My Life Seems to have Undergone ‘Mutation’!

  •   Mon, Jun 01 2009
  •   Divvy Kant Upadhyay

March 5, 2009
 
 
“In the last one week, this science camp has shown so much to me that I feel my own life has undergone some kind of mutation” says Sangeeta, a Grade 9 student from a school in Udipi .The giggling 13 year old girl was perhaps giving a subtle hint that she now knows a little bit about mutations and genetics.
 
She and her friend are hurriedly sipping their tea and gulping down buttered toasts and ‘upma’ in a hostel mess meant for doctors pursuing their post graduate studies in the medical college at Manipal. They are excited as today is their last day at the week long ‘Science camp’ organised for them by the Manipal University leading to the celebration of the National Science Day marked annually on the 28th of February. Today they are going to be trained by the Agasthya Foundation in about 60 Science models. The team of 23 students will then explain the models to over 500 students that are expected to visit the Science Exhibition to be held on Saturday at Manipal.
 
10 boys and 13 girls, were selected from around 40 schools in and around Udipi based on their academic performance. The ‘cream’ as they are referred to generally, may be special in more ways than one as they perhaps represent that hope of ‘India shining’ tomorrow - Among the 23 kids in their early teens, many of them are children of farmers, mechanics and auto rickshaw drivers. The only ‘opportunity’ they had were the schools that were set up close to or in their ‘rural areas’ and the only thing that earned them their scholarship to come and stay for a week at a university learning practical aspects of Science, was their academic performance.
 


They visited labs at Manipal Life Sciences Centre – the research hub at Manipal and did basic science experiments. In some cases they were spell bound to have an entire microscope to themselves- It’s a luxury for so many schools in India to even afford a microscope. Sangeeta says that in her school, there is just one microscope and the teacher prepares the slide which they then see one by one. The kids had some practical experience in Physics when they visited some instrument- workshops at the Engineering college. They also got to see how a printing press works. The kids are being given science models to make and project work to do once they go back to their schools. Concepts of hygiene and health awareness were introduced to them at the hospital here where they underwent free basic medical and dental check ups.
 
Almost all the students were ‘home-bred’ and had only ‘heard’ about hostels. They found it a fascinating experience to live in one. Maybe that’s why when asked about the biggest lesson she learnt apart from Science, Sangeeta says it taught her how to mingle with people she didn’t know at all. Not all were as outgoing as Sangeeta and they remained a wee-bit shy in the initial days but towards the end of the week, the bonhomie was evident when they had a cricket match between the boys and girls teams. If you are wondering how boys can play against girls, it is because the director of the Life Sciences Centre at Manipal (MLSC) was captaining the girls team! Passionate about Science, Dr Satyamoorthy is a well known molecular biologist in scientist circles and is heading the MLSC where research work worth several crores is going on. Taking a break one evening, he invited all the 23 kids for a game of cricket and hosted a party for them. Rajat a Grade 9 Student from Manipal wishes this camp be extended upto a month while Shreya a grade 8 student wishes she could bring more of her friends from her school to show them things they have seen only in textbooks. Among the 23 of them, a whooping majority of them(10) want to become doctors. Interestingly none of the ten students’ parents were doctors. The other majority wanted to become ‘software engineers’. Ask them what it means and they say it’s their parent’s desires to see them become successful engineers in the IT world. The kids did get some hands on experience at computers as well. They were taken to a lab where they were taught few computer basics and they created their own email addresses too.
 
Literacy rates and health indices in the twin districts of Udipi and Mangalore are among the best in the country and some of those statistics are comparable to the ‘Western’ world.
 
While everybody talks of India’s future, sometimes we happen to overlook what’s happening in 65 percent of India which is rural. This 65 – 70 % of India which is rural has only 20 percent of India’s Higher Education institutes or colleges where the gross enrollment ratio is as low as 4 percent. Are we talking of dismal statistics? Let’s leave Higher Education and look at basic primary and secondary education. Dilip Thakore, Editor of the Education World magazine recently wrote in his editorial that ‘tens of thousands of India’s 1.25 million schools lack basic infrastructure such as proper buildings, blackboards, drinking water and lavatories – let alone luxuries such as laboratories, libraries and computers. He goes on to say that not much learning is possible in the 21st century-India’s over crowded and ill-equipped classrooms plagued with chronic teacher truancy.
 
Almost 75 percent of those 1.25 million schools in India are run by the Government. Thakore’s analysis maybe true and dismal, but then hasn’t this nation of ours always survived on hope and optimism? Not very long ago, somewhere in Goa on the Teachers Day last year, Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh had said that the “India of the twenty-first century will be built in the classrooms of our institutions of learning and they will remake both India and the world”. There are no two doubts about the ‘market-value’ of Indian graduates across the world, but it is evident that there is scope for a lot more to happen at ‘home’ first. For the time being the token-initiative taken by the Manipal University may seem a tiny little step which if overlooked may not even matter, but how would the scenario be if 400 other Universities in India, whether public or private, emulate this initiative and offered such week long scholarships to deserving students to sell nothing else but Science and hope with conviction. Marketing education is a challenge and faces many hurdles, but this tiny little step of marketing science and broadening horizons of young kids can prove to go a long way. It might just put life into those textbooks that are being mugged up for the sake of clearing exams and going onto the next grade. Guess we really need some serious mutations to occur in our education system.
Divvy Kant Upadhyay
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