Vinod Raina

For two years, between 1990 and 1992, the Sunderlal Patwa government of BJP tried its best to close down the Hoshangabad Science Teaching Program (HSTP, popularly called Hoshangabad Vigyan) including resorting to violence against Eklavyaís staff and offices. They couldnt do so, and the government itself fell in the aftermath of Babri Masjid demolitions. The secularí and efficient government of Digvijay Singh has taken only a few months to murder perhaps the best educational program ever to promote values of secularism, democracy, creative and scientific thinking, by upholding the complaint of the Itarsi BJP MLA, Sitasharan Sharma. In retrospect, the Patwa ministry should have called for the services of Digvijay Singh way back in 1990 to accomplish the task!

It is no secret that the rise of the sangh parivar has been greatly facilitated by the creation of cadres through the vast network of RSS schools (Saraswati Shishu Mandirs) and more recently, the Ekal Vidyalayas of VHP. Gujerat is a living example of what poisoning of young minds through school education can do. The history book ëGaurav Gathaí in these schools exhorts the true Hindus to use the sword against the children of Babarí; the sangh children obliged in the most barbarous and heinous way in Gujarat. School education has therefore been the home turf of the sangh parivar, brooking no competition. And when they captured state institutions by coming to power, they lost little time to transform the NCERT, UGC, and ICHR to promote their ideology. The response of secular organizations has been the usual, to hold seminars and conferences and issue statements against the change of history books and so on. But no one has confronted them on the ground, in the villages where they run their schools.

Started in 1972 in collaboration with the MP government, Eklavya’s HSTP and, later, its allied programs, Prashika for class 1-5 and Social Science for class 6-8, became in the recent past, the most important competitors to the sangh parivar agenda for school education. So obsessively opposed is the BJP to Eklavya programs that the then Education Minister of MP, Vikram Verma, thundered in 1992 Eklavya must pack up! They can write in English magazines, work in big cities, hold seminars, but we wont let them work in village schools.

HSTP in particular was initiated as a quality improvement program for government schools, taking inspiration from the Harvard and Nuffield Science Programs, begun in the late sixties in the US and Britain respectively. Transforming the activity-based, discovery approach to rural schools has been a pioneering achievement of HSTP, acknowledged all over the World. Many eminent scientists of the country, including Prof. Yashpal, Prof. M.G.K. Menon, Prof. Vinod Gaur, Prof. D. Balasubramaniam, Prof. J.V. Narlikar, Prof. Rama Rao, Prof. M.S. Swaminathan etc. and resource scientists drawn from the Tata Institute for Fundamental Research, Delhi University, IITís, Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Indian Institute of Immunology etc. have participated in it. The initiative to set up Eklavya in 1982 was in fact supported by the Planning Commission and the Department of Science and Technology in order to create an autonomous premier agency for science education, curriculum, pedagogy and teacher trainings. The Congress party in the past has been an open admirer of this effort, viewing it as Nehruvian thought in action. Indira Gandhi and her aide P.N.Haksar, Rajiv Gandhi, Narasimha Rao and in particular, Arjun Singh have supported and lauded the effort publicly. Narasimha Rao as Prime Minister made special reference to it during his speech to the Nine Country Educational Summit in 1994.

Begun as a sixteen-school experiment in 1972, the program was extended to the entire district of Hoshangabad in 1978 after being evaluated as suitable for expansion by the NCERT, through its Regional College of Education in Bhopal, and the Government of MP. The GoMP further expanded it to school complexes of 13 other districts of MP by 1986. In 1992, the Ministry of Human Resource Development, through a letter from the then Union Education Secretary, Anil Bordia, acknowledging that over the years the efficacy of HSTP as a major program in improving the quality of science education has now been established and the entire country needs to benefit from it, initiated a process for its expansion, by setting up a high-powered review committee composed of eminent scientists drawn from all over the country. Housed by the NCERT, the committee unequivocally called for a state level expansion of the program in the first phase. Even though Eklavya submitted a blueprint for such a state level expansion to the state Government, the attitude of the state government beginning 1994 has been at best cursory. In the meanwhile, the All India Peopleís Science Network took the initiative in translating the three books (Bal-Vaigyanik) into fourteen Indian languages, and many states have been using the material in a variety of ways. The Science Promotion Centre of the Aligarh Muslim University has translated them into Urdu, with a view to promote their use in Madrassa schools, where science teaching is otherwise shunned.

