Many civic schools will have computer-literacy programmes, thanks to Nitin Wadhwani's tireless efforts, finds Amrita Nayak Dutta
Rs850 crore was the budget allotted for primary education, when Nitin Wadhwani first started working towards improving the quality of city municipal schools under the banner of his NGO, Citizens Association for Child Rights.
Though the budget today is a whopping Rs2,475 crore, Wadhwani says the amount is yet to justify the work done in civic schools.
“Most of us plan before we spend, but in case of education affairs, the government allocates funds without a proper plan.
This can be attributed to the lack of development in civic schools over the last few years,” said Wadhwani.
Civic schools came his way when he chanced upon the sorry state of affairs of these schools while working for CRY as a volunteer. “There are 1,100 primary schools and 150 secondary schools in the city.
The dwindling number of students in civic schools was a cause of concern. Several factors contributed to the trend. Many parents, nowadays, choose to send their wards to private schools as they feel it would make them better in English,” said Wadhwani.
“Moreover they want their kids to be computer literate. A few years ago, the corporate sector donated 1,000 computers across civic schools in the city. Since there was no plan, there was no maintenance, curriculum and teachers. So, the computers were scrapped,” he said.
Wadhwani is currently focusing on the implementation of School Management Committees (SMC) in civic schools.
According to the RTE act, the committee should have 75 percent of parents, of which 50 percent should be women. “It is a challenge for us to implement that as several parents, who send their kids to these schools are uneducated. So, they are scared of participating in any discussion,” said Wadhwani.
He has recommended 50 volunteers from his NGO, who can take out time to monitor the SMCs. Interestingly, his NGO has tied up with IIT Bombay to bring out a computer literacy programme for the municipal schools.
“The IIT resource team has made a self learning software, where students could learn the basics of computers without any help. The IIT team has also trained our volunteers in the basics of this software. They will also train more than 350 art and crafts teachers of the school in the software next month onwards,” he informed.
According to him, the education department just needs a proper planning and a monitoring agency to see if the programmes they come out with are implemented.
“Whether the schools have an adequate number of toilets or the quality, quantity of mid meals provided to the students, our citizen volunteers are actively involved in monitoring everything. The more volunteers we have, the better it is for us,” he said.
Wadhwani is very clear in his goal. He doesn’t want his NGO or any other NGO to take over the system. “That’s the reason why I was not in favour of the School Adoption Programme, which entailed one NGO to adopt a school and work towards its improvement.
There is already an excess of people in the education department. So, we should work towards supplementing the system instead of taking over it,” he said.
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