Chetan's Musings

Government of India, Act 1: THE RIGHT OF CHILDREN TO FREE AND COMPULSORY EDUCATION ACT, 2009 Chapter II, Section 3 (i) states: "Every child of the age of six to fourteen years shall have a right to free and compulsory education in a neighbourhood school till completion of elementary education." Chakkarpur Village is in the heart of Gurgaon, surrounded by malls, five-star hotels, and gated condominiums Reality Check: In the urban village of Chakkarpur, embedded in the heart of the sub-metropolis of Gurgaon, and home to thousands of migrants from Bengal and Bihar, at least 1000 children of school-going age do not attend school. This, despite the existence of a large government school in Chakkarpur. Since most of these children are from Bengal, they are unable to adjust to the school environment, are forced to drop out, and the authority's apathy ensures they stay away. Government of India, Act 2: THE NATIONAL RURAL EMPLOYMENT GUARANTEE ACT, 2005 (NREGA) Ch...

Raj Kishore Satnami is from the Kendrapada district in coastal Orissa, from where a large number of youngsters migrate to Delhi and Gurgaon to work as plumbers. He too is one of them. He has never been formally trained as a plumber, just picked up the skill on the job, working as an apprentice with a senior plumber. Raj has rarely felt the need for any formal training in his vocation. In early 2008, when the world was waking up to economic recession in the US, the Government of India had a wake-up call. Somewhere, someone in the corroded corridors of power realized that the Indian economy was ailing from - among other things - a serious Skills crisis. As terms such as "Unemployable" and "Skills Gap" found their way into the national HR lexicon, the expected reaction of the government was the formation of the Prime Minister's National Council of Skills Development, comprising senior cabinet ministers and industry stalwarts. The mandate of the council was ...

By early 1997, I had spent just under two years in the corporate sector, but these were enough to kindle in me several questions about whether this was really the ladder I wished to climb. A personal situation back home (in Patna) also catalyzed the existential questions, which were by now churning furiously in my 26-year old being. It was in these times that a friend recommended Stephen Covey's  7 Habits of Highly Effective People  to me. Though I'd always been fond of reading, and had a decent collection of books by them, the self-help kinds did not find a place in my library. So I took up  7 Habits  reluctantly to begin with, but within a few pages, was marveling at the resonance I found with what I was going through. The book helped me enormously during that fragile phase of life. I read and re-read the book, reflected upon it for hours, discussed the ideas contained in it with a few friends. This was a phase of intense introspection for me. Covey's ...

Last year summer, Edulever conducted a feasibility study for a vocational training program in the mofussil town of Saharanpur in western U.P. As a part of this, we conducted a survey covering 1000 households situated in lower-middle income areas of the town. The target was to interact with youth in the 15 - 25 age group, but we decided to extend our mandate and look at the education status among 6 - 14 year olds as well. It was in this second category of children that we found something seriously amiss. The slide from the final presentation on the survey in which we highlighted the gender skew Of the 550 children for whom information was collected, the ratio of boys to girls was 65-to-35. Even in the older age group, there were only 78 females for every 100 males (for a pool of 1687 respondents). These were randomly selected households, though a majority happened to be orthodox Hindu families. We could not probe further into the reason for the gender skew - it is likely that in...

That little boy in Grade 4 of the MCD school gave me a desolate, forlorn look...a look of desperation and helplessness. In front of him, on his desk, was a notebook. On it was his vain attempt to write a simple sentence in Hindi. Just a few minutes back, as I had walked into this classroom at the school in Nand Nagri in North Shahdara, Delhi, the children had greeted me with their singsong Good Morninnnnng, Sir! I had walked to the back of the class, and had asked this little boy whether he knew how to write. Yes, he had said confidently. Okay, I said, smiling at him. Can you write down this simple sentence? I opened a fresh page on his notebook in front of him, and dictated, "राम आम खाता  था", ensuring the words were all of the same easy vowel sound in Hindi (the long aa). He took his pencil, and started to write. Managed to write the first letter र. Added the aa sound to make it रा. Then stopped. Fumbled...thought...gave up. Looked at me with those helpless little eyes....