Punjab Government – Bringing Congress’ Vision for School Education to Reality

Punjab topped the National Performance Grading Index of school education for 2019-20 released by the Central Government recently. The Congress government in the state has delivered what many opposition parties merely talked about in electoral speeches or wrote in their manifestos only to be treasured somewhere in the party offices to remain unfulfilled forever. Performance Grading Index is a tool devised by Ministry of Education to provide insights into the status of school education in the States by analysing five parameters including Accessibility, Infrastructure/Facilities, Equity, Governance Process and Learning Outcome. Punjab outshined in most of the parameters. This comes as a boost for the Congress government ahead of the state elections, as the AamAadmi Party (AAP), the principal opposition in the state has been trying to corner the ruling Congress on school education. The AAP has been repeatedly comparing the state of government schools and their performance in Punjab with that in Delhi, where its national convener Arvind Kejriwal heads the government, telling Punjab to learn from them. The irony for the AAP’s claims is that Punjab is the top performer whereas Delhi is at number six in theses rankings, giving the former an upper hand. This has further strengthened the INC’s blame of more marketing and less deliverance on the AAP.

The Congress Government in Punjab credits this achievement to the vision of former party chief Shri Rahul Gandhi and the formula of talk less – work more. Many initiatives were behind this success. These included a Transparent online transfer policy for teachers benefitting almost 21,600 of them, Universalization of pre-primary education across all government schools being the first state in the country to do so in 2017, Accelerating recruitment process across the state and ensuring separate cadre for disadvantageous/border areas and most importantly, focusing on establishing smart schools making 12,976 of them already functional. The initiative of providing smart phones to nearly 1,75,443 students studying in their senior secondary was also a masterstroke.

To ensure maximum attendance, the government made Sports and Self-defensive training as an inseparable part of the curriculum. One inspiring effort of the Congress government, which truly shows the much-needed thought process in the nation, is to provide free sanitary pads to female students from classes 6th to 12th. All this has led to an increase of almost 6.77 lac students in government schools in times when private schools have overtaken the public education system in a great way.

In a country where education in public schools with equity in representation was envisioned by the great visionaries including Dr.Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and Pt. Jawaharlal Nehru, the reality still remains disturbing even after 73 years of independence. But the Congress government of Punjab comes as a ray of hope or to put it more strongly, ‘It Brings Congress Vision For School Education To Reality’.