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Congress gets into survey mode in Rajasthan -Smita Gupta
-The Hindu

Aim of the exercise is to map damage due to closure of 17,000 govt. schools.

Eight months after the BJP government closed down 17,000 government schools in Rajasthan, dramatically pushing up the dropout rate largely among marginal communities, the Congress has decided to undertake a survey, starting in Jaipur's Amber block, to map the damage.

Once the audit is over, a campaign to force the State government to reopen the closed schools, which represent almost 20 per cent of the total number till August 2014, will follow.

If last year's general election demonstrated how much the Congress had lost touch with its constituents, the education survey is part of a bold new experiment by the party's Rajasthan unit. It will hold the State accountable for issues that matter to the people, cutting across the urban-rural, religious, class and caste divides.

"We want to do a different kind of politics," State Congress chief Sachin Pilot told The Hindu. "One that focusses on what sort of governance model we should have for education, health, police reforms. We want to involve people by concentrating on issues that affect them the most. We don't want to do emotive politics that relates to issues like caste reservation."

Mr. Pilot said the idea of conducting the survey came from the party's State Scheduled Caste department in-charge, Ruchi Gupta, who had been travelling through the State, studying among several things, the impact of closure of the government schools on Dalit and tribal students.

The survey in Amber block, where 81 schools were merged, will be conducted jointly by the various Congress departments in the State, with the full backing of the Pradesh Congress Committee, an activity that will see Dalit and tribal issues being mainstreamed rather than remaining on the margins.

For instance, in Amber's Banjaro ki Dhani, a hamlet barely 15 km from Jaipur, the entire student community, all Banjaras, dropped out, with many reduced to entering the trash trade, after the Rajasthan government announced its school merger policy. Since then, pressure from the Congress, non-governmental organisations and various communities has forced the State government to overturn its own orders repeatedly, reopening schools selectively and then, in a face-saving gambit, authorising the local education officer to reopen schools in the original building wherever more than 30 students had been enrolled.

In Amber, 24 schools were reopened, citing distance, high enrolment, the presence of a railway line, a deep ditch, a river, all of which made it hard for students from schools that had been shut down to make the journey to another.

Mr. Pilot pointed out that it was not just distance or physical barriers that had resulted in dropouts: in some cases, tribal or Dalit children found themselves unwelcome in schools dominated by Thakur or Jat students.

Ms. Gupta said that when she visited one such "upper caste" school in Amber, the teachers described the Banjara children as "troublemakers."

Ineligibility to contest polls

The increasing dropout among children of deprived communities comes against the backdrop of the new law in the State to exclude all those who have not cleared Class VIII or Class X from contesting the panchayat and municipal elections, respectively.

One estimate says 80 per cent of rural population in Rajasthan has thus become ineligible in standing for local elections.

Mr. Pilot said: "If this legislation was aimed at ensuring lesser participation by the Congress - as our support base is greater among marginal, rural communities - by forcing Dalit, tribal and minority students to drop out, the numbers of those who cannot contest such elections will mount. Ironic, as 23 of the BJP's MLAs and two of its MPs have not studied up to Class X."

The Congress is apprehensive that the empty schools, which are headed for "privatisation," will be handed over to the RSS. The condition for eligibility is that any private party coming forward must already be running at least 100 schools - the RSS's Saraswati Shishu Mandirs fit the bill.