NEED FOR HIGHER EDUCATION OF WOMEN IN RURAL AREAS OF INDIA

Presentation of Richard L. Ottinger

Forum on Higher Education of Women and Minorities in India

April 27, 2002

            I would like to salute Dr. Surendra Kaushik, Professor of Finance at Pace University, for convening this forum and for his inspirational efforts at promoting higher education of women in rural areas of India through his founding of the Mrs. Helena Kaushik Women’s College in Malisar, Rajasthan.   I had the privilege of visiting the college earlier this year and keynoting a conference on energy for development there.  What an experience it was!  Tucked in a small community some 150 miles west of New Delhi, the College, established just three years ago and already fully accredited, is providing a first class education in the arts and sciences to more than 150 rural women who never would have had the chance otherwise to obtain a college education. 

The dedication of the faculty and the enthusiasm of the students are noteworthy.  Besides my formal presentation, I took the opportunity to speak informally with students and faculty.  They are such a bright group, the students being the top in their classes from rural high schools from a wide area around Malsisar.  They were so well informed and so full of questions about world events and about US policies about which they were quite familiar.  I don’t think I could have begun to address the issues of their interest had many times the time allotted been available.  The College, about which Dr. Kaushik will say more, is an example of what can be done to provide higher education to rural Indian women – and the tremendous hunger that exists among them for college level knowledge.

The challenge of providing higher education to rural Indian women must be put in the context of the demographics and cultural traditions of the country.  While great efforts have been made at population control resulting in a rate of population increase of just 1.8% per year, in a country of 1 billion people, that still means an annual population increase of some 18 million people who require all the essentials of life as well as education at all levels.  The population increase in and of itself presents a staggering educational and financial challenge. 

The Indian Government has made heroic efforts to provide universal literacy and primary education. The literacy rate (ages 5 & up) of India increased to 62% in 1997 from 52.21% in 1991, but the 1997 female literacy rate was just 50% and the rural female literacy rate was just 43%.  The adult rates (ages 15 and up) were 54% total, 40.7% for women.  The total enrolment in secondary schools in 1997-98 was still only 50% of the eligible population of which 44% were girls in primary school, 40% in middle school and 37.1% in secondary school.  So the percentage of students who qualify for higher education is still small, particularly among female students.  And while the Government has aggressively promoted the construction of facilities and preparation of teachers, there still is a distressing inadequacy.  On top of this, the vast majority of the population is very poor, so that attendance of students must be subsidized.  Education is free through the 12^th grade and scholarships are available for university education.  There are set-aside positions and counseling provisions for special cast and tribal students at all levels of the educational system.  While again, the Government has made great efforts to address all these problems, higher education funding has suffered by the priority placed on universal availability of primary education and literacy, leaving inadequate resources for higher education.  The end result is that only 6% of the eligible population attends institutions of higher education today, 34.7% of them women, about 2% of the eligible women and less than 1% of the eligible rural women.1

On the other hand, as of 1997-98 there are 229 universities in the country, 16 central universities and remaining operated by the states.  And there are some 9,274 colleges, 7,199 of them colleges for general education and 2,075 colleges for professional education.2  Together they enroll some 7 million students and employ 331,000 teachers.3 In addition the Indira Gandhi National Open University provides flexible higher education opportunities to large segments of the population who have no access to the colleges and universities.  Established in 1987, it now has 47 programs consisting of 553 courses.  In 1999, it reached over 172,000 students.4

For women, participation in higher education faces additional hurdles of culture and tradition that militate against their post-primary education opportunities.  And these cultural problems are even more pronounced for rural women where the old traditions of protection of young women, subordination to their husbands and the place of women in society as focused on the home and child rearing are the strongest and exposure to feminist reforms are the weakest.  Nevertheless, the Government has declared policies of educational equality and opportunity and, within its limited resources, has made remarkable accomplishments.  I will describe briefly below the history of the Government’s efforts since independence and the cultural barriers that must be overcome, taking my information largely from a remarkable address by Dr. Suma Chitnis, Director of the JN Tata Endowment for Higher Education of Indians, in a remarkable address, The education of women – a continuing challenge, to the Winds of Change: Women and the Culture of Universities’ International Conference in Sidney Australia, 13-17 July, 1998 (http://www.woc.uts.edu.au/chitnis.html).

Viewed in the context of the global concern about the role of governments in bringing about equity and equal opportunity for women, it is significant that as far as government initiatives and policies on behalf of women are concerned, India is far ahead of many countries.

