India Ink: At M.A. Ideal School, Teenage Teachers, Hopeful Parents

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota
Kuni Takahashi for The New York TimesStudents in a classroom at M.A. Ideal School, a private school run by Mohammed Anwar, in Hyderabad.

Second-grade teacher Shaziya Begum paced through the classroom, read a story to her students and managed to hold the attention of the 7-year-olds long enough to ward off anarchy.

But at 17, Ms. Begum could be in school herself.

She, and many others like her, is one of the reasons scores of poor parents scrimp to send their children to private schools that cost about $3 a month in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad, although the government offers free schools that include perks such as a free lunch, textbooks and even uniforms.

The method of teaching in these private schools is much the same as elsewhere in India, where rote learning dominates. But the teachers, though younger and far less educated than their government school colleagues, are far more accountable in educating the children.

Most importantly — they show up.

About a quarter of the teachers at India’s government-run primary schools don’t usually show up for work, a World Bank study found, and of those who do show, only half are actually teaching while they are there.

In the mostly-Muslim neighborhood where Ms. Begum teaches, at the M.A. Ideal School, parents, who are often day laborers and rickshaw drivers, praise the school’s convenient location, the teachers’ commitment in educating their children, and the low school fee.

Kuni Takahashi for The New York TimesWasim Akhtar with her son Mohammed Ahmed Khan, 7, outside the M.A. Ideal School.

I squeezed myself onto the last bench of a second-grade class, behind a metal desk narrower than my reporter’s notepad, to understand better what these private schools have to offer. M.A. Ideal School, started in 1987 with less than three dozen kids, now has some 2,000 students and 55 teachers. The blackboard was chalked up with English phrases such as, “Can I help you?”

During the class, Ms. Begum paced up and down and read sentences which the students chirped back.

“Clean clothes” (repeat) “make us” (repeat) “look smart” (repeat)

It was a mantra most of the children, or at least their parents, took seriously as they sported neat navy and white uniforms. The girls, who sat on one side of the classroom, and accounted for half the class’s two dozen students, had their hair neatly partitioned into two braided buns knotted immaculately with white ribbon.

Ms. Begum read the students the tale of the tortoise and hare, and had them repeat after her. Then followed another story about a fair.

“What is the meaning of a fair?” the teacher, dressed in salwar kameez – traditional Indian wear – and a blue cotton coat, asked her class.

“Mela,” the kids chorused.

“Do you all know what that means?” she asked.

“Yes!”

“Everyone clap for yourselves.”

Enthusiastic applause ensued.

“Now put your fingers on the first line,” instructed Ms. Begum, pointing to some copy in a textbook. The students dutifully traced the lines in their books with their fingers as she read and explained what the words meant, often translating the meaning into Hindi for their comprehension. The exercise was broken when the bell rang and a cry of victory erupted in the classroom.

The teacher flashed the kids an exasperated smile and helped them line up to leave the classroom. Ms. Begum, who joined the school in the summer of 2009, told me she enjoys teaching, but dreams of becoming an accountant one day. She, like other young teachers at private schools, often start working while in high school to make ends meet.

Priyanka Thakur, 17, who teaches Telugu, the state’s local language, to the same class, only finished the 10th grade before she became a teacher. In order to prepare for her classes, she studies the course material at home before getting into school. Despite her young age, kids snap to attention when she walks through the classroom, licks her fingertip, flips a page, and dictates to them. This, often when there’s no electricity, and the dismal tube light needs to be fiddled with at periodic intervals to start working.

Before students head home, they have to jot down their homework assignments in a diary, which teachers sign, so that parents know what their children need to finish before coming into class the next day. (Some who don’t do their homework sneakily finish it in the classroom — during a different class.)

Outside the school, most kids trickle down the narrow lanes to make their way to their nearby homes. The younger children are picked up by their parents. One such parent, Wasim Akhtar, who’s come for her 7-year-old son, Mohammed Ahmed Khan, said she sends her child to a private school because teachers actually turn up.

“We have to think about our kids’ future. We have to send them to a good school,” said Ms. Akhtar. “Here, they look after the kids.”

