Shiksha by Manish Sisodia

Author:Manish Sisodia [Sisodia, Manish]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789353056414
Publisher: Penguin Random House India Private Limited
Published: 2019-09-19T18:30:00+00:00

Both these incidents are from 2016. The SMC was not authorized and didn’t even have the money to hire teachers or resource persons on a temporary basis. There are many examples where, bound by rules, regulations and laws or processes, teachers and principals would lie in wait to get things done by the directorate. It was then that the SMC members came forward and found a solution. I must also add that as an education minister, the SMC acted like my eyes and ears. What was lacking in a school? Which teacher taught well? Or which didn’t? Which principal came on time? Who misused his/her position? SMC members often came to me with problems or solutions for these things. Getting new rooms built in schools, providing facilities of many kinds, repairing labs and libraries—these were some of the requests SMC members from thousands of schools came to me with over the last four years. The other big takeaway is that if I need information on any project or plan quickly, I get in touch with the SMC and get it within an hour or two while it usually takes the Directorate of Education a week to ten days to collect the same information. I have selected, on an informal basis, a coordinator for every Vidhan Sabha area. In the same way, for smooth coordination between SMCs in a district, I have appointed a district coordinator. I have made a WhatsApp group of the seventy Vidhan Sabha coordinators and thirteen SMC coordinators on which any SMC-related information or communication can be exchanged. Any work given by me reaches the SMC members of all 1000 schools in a matter of minutes.

The experiences of the last three years motivated us, and we decided to make the SMCs more autonomous. This directive came straight from Arvind Kejriwal. In 2017, we called a meeting at the Indira Gandhi Stadium of all the newly elected SMC members and principals. This was attended by almost 16,000 people. Here, the CM made the announcement that the SMCs would be allocated a fund for hiring teachers in their schools, maintaining buildings or for education-related experiments or activities. This fund would make them autonomous. It took us almost a year to put this into practice. On 9 October 2018, the education department issued the historic order to allocate funding to the SMCs. This was the biggest experiment till date in decentralizing government school administration and management not just in Delhi, but for government school authorities all over the country. No other state has given its SMCs such powers. It won’t be wrong to say that this decision was a huge step towards making principals stronger as now their decision-making abilities included everything required to run a school barring a few things like paying salaries and getting new school buildings constructed. Two months after this order was issued, I held meetings with principals of all the schools in groups of fifty over many days and tried to understand how they had used the power given to them.

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