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Left govt pursues parallel school system, future of 18 lakh at stake

The Bengal government today pushed through a controversial bill that will empower the state panchayat department to create a parallel school education system with nearly 20,000 rural schools.

The West Bengal Panchayat Board of Education Bill had fuelled widespread concern at its conception itself but the Left government bulldozed the legislation through the Assembly today in the face of a walkout by the combined Opposition.

At the root of the overdrive appears to be the eagerness to regularise around 55,000 teachers, who may feel gratified enough to vote for the Left at a time it is groping for ideas to stem its rural slide.

The bill, if it clears the remaining constitutional formalities and becomes a law, will affect as many as 18 lakh students in the state and has the telltale symptoms that made education one of the biggest casualties of the Left Front’s three-decade-old rule.

No other state in the country has an education board run by the panchayat department.

Sections within the Left Front also share the Opposition’s concern as they fear that the panchayat department would impart “inferior” education and jeopardise the future of their children.

The absence of sound primary education, which suffered immeasurably once when the Left banned English in junior classes, had turned out to be the biggest hurdle that stood between jobs and a generation of youths in Bengal.

The new legislation seeks to create a primary and secondary education board under the panchayat department and will cover the 16,108 shishu shiksha kendras and the 1,917 Madhyamik shiksha kendras set up under the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan in 1997.

All these shiksha kendras now have classes only up to VIII. They follow the syllabus approved by the Madhyamik board under the state school education department.

The government’s logic in setting up a new board is that students passing Class VIII from these shiksha kendras do not get admission in Madhyamik schools because of lack of seats.

The ideal response should have been to build more schools — something many other states have done but is unthinkable in Bengal because of the parlous state of its finances.

So, the Left government came up with a quick-fix solution: set up a new board, bring the existing shiksha kendras under it and add two more classes. The government sought to justify the need for a new board by saying the Madhyamik system is creaking under the burden of 10 lakh examinees each year.

However, if the shiksha kendras were upgraded and added to the Madhyamik stream, automatic regularisation of the 55,000 teachers would have been difficult. Recruitment would then have had to be undertaken in line with the Madhyamik rules.

Trinamul leader Partha Chatterjee said academic experts had not been consulted — a charge the government has not been able to deny — and that the bill was passed in a hurry in the last session of the House before elections so that it acts as a pre-election sop.

Amal Mukherjee, a former principal of Presidency College, said: “Any major step related to education should be discussed publicly and the views of experts sought. All the pros and cons have to be considered. The future of many students is at stake.

“In fact, I don’t think the new board was necessary and we could have done the same thing as other states have done and got around the problem by setting up more secondary schools under the Madhyamik board.”

Chatterjee later met the governor and requested him to consider the demand to withdraw the bill.

The bill was introduced in the House in July this year but after protests from the Opposition and sections within the Left Front, it was referred to a standing committee.

Rishi Kumar Halder of the CPM, the chairperson of the standing committee, said: “The Opposition members in the panchayat standing committee had not raised any objection when the issue was discussed among the members of the committee.”

Anisur Rahman, the state panchayat and rural development minister, said the government would ensure that the quality of education would be on a par with the boards run by the school education department.