Tsewang Rigzin
Executive Councillor for Education
Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Council, Leh

 Ladakh Model of Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (LMSSA)

People’s movement to overhaul the Government School System in Ladakh,
creating a model for the state and the nation.

Background

Ladakh has had a tradition of education movements starting from the early 1950s, when our leaders launched a movement for school enrolment bringing the enrolment rates far above the national average despite all the disadvantages that Ladakh suffered. In the recent past the Hill Council, in partnership with Ladakhi NGOs and village communities, launched another movement in 1994 called Operation New Hope (ONH). Here the issue of quality was addressed. As a result of the measures taken, i.e. a massive teachers training drive, formation of Village Education Committees (VECs) for local ownership and accountability in schools, and publication of locally adapted textbooks, the Matric exam results, which continuously used to hover around 5% until 1998, rose up to 55% by 2004.

Introduction

While many of the major ills in the government school system were addressed by the first phase of ONH movement, there is a serious need to further resolve some of the remaining ills, in order to make government schools a source of quality education for all — rich and poor, rural and urban. With the introduction of Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) in 2003, most of the attempts made in ONH got a formally institutionalised. Yet SSA needed to be locally adapted as the issues facing Ladakh are so different from the rest of India. Apart form the unique geography and culture, other social factors are equally different, to cite a few examples, school enrolment in Ladakh has been near 100% for years, except in certain nomadic communities. On the other hand retention is a serious issue but again, unlike in the rest of the country, here the issue of drop-out is much more serious among boys* than girls. Similarly for the last 10 years Ladakh has seen a home grown education reform movement much like SSA and this should ideally be used to catapult it to the next stage of reform rather than being clubbed with the rest of the state to start all over from scratch.

The challenge in education in Ladakh therefore is not of opening more schools, there is already a school in every little hamlet. With an incredible teacher: pupil ratio of 1:10, the challenge is more of managing these resources creatively to improve scholastic performance. The educational awareness movement of the past decade has raised the expectations of the parents so much that many village schools are facing closure, with parents opting for a very unsustainable and child-unfriendly option— of sending their three year olds to distant private schools in Leh city.

This document tries to explore these major challenges facing our schools today due to which they are unable to attract children despite the fact that in Ladakh the government expenditure per child per month is a staggering Rs. 1,500 (comparable to the best private schools in the country). LMSSA is also an attempt to translate into reality the goals of education sector set in the ‘Vision Document-Ladakh-2025’, adopted by LAHDC, Leh in 2005. LMSSA could also be seen as the second phase of LAHDC’s own Operation New Hope. It aims to be a partnership of government, civil society organisations and village communities to take the education reform movement in Ladakh to a new height — where government schools become as good as any other schools and can realise the vision of the ‘Neighbourhood School’ or the ‘Common School’ floated by Kothari Commission in 1966.

We hope that in this way apart from benefiting ourselves, we can also benefit the rest of the state and the country by becoming a model. A model is most powerful when it succeeds in a place that is otherwise considered harsh, backward and difficult, as it can generate the feeling — If a place like Ladakh can do it, any place can do it. This perhaps, could be Ladakh’s way of repaying the gratitude we owe to the state and the nation for all the unconditional aid and support we have received so far. 

1.      A Holistic Approach to Education

Apart from better exam results today we are in need of an education system, which strengthens our children and youth in every way, which enables and empowers them in the modern world without sacrificing the depth of traditional knowledge and wisdom inherent in our unique culture. A system that caters not just to the 3 Rs, but to a balanced development of the ‘3 Hs’ in every child. A bright Head for knowledge and ideas, skilled Hands for self reliance and above all a kind Heart for harmony and peaceful coexistence in this diverse world.

2.      Locally Relevant Curriculum

Ladakh with its distinct cultural, geographical and environmental situation needs a curriculum and teaching learning materials that are contextualised so that children can relate to what is taught and are strengthened rather than weakened by the process of schooling. We need to be carried further the programme started under ONH for adapting the curriculum and publication of text books. Importance has to be given to the special needs of the minorities within Ladakh just as Ladakh seeks special attention from the state and the country. In this regard people in Changthang region need special attention towards making education relevant to their nomadic lifestyle and livelihoods, similarly linguistic minorities like the Brogpa (Dard) population also need attention, at least in early primary education. While extra emphasis on enrolling the girl child may be out of place in Ladakh, the issue of inclusion of children with special needs (disabled) seems to be a bigger need.

