[Reader-list] RTI and the Distant Dream of Women's Empowerment

[vidya shah]

This is an account of a friend who has been trying to use the RTI 
effectively. Not so easy after all.
Vidya

IGNOU, RTI and the Distant Dream of Women's Empowerment

Rahul

Analysis of the latest data made available by the Indira Gandhi National 
Open University, New Delhi (IGNOU) in response to an application made under 
the Right to Information Act reveals that the average number of female 
students freshly enrolled each year in the Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree 
programme in the seven years from 1996 to 2002 was 17146 which is 65% of the 
total. Among these the average number from the Scheduled Castes (SC) was 
1903 (11.1%) and the average number from the Scheduled Tribes (ST) was 831 
(4.8%). The average number of female students per year over the same period 
who had successfully completed the course and been awarded the BA degree was 
a miniscule 440. Among these the average number from the SC was only 64 and 
the average number from the ST was just 17. Even though the time schedule 
for completion of the course in the distance education format is flexible 
and so it is not possible to directly compare the enrolment and pass 
averages given above nevertheless it can be roughly said that over the 
period under review on an average about 2.6 % of the female students were 
successfully completing the course every year while this statistic for the 
SC is 3.4 % and for the ST it is 2 %.

The most striking feature of this data is that of the considerably fewer 
number of female students passing as compared to male students. Thus in 1996 
even though females constituted 67.1% of those enrolling their proportion in 
those passing out was just 29.5%. Similarly in 2002 while females 
constituted 63.4% of those enrolling their proportion in those passing out 
was just 31.6%. Thus it is quite evident that IGNOU, which is the premier 
institute of distance education in the country, has not quite lived up to 
its self professed mission of " ....knowledge ... dissemination through 
sustainable open and distance learning systems seamlessly accessible to all, 
including the hitherto unreached, from among whom the leaders and innovators 
of tomorrow will emerge."(Italics added for emphasis) (IGNOU website - 
www.ignou.ac.in).

However, not being privy to these dismal statistics in 1998, Subhadra 
Khaperde, impressed by the mission statement of IGNOU, had then enrolled for 
the Bachelor's Degree Programme of the university. She comes from an 
economically very poor dalit marginal farmer family and had had to give up 
her education after somehow passing the higher secondary examination in 1987 
in the third division and start work as an anganwadi worker. She progressed 
to becoming a political activist involving herself in the many battles that 
were fought over land, water and forest rights in Madhya Pradesh before 
concentrating on securing the reproductive health and rights of Bhil adivasi 
women in western Madhya Pradesh from 1995 onwards. After a decade of 
grassroots mobilisation however she found that her initial belief that the 
various enabling provisions of the Constitution and many affirmative laws 
would be implemented if only the people got organised and demanded their 
rights was very naive. She realised that the rule of law promised in the 
Constitution was not only there only on paper but also that the state would 
not tolerate organised attempts by the masses to make it work on the ground. 
This made her feel that she must read up on political theory and practice to 
properly understand this sad conundrum of laws on paper that are never 
implemented. However, the education she had received in school she found was 
wholly inadequate for her to understand the various books that she was plied 
with by other better read activists. So in 1997 she decided to start formal 
studies again by doing a bachelor's degree in Political Science from IGNOU.

Subhadra soon found herself all at sea in the deep waters of the IGNOU 
course material. The problem was compounded by the fact that the texts had 
been originally written in English by the leading Indian scholars in their 
fields and then translated into Hindi. The normal practice for translation 
of arcane technical terms is to break up the English word into its Latin or 
Greek roots and then construct a Hindi word by combining the corresponding 
Sanskrit roots. This artificially created term being a specialised one is 
not found in any of the standard Hindi dictionaries. Moreover since the main 
words are in Sanskrit the sentences constructed with these also use a high 
Sanskritised Hindi, which has little relation to the colloquial Hindi that 
is popularly spoken. Thus making sense of the IGNOU course material for a 
graduate of the government school system is almost as difficult an exercise 
as deciphering the Harappan script. Since this was beyond her capacity 
Subhadra had to engage a tutor to assist her in a big way not only in 
understanding the meaning of the texts but also in doing the assignments 
which too had to be written in high quality Sanskritised Hindi. The crunch 
came in the examinations. The papers were set in such a way that they 
thoroughly tested whether the student had read and assimilated the course 
material properly and wholly. A study of past question papers revealed that 
there is no pattern discernible in the questions asked. So it is very 
difficult to predict the possible questions and prepare accordingly as is 
the custom in most universities in this country. Nor are there any study 
guides as the student base of IGNOU is too small to make their publication 
profitable.

