The recent World Bank - Nagaland project a crucial opportunity to push ahead with inclusive and quality education in the State
The World Bank has signed a $68 million project to improve teaching practices and learning environments in ‘select schools’ in Nagaland.
According to a statement issued through the Press Information Bureau, the ‘Nagaland: Enhancing Classroom Teaching and Resources Project,’ inked on February 23, will support the State’s efforts to reform and improve the learning environment in schools.
The objective is to make the schools ‘child-centered, supportive of modern, technology-enabled teaching and learning approaches, and resilient to future shocks.’
It also specified that approximately 15 out of Nagaland’s 44 higher secondary schools would be developed into school complexes that operationalise the envisioned learning environment during the project period.
While this is good news on several fronts, the statement was devoid of any provisions to improve disability-inclusive education—an area that needs utmost attention, considering that children with disabilities are one of the most marginalized groups in education.
The UNESCO's 'State of the Education Report for India 2019- Children with Disabilities’ stated that there were 6,568 Children with Disabilities (between the ages of 5 to 19) in Nagaland. Out of the total, only 50.8 percent were enrolled in schools during the period, 10.3 percent had dropped out, and 38.9 percent had never attended any educational institution.
The number of dropouts is likely to have increased in the past year as many children with disabilities struggled to cope with the ‘new normal’ of online education.
This is not to say that the State authorities have not done anything to mitigate the challenges. However, beyond introducing sign language interpreters in video broadcasts, there are complexities involved in planning for disability-inclusive education.
To begin with, there is an urgent need to recognise that all children with disabilities cannot be clubbed into one group. They are persons with different disabilities and, therefore, different needs.
Under the existing disability rights frameworks such as the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016 (RPWD Act), schools and local governments must actively identify children with disabilities for their entry into the education system and ensure that they are given required aid. However, there seems to be no standard methodology for the identification of children with disabilities. In some cases, the process of identification is carried out by special educators (resource persons) who are trained in a singular disability type. Thus, judgments made by them for other disability types, particularly intellectual disability, become suspect.
Further, inclusive education has to be conceptualised as a system-wide practice, rather than being viewed as a specialised service for CWDs. Moreover, the availability of appropriate data is indispensable for targeted policy interventions and addressing the exclusion of CWDs from the teaching-learning process.
This calls for greater budgetary allocation and inter-ministerial convergence.
The World Bank project can be taken as an opportunity to honour the commitment towards inclusive and quality education for all in Nagaland.
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