Ms. Akhtar, whose husband earns about $90 a month doing odd jobs at the local market, said she’ll cut spending elsewhere to keep them in school. “We’ll reduce our household expenses but we won’t skimp on their education.”

“They can do a lot if they study,” said Ms. Akhtar, as she ruffled the hair of her son, who was standing next to her. “If they don’t, they’ll end up with a job like my husband’s.”

Ms. Akhtar is not the only parent who carefully balances her household income to be able to send her kids to a private school.

Kuni Takahashi for The New York TimesMohammed Haneef with his son, Nadeem, 8, at M.A. Ideal School.

Mohammed Haneef, 38, sends his 8-year-old son Nadeem to another branch of the same private school that’s located closer to him. Mr. Haneef has three other children: an 11-year-old son and 9-year-old daughter who go to a government school nearby, and a 13-year-old daughter who goes to a local madrasa. Right now, Nadeem is Mr. Haneef’s only child attending a private school — but he won’t be for long.

“After two or three years, when he gets smart, I’ll remove him and put him in the government school,” said Mr. Haneef. His other kids had all attended private school for about four years before he shifted them to the government schools.

“I couldn’t afford it any longer as they grew older,” said Mr. Haneef, whose income fluctuates as a daily wage construction worker and amounts to about $60 to $80 per month.

He said his kids in the government schools aren’t taught much. “The teachers don’t control them. They just let them go.”

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India Ink: Islamic Center, Hindu Priest's Home Targeted in New York

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota

Four sites in Jamaica, Queens, were firebombed Sunday night by an attacker who favored Starbucks Frappucino bottles filled with flammable liquid. The attacker, who has not been captured, targeted an Islamic center, a bodega owned by a Muslim man, the home of a Hindu priest which had a shrine in its window and the home of residents who said they were Christian.

The imam at the Islamic center said he had heard about the attack on the Hindu temple, and added, “Some people confuse Hindus and Muslims.” Read more ?

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India Ink: Hello, How Are You? Hello, How Are You?

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota

Private schools in India are often attractive to parents because they offer English language instruction.

English has long been considered a passport to white collar jobs in India. Here, kindergarten students at the M.A. Ideal School, Phadi Branch, which is located in a Hyderabad slum, are taught phrases and gestures in English to build basic conversational skills and confidence.

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India Ink: Will the Food Security Bill Fight Hunger?

AppId is over the quota AppId is over the quota Rajesh Kumar Singh/Associated PressA child eats as his mother cooks by the roadside on a winter morning in Allahabad on Dec. 20, 2011.

While the fracas over the anti-corruption legislation known as the Lokpal Bill dominated the most recent session of Parliament, another new bill that is likely to more directly affect the lives of hundreds of millions of Indians has received much less attention.

The National Food Security Bill 2011 promises a legal right to cheap food for the poorest in the country. While India currently provides subsidized wheat and rice to the poor, this legislation would make food cheaper and provide more of it to poor families. The bill aims to cover 75 percent of rural households and 50 percent of urban households.

So far, discussion of the bill in the Indian media has focused on the cost of providing more cheap food – the bill would increase government spending by more than 200 billion rupees, or $3.75 billion, annually. India’s agriculture minister, Sharad Pawar, has said it might be difficult for the government to buy enough grain to sustain the program. Congress party opponents argue that it is being introduced solely to garner votes ahead of upcoming elections.

A fundamental question about the bill remains: Would it actually alleviate hunger in India? India’s child malnutrition rates are worse than sub-Saharan Africa’s, and nearly half the country’s children are underweight, according to the World Bank. Improving the problem is seen as a crucial step the country’s development.

Several parts of the Food Security Bill make it hard to predict its impact on hunger.

First, the bill proposes a new way of identifying beneficiaries. Under the current system, the government provides subsidized food to everyone living below a poverty line. Under the new arrangement, households would be identified as “priority,” “general” or “excluded.” Priority and general families would receive subsidized food at different prices (those classified as priority would get a larger benefit). ?Excluded households would receive no subsidized food. The draft bill does not specify how, exactly, families would be put into these categories, leaving the details to the federal government.