The inevitable result of all this was that in the initial stages Subhadra 
mostly passed her examinations by the skin of her teeth or sometimes failed. 
Even though the tutor prepared the answers for a wide range of questions it 
was just beyond her capacity to cram all of them. So she had to write off 
the cuff answers to questions for which she had not prepared and obviously 
she did not have the proficiency to do so. Sometimes she was failed or given 
poor marks despite writing good answers and there was no redressal even 
after filing for review. The only saving grace is that a student could take 
as many as eight years at that time to pass the three-year course and so 
failed papers could be reappeared for or a lesser number of papers could be 
taken per semester. She gradually passed her papers till only one paper 
remained. This was the foundation course in English. She had already failed 
in this once in the initial stages. She had to spend a whole year learning 
only English and then somehow passed the paper on the strength of an essay 
on a topic, which she had prepared before hand that luckily came in the 
paper.

Once this IGNOU odyssey was over Subhadra began wondering as to how many 
people actually passed the BA examination of IGNOU given the toughness of 
the course and the exacting examination standards. The BA being the most 
basic graduation level course would be opted for mostly by people from a 
disadvantaged background who had like her lost touch with education for a 
long time and wanted to catch up on it. But the fact of the matter is that 
Subhadra had been able to stay the course and become a graduate of IGNOU 
with much difficulty only because she had engaged a tutor to help her 
throughout. Not everyone is so lucky and so she surmised that very few 
people were actually successfully completing the course. She asked around in 
her own city Indore and found that all the people whom she traced had 
dropped out of the course after enrolment having been frustrated by the 
toughness of the course and the examinations. This prompted her to write to 
IGNOU for statistics regarding the pass percentages disaggregated by caste 
category in the BA course over the past decade. There was no reply. The 
research section of IGNOU, which should be analysing the performance of the 
students and evaluating the efficacy of the course, too said that they had 
no data regarding the BA course. She then got some of her journalist friends 
in Delhi to inquire about this and they too got fobbed off with vague 
replies. She then wrote to the Principal Secretary Higher Education of the 
Government of India who is an IAS officer from the Madhya Pradesh cadre to 
get this information and once again drew a blank.

Finally as a last resort an application was filed with the Public 
Information Officer (PIO) of IGNOU under the Right to Information Act 2005 
for this information. A subordinate of this officer replied and refused the 
information with some vague excuse. A stern letter was then sent to the Vice 
Chancellor who is the Designated Appellate Authority for IGNOU under the RTI 
Act, pointing out that the Public Information Officer was liable for penal 
action for having wilfully obstructed the furnishing of the information that 
had been demanded. This had some effect and the officer sent the data but it 
was complete only for seven years from 1996 to 2002. Repeated reminders 
could not elicit the remaining information from 2003 to 2005 and so a second 
appeal was filed with the Central Information Commission to direct IGNOU to 
furnish the data for the whole decade from 1996 to 2005. After a long wait 
of eight months the appeal finally came up for hearing before the Commission 
on 18th of December. The Information Commissioner instead of taking the 
IGNOU PIO to task for not supplying the complete information and penalising 
him said that since he had given some information the petitioner should not 
be intolerant and should sit with the PIO and sort out the remaining 
differences. The petitioner's argument that enrolment and pass statistics 
are basic information and that the Information Commissioner should order 
IGNOU to put them up compulsorily on their website so that they would have 
to sit up and do something to improve their performance as a result of 
public scrutiny of such a dismal performance cut no ice with the Information 
Commissioner who said that the staff of IGNOU were over worked anyway. The 
petitioner finally left in disgust leaving the IGNOU PIO and the Information 
Commissioner to their mutual backslapping.

This whole sordid scenario indicates that there are a lot of women like 
Subhadra with a poor schooling background and unable to take admission in 
colleges which require regular attendance who are enrolling in IGNOU in the 
fond hope that they will get a BA degree. However, the toughness, nay 
inappropriateness of the course material, the examination papers and their 
strict and even sadistic evaluation coupled with inadequate coaching are 
putting paid to their dreams leading to these women not being able to pass 
out. No wonder then that these statistics regarding pass percentages, that 
are easily made available by most universities, are such a closely guarded 
secret in IGNOU and not readily disclosed to anyone. Not only has IGNOU 
failed to help the underprivileged students who have taken admission in the 
BA degree course to emerge as leaders and innovators of tomorrow but it has 
instead severely dented their self respect by making them into failures. 
This criminal negligence assumes an even more serious hue when we consider 
the fact that an overwhelming two-thirds majority of those aspiring and then 
failing to make something of themselves due to this insensitivity of IGNOU 
are women. What is most galling is that an institution that projects itself 
as the best distance learning university in the world on the strength of the 
performance in its money spinning elite professional courses like 
management, which are availed of by students from a privileged background, 
does not have the honesty to review the continually deteriorating 
performance of its most basic BA degree programme. The attempt to bring some 
transparency into the operation of IGNOU through the RTI Act too has proved 
futile given the tendency of bureaucrats to shield each other. The net 
result is that the empowerment of poor women is destined to remain a distant 
dream.

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