(New Delhi) – School
authorities in India persistently
discriminate against children from marginalized communities, denying them their
right to education, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. Four
years after an ambitious education law went into effect in India guaranteeing
free schooling to every child ages 6 to 14, almost every child is
enrolled, yet nearly half are likely to drop out before completing their
elementary education.
The 77-page report, “‘They Say We’re Dirty’: Denying an Education to India’s
Marginalized,” documents discrimination by school authorities
in four Indian states against Dalit, tribal, and Muslim children. The
discrimination creates an unwelcome atmosphere that can lead to truancy and
eventually may lead the child to stop going to school. Weak monitoring
mechanisms fail to identify and track children who attend school irregularly,
are at risk of dropping out, or have dropped out.
“India’s immense project to
educate all its children risks falling victim to deeply rooted discrimination
by teachers and other school staff against the poor and marginalized,” said Jayshree
Bajoria, India researcher and author of the report. “Instead of
encouraging children from at-risk communities who are often the first in their
families to ever step inside a classroom, teachers often neglect or even
mistreat them.”
Detailed case studies
examine how the lack of accountability and grievance redress mechanisms are
continuing obstacles to proper implementation of the Right to Education Act.
Human Rights Watch conducted research for this report in the states of Andhra
Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and Delhi, interviewing more than 160 people,
including children, parents, teachers, and a wide range of education experts,
rights activists, local authorities, and education officials.
The Indian government
should adopt more effective measures to monitor the treatment of vulnerable
children and provide accessible redress mechanisms to ensure they remain in the
classroom, Human Rights Watch said. According to the government, nearly half –
over 80 million children – drop out before completing their elementary
education.
In drafting the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, the
central government recognized exclusion of children as the “single most
important challenge in universalizing elementary education.” But many education
department officials at state, district, and local levels have been unwilling
to acknowledge or accept that discrimination occurs in government schools, let
alone attempt to resolve these problems, Human Rights Watch said.
“The teacher tells us to
sit on the other side,” said “Pankaj,” an eight-year-old tribal boy from Uttar
Pradesh. “If we sit with others, she scolds us and asks us to sit separately.
The teacher doesn’t sit with us because she says we ‘are dirty.’”
Marginalized groups
continue to face discrimination in India despite constitutional guarantees and
laws prohibiting discrimination, Human Rights Watch said. School authorities
reinforce age-old discriminatory attitudes based on caste, ethnicity, religion,
or gender. Children from Dalit, tribal, and Muslim communities are often made
to sit at the back of the class or in separate rooms, insulted by the use of
derogatory names, denied leadership roles, and served food last. They are even
told to clean toilets, while children from traditionally privileged groups are
not.
“Non-discrimination and
equality are fundamental to the Right to Education Act and yet the law provides
no penalties for violators,” Bajoria said. “If schools are to become
child-friendly environments for all of India’s children, the government needs
to send a strong message that discriminatory behavior will no longer be
tolerated and those responsible will be held to account.”
Most state education
departments have failed to establish proper mechanisms to monitor each child,
and intervene promptly and effectively to ensure they remain in school, Human
Rights Watch said. Because there is no common definition for assessing when a
child is considered to no longer be attending school, various states have
different norms: in Karnataka, students are regarded as having dropped out of
school after seven days of unexplained absence, in Andhra Pradesh it is a
month, and in Chhattisgarh and Bihar it is three months. This lack of a common
definition hinders efforts to recognize and address the problem.
The Right to Education Act
provides that children who have dropped out of school or older children who
never attended school should be offered “bridge courses” to bring them up to
speed so they can return to mainstream schools in an age-appropriate class. But
state governments do not maintain proper records of these children, provide the
additional resources needed for appropriate bridge courses, or track these
children through completion of elementary schooling once they are in an
age-appropriate class.
