Author: Hema Easley
Publication: The Journal News
Date: May 27, 2003
URL: http://www.thejournalnews.com/newsroom/052703/a0127tribalschoolsn.html
On a dusty byway in a busy city
neighborhood stands an innocuous single-story house. It could use a coat
of paint, and its small patch of lawn needs mowing. A two-wheeled scooter,
a symbol of lower middle-class India, is propped against a peeling wall.
The door has no sign, just an electric bell.
But for all its simplicity, 5-A
Link Road is the headquarters of one of the largest privately funded, free,
mass education programs in the world. The Ekal Vidyalaya (One Teacher School)
Foundation, paid for by Indians across the globe, including many in Westchester
and Rockland counties, provides nonformal education to 400,000 children
in far-flung tribal areas of India that the government-run school system
does not reach.
Bolstered by its exponential growth
- 10,000 schools in four years - it hopes to increase the number to 100,000
schools with 4 million students as part of its ultimate aim to bring literacy
to every village in India.
It may sound like an ambitious plan,
but not to Bhupendra Kumar Modi, the chairman of Ekal Vidyalaya Foundation
and a successful industrialist in India.
"The goal is reachable," said Modi,
seated in his Manhattan apartment overlooking the East River during a stop
in the United States earlier this month. "Initially, there was no faith
in the movement. They said it can't be done. But now that we have reached
critical mass of 10,000 schools, then 100,000 is possible."
Despite its successes, the foundation
has come in for some criticism. Some expatriate Indians have reportedly
been reluctant to contribute because of its alleged links with Hindu religious
groups. These groups, critics say, back the foundation as a way to counter
Christian missionaries who have also set up schools in tribal areas and
are being accused of seeking converts in the guise of educating poor tribals.
The foundation denies the charge. Eighty percent of Indians are Hindu.
The country is a secular democracy.
"Any organization this size will
get criticism," said Sanjay Bhatt, a Indian-American from Schaumburg, Ill.,
who is doing a third-party evaluation of Ekal Vidyalaya as part of a yearlong
educational project in India. "In order to motivate people to come together,
you need commonality. In India, religion is the biggest commonality. The
primary goal of the Ekal Vidyalaya is tribal education."
The foundation began as an idea
four years ago. If India, a British colony until 1947, could become the
world's fifth-largest economy with the third-highest growth rate in the
world, and with a huge intellectual capital in its thousands of trained
professionals, what could the country achieve if all its citizens were
educated and could contribute to the economy?
"If you want India to become a world
power, the average of India has to move up," said Modi, explaining the
raison d'etre for the movement.
India's middle class is 250 million
strong with most of them having access to health care, schools, housing
and private transport. However, 40 percent of the country's 1 billion people
are illiterate, unemployment is high and millions lack health-care facilities.
The government's per capita spending on education is $13, and an estimated
130,000 of India's 600,000 villages do not have access to schools.
"What we need is balance," said
Balram Advani of Congers, who is president of the ADH Health Products Inc.
and a contributor to Ekal Vidyalaya. "If you want to help them, educate
them."
It's not that the Indian government
doesn't spend money on education; it's how it spends it. India's budget
for education is approximately 3.2 percent of its gross domestic product.
But while the United States spends nearly 60 percent of its education budget
on elementary and secondary schools, India spends 14 times as much on scientific
and technical studies as it does on primary education. Almost all higher
education is subsidized in India. A year of college can cost can as a little
as $3. (India's per capita annual income is $450).
This stems from a vision of the
country's founding fathers that world-class scientific education should
be available to all Indians irrespective of their ability to pay. While
the country pumps millions of dollars into technology universities and
medical and business schools, millions of rural children have no access
to education.
At the same time, Indians across
the globe are accumulating wealth - the total income of expatriate Indians
and people of Indian origin is one-third of India's gross domestic product
- in large part because of the subsidized education they received in India.
Sabeer Bhatia, the creator of Hotmail, the world's largest e-mail provider,
received his education in India. So did the creator of the Pentium chip,
Vinod Dahm, and the founder of Sun Microsystems, Vinod Khosla. There are
45,000 Indian doctors in the United States, about 520 of them in Westchester
and Rockland counties, which also have more than 1,000 Indian engineers.
Thousands of Indians work as financial and computer software professionals
in the United States.
This is this source that Ekal Vidyalaya
Foundation is hoping to tap to take its movement forward.
"Whenever I talk to people, I tell
them our success in this country is because of our education," said Bharat
Patel, a pharmaceutical businessman and the coordinator of Ekal Vidyalaya
in the tri-state area.
"Now, it is our turn to give back
to our country, especially to the forgotten children of India," said Patel,
who lives in East Windsor, N.J., and last year raised money to run 650
Ekal Vidyalayas in India. Indians from the United States have contributed
to the running of 2,500 Ekal Vidyalayas.
Dr. Bharat Parikh of Ardsley, an
internal medicine specialist in the Bronx, first heard of Ekal Vidyalaya
through literature distributed by the foundation. He was impressed by its
goals and decided to contribute to it.
"India is a poor nation with so
many needs, so many requirements. Whatever we can do to help, we should,"
said Parikh.
The foundation's beneficiaries are
children between the ages of 5 and 15 who live in tribal areas inaccessible
by train or motorable roads. A typical class is held under a tree or under
a thatched roof; if it rains, students scurry into the teacher's house.
The foundation invests in a blackboard, chalk, charts for children and
a schoolteacher, and the families provide the rest. Only 10 percent of
the $3.5 million annual budget is spent on administrative costs.
Children - at least 45 percent of
the students are girls - study reading, writing, math, history, science,
yoga, health and hygiene, and local customs and culture. Classes are held
three hours a day, six days a week. The teachers, specially trained by
the foundation, are local men and women who have studied up to eighth or
10th grade. They are paid an honorarium of about $10 a month and are deeply
committed to educating children in the village.
"This movement is based on the volunteerism
of thousands of people dedicated to education," said Anil Kumar, the joint
project coordinator in New Delhi and an activist who has worked in rural
India for 25 years.
A large part of the Ekal Vidyalaya
movement's success and the lightning speed of its growth lies in the relative
low cost of providing this nonformal education in India. An average school
of 40 students has a budget of $365 a year or $1 dollar a day. No infrastructure
or capital investment is needed. This may not be much, but it's enough
to give the children a start.
"God has given only one life to
these children. They cannot wait until government aid comes and a school
is built," Patel said.