The bill does attempt to address the biggest shortcoming of the current system, ?which is that many of the poor do not get the subsidized food they are entitled to. It does so by proposing that poor Indians get a food security allowance, or cash, along with a way that families could complain if they were not provided the food they should receive. One of the major concerns among nonprofit groups working with the poor, however, is that the money provided in lieu of food would go to the men of households, who might not use it to purchase food.

The bill has made an effort to empower women by recognizing them as heads of households, but without addressing how this would be enforced.

It is also unclear whether the agency that would handle complaints would be independent of the officials charged with providing subsidized food. The bill states that complaints would be investigated and resolved by district, state and national bodies. But these agencies would be under the direct control of the federal and state officials also responsible for providing subsidized food in the first place. State governments would also be required to set up vigilance committees, but those agencies’ powers would be limited to bringing violations to the attention of district officers and reviewing the implementation of the act.

Lastly, food would continue to be provided through the chaotic existing government food distribution system, which the proposal says the government should “endeavor to” overhaul. The absence of any time frame or penalties for not accomplishing that makes this aspect of the proposal merely a directive rather than enforceable. Many analysts argue that tackling inefficiencies in the current distribution system will require more than additional subsidies and more food. The Expert Committee on the National Food Security Bill set up by the prime minister, the Justice Wadhwa Committee established by the Supreme Court and a petition by a group of eminent economists have all ?highlighted this concern.

Perhaps it should come as no surprise, then, that some critics of the bill say that while it is a step forward, the proposal does not tackle the fundamental problems that cause so many in India to go hungry.

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India Ink: Newswallah: Long Reads Edition

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota

Joe Sacco, the well-known American cartoonist and journalist, uses his “comic journalism” lens on a rural district of Uttar Pradesh, India’s largest and one of its poorest states. Caravan magazine publishes a long piece by him in its latest issue, which also includes a long profile of Imran Khan, the Pakistani cricketer turned politician. Mr. Sacco and an Indian journalist who assisted him, Piyush Srivastava, travel to the district Kushinagar near the border between Uttar Pradesh and Bihar to meet with poor and lower caste families.?

In its special end of the year issue, The Economist looks at what the East India Company may tell us about today’s state-owned or state-backed firms from countries like China, Brazil and Mexico. While most of today’s politically connected companies do not have standing armies as East India did, the piece argues there are many similarities between the two, chiefly that they “serve two masters, keeping one eye on their share price and the other on their political patrons.”

Outlook magazine devotes its first issue of 2012 to the cuisines of India. The lead essay by Pushpesh Pant, who wrote “India Cook Book” and “Gourmet Journeys in India,” celebrates the fact that regional foods of the country have not been completely homogenized. The issue covers lots of ground from Kerala fish curries to the similarities and differences between food from Bengal and Orissa.

The New Yorker magazine has a flattering profile of Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, the founder of India’s leading biotech firm Biocon. The piece asks the question “Can one self-made woman reform health care for India, and the world?” It cites her company’s work on diseases that are most prevalent in developing countries like India, and also her philanthropic work to bring health care to the poor. (Subscription required)

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News Analysis: India Ends Year of Political Bickering and Government Inaction

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota

For months, India’s politicians have promised to respond to public anger over official corruption by creating an independent anticorruption agency, known as a Lokpal. Yet with minutes ticking down to a midnight deadline — and with a decisive vote on Lokpal legislation still pending —lawmakers responded late Thursday night to political self-interest: they screamed and postured but ultimately did nothing, allowing Parliament to adjourn for the year without a vote.

Doing nothing might be considered the epitaph of India’s political year in 2011. A coalition national government led by the Indian National Congress Party demonstrated little political vision, analysts agree, and even less political backbone. An opposition led by the Bharatiya Janata Party seemed interested primarily in thwarting the government, offering little in the way of a constructive alternate agenda.