The Sharma family of Hoshangabad is one of the most prosperous and influential BJP conclaves in MP. One of the brothers, K.S. Sharma, an IAS officer, retired as the Chief Secretary of MP during Digvijayís regime. The prosperity and influence of the family can be gauged by the fact that the famous Sethani Ghat on the river Narmada in Hoshangabad, where all the mandirs are situated, is actually their contribution. HSTP, and Eklavyaís other educational programs have been like festering wounds to this BJP powerhouse. Since they consider Hoshangabad district as their fiefdom, their feudal ego has been bruised for 30 years, witnessing the emergence and popularity of a secular educational program in their backyard. And they do not hide their chagrin. In a meeting with Eklavya members after Sitasharan filed his complaint with the District Planning Committee some months ago, they candidly said ëour opposition is to the fact that the government has allowed you to operate in their schools, and not the RSS.í

Sitasharan Sharmaís complaint to the DPC is at best flimsy, and with a history of such flimsy complaints in the last thirty years, no one paid much attention to it, except the Minister- in-charge of Hoshabgabad district (since changed), Finance Minister Ajay Narayan Mushran. With a low quorum of committee members, and giving Eklavya representatives a few minutes to respond, he pronounced, in a banana court manner (he is a retired army colonel!) phansi ho gayi, karyikram band hoga. The simple fact is that the DPC has no jurisdiction to take decisions on professional matters, for which it has no expertise. It can decide, at best, on administrative or financial matters. The pedagogical, curricular and educational issues are outside its purview. So everyone felt that once the issue came to the state level, where at least people know about the history of the evaluations, reviews and so on, the decision would be upturned. In particular, since it was a complaint originating from the BJP on expected lines, it was felt that the Digvijay government would summararily throw it out. However it became quickly apparent from the attitude of the bureaucrat duo, with claims to be the educationists of the Digvijay darbar, Gopalakrishnan and Amita Sharma, that the state government was not going to intervene, and in fact, the two were reinforcing the closure case. Throughout the negotiations for the past couple of months, Eklavya’s plea to the state government has been to set up a group of science education experts and refer the issue to them. During the course of these months, the state government has in fact set up a State Advisory Board on Education, and this looked to be a fit case for the Board to take up. While keeping the negotiations open, and giving the impression that no decision shall be hurriedly taken, it came as a nasty surprise on July 11 that Amita Sharma had actually signed the order for closure on July 3 while the Chief Minister told the Eklavya representatives on July 10 that negotiations shall continue, as if no decision had been taken!

The question everyone asking is, why have they done this on a BJP initiated move, without consulting educational experts, and ignoring previous review and evaluation reports? Do bureaucrats and politicians have the right or expertise to take such decisions? At a time when everyone in the country is seized with the issue of secular, quality education, a Congress government’s decision to throttle a program, that has admirers from amongst the leaders of its own party, and which has been an inspiration within the country, is beyond belief and comprehension of any sensible person. Can the influence of the Sharma family, and perhaps the lobbying of Digvijay’s ex-Chief Secretary from this family, explain a decision that can otherwise tarnish the Congress party’s image, not only in MP but the entire country, of upholding secularism and the scientific spirit.

Or is Digvijay Singh’s overconfidence making him walk on thin ice now to secure his future, as a possible PM of the country? By keeping one foot in the secularist camp financially and otherwise promoting SAHMAT, Communalism Combat, the History Congress, Sadhbhavna Trust etc; and keeping the other in the sangh parivar, by supporting the teaching of astrology in schools and colleges, and by dismantling the competitor to their educational agenda ñ the HSTP. So that he can jump either way when the opportunity arises? His ardent admirers, nearly all of them outside the state of MP today, fed by a managed media, shall baulk at such a possibility. But why else has he chosen to position himself as the pointsman of BJP by obliging them to order the closure of Hoshangabad Vigyan, something the BJP itself tried and failed to do?

(The author, a physicist, has worked with HSTP from its inception and is the co-founder of Eklavya)

July 13, 2002