Children of migrant
workers, many belonging to Dalit and tribal communities, are most vulnerable to
dropping out due to lengthy absences from school while searching for work with
their parents. Yet the state governments do not keep track of these children in
any systematic manner to ensure that they continue their education. The labor
departments at state level are not properly carrying out programs meant for
bringing child laborers back to school. And state education departments are not
following up once a child is admitted to a mainstream school, which often
results in the child’s return to work.
Central and state
authorities are not adequately supporting creative community-based mechanisms
envisioned under the Right to Education Act such as “school management
committees.” Parents told Human Rights Watch that they do not have adequate
representation on these committees, and so they do not complain when there is
injustice against their children because school authorities ignore the
complaints or even reprimand the students. Guidelines adopted to address grievances
have often not been implemented.
India is a party to core
international human rights treaties that protect children and provide for the
right of everyone to education, including the International Covenant on
Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and the Convention on the Rights of the
Child. International law also prohibits discrimination on the basis of
religion, ethnicity, social origin, or other status. The Convention on the
Rights of the Child obligates India to take measures to encourage attendance
and reduce dropout rates, and ensure that the rights of the children are
protected through effective monitoring.
Prior to the national
elections in India in April 2014, the major national parties made commitments
in their election manifestos to improve elementary school education. The
central and state governments should create clear indicators to detect and
address discrimination in schools, and to lay out appropriate disciplinary
measures for those found responsible, Human Rights Watch said.
The
government should create a system to monitor and track every child from
enrollment through completion of elementary schooling, up to Grade VIII. The
government should initiate proper training of teachers, so that they end
exclusion and facilitate greater interaction among children of different
socio-economic and caste backgrounds.
“India’s political parties
focused on education during the election campaign,” Bajoria said. “But whoever
takes office will need to do more to ensure that children attend classes. An
important law is set to fail unless the government intervenes now.”
Selected Quotes
The names and identifying
details of interviewees have been withheld to protect their safety. All names
of children used in the report are pseudonyms.
Whenever the teachers are angry, they call us Mullahs. The Hindu
boys also call us Mullahs because our fathers have beards. We feel insulted
when they refer to us like this.” – Javed, a 10-year-old Muslim boy, Delhi
“The teacher always made us sit in a corner of the room, and would throw keys at us [when she was angry]. We only got food if anything was left after other children were served…. [G]radually [we] stopped going to school.” – Shyam, a 14-year-old Dalit boy, Uttar Pradesh
“We were asked to massage a teacher’s legs. If we refused, he used to beat us. There was a toilet for teachers, which is the one we had to clean.” – Naresh, a 12-year-old Dalit boy, Bihar
Muslim students
served food last, says rights group
New Delhi: Some teachers force children from lower
castes and minority religions to clean toilets and sit separately from their
classmates as part of "persistent" discrimination in classrooms, a
rights group said Tuesday.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) said pupils from marginalised communities often drop out of school and start working as labourers rather than face continued humiliation at the hands of teachers and principals. (Read full report here)
The
77-page study on schools was compiled through interviews with more than 160
teachers, principals, parents and students in four states - Delhi, Uttar
Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh and Bihar - which have large populations of low-caste
poor, indigenous tribals and Muslims.
"India's immense project to educate all its children risks falling victim to deeply rooted discrimination by teachers and other school staff against the poor and marginalised," said the report's author Jayshree Bajoria.
"Instead of encouraging children from at-risk communities who are often the first in their families to ever step inside a classroom, teachers often neglect or even mistreat them," she said.
Children from Muslim communities were among those often made to sit at the back of classrooms or in separate rooms. They were called derogatory names, were denied leadership roles and were served food last, the report said.
Some
children said they were segregated and neglected because they were considered dirty,
while Muslim students said they were called "mullahs", a term for an
Islamic cleric, instead of by their names.
In 2009, the parliament passed landmark legislation that guarantees state schooling for children aged six to 14 and enrollments have reached more than 90 percent nationally.
But HRW said the law does not contain punishments for those who discriminate in the classroom.
Most education authorities have failed to establish proper mechanisms to monitor and track children, who were at risk of dropping out, and acting to ensure they were able to remain in school, the report said.
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