Immortal that Mr. Sibal wants to be.....

I have been waiting to write this article ever since I was in class IX because that was the first time NCERT books (which is the Bible for CBSE) underwent a change. The syllabus was changed drastically and as a result, among others, history, which was 300 page thick was trimmed down to 50 pages and the four subjects of Social Studies-History, Geography, Civics and Economics were combined in a single book unlike before when we had four different book for each of these. Misfortune was of our batch while the batch, 1 year senior to us studied topics like World War and India's struggle for Independence, we mugged up the locations of Taj Mahal, Qutub Minar and other monuments. As far as my memory goes, the seed of the grading system was planted at that time only.

Like my all other articles, my this article also emphasize on a basic ideology of how proud I am to be an Indian but I feel unfortunate to be living in this country.

Every time there is a change of guard at the center or the state government, the ruling party and its ministers sit on their chair and mold the entire system their way. The ministry of Human Resource Development(or the HRD) is one of those important ministries which makes a loud noise about the ruling party's work at the end of their tenure. Consequently when the BJP comes into power, they alter Indian History in a way that it projects Sangh Parivaar as the ultimate hero. They will also remove sex education from the science text books, even when Aids is rising alarmingly. But they will make yoga mandatory(and why not that is what people in RSS do!). When congress comes into power they will change the writings in the text books to show the world how great Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi have been. And this time it will be computers that will be made mandatory(by the way Rajiv Gandhi was the one who brought computers to India!).

And in every political regime there comes many over ambitious men, who with their vague ideas try to bring a revolution, with a prime motive of making themselves immortal(That what it seems to me). Mr. Kapil Sibal, The HRD minister, is one of them.

Mr. Sibal is one of those "Wannabe", who in the name of reforms, is spoiling the future of Indian students. He is preparing the final draft for the students of class Xth but as a student, I can say his idea is mindless. I have heard and read almost all his interviews where he talks about his "Ultimate Reforms". These are some of the questions I have in my mind.

1. "What is the point of introducing grading system in class Xth? All his life, from class 1st to IXth, a student will be adjudged on the basis of marks. In Xth he will be introduced to Grading System. Then again from XIth he is back on Marking System.
2. Why does he, in all his interviews, constantly give the reference of the western world? Indian schooling is different from our counter parts in the West. We can not allow a girl wearing Spaghetti inside the school like the West.
3. If they are genuinely committed to reforms, start it from the basic class 1 and then ascend above. Why always class Xth students are experimented with?
4. Why is there so much fuss about the pressure students have, when our parent's generation successfully wrote exams of 200 marks. We write it for 100.
5. HRD has only CBSE under its jurisdiction, but what about the State boards which are under the control of their respective governments?
6. And does he wants to say there is no difference between a 90% and 94%?
   

Yes Indian Education system needs reforms but not a direction less one. A much wider picture will have to be taken into consideration and a proper road map has to be prepared and strictly followed. What Sam Pritoda did to the STD booths or what Verghese Kurien did with Milk Revolution was done by working it out from the roots. Otherwise Mr Sibal, there are many other ways of immortalizing oneself, may be you can learn more about it from Maya Memsahab(By the way, I quite like her idea).