MCGM wants to shift the responsibility of improving the quality of education to NGOs.

Mumbai’s city government has now come out with a confessional: it has botched primary education, a part of its mandate under the law. The mandate was self-imposed decades ago when leading lights of the civic body realised that mere economic growth did not much if its people were unlettered.

It crept into the Mumbai Municipal Act making it a statutory obligation and in numbers, it grew with the city. It has 1,174 schools with 1,296 teachers to educate children, and the budget for these in 2011-12 is Rs 1,800 crore. The quality of education there, as we all know, is poor which if possible, even the poor would like to shun.

The civic body now wants to shift the responsibility of improving the quality to NGOs, who have been asked to bid to take up the responsibility of governing the select schools as a pilot. The NGOs, the Parent Association, and the headmasters will run the show. The tab will be picked up by the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai.

Even the teachers who would conduct the classes would not be from the present pool that the MCGM has across the city. The NGO can hire them, the criterion obviously being 'good teacher’. The implication is that the present stock is not good enough for the objective of what is now called the public-private participation model.

The civic schools are indeed a tragedy. Generations of children have gone to study in these and come out ill-equipped. In the past, going to a municipal school was not infra dig because they were then good. They are poor in outcomes despite the budgets that are huge, and ideas. More often, the ideas are on paper.

Therefore, Mumbai owes a debt of gratitude to its city fathers and administrators who have done it a great favour by admitting that running good elementary schools is not in their competence, much like everything else is not.

Is this a landmark decision? Could well be. Is it regressive because the city is abdicating its responsibility? The jury is gathering just now with more misgivings in the air than even hope. Has the policy been formulated in consultation with NGOs working in the education sector? We don’t know. Is it some nice note prepared by a bureaucrat? Quite possible.

There is, however, no iota of doubt that the civic education needs a thorough overhaul. There’s no point carping on who carries out the task as long as the city pays for it and the students don’t get burdened by being asked to pay a fee. To say the least, municipal education has been in the pits. These schools are dingy classrooms, some entire schools in bad repair, and scandalously there are some without toilets with adequate privacy especially for the growing girls entering puberty, and reputedly indifferent teachers. This encouraged girls to drop out.

The boys drop out due to other reasons. The students who pass out of the elementary schools are more than what the few civic secondary schools can absorb. The others are forced out of schools because they are spurned by private schools for they are ‘not like us’ or the students cannot afford them. The dropouts at the pre-elementary stage, by either proportion or in numbers from these schools, are far, far higher than in the private schools.

The search for English medium education has emptied out several civic schools even as several areas which need them badly don’t get covered. What is ironic is that students are fleeing from Marathi schools in a city which, or at least its rulers, swear by Marathi. It has something to do as much with language preferences as it is with quality.

This PPP approach, it is explained, does not mean ‘handing them over’ to the private parties but seeking help from the NGOs. Also, this is not going to be a universal approach for now but testing of waters. It would only run a pilot in a few selected schools, and has ‘called for bids’ as one newspaper reported.

The teaching staff for these schools, however, will not be from the pool the city body has but would be new ones hired by the NGO which wins the opportunity, implying that the teachers are

responsible for not delivering. The blame for poor monitoring of the system has not been apportioned to the civic body itself.

The city government has not, however, admitted to the possibility that NGOs with other than educational credentials will apply and schools handed over in proportion to the political clout of political parties rather than those with educational credentials. Mumbai has politicians who have at least one trust they run which could well qualify to be recognised as an NGO: it gives away a few farthing to the needy via the Ganapati Mandals collections.

The welcome bottom line: The civic body has thrown up its hands, saying ‘we failed – let someone else do it better’. That needn’t have been the case, for the expense per student is the same as those of the expensive private ones with huge fees do. It just could have worked better its own policy.