Name: Atul Sarma
Country: India

Year: 2016
Volume: Volume-1, Issue-1 (January-June)
Page Number: 1-8

Let me start with a couple of observations. The first relates to an important insight I obtained from a survey that I had conducted I Gujarat decades ago, in 1979, to be precise. The survey was carried out as part of a study for developing a methodology for evaluating the adult education program. While going around the villages in Gujarat along with the survey teams, I had gotten a sense of people’s perception about education at that time. It is the people were aware of the fact that educated people got good jobs and had a higher level of living. But they also perceived that the benefits of education would accrue only if they could support the education of their children beyond the threshold level. Since many of the villagers did not have the means to educate their children beyond the threshold level, they saw no point in sending their children to schools at all the depriving themselves of their farm or family help or the income that the children could supplement to their household income.
Much later in 2009-10, I had an opportunity as part of the Thirteenth Finance Commission to visit different parts of the country. I visited many work sites of women workers under the Mahatma Gandhi national Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA). I had asked some of the women at random In those work sites located in different states: what they did with the cash that they earned? I got an overwhelming sense that they spent a large part of their earnings in sending their children, irrespective of whether boys or girls, to ‘English Speaking private School’. In the process I learned two things: one, what we have today is an aspirational society and two, there has been a huge awareness of education as a means of empowerment and as a means of economic betterment. This perception stood as a stark contrast to what I had obtained years ago as a narrated earlier.