Aheli Moitra
As the 10th Manipur Assembly Election came and went, a ghost lurked around—while future leaders/losers obsessed about securing assembly seats, people of their constituencies looked on with hollow eyes at the drama. They had been pitted against each other, termed ignorant for not “understanding issues”, got shot and searched, they cast their vote and faced post poll backlash. But their children continue to go to schools with no teachers and healthcare centres continue to operate without anaesthetists. Ignored, the ghost just hovered around and shrugged—perhaps it’ll grow teeth in the next 10 years. This election, territorial integrity played god over its human counterpart. Governance and people be damned.
In a hill district hospital of Manipur, there is no paediatrician when 50% of its patients are paediatrics. Since 1989, perhaps longer, number of patients has tripled with no corresponding increase in the number of doctors which has, instead, dipped. Eight doctors have to handle an average of 70 (at times a maximum of 200) patients a day; there is no operation theatre but one of the specialists is an anaesthetist. A physician has left to study further, without being replaced, and a paediatrician transferred the same way. In the lack of expression, medical officers, who have had the conviction to stay put and work, call it the case of the “missing doctors”—they cannot distinctively explain the phenomena without hampering their jobs and whatever little doctoral care patients receive. They say patients are being cured here by “god’s grace” because there is no infrastructural support either. Just imagine the helpless irony of this statement—these are doctors!
And this is a district hospital (from one hill district to the other, status quo is maintained); the state of Primary Healthcare Centres (PHCs) in villages and Sub Centres is worse. Corresponding to the condition is the near negligible percentage of Chief Medical Officers (CMOs) in Manipur from the hill districts. Even though some of the medical officers from the hills were first recruited in, say, 1996, they were terminated and reinstated a number of times over the years without reason, regularised only in 2002 after some hill districts faced acute shortfall of doctors. Mind you, Manipur state overall does not face a shortage of doctors or facilities. Little wonder that Imphal has top notch healthcare facilities while its peripheral population prepares for amputation. In travelling from the hill peripheries to Imphal, a medical patient with a wheezing heart could do well without the roller coaster ride on offer.
Education fares worse. Teachers get transferred on three grounds: on utilisation, transfer with post and a normal transfer. Barring the last, the transfer scenario in schools of the remote hills in Manipur is one big scam. Weigh the situation—you go to school but never learn math, a basic for physics, chemistry and computing. Or English, the medium of instruction for all subjects (except other languages of course) because there’s no one to teach it. The two systems of transfer make this possible. When a new school opens, it is easier for departments (the district councils and education department run government schools) to transfer teachers from one school to the other “on utilisation” so that “creation of post”, which burdens the financial department, can be avoided. This system is feasible only if there is an excess of teachers in a school (of which there are some in Imphal) but creates a shortfall of teachers in the hills, in both the parent school (which for the hills is from a neighbouring hill school) and the new school.
If this is made legally possible using the language of utility, the “transfer with post” is downright illegal. With sufficient MLA connections, a teacher who cannot get out of a remote hill trap with a normal transfer will use this option to get out with her/his post. This means that a vacancy for the missing teacher is never created, the deficiency is not visible and students have to forgo learning a subject as important as, say, science. With 40 MLAs from the valley, and 20 from the hills, you can do the math on which section of the Manipuri populace accesses this system most frequently. The aberration is apparently not seen in the government log book.
Corruption should not necessarily be correlated with ethnicity. Even though one uses the other to perpetuate itself, corruption unites everyone willing to share a crooked buck. Take the bizarre system of “substitution”, for instance, also popular in Nagaland. Government school teachers actually qualified for the job (and thus holding post) aren’t keen on working in a remote hill village, so they sublet the job to a local, less qualified, person on a pay scale affordable to the former. Education in Manipur is like real estate in Mumbai. Rates of substitution are not fixed, and contracts are arranged many atimes by the school headmaster, village headman or chairman. The Assistant or Deputy Inspector of Schools (AI or DI) ignore it because some of them were probably headmasters before they got promoted to these positions, profiting well from the institution. Everyone gets their cut and lives happily ever after, except the children who will grow up to find themselves perpetuating the same system because this was education.