India acquired independence from British colonial rule in 1947. The Constitution of India declared in 1951 firmly affirms the equality of all citizens before the law. Impressively it goes far beyond this, by identifying the country's aboriginal tribes (indigenous people), former untouchable castes, and women as weaker sections of society, wronged and discriminated against for generations, and therefore deserving special facilities and support for advance. In the five-year plans that followed, the Indian government has consistently emphasized education as one of the principal instruments for the advance of each of these categories of people. Because of these provisions Indian women have had the benefit of affirmative action by the government long before the practice was accepted in other parts of the world.

However, after fifty years of freedom it is apparent that Constitutional assurances, policy provisions and government programs are insufficient. Not much can change unless cultural constraints to equality for women are wiped out and unless real opportunities are made available for women to exercise the equality made legally available to them. With reference to education for instance, the opportunity for education, particularly higher education, is important. But, higher education cannot take women very far unless they also have opportunities to earn, to pursue careers, to participate in democracy and development, and generally to function as independent individuals. In fact, unless a society is sensitive, open and committed to all this for women, policy remains empty rhetoric.

Almost immediately after independence, in 1948-49 the government of India appointed a major national Commission focusing on higher education. Known as the University Education Commission, this Commission was headed by Dr. S. Radhakrishnan, one of India’s most distinguished scholars and philosophers and a man very sympathetic to the cause of women. He later became the President of India. In the report of this Commission the chapter on university education for women, leads with an angry statement on how the British government had done nothing to advance women's university education in India.

The report makes some powerful statements about the importance of women's education and underlines the government's obligation to provide equal educational opportunities for women.

Despite the powerful statements on equalization of opportunities for women, however, the Commission seemed to be guided by the conviction that motherhood and home making are, and will remain, central to the lives of women.

And yet the fact that the Commission specifically mentions the possibility of the employment of unmarried girls must be conceded as an impressive advance. At the time at which the Commission submitted its report, young unmarried girls were not exposed to the world of work. On completion of their education they were expected to stay at home until they were married. This was basically to protect their virginity and to keep them under control. But also because, according to then prevalent norms, the course of a girl's life is to be determined as per the wishes of her husband and her in-laws after her marriage, particularly in matters that involved her interaction with others, or stepping out of the home. Parents were expected to facilitate this by keeping their daughters in a "neutral" state at home before they gave them away in marriage. By acknowledging the possibility that unmarried girls may want to work, the Commission made a bold and radical departure from this norm.

The other major contribution of the Commission is that it recommended that the number of women's colleges in the country should be increased. Over the course of the decades since it was made this recommendation has had positive returns. There were less than a hundred women's colleges in the country when the Commission submitted its report. Today there are more than twelve hundred.

In 1958-59, almost ten years after the appointment of the University Education Commission, the government of India appointed a National Commission on Women. The National Commission on women recommended special hostels, special colleges and special scholarships for women. It recommended special syllabi for women and specified that these syllabi should focus on creating the right attitudes among them. The recommendations of the Commission lead to the establishment of the National Council for Girls, the establishment of a Comprehensive Development Plan for Women, to the allocation of special funds for women, and in the central and state ministries of education, to the establishment of separate units to attend to the educational needs of women. The Commission said nothing about equipping women for equal careers, but it did make one major contribution on this issue. It looked carefully into the needs for occupations in which women were preferred, and pointed out that qualified women were needed, in large numbers, to function as pre-primary school teachers, nurses, midwives, women doctors, pharmacists and social workers. On this basis it firmly recommended the promotion of education for women in these fields.

From the decade of the seventies onwards there is a visible change. The National Policy on Education, declared in 1986, talks of education for the "empowerment of women." It further promises that "this will be an act of faith and social engineering". The Eighth Five Year Plan of the country launched in 1991 categorically states that education of women is imperative in order to improve health and nutrition levels in the country and to succeed with the country's efforts to control its population explosion. It speaks of women as "partners in development." In the Ninth Five Year Plan, which became operative in 1997, the title of the chapter on women's education is Education for Women's Equality. It is pertinent to point out that the ambivalence about equality and about the objectives of education, which were so conspicuous earlier, are now completely gone.

Both the tone and the substance of these documents and other policy statements of the eighties and nineties exude a new urgency and determination. Three different factors seem to have contributed to the change. First the findings from the country's review of its development efforts, second the feminist movement, and third the revolution of rising expectations and standards of living which has made it necessary for women to be gainfully employed.

