EDUCATION

A Report on Taleemi Caravan 8-26 December, 1995

Professor A.M. Khusro called it the Caravan of Life. Minister Sita Ram Kesri compared it to Mahatma Gandhi's Dundee March that heralded, surely and unmistakably, the country's independence. Although encouraged by popular response and selective appreciation, the UP Rabita Committee chose to retain for the movement the modest label of Taleemi Caravan.

The genesis of the UP Rabita Committee, founded in 1991, was the felt need for coordinating effectively the activities of voluntary organizations in the fields of educational, social and economic uplift of Indian Muslims. The coordinated effort, it was felt, would optimize scarce resources by avoiding overlap. The purpose of the caravan was to break the ring of tagnation and inaction; its logic was to compel response by knocking at people’s doors and to bombard them with the collective and concerted attention of a large group of educationists, academicians, professionals and social workers. Their strength during the journey across the country vacillated between 30 and 40. There was renewal at every stage, some dropped out, others joined, and the caravan moved on.

Understandably, the UP Rabita Committee had made a beginning with UP (1992). It struck new grounds by initiating a caravan for a cause. Its motivation was sympathy, fellow-feeling and concern; its strength was mobility, its payload: message. Vitally important messages.

The All-India caravan had been rehearsed ten times over. The first state caravan that crisscrossed the vast and populous state of UP started gn its pioneering journey in the summer of 1992.

The awakening caused by the 1992 caravan was not allowed to be extinguished. There followed in unfailing succession smaller caravans, workshops. conferences refresher courses for teachers and membership drives.

It obtained a mandate in the form of an appeal from ulema of diverse dispensations and schools who stressed, among other things, the importance of modern Year education and social reform.

Fortified by the ulema's mandate the caravan embarked on its countrywide tour on 8 December 1995.

It was flagged off, after a meaningful meeting in the Aligarh Muslim University, by vice-chancellor Mahmoodur Rahiman.

The first stage was Kanpur where at midnight the caravan addressed a mammoth meeting. This set the pattern. The caravan, stopped at Patna, Calcutta, Cuttack, Vijaywada, Mysore, Madras, Hyderabad, Bombay, Ahmedabad, Vadodara, Bhopal, Ujjain, Jhalawar, Kota and Jaipur and ended in Delhi on December 25.

The caravan came back with the firm conviction that there is a perceptible awakening among Indian Muslims to the need for eradicating illiteracy and competing in the sphere of education. It appreciated the strides made in the southern states. Even in the South there did not appear. to be any sizeable spread-effect of the educational endeavor. The general standard is inadequate.

What is needed is a planned effort to spread literacy, set up new institutions and improve standards of the existing schools and colleges. Women's education is woefully inadequate and needs to be pushed up.

Wherever the caravan went, people emphasized the need for a central organization which could prepare and implement the community's educational plan and establish a data-base. The new-born craving for education ought to be harnessed into a massive national effort. The caravan and its hosts have made up their mind to respond to the public demand and sel up a countrywide infrastructure for improving the educational status of Muslims in a planned and scientific manner.

The caravan may not have broken new ground, but manner of its constitution, the magnitude of its effort, its trend-setting mobility, the unique co-operation between voluntary organizations in different states that it illustrated, and the comprehensiveness of its plan of upgradation of human resource, had a tremendous impact. It heralded a movement, a collective attempt at self- uplift.

(Source: The Nation and the World)

Maharashtra: Educational Statistics

1-SSC Examination Results for Nasik District

Year                Total         Muslim          %-       Total              Muslim                %

                     Students       Students        age      Students         Students         age

                    Appeared    appeared                      passed          passed           

1990-91           46763         1616            3.45       19498               1040               5.33

1990-92           55266         2130            3.86        27895              1130               4.05

II-H.S.C. Examination Results for Nasik District

1992-93           27662        1516          5.5             12926                712                5.5

Aligarh Muslim University: Certificates/Diplomas/Degrees Awarded during 1993-94

Aligarh Muslim University: M.Phil/Ph.D.'s Awarded during 1993-94