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We agree with chief adviser when he says the problem of ‘a widening difference in the quality of education in urban and rural schools’ should be solved ‘as soon as possible’. Education, needless to say, is a principal precondition for human resource development. It is also needless to say that the existing education delivery system – from the kindergartens to the universities – is heavily city-centric. The concentration of good educational institutions and availability of education accessories is disproportionately higher in the cities than in villages. It is of little surprise then that the overall quality of education is much higher in urban areas than in rural areas. It follows then that the urbanites have far greater avenues for human resources development than their rural counterparts do. Clearly, such an arrangement affords the urbanites an undue and undesirable edge over the rural people, who constitute the majority of the population, vis-à-vis not only employment opportunities but also overall access to public resources. In other words, the rural people are doubly discriminated against. First, they are denied access to quality education and then their employment opportunities are limited for not having quality education. The urban-rural gap in quality of education also translates into domination of urbanites in the decision- and policy-making process, which, in turn, translates into perpetuation of city-centric policies and asymmetric development, economic and otherwise. Overall, the disparity not only widens but tends to take a perpetual form. The solution, therefore, lies not in piecemeal changes in the education delivery system or, for that matter, the education policy; we need to make a paradigmatic shift in our overall development outlook. The country’s development policy is brazenly city-centric and hardly accommodates the wants and needs of the people in rural areas. Whatever programme there is for rural development has been defined and developed mostly arbitrarily, by people not necessarily aware of the realities on the ground in rural areas and without proper consultation with the rural populace. We need to come up with a development model whereby the interests and aspirations of the rural people, who, to reiterate, constitute the majority of the population, will be accommodated. The major step in this direction should be to have governance by people’s representatives at every tier of the administration and effective inclusion of local government representatives in the national-level decision- and policy-making processes.
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RSS