Uncommon Ground – For The Children Of India

The debate has shifted to higher studies, but we I cannot afford to take the foot off the pedal on early education.
In this, the final column in this series, I turn to a core area of my work over the past decade—the education and development of young children.
Some sights and sounds remain sharply etched in the mind—the five-year-old in a preschool that we had set up in a Bangalore slum, who cheerily sang a rhyme about butterflies but said she had never seen one; the little children in the fields in Bettiah, who looked like they were just playing, but in actuality were catching tiny fish from the ponds for their dinner; the 10-year-old boy who stood outside a school in Kolar, but could not bridge the social distance to get in.