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Unit 11: India Independent to 1964

intermediate students, to 613,000. The number of girls students increased six-fold and constituted Notes
22 per cent of the total. However, the progress in primary education, though recognizable, did not
match the needs or the intentions especially as the number of eligible students was growing fast
because of the high rate of population growth. The constitutional target of free and compulsory
education to all children was first shifted from 1961 to 1966 and then to a distant future. By the end
of the Third Plan in 1965-66 only 61 per cent of the children between the ages of six and fourteen
were in school, the figure for girls being only 43 per cent. Consequently, widespread illiteracy
continued; as late as 1991 only 52 per cent of Indians were literate.
In 1965, 5 per cent of the rural population was not served by any school at all. Moreover, the
facilities provided in the existing schools were very poor, with the majority of schools having no
pucca building, blackboards or drinking water. Nearly 40 per cent of primary schools had only
one teacher to take three or four classes. A particular malady of primary schooling was the high
rate of dropouts. Nearly half of those enrolled in class I would have left school by the time they
reached class IV and been rapidly reduced to virtual illiteracy again. Moreover, the dropout rate
was higher in the case of girls than boys. Clearly, there was no equal opportunity in education and
therefore also hardly any equalization of opportunity in work and employment for the poor and
those in the rural areas who constituted the vast majority of the Indian people.
A major weakness that crept in was the decline in educational standards. Despite recognition of
the problem, except for the technology sector, the educational system was left untouched and
unreformed and the quality of education continued to deteriorate, first in schools and then in
colleges and universities. The ideological content of education also continued to be the same as in
the colonial period.
Nehru was aware of the unsatisfactory progress in education and near the end of his prime
ministership began to put greater emphasis on its development, especially of primary education,
which, he now stressed, should, be developed at any cost. ‘In the final analysis,’ he wrote to the
chief ministers in 1963, ‘right education open to all is perhaps the basic remedy for most of our
ills.’ Also, ‘In spite of my strong desire for the growth of our industry, I am convinced that it is
better to do without some industrial growth than to do without adequate education at the base.’
Community Development Programme

Two major programmes for rural uplift, namely, the Community Development programme and
Panchayati Raj, were introduced in 1952 and 1959. They were to lay the foundations of the welfare
state in the villages. Though designed for the sake of agricultural development, they had more of
a welfare content; their basic purpose was to change the face of rural India, to improve the quality
of life of the people.
The Community Development programme was instituted on a limited scale in 1952 covering 55
development blocks, each block consisting of about 100 villages with a population of 60,000 to
70,000. By the mid-1960s most of the country was covered by a network of community blocks,
employing more than 6,000 Block Development Officers (BDOs) and over 600,000 Village Level
Workers (VLWs or Gram Sewaks) to help implement the programme. The programme covered all
aspects of rural life from improvement in agricultural methods to improvement in communications,
health and education.
The emphasis of the programme was on self-reliance and self-help by the people, popular
participation and responsibility. It was to be basically a people’s movement for their own welfare.
As Nehru stated at the very outset of the programme in 1952, the basic objective was ‘to unleash
forces from below among our people’. While it was ‘necessary to plan, to direct, to organize and
to coordinate; but it [was] even more necessary to create conditions in which a spontaneous
growth from below [was] possible’. While material achievements were expected, the programme
was much more geared ‘to build up the community and the individual and to make the latter a
builder of his own village centre and of India in the larger sense’. ‘The primary matter is the
human being involved,’ he added. Another major objective was to uplift the backward sections:

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