How India get the children to school

Writing this text I am living for some time in Goa in India. I every day here see the consequences of lack of education. The literacy is low, at best at 95 % in some states, in some states as low as 60 %. In destitute families, and often in poor families, the children are forced to work instead of go to school. The family will not make it without them. Some families are often forced to manage living from a couple of hundred rupees or less than 4 dollars for a day’s food. Prices go up and they all work for almost no money.

Now you wonder how this is working. There ought to be laws against childhood work. There sure are. The law about free school, including books, material, lunch and school uniform goes for all children since 2010. But only for the children who really come to school. Everything is paid for by governmental money and get priority. With parents who still put you into work there is no school for you.

Poverty is made from some different factors. One of them is that there are too many people local and global. Another factor is the level of education and the skills. A third is the way plans and order work out in society. A fourth is for sure what you think is possible. Because man can do a lot of progress, as long no one shoot her, and she finds enough to eat and water to drink.

The most important in the strategy is just the uniform and the lunch. All outgoings for the family but the food is often not existing or impossible. Still the children need clothes in most families, especially to work. I have seen some families living on the sidewalk or under traffic signs in the largest cities of India, where the children had no clothes on, although they should have been in the school. Through visiting poor families, the schools explain all the rules and rights, and more and more families start to send their children to school.

There are for sure more than six years since the law came, but poverty change slow. Many leading economists and many think tanks have realized that the extinction of poverty is necessary. They have reached their conclusion through analyses of the markets and discovered that poor people are bad consumers. To be able to expand the markets and sell to the poor, we need to give them resources to use in buying.

No matter from which thoughts you reach a conclusion and put up a goal, you have to have strategies for reaching the goals. Through the school uniform and the school lunch India motivates families to send their children to school. They are of course not in school all hours. The parents can always put them to work when they come home and are supposed to do their homework.

In the same manner, we could help poor adults, often without work. Give them areas to keep clean and ready and also all the meals served in simple kitchens by personal recruited from the same groups in the same manner and conditions. But only for registered inhabitants to prevent illegal immigration. The food and so could be paid from the town.

The gap from the basic eight years of school to the needed level to be recruited to the positions in the bureaucracy of India is still very big. 1992 the highest court of India decided to give 27 % of the governmental employments to these groups of poor people. Up to today less than 10 % of the employments are used up. If I promise you to give you a billion dollar if you make a legal high jump of 342 cm, you will get no money!

Goa the 9th of January 2017                                           Lennart