New Delhi, Sep 10 (PTI) A big boost to literacy is the only way to sustain the gains of the 1991 reforms and raise the quality and level of migrant workers’ lives in the soft underbelly of the big cities, felt academics and administrators while many aspects of a book by educationist Manimala Roy’s new book.
The speakers concurred with Roy’s contention that schooling opened up new opportunities for children of the uprooted workers in the unorganised sector and that in turn raised the community’s economic and social status.
According to the author, the 1991 economic reforms unleashed a silent revolution in the festering city slums. Migrant workers saw the possibility of a large number of white-collar jobs being available to their children once liberalisation opened up many sectors of the economy. With some education, they knew, their children would be able to land low-level jobs in sectors like telecom, civil aviation, retail and automobiles.
Buoyed by such prospects, they sent their children to school, often private schools, paying hefty tuition fees. Without any government intervention a quiet social movement took off with far-reaching consequences.
As a result, the country’s literacy scene got a new boost, the blows of child labour were softened and within a generation the migrant community moved up socially and economically with their children becoming part of the organised sector.
This story has been traced, researched and chronicled by Roy in her book “From Shanties to School”, published by Konark Publishers Pvt Ltd.
During the discussion at the India International Centre on Friday, Former ambassador Reena Pandey said the book effectively conveyed the impulses for literacy growth in the distressed slums.
Terming the development as a “moving story of the underprivileged living on the fringes of Delhi’s urban society”, she said this was a heartening trend.
The former Indian Foreign Service officer, who once served in Nepal, said even in the Himalayan kingdom a robust literacy campaign had been launched with liberal Indian aid.
C B Sharma of IGNOU talked about the need for inducting technology into the literacy drive to give it a new dimension.
“Big economists write books that are full of useful statistics, we quote them, but Dr Roy’s book is written from the heart and reads like a real-life story,” he remarked.
He said the new education policy that is on the anvil will have a big focus on the grass-roots realities and the problem of the first-generation literates in accessing education.
Roy said what gave the book its real value was the use of a huge amount of primary data she collected from case studies in the city slums.
Renu Tomar, deputy registrar of Guru Govind Singh Indraprastha University, called for participation of the entire academic community in the literacy movement. She said though the book is packed with useful statistics it grips the reader because of its literary quality. PTI ZMN RDS RDS
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