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By:

Commodore S.L. Deshmukh

31 October 2024 at 3:00:19 am

The School That Changed India

In the closing decades of the 19th century, education in India was less a public good than a colonial instrument. The British administration had little interest in creating a broadly educated society. Inspired by the logic of the 1854 Wood’s Dispatch, it sought instead to cultivate a narrow English-speaking elite capable of staffing the lower rungs of the imperial bureaucracy. Schools and colleges produced clerks, not citizens. For the overwhelming majority of Indians, education remained an...

The School That Changed India

In the closing decades of the 19th century, education in India was less a public good than a colonial instrument. The British administration had little interest in creating a broadly educated society. Inspired by the logic of the 1854 Wood’s Dispatch, it sought instead to cultivate a narrow English-speaking elite capable of staffing the lower rungs of the imperial bureaucracy. Schools and colleges produced clerks, not citizens. For the overwhelming majority of Indians, education remained an unattainable privilege rather than a pathway to opportunity. Stifled Aspirations If men faced exclusion, women confronted near-total invisibility. The 1891 Census recorded female literacy at a microscopic 0.42 percent, compared with 8.44 percent for men. Formal education was largely confined to daughters of affluent, progressive urban households. For rural women and those from disadvantaged communities, schooling scarcely existed. Child marriage, rigid patriarchal customs and the confinement of women to domestic life combined to ensure that literacy remained a distant aspiration. Yet, history changes because individuals decide that prevailing assumptions deserve to be challenged. The latter half of the 19th century witnessed the emergence of Indian social reformers who questioned inherited orthodoxy. Figures such as Raja Ram Mohan Roy began attacking customs that denied women dignity and opportunity. Their campaigns met fierce resistance from conservative opinion while operating within the constraints of colonial rule. Nevertheless, they planted the intellectual foundations for one of modern India's most profound social transformations. Among those who carried that movement to its logical conclusion was Maharshi Dhondo Keshav Karve. Born in 1858 in Sheravali village in Maharashtra’s Ratnagiri district, Karve’s early life offered little indication that he would become one of India’s greatest educational reformers. Raised in modest circumstances, he pursued learning with remarkable determination, graduating in mathematics from Mumbai’s Elphinstone College before teaching at Pune’s Fergusson College. It was there that he confronted the grim realities facing widows and women denied even the most basic educational opportunities. At a time when widow remarriage invited social ostracism and women’s education was dismissed as dangerous, Karve devoted himself to both causes. His conviction rested on the deceptively simple proposition that a nation could not hope to progress while excluding half its population from education. Women’s education was no charity but an investment in national development. That belief acquired institutional form in 1896 with the establishment of the Maharshi Karve Stree Shikshan Samstha in Hingne in Pune’s Karve Nagar. Its beginnings could scarcely have been humbler. The institution functioned from a tiny hut, admitting just four girls, many of them child widows whom society had effectively abandoned. Resources were scarce, public support limited and opposition intense. Yet Karve understood that enduring reform begins not with grand declarations but with functioning institutions. Radical Experiment The experiment steadily expanded. A women's school followed in 1907, where Karve’s own widowed sister-in-law, Parvatibai Athavale, became its first student - a deeply personal affirmation of his ideals. His greatest achievement arrived in 1916 with the founding of SNDT Women’s University, India’s first university dedicated exclusively to women. Long before phrases such as “women's empowerment” entered official vocabulary, Karve had already translated the concept into educational practice. Today, the Maharshi Karve Stree Shikshan Samstha educates more than 32,000 girls through dozens of institutions across Maharashtra, serving students from disadvantaged communities, tribal populations and economically weaker families. What began with four pupils in a hut has become one of India’s largest networks devoted exclusively to women's education. Its expansion tells a larger story about India itself. Educational reform succeeds not merely because governments legislate it, but because visionary individuals create institutions that outlive them. Karve’s legacy survived changing political regimes, economic upheavals and shifting social attitudes precisely because it rested on durable foundations rather than passing slogans. That legacy is preserved in the Maharshi Karve Museum in Pune, established on his 150th birth anniversary. The museum displays his personal belongings and chronicles a life defined not by dramatic gestures but by extraordinary perseverance. Visitors encounter more than the biography of a reformer; they encounter the origins of an educational revolution that quietly reshaped Indian society. India today debates artificial intelligence and global university rankings. These conversations risk obscuring a more fundamental truth. The country’s educational transformation began not with technology or policy frameworks, but with a moral conviction that every individual deserves the opportunity to learn. And Karve recognised that principle long before it became fashionable. (The author is a retired naval aviation officer and a defence and geopolitical analyst. Views personal.)

Choking Mumbai

For decades, Mumbai was perceived as a rare urban oasis, where the saline sweep of the Arabian Sea blunted the worst ravages of India's air pollution. That illusion has now been dispelled. A meticulous four-year study by Respirer Living Sciences (RLS), using data from its AtlasAQ platform, reveals the bleak truth that the city’s air is thick with pollutants all year round, with no ‘clean season’ left.


Mumbai’s annual average levels of PM10 (particulate matter ten microns or less in diameter) have consistently breached the national safety threshold of 60 micrograms per cubic metre (μg/m³). This is not merely a seasonal malaise tied to cooler winter months, as once assumed. Alarmingly, the city’s pollution levels persist even through the hot season, a time when improved atmospheric dispersion should offer natural reprieve.


Across the city - from Chakala in Andheri East to Deonar, Kurla, Vile Parle West and Mazgaon - pollution has become an unrelenting, ubiquitous presence.


The culprits are well known: traffic emissions from a burgeoning number of vehicles; unregulated dust from frenzied construction; industrial activity in and around the ports; and a conspicuous lack of dust control measures. Mumbai’s ceaseless growth now risks becoming a chronic liability.


Worryingly, the regulatory response remains sluggish. Mumbai’s urban planning continues to treat clean air as a peripheral concern, not a foundational necessity. Development plans rarely integrate environmental impact assessments in a meaningful way.


A sharper, citywide strategy is urgently needed. Dust suppression rules at construction sites must be enforced strictly, with financial penalties for violators and incentives for best practices. Traffic management systems should be overhauled to ease congestion and encourage the use of public transport. Expansion of clean, reliable mass transit network needs to be urgently prioritised. In addition, comprehensive real-time air monitoring at the ward level should be deployed, enabling authorities to respond to localised pollution spikes swiftly rather than relying on citywide averages that conceal dangerous hotspots.


Longer-term, clean air targets must be hardwired into the city’s master planning and transport policies. Green buffers along major traffic corridors, stricter emission norms for commercial vehicles and incentives for rooftop gardens and urban afforestation could all play a part. Industrial zones near port areas should be subjected to rigorous air quality compliance measures, not token self-certifications. Private developers and large infrastructure firms, often among the worst offenders, must be made stakeholders in the clean air mission through binding regulations.


Mumbai’s commercial dynamism - as a magnet for migrants, entrepreneurs and investors - depends not just on glittering skyscrapers but on something far more basic: the ability to breathe. Unless clean air becomes an unshakeable priority, the city risks suffocating its own future. For a metropolis that prides itself on its resilience against terror attacks, monsoon floods and economic shocks, the real test will be whether it can muster the will to fight an invisible, pervasive enemy slowly corroding the lives of its 20 million citizens.

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