3.      Teacher Training

In-service Training: An apex Educational Resource Centre

Trained and passionate teachers are the soul of any education system worth the name. Since accessibility to a state level resource centre is very difficult due to our remoteness, and since cultural and geographical conditions are very different here, Ladakh needs to have an apex educational resource centre within our reach, for high quality training of trainers for both Leh and Kargil. The District Institute of Education & Training (DIET) is of course the ideal place for this. But the DIET so far has itself been ailing and starved of manpower and other resources and needs to be properly functionalised.  If this is difficult within the present set-up of SSA, then separate resources could be mobilised by the Hill Council along with the NGOs to hire the best key resource persons on contract, from within Ladakh and throughout the country. This centre would train and support trainers who would then act as resource persons at zonal and cluster levels. Apart from this, the apex team could also continue developing training and teaching/learning materials, as also localisation of curriculum and publication of text-books.

Pre-service Training

While the above Educational Resource Centre could ensure quality in-service training under the SSA programme, it would also be important to arrange facilities for good quality pre-service training programmes offering D.Ed and B.Ed degrees, whether through the DIET or through private/NGO institutions.  However for this to work, the government will have to make such qualifications a basic criterion at the time of recruitment.  There is no reason whatsoever in this day and age for the government to recruit untrained teachers with a mere class XII or a plain BA degree and then sponsor them with full salary for in-service D.Ed and B.Ed degrees.  This scheme, perhaps launched when qualified teachers were scarce, has outlived its utility and should be closed as in most states.

4.      Reconstruction of School Infrastructure

One of the reasons both teachers and parents lack enthusiasm about government schools is that the school buildings are old, cold, dark and dilapidated. For our village schools to as good as private schools, apart from the software, the hardware i.e. building etc. will have to be inspiring. Most of our schools were built in the sixties with inappropriate technologies. Today it has been shown by many Ladakhi NGOs using affordable solar heating technologies that schools can run throughout the winter without any heating bills. This can mean that we can run the schools in winter and let the children have vacations in summer months so that they can participate in and learn from village life, all the farming and other life skills. This would make our school education very progressive — offering modern academic education without sacrificing traditional wisdom and skills.

In this massive reconstruction activity we are lucky that the Indian Army’s Sadbhavana outreach and other donors have already expressed interest to join hands with the Hill Council.

5.      Better Management of Human Resource.

          Separate primary, post-primary and pre-primary cadres

It has been observed that at present no distinction is made among the teachers from primary to high school. This makes management of their training and transfers a major challenge. A teacher trained in primary school subjects and methodologies is often transferred to a middle or high school where they are required to teach higher classes and vice versa, thus wasting their training and at the same time leaving them lacking in the training actually needed for handling these classes.

Therefore it would be good if primary and post-primary teachers were separated into two different cadres and all their training and transfers were managed separately.

          Multi-grade system at primary level

Most village primary schools have around 5 to 15 students scattered over five grades, with two or three frustrated teachers trying to treat them like five separate classes like in any other mono-grade situation. This is very ineffective and the pupil-teacher ratio is most unsustainable. A look at other parts of the world like Australia, New Zealand, and Sweden, where similar situation exists in the remote sheep and reindeer herding populations shows that they treat such schools as a special multi-grade case and handle them accordingly. Under this system a teacher is trained to handle 20 to 30 students of different grades simultaneously and single-handedly. Such a programme has also been carried out successfully in India by the Rishi Valley Education Research (River) project in Andhra Pradesh. Their programme is today replicated by many state governments in roughly 40,000 schools.

It would be ideal if Ladakhi villages adopted this system. This would also free up around 300 primary teachers who could then be re-trained to provide the much needed pre-primary facility in government schools.

6.      A Kindergarten in every school

In Ladakh the main reason why many parents chose distant private school over the neighbourhood government school is not so much because the private schools are better in quality but because most government schools take students only in grade one, at the age of six.  In today’s well-exposed world, even village parents are not willing to wait till the children turn six. Therefore if government schools are to survive in this fast changing world they must have an effective pre-primary component. And one way this can be done without any extra cost or manpower is to introduce multi-grade system at the primary level and then to use the nearly 300 freed-up teachers along with the ICDS (Integrated Child Development Scheme) worker and helper, to provide a high quality pre-primary school right within the village.

