I have had humiliating treatments even from the staff who collect taxes and bills in government offices. Now I pay all such things online and stay far from government staff.]

A lion’s share of the Kerala government’s revenue is spent on these employees (to pay their salaries, perks and pensions) who do hardly any work sincerely (unless they are bribed). The most ludicrous irony is that the teachers of the government and aided schools in Kerala don’t send their own wards to their own schools. These children study in private schools. What better proof for the redundancy of these schools where the government invests bulk of its revenue?

Kerala is notorious for such stealing from the public coffers. Every MLA in the state appoints all his relatives and friends and their relatives and friends in some place or another which gives them government salaries for a few years after which they will be entitled to state pensions. Where on earth will an employee get lifelong pension from the state after serving for two years except in Kerala?

I left Kerala as a young man and found a job in Meghalaya because I couldn’t get a decent job in the state as I had no influential people in politics or religion to promote me. [Ok, even that job in Shillong was a gift of some religious friends!] Today the youth of Kerala are leaving soon after school for other countries because they know they have no future in this state (or even in the country which is becoming increasingly sectarian).

Now, though retired officially, I teach in a private school which has over 2300 students while the government and aided schools in the locality struggle to find at least a handful of students so that the well-paid teachers there won’t feel bored without any work at all to do.

This system has to change. Why can’t the government make the state schools efficient? Why can’t the medium of instruction be changed if the people of the state want that? Why can’t the teachers be made more accountable? And there are many more questions. 

With a few former students who visited recently
[Seated are all teachers]

Comments

  1. That is the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. We have 1800 students in our school which is a private school, and our teachers slog like workhorses for salaries that are below the government scales. Maybe, it has much to do with job satisfaction and the feeling that they are actually making a difference to the children they teach.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Job satisfaction is certainly a great reward. But why can't government make that job satisfaction a part of the remuneration? I mean, there's something wrong here.

      Delete
  2. Hari Om
    an intriguing conundrum... one wonders if there is anywhere in the world where a state-run/funded educational system actually comes up to full standard. Even here there are issues - but more to do with not enough teachers rather students I think. Not an area I am very 'au fait' with so cannot make much more comment than this... YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The situation is different there, I guess. I have seen schools here trying to ape western systems but failing to achieve any of the expected objectives. Education has to touch hearts.

      Delete
  3. That's what the situation with the both of our Telugu states,say, AP and TS.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Sad. We can never progress intellectually if that's the situation.

      Delete
  4. Good Article.
    Yes it's a sorry state of affairs.
    Kerala has a great potential with all the resources and talent but somehow the politics is ruining it.
    One valuable point you mentioned - Why can't the medium of instruction change? This will help the Govt schools to move forward if the Govt takes it seriously.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. There's a powerful political lobby of teachers at work in Kerala. That lobby gets government to dance to its tunes. Even the aided school managements act in connivance with that lobby.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

Don Bosco

Don Bosco (16 Aug 1815 - 31 Jan 1888) In Catholic parlance, which flows through my veins in spite of myself, today is the Feast of Don Bosco. My life was both made and unmade by Don Bosco institutions. Any great person can make or break people because of his followers. Religious institutions are the best examples. I’m presenting below an extract from my forthcoming book titled Autumn Shadows to celebrate the Feast of Don Bosco in my own way which is obviously very different from how it is celebrated in his institutions today. Do I feel nostalgic about the Feast? Not at all. I feel relieved. That’s why this celebration. The extract follows. Don Bosco, as Saint John Bosco was popularly known, had a remarkably good system for the education of youth.   He called it ‘preventive system’.   The educators should be ever vigilant so that wrong actions are prevented before they can be committed.   Reason, religion and loving kindness are the three pillars of that syste...

Coffee can be bitter

The dawns of my childhood were redolent of filtered black coffee. We were woken up before the birds started singing in the lush green village landscape outside home. The sun would split the darkness of the eastern sky with its splinter of white radiance much after we children had our filtered coffee with a small lump of jaggery. Take a bite of the jaggery and then a sip of the coffee. Coffee was a ritual in our home back then. Perhaps our parents believed it would jolt our neurons awake and help us absorb our lessons before we set out on the 4-kilometre walk to school after all the morning rituals at home. After high school, when I left home for further studies at a distant place, the ritual of the morning coffee stopped. It resumed a whole decade later when I completed my graduation and took up a teaching job in Shillong. But I had lost my taste for filtered coffee by then; tea took its place. Plain tea without milk – what is known as red tea in most parts of India. Coffee ret...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...

Relatives and Antidepressants

One of the scenes that remain indelibly etched in my memory is from a novel of Malayalam writer O V Vijayan. Father and little son are on a walk. Father tells son, “Walk carefully, son, otherwise you may fall down.” Son: “What will happen if I fall?” Father: "Relatives will laugh.” I seldom feel comfortable with my relatives. In fact, I don’t feel comfortable in any society, but relatives make it more uneasy. The reason, as I’ve understood, is that your relatives are the last people to see any goodness in you. On the other hand, they are the first ones to discover all your faults. Whenever certain relatives visit, my knees buckle and the blood pressure shoots up. I behave quite awkwardly. They often describe my behaviour as arising from my ego, which used to be a oversized in yesteryear. I had a few such visitors the other day. The problem was particularly compounded by their informing me that they would be arriving by about 3.30 pm and actually reaching at about 7.30 pm. ...