The substituted teacher earns less than the actual salary, obviously, might not be paid on time when the government employee is not, might not be paid at all if the employee is transferred in the absence of a real contract and doesn’t get the required government perks, which is enjoyed by the actual employee who prefers to stay on in, say, Ukhrul town than a village in Ukhrul district because contract work and more money can be had in the former. People in the hills (and probably the valley) perpetuate this system, willingly, eroding their own people from within. It’s even better if a school in a remote village shuts down when students don’t show up anymore (why would they? There are no teachers!). The government doesn’t always realise this huge lapse and the mid day meal rice from the Sarva Shiksha Abiyan (SSA) scheme, which has minimal cultural relevance in this region anyway with family meals taken in the morning and evening, can be sold by those who have access to it and the prize shared. Hoorah!
Administration ignores this, as do politicos, for obvious reasons. Crores of rupees are pooled into the state by the centre in the form of National Rural Health Mission (NRHM), SSA or Rashtriya Madhyamik Shiksha Abhiyan (RMSA) bring marginal development for the periphery and increased dependence on Delhi but not without erroneous distribution mechanisms. In some district hospitals, doctors are happy just to have prescription paper and their walls painted first time since construction through NRHM. From 2005 to 2009, Manipur state showed to have expended Rs. 116.62 Crores of the Rs. 290 Crores NRHM fund allocated to it. Yet government healthcare centres remain under staffed, without medicine and infrastructure.
For the year 2011-12, the Ministry of Human Resource Development has sanctioned Rs. 5167.49 Lakhs for the universalisation of secondary education in Manipur state, through RMSA. With the centralised way of operation that Imphal adopts, the above mentioned systems of treachery are not easily removed from education; a grant like this might see some trickle down but without an overhaul of the system, it will remain clogged in and around Imphal.
Last year the Principal Secretary of the State Education Department of Manipur, Dr. J Sureshbabu, declared the desire to start 535 primary schools under SSA with a recruitment of 2500 upper and lower primary school teachers. Primary schools fall under the purview of district councils while anything above is handled by the education department. However, the management and control of funds from SSA (and all other schemes) remain solely with Imphal. If this is not separated, as well as the effective rationalisation of teachers (re distribution) not achieved, how is Manipur to bridge the gap between plans and implementation?
The key, again, to the effective implementation of these funds and schemes might well be in de centralisation through effective use and autonomy of district councils. Funds could be directly given to the latter, which could then handle the implementation of the schemes directly, strengthening local governance. The inherent corruption might take some years to stabilise, but monitoring of schemes by local civil society and related associations would be much easier, and hopefully effective, this way. It will also ease the burden on patients who need to make five trips to Imphal to access funds from schemes such as Janani Suraksha Yojana (JSY), which can then be accessed directly from district or sub divisional headquarters.
It’s not an easy task considering the huge army of bureaucrats and ministers that feed off central schemes, apart from making the centre look good at the grassroots with the schemes bringing in marginal changes never seen before. The problem is surely more complicated than postulated here, and needs dedicated political will to resolve. Spending pre election campaign days and post election years hammering in territorial integrity and flaring up ethnic divide will hardly give any meaningful inputs to these tangled problems, not ruling out the role of non state actors who complicate the situation further. While ethnic divisions are not imaginary, playing them up before resolving governance issues would lead to weed-like privatisation of schools and hospitals (as is already the case), leaving the poor out to access poor government healthcare facilities, which they will find it too difficult to challenge considering their weakened polity. In effect, new conflicts will emerge.
Manipur, and the region’s united political intelligence, ability and determination, will hopefully try to avert such a doom. And try to educate its polity on ways to demand accountability for rights the state owes to them.
