Requirements for Uplifting Indian Rural Population through Education

 

Requirements for Uplifting Indian Rural Population through Education

Today I learnt something that uplifting Indian rural population is not all that difficult. All you need are the following: broad band connectivity, smart phones and mothers; yes, mothers! Someone, possibly an edupreneur wrote so in an opinion piece in today’s (2025-02-08) newspaper.

I will go back to my teacher for my third class geography. This was in the early years of the decade of 1960s. She did not have a smart phone. She was teaching the class how we can prove that the earth is a sphere, at least round. We did not need to fly in an airplane (very expensive) to see the earth below that could possibly indicate the earth is a sphere, but she seeded a process of thinking in my mind – a visual appreciation of earth-bound reality, seeing from the beach a ship approaching the harbour. This came in handy when I answered her sort of follow–up question in a subsequent class why the Pole Star is always seen in the northern sky at a particular angle (from Madras), and why the Pointers (two stars of the Ursa Major constellation, Saptha Rishi Mandalam) always point to the Pole Star. It took me less than a second to realize the why of these facts. Of course, I also argued that the sky is the inside surface of the earth and the sun keeps creating a hole just so it can shine on earth! A child’s imagination! I had two models of the earth in my mind; two for the cost of one.

You may think that I am making a mountain out of a molehill. Look at the picture:

Even in the first year of my engineering study (start date 1971), this was fascinating as my memory had carried all the pictures I have seen in the newspaper, in Life magazine of the moon landing, and get this, my high school, in 1970 showed a grainy movie of the same (it was grainier than the photo here, as I recall!). My classmates were not impressed, but I was, and so were my parents that I was going happily ballistic in something other than a century by an Indian cricketer in a cricket Test or a break point saved by Premjit Lall and Jaidip Mukerjea in Davis Cup contest.

Now I come to the meat of what I want to say in this post. The opinion piece writer, referred in the opening paragraph herein, said, “[O]wnership of smart phones is important when it comes to supporting young children’s learning.” As I have become big on reminiscing in the eighth decade of my life, it is difficult for me to accept that the above image as a Life magazine centrespread carries only as little awe as the image on a mobile phone screen offers. This “Awesome!” in yesterday’s teenage lingo (perhaps it is not today’s teenage lingo!) could not have matched my teenage “Awesome!” if only I had that word in my vocabulary then. I have seen the Crab Nebula in the constellation Taurus, the bull, and Andromeda galaxy, thanks to the astronomical telescope my father occasionally brought from his office. We were in Shenoy Nagar, the then western edge of the city of Madras now due east of Anna Nagar), a peri-urban area tucked behind Aminjikarai, a down-market urban area on the Madras-Bangalore highway,  and the sky was far less polluted, both of the air and of the light kind.

 

The focus is on what else the writer says. “[O]wnership of smart phones” by mothers is important not only in the education of their wards, but also for their own education. OK, I am not going to take general exception to this, but what is said in further justifying the need for such phones for mothers of school going children is exceptionally bad, particularly when it comes from a founder of an organization tuned towards improving rural education. I am led to believe that he may not have seen rural women working in the fields till near sundown.

This photo was taken by me and I had absolutely no idea how it could be of use to me when I snapped this shot. Indeed, my wife asked me the critical, “Why this at all?” I could only mumble that field could have belonged to my ancestor and it is not impossible that the workers are descendants of the labour employed by my ancestor, and possibly paid at below par. There is that severely disturbing connection.

Now, I am going to use it for my argument against women learning to use smart phones, for the explicit purpose of helping their children. Her job, in addition to going home and preparing meals for the night, is to learn and teach her child(ren) what he/she/they should have learned in school. Why the task is specifically assigned to the mother? It is just so, the tone of the write-up implies.

Statistics is thrown to bamboozle the reader: 40% of the rural women have studied only up to “class five”; another 40%, up to but not completed “class 10”; the remaining, completed “class 10”. Based on the above, the writer writes, and I quote in extenso, “Educating mothers so that they can help children is an investment India should make to accelerate and strengthen education of children.”

Where is the father of the children in all of this? Oh, he is working hard elsewhere, perhaps in the next town. It is inhumane to demand that he help teaching his children after returning home.

In Hindi, it is said, Ghar ki murgi dal barabar. If you work in the village fields, your work is daily food; if you venture out to earn, it is a wedding feast!

The writer talks about AI and all that, the most recent stuff. But, he stumbled across the threshold. He says that education integrates countries, and what follows is the tell, “...so is profit”!

Would anyone other than an edupreneur say this? I do not think so. The edupreneur is more”...preneur” than “edu...”!

That is why I put, “Broadband connectivity, smart phones, and mothers” in the writer’s mouth – a consolidated list of needs of an edupreneur! No need for a father.

Raghuram Ekambaram