Political stalemate is not always a terrible thing, but the question is how much longer India can afford its increasingly dysfunctional politics. India’s dynamic economy, buffeted by the broader global slowdown and uncertainty about Europe, is wobbling precariously: the rupee has weakened badly, economic growth is slowing and private investors are spooked by governmental inaction or timidity on a long list of reforms on economic issues including pensions, land acquisition and foreign investment in retail.

“The problems that the political difficulties are adding to the economic weakness are quite serious,” said Ila Patnaik, an economist with the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy. “We were already in a situation where reforms were not happening. There was a policy paralysis.”

Gloom is the prevailing political mood in New Delhi, less than a year after Indian leaders were projecting 9 percent growth. Now the government is scaling down expectations, while some analysts say the growth rate could be far lower. Shekhar Gupta, editor of The Indian Express, recently warned that India was at risk of falling into a difficult slowdown, with growth at 6 percent — a stellar figure elsewhere, but too low to keep pace with employment and demographic pressures in India. He called it “the new Hindu rate of growth,” invoking the old insult about India’s onetime plodding socialist economy.

India’s economic problems may well be confined to the short term or midterm, assuming an improvement in governance. Most analysts still point to the country’s underlying economic strengths, including high investment and savings rates, a consumer-driven domestic economy and a dynamic private sector. But if Indian entrepreneurs have managed to maneuver adroitly around the inefficiencies of the Indian state in the past, analysts say, that will not be enough to keep driving the economy forward.

Politically, India’s federalist democracy is still regarded as the essential infrastructure binding a polyglot nation of 1.2 billion people. Yet frustration with the mechanics of India’s political system is boiling over. Shashi Tharoor, an influential National Congress Party lawmaker, recently questioned whether India should shift from its parliamentary model to a presidential system, a proposition rejected in many quarters.

Parliament, once the proud symbol of India’s democracy, has increasingly become a stage for televised acts of obstruction and political theater. Days of planned legislative activity have been lost to disruptions by protesting opposition parties that lead to forced adjournments.

An analysis by PRS Legislative Research, an independent research group here, found that since 2009 Parliament has been losing more productive time than ever before, while passing fewer pieces of legislation than in recent memory.

“It has seen the most disruptions in the past 25 years,” said Devika Malik, an analyst at the research group.

Public disgust with the political class helped fuel the rise of Anna Hazare, the anticorruption campaigner. His hunger strike during the summer brought out hundreds of thousands protesters and forced government leaders to put the Lokpal issue on the front burner. Yet Mr. Hazare, too, stumbled last week, misjudging his own public mandate. He and his advisers waged a blistering attack on the government’s Lokpal legislation — calling it too weak — and exhorted supporters to again take to the streets.

But the strategy fizzled, and the crowds were sparse. Yogendra Yadav, a political analyst here, said Mr. Hazare’s strategy had backfired, especially since the increasingly strident attacks by his “Team Anna” advisers had continued even after the government met some, though hardly all, of his demands.

“Team Anna overplayed its hand,” Mr. Yadav said. And when the crowds did not rally behind Mr. Hazare this time, the pressure on the political class was suddenly reduced. “They went back to business as usual,” Mr. Yadav added.

The Lokpal fight exposed the hard-knuckled quality of Indian politics. The inability of the National Congress Party to control important allies exposed the weakness of the coalition national government. Mamata Banerjee, leader of the Trinamool Congress Party, a coalition member, ended up blocking government initiatives on foreign investment in retail, on pension reform and, finally, on the Lokpal bill — partly to teach National Congress Party leaders not to take her for granted, analysts say.

Whether Ms. Banerjee, too, overplayed her hand remains to be seen. In India, the ultimate arbiter is the ballot box, and analysts are closely watching five state elections scheduled for this year. Ordinarily, given the ineffectiveness of the national government, the National Congress Party might seem headed for a pasting. But Mr. Yadav said the opposite could be true.

In each of the state elections, Mr. Yadav said, the National Congress Party could actually improve its standing, given the local dynamics of each race, even though public attitudes toward the government have seemingly soured. It is a reminder that the logic of governance and the logic of elections are not always one and the same.

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