

A staunch RSS man, Manohar Parrikar held education close to his heart. He looked beyond the present to secure the teaching sys­tem and students’ futures.

It was June 2013, a little over a year since the BJP earned its first simple majority in Goa’s assembly polls. Just as the new academic year was to begin, chief minister Manohar Parrikar made the announcement — Goa’s school hours were to be increased by half an hour. Not much, someone unfamiliar with the way of life in Goa, would say.

But Parrikar knew exactly what the move would mean. And sure enough, there was stiff resistance from school managements, teachers and parents alike.

During each of his stints in office, he retained his pet portfolio — educa­tion. When Parrikar was convinced of one of his policy decisions, no one could tell him otherwise, least when it was in the field of education.

The chief minister had often won­dered publicly why Goa’s schools should run for half a day, when most other states have full-day learning. He took the middle path instead and in­creased school hours by half an hour.

Schools, teachers and parents rolled up their sleeves and conjured up every logical sounding reason to retain school hours. But Parrikar’s resilience tri­umphed. “Most parents in Goa work nine-to-five jobs. They find it conve­nient to drop their kids before work and pick them up at 1.15pm during their lunch break and drop them home,” Par­rikar had told journalists, reasoning that good schooling cannot be sacri­ficed for such considerations.

From his very first term as educa­tion minister, Parrikar had made heads turn with his decisions. He grabbed attention outside the state as well when he announced the Cyberage scheme, where, for the first time in India, stu­dents of higher secondary schools and professional colleges were to be pro­vided computers, almost free of cost.

Parrikar formed the Goa Education Development Corporation and, initi­ated schemes to finance students who wanted to pursue higher education in IITs and IIMs. There was also a scheme that offered funds to students to study abroad.

He also shocked teachers by announcing early retire­ment for those who had at­tained the age of 58 -- two years earlier -- before rolling it back. For others, a volun­tary retirement scheme came as a pleasant surprise that they grabbed with both hands.

The Cujira school com­plex, which became opera­tional in 2014, was planned by Parrikar as early as 2001 with an aim to decongest the state capital. The idea was to relo­cate schools from the heart of Panaji to the outskirts.

During his early years as education minister, it is well-known that Parrikar took many of his decisions after close consultation with former RSS chief and long-time higher secondary school teacher and later principal Subhash Ve­lingkar. It is entirely another matter that the relationship later soured over the medium of instruction. After being elected in 2012, Parrikar decided to stick with the decision of the previous Con­gress government and extended grants to government-aided English primary schools.

Those in the know say that one of the schemes successfully implemented un­der Velingkar’s advice was the setting up of school complexes. Under the scheme, a neighbourhood primary, government and higher secondary school were con­sidered a cluster, where teachers and heads of high schools helped those in the lower school to improve the standard of education.

Parrikar had also announced other plans for the sector which either did not take off or were not accepted well. Fol­lowing a barrage of criticism, he was forced to withdraw the scheme providing computer tablets to Class V and VI stu­dents. His ambitious plans of inviting foreign universities to Goa to set up edu­cation estates remained a distant dream.

The chief minister, though, was always true to his conviction that Goa’s education sector needed transformative measures.

He never lost an opportunity to re­mind teachers that they needed to im­prove first, before expecting students to achieve greater heights.

Teachers never dared to dismiss his word. After all, he spoke with an authority that few other education ministers did.