In the mid seventies, in response to the feminist movement and declaration of the International Women's decade, the Government of India appointed a Parliamentary Committee on Women. In 1978 this Committee submitted its report entitled Towards Equality. Its chapter on education points out how difficult it is for girls in villages to go to schools and how irrelevant most school and college education is to the lives of women. It complains that education does not equip them to earn nor empower them to be more independent, autonomous and effective in their personal lives, or in carrying out their political and civic responsibilities. With carefully documented data the report illustrates the educational backwardness of women and indicates how unfortunate the consequences for the country are. It also points out that policy statements on the education of women are ambivalent. It is particularly critical of the fact that although policy statements emphasize equality for women, they do not accept the idea that every woman has the right to pursue a full fledged career or acknowledge that women's ambitions in life may extend far beyond their roles as wives, mother's and home makers. The findings and statements in this report shook the government of India out of its complacency concerning the status of women in India, and forced the issue of their education into a new focus.

While the feminist movement was thus impacting attitudes and aspirations across the country, feminist concerns found their way into the university system. Departments for women's studies were established at several universities.

It is heartening that both the Eighth and the Ninth Plan are clear and unambiguous about education particularly higher education as an instrument of equality for women. However what really matters is that attitudes and aspirations have changed. At the societal level the education of women is now considered to be the cornerstone of development. At the family level the education of women is slowly being accepted as an economic investment in the same manner as the education of men. It is also seen as a multi-faceted investment in the enrichment of family life. At the personal level education is seen as an instrument for the empowerment of women and the foundation of a new, independent, self-reliant and richer selfhood for women. In a sense the change that has taken place is rooted in a century and a half of efforts to promote the education of women and to advance their status. It is almost as if these efforts seemed finally to have matured after a long period of gestation.

Returning to the statistics and focusing on the role of women in higher education, more than two million women are enrolled for higher education in India today. The figure may sound impressive to those who are not fully aware of the size of the population of the country. But it is not, as may be acknowledged from the fact that these 2 million women constitute just 34% of the total enrolment of 6.5 million students in higher education. It is interesting that the percentage of women is slightly higher at the postgraduate level (39%) than at the under graduate level (34%), and that this is higher at this level than the enrolment in the diploma level (26%). Data on the faculty-wide distribution of women show that of all the women enrolled in higher education the largest percentage (54%) are enrolled in the faculty of Arts and the Humanities, 20% are enrolled in the faculty of Science, 14% in the faculty of Commerce, 4% in Medicine, Agriculture, Management, 2% in law and 1% in Engineering.

The data clearly reveal that the overall representation of women in higher education is poor, and that they are poorly represented in the faculties that lead to prestigious and lucrative occupations such as engineering and management. However it is significant that the decadal increase of enrolment in higher education has consistently been larger for women than for men. The figures are as follows. In the 1950's enrolment of women in higher education increased by 275% and of men by 126.4%, in the 1960's women's enrolment increased by 187.33% and men's by 108.78%, in the 1970's women's by 73.55% and men's by 31.60%, and in the 1980's women's by 92.11% and men's by 49.18%. Women's representation, in all disciplines, has also gone up substantially. Today one sees increasingly larger numbers of women in every field, including those from which they were practically excluded until a few years also. In fact women are moving steadily towards equality in higher education.

However the more important issue to take cognizance of is the generally limited access to higher education in the country. The 6.5 million students enrolled for higher education in India constitute only 6% of the population in the relevant age group, as compared to 25-30 per cent in Europe and 50-60 per cent in North America. Thus when we talk about equality for women in higher education we are talking about equality within a very privileged sector, namely the 6% that has made it to college.

It is now more than five decades since the Constitution of the country promised free and compulsory elementary school education to all children up to the age of fourteen. Nevertheless barely 70-80 percent of the children in the country are in school. Only 65% of those who join school complete the four years that mark the completion of primary school. Just 35 per cent complete higher secondary schooling that is the qualifying requirement for entrance to university education. The inability to enroll all children in school, and to retain those who are enrolled until they complete their primary school education, is acknowledged to be one of the most serious failures of development. It is, as may be imagined, not only a source of great embarrassment to the government but a matter of grave concern from the point of view of the country's future. All government and public effort is therefore currently concentrated on universalizing elementary school education. And thus, although in principle there is a strong commitment to the higher education of women, for purposes of funding and concentrated action the country has to make way for the urgent and more compelling responsibility to universalize primary school education.

In conclusion, the need for higher education of women, and in particular of rural women, is overwhelming.  It is recognized by the Government to be essential to the country’s development and population control.  Much has been done, but there is a long way to go.

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