Dear Editor,
Indian education system happens to be the second best in the world. Second best among so many countries in the world really means a huge potential and a big deal of success in itself. This system of education creates the finest products of human capital. And the typical of the Indian curricula, to make the particular mention here, in a particular regard; the Indian curricula has a compulsory in social studies of the duo, disaster management and environmental sciences. The two connected subjects, that the children are taught from the early age, in order to develop in them a conscious environmentalist and to make them familiar with the disaster tactics. It even consists of the practicals where drills etc are conducted in order to teach them a complete way of such dealings.
However with the privatisation of the education, the institutions began to make their own constitutions and curricula and there came an obvious diversion from the main prescribed course. Statistically there are less than 10 per cent privately owned schools where the duo is taught and when it comes to the schools run by the government, infrastructural parylisis creeps in. As a matter of result the children are left uneducated in these vital fields and these children grow up as environmentally unconscious people and thus begin the steady scratches to the same environment that later turns out to be the great disaster, creating the widest destruction.
The problem of course lies somewhere in our education system. The malfunctions of the education system usually are reflected in the lack of awareness and knowledge. A perfect example just as fresh, is of the flood that just hit our part of the land. The local schools; only 0.2 per cent of them have the curricula that I just mentioned and thus only as much little ratio of the population knew the preventions and precautions and the ‘get ready’ of the approaching problem.
Not only this, when via the mass media, it was conveyed to the masses, to remove the essentials, furniture and all the movables to the upper stories, no one listened, with a mutually shared view, “we never saw any severe flood here thus water will not come”. The first reflection of the absence of education and awareness. Then the Metrology Department saw the speed of the approaching water and again the mass media requested the people to evacuate from the residential dwellings of the red alert zones and move to safer places. The people again denied, and why not; we people are too fond of our palatial homes and royal weddings, only to mention the former. When the water level rose, people got stuck in the upper parts of the houses and pleaded later, to be evacuated! Thus the problem, initially was not as complex and big, as the people with their self regulating actions pushed its domains.
To end a(ny) problem once for all, its roots need to be eradicated. The solution to any and every problem begins at the grass root level. The best we can do to end this problem of ours is of course education. Education is a tool to all the problems. Had our people been educated in environmental issues and disaster tactics much of the loss could have been prevented. Since, to cry over the split milk is no use, we must aim at the correction. It is time to correct the flaws of our system and if from the grass root level, it has to be the correction in the education and its system.
Dhaar Mehak
Jammu
