It was when she moved from Pune to Delhi in 1971 at the age of 11 or so that Rukmini Banerji got her first taste of how conservative schools in the capital back then were.
She easily cleared the entrance tests and interviews at one school in the capital, but when the authorities learnt that her mother was working – as a lecturer at the Lady Shriram College – she was denied admission. The school was of the view that the children of working mothers received no attention at home, after school hours. Her forward-thinking parents scoffed at the absurdity and admitted their daughter to Carmel Convent, a school that had “no such hang-ups” and one they had previous links with from Patna, the town where she spent her early years.
Not only did Banerji shed and break all such conventions, but she has also gone on to chart a course for herself that recently won her the much-coveted Yidan Prize for 2021 (with a cash reward of approximately US $ 3.9 million), for her work in the field of education. She is the first Asian woman to win the prize since it was first instituted in 2016. The prize is given away to individuals who have made significant contributions to education research and development.
Convention was not exactly her thing in more ways than one. At a time when few parents encouraged, and some even frowned upon their daughters playing sports, Banerji played anything she could lay her hands on: from tennis to hockey to swimming. As a good “exam taker”, all she did was only study three days prior to the crucial exam and get over with to go back to playing whatever sport was holding her attention at that point.
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As the CEO of Pratham, India’s leading NGO in the K-12 space, Banerji and I have been connecting over Zoom in the midst of utter confusion over schools opening physically across states. India – like other countries – is faced with the very real possibility of a “generation lost” thanks to the severe learning losses that have occurred since February-March 2020. Almost every state is scrambling around to see if any of this loss can be bridged.
Early influences
After finishing school, Banerji graduated in economics from St. Stephens College and followed it with a one-year master’s from the Delhi School of Economics (DSE). Later, she went to Oxford University winning a prestigious Rhodes scholarship. Yet economics was never where her heart lay with its numerous theoretical postulations but rare practical application. So, when she decided to head to the US for further studies – a doctorate as only those got funded – she applied and got into American scholar John Dewey’s University of Chicago Laboratory School, an institution at the forefront of education reforms at the time.
The University of Chicago Laboratory Schools. Photo: Public domain/Wikipedia
Three things happened back then at the lab school and her neighbourhood charted the course of her life from that point. The university was coming up with a math curriculum that was being tried as a pilot in schools in that area. To earn some extra money, she worked with the schools, learning a lot about the practical application of such reforms in the bargain.
A politically-charged area as the hub of the Black activist movement of the day – Banerji’s children attended the same preschool as the first Black female senator’s children, the first Black mayor lived nearby, Jesse Jackson’s headquarters were in the area and so on – also influenced her thinking as did a three times a week volunteering exercise in a local ghetto government middle school. Working at the school gave her an insight into the lives of the less privileged kids and made her curious about the situation of government schools in India.
So, every summer Banerji took time off from the US assignments and came back to Delhi’s Ambedkar Nagar and immersed herself in a study of 30 MCD (Municipal Corporation of Delhi) schools for three years. It was around this time that she started working with Jean Dreze and his team, coming up with some great insights that shaped her later work and thinking.
One of these insights was how there was a great cohort variation within the same school with students of almost identical economic and family backgrounds depending upon the quality of teachers. So if a student got a good teacher from Grade 1 to 5, he or she did relatively better than a cohort who ended up with a not-so-good teacher for these grades.
Representative image. Photo: Facebook/Rukmini Banerji.
A second insight they gathered was that the poor were very much invested in their children’s education and often took good decisions on where their wards would fare best, given the range of schooling options before them. Both findings were contrary to what media articles at the time may have led academicians and policymakers to believe.
In 1996, Banerji relocated to Mumbai with her family to work with Bombay Municipal Corporation schools, where the team had one researcher as opposed to Chicago’s 100-odd member research team for a similar number of schools. The single researcher there was aghast that someone with her background wanted to work there and suggested she went back to Delhi instead.
It was after she was rebuffed by the Bombay Municipal Corporation that she happened to come across Pratham led by Madhav Chavan. She now jokes that she can never be fired as she was never “hired” but just “blended in” and became a part of the early years of the NGO, which at the time was setting up “balwadis” in the state.
Rukmini as minister for education
Although I am quite enjoying the delve into her past, I bring her back into the present with its rather hard realities. We have had two years of school closures and unprecedented learning losses across states in the country. India’s learning poverty was absurdly high and climbing. What would she do to remedy the situation if I made her the Union minister for HRD or some such?
Mothers look on as children work together as part of Pratham’s Library programme in Assam. Photo: Facebook/Rukmini Banerji.
I suspect she was asked this question before, as she takes less than two seconds to respond. She refers to my article that appeared that morning in The Quint on Tamil Nadu’s experience with volunteers – mostly young housewives – who are helping small cohorts of children catch up on their learning. This has been Pratham’s biggest learning in the pandemic, she says. Family matters and in spite of all the difficulties they faced, it’s an area where Pratham has seen a lot of traction.
“We have underestimated what even the poorest families can and will do for their children,” she says. Mothers of young children working in groups can make all the difference if encouraged correctly and can be one of the strongest pillars of NIPUN Bharat (National Initiative for Proficiency in Reading with Understanding and Numeracy). Pratham has during the pandemic worked directly with close to 40,000 mothers’ groups across 10,000 villages in India through the pandemic and it’s been an eye-opener on what can be achieved.
A second area where she would focus would be on merging the anganwadis seamlessly with early schooling to create a continuum of learning for children of the age group three to eight years – the target group for NIPUN Bharat. This is an area where the project component of her Yidan Prize will be invested over the next few years. And, last but not least, if it was up to her teaching would be at level and summer holidays would be spent under banyan or peepal trees helping children catch up and reach grade level before progressing to the next class. A country-wide catch-up programme through youth volunteers. Thinking small is clearly not a characteristic of this lady.
As we end our chat, I ask what she would do with the personal component of the Yidan Prize, around half of the prize money. I learn that this amount – which is not tied in any way – has been kept aside to build a corpus for staff welfare of Pratham’s 6,000-odd employees who are typically not very highly paid, had a particularly hard time during the pandemic and who, she argues, the organisation should be in a position to support in their time of need.
If only more ministers in the country thought like this, I think to myself, India would not be facing a plethora of crises and challenges across sectors, especially in education at least.
Anjuli Bhargava is a senior business journalist.