7.      Public Engagement and Ownership

In a democracy it is of utmost importance that the whole community is aware and excited about education, for it to attract the all important interest, attention and imagination of political leaders and bureaucrats. A massive drive needs to be carried out to further the recent tradition of community participation and ownership of government schools. While each village in Leh District has an active Village Education Committee (VEC) linked to the Halka panchayat through the Panchayat Education Committee (PEC), we now need to link these upwards through Block Education Committees (BEC) and a District Education Committee (DEC). Along with vertical integration of these bodies for empowerment, at the village level itself the concept of VEC needs to go deeper. In the last reform phase their role evolved from teacher-care and school-repair towards demand for quality education. In future they need to become partners in planning and execution of a holistic education of their children. While the teachers teach the regular subjects, parents and community can bring into school a wealth of traditional knowledge and wisdom by organising weekly workshops with village resource persons like musicians, storytellers, weavers, carpenters and other craftspersons. Some villages have already started this through the Mother’s wing of the VEC. Ladakh’s tradition of participation of women and even students in the VECs needs to be further strengthened.

8.      School as a community learning Centre

Schools have all the potential for becoming a learning resource centre for the whole community. They need to be equipped accordingly with a good library, village level museums of different kinds, facilities for learning cultural activities like music, art and theatre. Through theatre and music children could get involved in health awareness and literacy campaigns and develop a spirit of volunteering for public cause. For a dynamic learning centre of this kind it would be good to always build the village Community Hall in the school compound. They could serve as a village resource centre and be equipped with all the statistics and information about the village.

9.      Resource Mobilisation

All the above measures will require sizable financial resources, but with the already prevailing enthusiasm among the people and political leadership it is not impossible to raise this. While funds under SSA and other programmes should be used in a synergetic way, special packages, if really required, can be requested from both the State and the Centre for this important sector in this remote and disadvantaged region. On the other hand the public enthusiasm for a change in Ladakh’s educational state is so strong that a massive resource mobilisation drive can also be organised among the Ladakhi urban and rural population through the VECs. During a similar drive in the late nineties, SECMOL with the help of a seed contribution from HH the Dalai Lama, managed to help the VECs raise roughly ten lakh rupees within a year. Similar but larger scale campaigns could be launched now for the Ladakh model of SSA. It might also be possible for the Hill Council to float a voluntary “education tax/contribution” on all tourism-related businesses in Ladakh, which the business establishments could pass on to the clients.

The above collection of local financial resources could then be used as a leverage point to raise further grants from national and international donors who are always happy to see a matching local contribution.

Ultimate Vision

The ultimate vision of the programme would be to jump-start the government educational machinery to a level of quality where the educated and the influential of the society can also entrust their children to state schools. Together with the quality enrichment programme within the school, a parallel campaign would try to build public opinion to make it a moral obligation for all elected representatives and all teachers/officials to send their own children to the schools they run, by the year 2010.  This would be the ultimate expression of confidence in our own conviction, and once this happens there might be enough stake and accountability within the system to make this change irreversible. It may sound far-fetched for the rest of the country but in Ladakh, after ten years of reforms, this process has already started and there are instances of people including some leaders bringing their children back from private schools into an improved local government school. Elsewhere in the world whether it is Sweden, Denmark or even a monarchy like Bhutan, the top national leaders including the prime minister and the royal family send their children to the same government schools where the children of common citizens go.

This would be the model we could be presenting to the rest of the country and the developing world. That economic segregation of children into rich private schools and poor government schools will lead to conflict rather than progress. When India’s 95% children are forced into schools that are below African standards, it is unlikely that there will be peace of mind in future, for the 5% who go to schools that are above American standards. Apart from general social unrest, an unskilled labour force will mean that India’s capitalists will also not be able to compete with say their Asian counterparts.

A Befitting Launch

Finally a programme of this scale and ambition should have a befitting launch, to raise public awareness and enthusiasm at local and national level and to instil a sense of confidence and pride in the programme. Therefore, we are most fortunate to see its launch by the President of India Dr APJ Abdul Kalam on 28th July 2006. This is most appropriate, both because of Dr Kalam’s love for children and his vision of India as a developed nation by the year 2020.

Tsewang Rigzin

Executive Councillor for Education
Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Council, Leh
Email: rigzinhimalaya@yahoo.co.in