The Whitaker-Hancock Residence

We moved into our flat in the last days of January and spent the first few weeks snatching opportunities to scrub and clean. When we took the flat it had just been renovated and a powdery paint and mortar dust lay everywhere, making it a grim environment to live in at first. The apartment is what's called a 2BHK (two bedroom, hall and kitchen), a standard middle class design. The bedrooms are good sized and ours has an ensuite bathroom and a small balcony. The living room, which the front door opens onto, is even bigger, with a larger balcony overlooking the low Tulsi bungalows that line the road to the flats. You might think that a third balcony is excessive, but the one that opens off the kitchen serves an important function as a clothes washing and drying area and seems to allow the local pigeons the privacy they need to shit on our drying washing. The kitchen has a long black stone work surface, much too low for someone my height, which forms an L-shape with the even lower sink positioned in the foot of the L. After more than a month without one, we now have a squat blue fridge that sits at the top of the L, next to three stone shelves set into the concrete wall.

The windows of the flat are thin but tall, with oddly frosted panes spattered with watery mortar drops that won’t come off however much you scrub at them. Fitted to all of the windows are horizontal rows of black bars, also splashed here and there with paint and mortar. The floors are marble: big rectangular slabs in the living room and small, vaguely glittering rectangles in the kitchen and bedrooms. The walls have been re-plastered well but enthusiastically, the workmen apparently having little regard for natural borders like door frames and window ledges. Most striking of the flats features is the 2-D front door, which presents the image of a carved wooden door to the first floor landing. At head height is the meditative image of Ganesha, the elephant god, and below him, the Hindi symbol for ‘Om’. Also worth noting is the hook in the ceiling of the main balcony, from which can be hung a formal swing to allow us to repose in the manner of proper middle class Gujus. We can’t really make a claim to that class though as we haven’t employed a cook, cleaner or washerwomen. This sets us apart from pretty much everyone else in Ahmedabad with a regular income and means we spend a lot of time cooking, cleaning and washing clothes.

The Project

Since January I have been working on a project called Indian School of Education. That’s a holding name more than anything else; the project has been evolving for the last two years and has yet to have its exact parameters drawn. The gist of what we want to do is there in the title though: the area of concern is education and our intervention will involve teaching.

The project is a reaction to the parlous state of education in India. Although the government has had success in improving children’s physical access to primary and secondary schools, especially in rural India, the quality of education delivered remains poor. A key indicator of that quality is literacy levels amongst school-aged children. Recent data compiled by Pratham India (ISE’s mother organisation) shows that out of a total 140 million rural children, 110 million cannot read a whole paragraph in their mother tongue. While illiteracy is bad enough alone, its knock-on effect is low secondary school completion. Across India kids make it through primary school without grasping basic literacy and then can’t cope at a more advanced level and drop out of school into low paid work.

There have been concerted efforts by non-governmental organisations to tackle this problem for at least the last 15 years. But while efforts to improve curriculum, raise teaching standards and involve communities more in education have made inroads into the problem, there has not been systemic change. And that’s where ISE comes in. Our model of improving education identifies headteachers and local education officials as the key individuals able to transform schools and in turn raise levels of student achievement, enrollment in school and completion of basic schooling. Moreover, our assumption is that this requires headteachers and officials to themselves be transformed. In general neither group is currently able to improve education standards. This is because none of these public servants are given professional training. To make matters worse, within the education system promotion to positions of authority is compulsory and based on seniority rather than merit. In this way a teacher may suddenly find themselves heading a school or a cluster of schools without having had any preparation for the role. Unsurprisingly these supposed positions of authority become largely administrative; incumbents are not equipped to show leadership and are therefore not expected to.

While ISE can’t change the way leaders are appointed in India’s education system, we can improve the capacity of headteachers and local education officials to act as leaders rather than administrators. We intend to do this by providing the first in-service education leadership programme for headteachers and education officials in India. The plan is for a 3-year part-time programme that will combine short training sessions with 3-month in-field projects that trainees will implement in their own schools.

I’ve joined the project at ‘a very existing time’ to quote the Wachowski brothers. We’ve just secured our first major donor and have established a team in Rajasthan to market the training programme to potential trainees and build relationships with higher levels of government bureaucracy. We’ve also run a recruitment and selection process for recent graduates from India’s best universities and chosen 17 people for a 2-year placement scheme we’re calling ‘Gandhi Fellowship’. Each fellow will be sent into rural Rajasthan to support several of the leadership trainees in implementing their projects.

