Friday, July 6, 2012

Cong ad blitz against Modi govt’s edu policy

At the start of the academic session, the Congress has embarked on a
campaign to expose the govenrment’s mismanagement of education.
The party’s state unit issued advertisements in the papers criticising
the Modi government’s education policy that focussed on “donations,
privatisation, no salaries to teachers and no jobs”.
The advertisements issued in a prominent English daily and in local
papers on Saturday titled , “Bhajapni Modi sarkar no ‘kakko’ D for
donation and T for tuition” (the new alphabets by the BJP’s Modi
government) listed out the wrongs with the system. It ended saying, “I
am a Gujarati. I have come with a question. When the time comes, I
shall give the answer, bas, I have had enough”.
This, even as the National Students Union of India(NSUI) on Friday
chalked out a detailed programme how to attract university and college
students to its fold when the academic session started July 15.
State Congress spokesperson Manish Doshi said that with the state
government not opening any new college or school in rural areas, it
had provided an open field for the corporate groups to diversify into
education and mint money by charging a hefty amount as fees.
“People need to be told what they have been given in terms of
education in the last 10 years because it is an issue which concerns
all across caste and community boundaries,’’ said Doshi.
NSUI has also resolved to target students in more than 1,000 colleges
in the state on the issue.
NSUI’s initiative is chiefly focussed on enlarging the Congress
party’s vote base as most of the college and university students are
above 18 and are enrolled as voters.
NSUI state president Gulabsinh Rajput said that there was anger among
student community over the state government not opening any new
government college even in rural areas.
There was also huge shortage of teaching faculties in government
colleges thus affecting the quality of education and students heavily
depending on self-study as the existing strength of teachers was not
enough to handle the teaching in the colleges. An RTI reply by the
state directorate of technical education (DTE) recently revealed that
70 per cent of teaching posts were vacant in state-run engineering and
diploma colleges.
Rajput said that NSUI activists would be taking up the issue of how
the state govenrment had failed to implement the Right to Education
Act (RTE) properly and check the private schools from charging a hefty
amount as tuition fees, besides a huge amount as capitation fee for
admission.