Rajiv Gandhi Prathmik Shiksha Mission

 
· The Rajiv Gandhi Prathmik Shiksha Mission was set up as an autonomous registered society headed by the chief minister of the state, to supplement the state government’s efforts to universalise primary education in Madhya Pradesh. The objectives of the mission were to create a positive environment for education, increase enrolment and to improve the quality of teaching-learning processes so as to promote retention and achievement levels.
· The main challenges for the mission were the inadequate outreach of educational facilities specially in the interior, rural or tribal areas, marginalisation of economically or socially deprived children and insufficient support to academic processes and most importantly, a hierarchical delivery structure that did not involve the perceptions of the larger user community.
· The specific tasks undertaken by the mission to achieve its objectives were community mobilisation, opening new schools, construction of education buildings, upgrading school amenities, developing improved teaching-learning materials, teacher training, strengthening academic support systems and strengthening the information base for primary education. The mission has been able to mobilise over US $ 250 million of external assistance as grant to the state through the District Primary Education Programme.
· As a result of activities supported by the District Primary education Programme and the Edication Guarantee Scheme, the mission has succeeded in universalising access to primary schooling in the state.
· The Rajiv Gandhi Shiksha Mission undertook a door to door survey and mobilisation campaign designated as the Lok Sampark Abhiyan (LSA) in July-August 1996 covering 55295 villages in 34 DPEP districts and contacted 1.01 crore chi9ldren in the age group of 5-14 years. The LSA revealed a large gap in the outreach of schooling infrastructure, indicating how the tribal and far-fluing habitations were still unserved by the school network. The mission responded to this challenge by formulating the Education Guarantee Scheme (EGS).
· EGS was a pioneering initiative in the country acknowledging the child’s right to primary eduaction and to guarantee it. EGS perceive this guarantee as immediate action for creating opportunities of education rather than as a legal; decree because it saw the responsibility for providing education as collaboration between the government and the people. Under the scheme, whenever there is a demand from a tribal area from 25 children for a facility to learn (40 for non-tribal areas) and there is no school within one kilometre, the government guarantees to provide a trained teacher known as guruji within 90 days. The space for learning is provided by the community, which also proposes the Guruji’s name who has to belong to that village. The scheme is sensitive to the habitation pattern in the tribal areas of the state where people reside in hamlets called Majras, tolas or phalias, which are distant from one another. 
· EGS has made possible the universalisation of access to primary schooling facility in Madhya Pradesh in an extremely cost-effective and time-bound manner without compromising on quality and is an argument in favour of community-centred, cost-effective models of education. On 20.8.98, the mission completed the task of universalising primary schooling in the state.
· The ‘Neev’ programme of District Primary Education Programme (DPEP) lays emphasis on the provisioning of school buildings to the building-less schools. Though a building is perceived, as the necessary foundation required for a school, the importance of the nature and type of school building is a question that is often not given much thought to. The relationship of the building to its exterior environment on the one hand and relationship of the classroom to its interior is often ignored. The major objective of the District Primary education programme, which was initiated in 1996, is to make schools buildings so as to provide the right learning environment to the students. Regional workshops were held to bring together the perceptions and knowledge of the field functionaries and the national and state experts to arrive at alternative building technology. The major concentration of the workshops was on the need for improving the school buildings and their designs so that they are functionally enriched. This has become particularly important in the present education scenario where the method of inducing learning in a primary school has taken a turn from being curriculum based to activity based. The sitting arrangement ahs also taken a turn from being linear to being group based. The workshops induced cross-sharing of ideas on these subjects and came out with relevant suggestions, which would not only be useful in future school building constructions but would also encourage efforts for improving features in already constructed buildings.
· The mission has also brought the issue of the quality of learning upfront. For the first time in the state, the teaching-learning material was developed on a field trial basis involving teachers, NGOs and academicians. As a result of the mission academic interventions an average of one lakh teachers are trained every year for an average period of 12 days, by any standards an improvement on the pre-mission figure of 12,500 teachers. The mission has also effected decentralisation of institutional academic support to schools by setting up a number of block resource centres and cluster resources centres. The teacher community has developed thousands of teachers as master trainers and academic coordinators, thus creating ownership of schooling tasks.
· Alternative approaches to curriculum have also been initiated through the Alternative Schooling programme, which investigates the possibility of non-graded contextualised learning to motivate children particularly those of marginalised groups to participation in schooling. Working through local teachers and flexible time and space, alternative schooling has been able to arouse considerable community participation in contributing resources for constructing durable attractive shelters and buildings for their children.
· For the first time, Pre-primary education has also been introduced in rural schools through Shishu Shiksha Kendra, which give attention to the 3-5 age group children to inculcate in them appropriate habits of learning and socialisation through a schooling environment.
· These innovations have succeeded in creating increased opportunities for girls’ education, because they intend to make schopoling more flexibly organised and locally proximate, so as to mobilise community  attention towards supporting girls education  
· Working through the panchayats and using flexible, fast track procedures, the mission has been able to address salient educational issues with urgency and establish an effective model of decentralized educational management. The mission’s experience suggests that universalising primary education require a strong base of societal mobilisation. This in turn requires a restructuring of the entire sector of primary education on the principles of decentralisation and community participation. The mission realises the immediate need for institutional reform in the direction of decentralisation to give over the entire responsibility for primary education and total literacy to panchayat structures at district and sub-district levels.