My role in all this has been somewhat varied over the last 9 weeks. I’ve worked on a donor proposal, sat in on meetings with officials in rural Rajasthan and participated in the selection process for the Gandhi Fellowship in Delhi. My longer term role has become clearer in the last few days though and most of my time is likely to be spent working as part of a ‘new ventures’ team that will conceptualize and produce proposals on new elements of the project as it unfolds. For example there are plans for creating ISE as a private university and running masters programmes for education leadership, and an idea for setting up an education research centre.

Ahmedabad

We first arrived in the city at night, picking our way between sleeping bodies on the station platform, women and men with bundles of luggage moving past under the strip lighting and auto drivers quietly hassling us to ride with them. We didn’t accept any such entreaties until clear of the station and its surrounding road, also ringed with prostrate bodies wrapped head to toe with blankets to keep out the relative chill at 7:00 in the morning. Heaving our bags into the narrow space behind the back seat of our chosen auto, we clambered onto the padded bench and the vehicle eased into the road, the driver hunched forward to peer out under the swinging mirror emblazoned with red Gujarati lettering that hung from the top of the windscreen…

Ahmedabad is really two cities, separated by the wide Sabarmati River flowing North East to South West, the banks of which form grubby beaches largely devoid of human activity. On the Eastern side, the old city seems ragged and dilapidated despite the existence of modern hotels nestling in amongst the crumbling, stained apartment blocks and tenement-like residences. The side streets are narrow, with tall and unevenly built terraces leaning out over the bustling traffic below. Here and there remnants of Mughal monuments and the old city walls stand out from their surroundings, looking forlorn and out of place. The appearance of Navi Ahmedabad, on Sabarmati’s Western bank, is very different. Here there are high rise flats, flyovers and big brash shopping malls that reflect the sun during the day and shout ‘progress’ at night in neon lettering. There are modern, detached villas behind high walls or fences, whose owners display their social standing with expensive looking plaques that give details like ‘A.G. Patel, Civil Engineer’ or V.P. Rao, Advocate’. In the same way the ‘Mayor’s Bungalow’ makes no bones about its role in society. But it’s not that the new city is necessarily wealthier than the old. There is plenty of poverty to be found here. But the roads are wider and straighter, the infrastructure newer and showing less wear, and the buildings more modern. Some of the tower blocks appear to get bigger and bolder in design the higher they are; fortress-like cladding adorning what look to be penthouse apartments on the top two or three floors. The tallest towers almost touch the outer limits of the smog layer that lies upon the horizon, dimming the sky below 45 degrees. To appreciate the beauty of a sunny day you have to look right up and see the sky un-shrouded and seemingly pollution free.

Early days

The flight from London to Bombay/Mumbai was far from pleasant. After the first few hours I was longing for it to end; I was uncomfortable in my seat, my mouth was dry and the air felt warm and processed. For the first time in my life I had unnerving thoughts about flying. It suddenly seemed unnatural to be in a metal tube hurtling through the air at how-ever-many tens of thousands of feet above ground. The food was good though.

Arrival in Bombay was straightforward and unmemorable, but what has stuck in my mind is the view from the window as the plane came into land. Now, I wrote my thesis on poverty in Bombay, so I expected to be exposed to deprivation while passing through the city. Of municipal Bombay's 12 million inhabitants, just over half live in slums and tens of thousands eke out an existence on the city's pavements. But I was still struck by the sight of mile upon mile of small square roofs of plastic sheeting, wood and corrugated iron stretching into the distance, visible for the last five minutes of the flight. The slums dipped and climbed with the topography, reaching up to claim the high ground of small hills and only kept at bay near the airport by a deep trench and barbed wire topped concrete wall that surrounded the grounds. In the last minute or so of our descent the wing of the plane seemed to almost touch the roofs of the nearest shacks, suggesting disaster for 30 seconds before the plane passed rapidly over the trench, wall and short grass before the runway.

After negotiating the crush at arrivals, we made contact with one of my colleagues and paid a huge amount of money to be driven five minutes from the airport to where we were to meet. We manhandled our bags into the back of a 1950s model black and yellow taxi and left the airport with a minimum use of the horn by Indian standards. We ended up outside a block of flats off a windy, narrow road overhung by shrubby trees and lined with street stalls; the edges of the road giving way to broken pavement bricks, muddy slicks of water and tattered remnants of household waste. It felt like the suburb of a larger city; quiet but teetering on the edge of importance. Later that evening we were to leave from this place for the train and Ahmedabad.