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Despite funds and infrastructure, the Muslim community is still in the depths of poverty and illiteracy. Have we got our priorities all wrong?
In Mumbai and other urban areas, if you happen to pass by a garbage dump, stop for a moment and look at what is going on. You will notice cats, dogs and human beings, mainly children, trying to find something to eat, or something that can be sold, such as waste paper, cardboard etc., to fetch food.
Wait for a while and look again at the same dump and you will also notice rats as well as other small creatures engaged in the same activity. If you do not walk through these ghettos and happen to drive through the clean and beautifully illuminated roads in fashionable localities of a big city, sometimes traffic lights will force you to stop. Here, you are surrounded by many beggars, old and young, men and women, adult and children, destitute women, sometimes young, but, haggard looking girls carrying their sleeping babies (perhaps doped with drugs), asking for alms.
Why has the Muslim community not been able to lift itself from the depth of poverty and illiteracy? The community has a unique social system of Zakat. Even the infrastructure and network of education and welfare societies is good. Something is wrong somewhere.
Is it wrong planning or lack of focus? It seems Muslims must rethink what role Almighty Allah wants them to play in India. If resources and infrastructure was the problem, then, the Muslims should have progressed with the rise in investment in the last few years.
A random sample from these deprived sections of Muslim society, elicit spontan-eous responses: “We are poor. We and our children are hungry. We need food. We don’t have houses. We need shelter.” Basically, the unspoken message from the deprived section of Muslim community is, ‘link education with employment and productivity.” There is an urgent need to empower these population groups and the first step for empowerment is to provide them education. The important question is: what kind of education?
Muslim community invest-ment in the education sector needs to be redirected to those sectors whose priority is decided by a well structured local research process.
Muslim education and welfare societies at the local level, on their own should conduct research and identify the gaps. Most of the time, the investment and planning caters to the Muslim middle class or elite class, bypassing the deprived sections of the community.
If we conduct gap analysis of the community education requirement, the priority segments are: ‘those people who are not part of the organised education structure’. For initiating the education revolution for the deprived sections, we need not get entangled into financial and infrastructure requirements, but start the process by identifying local human resources. Step one is short listing those competent people who can donate their hours. Until now, the community was seeking financial donation from business community. Now the time has come for the middle class to repay the community by donating couple of hours every week.
Second step can be identifying core areas in terms of vocations for which there is need in the employment market at the local level. The local education and welfare societies can easily identify the vocations which can fetch employment for the student. No doubt there are number of educational institutions who offer short term job oriented vocational courses, but many of them are for middle class and are outdated.
The focus should be the deprived segment of the community. Care must be taken that a) The timing is most convenient for the students to attend classes b) the availability of educated teachers and c) accommodation available for classes.
Since the marginalised and deprived are being targeted, the curriculum should include: a) language learning/literacy b) simple arithmetic c) spoken English and d) a vocational skill for which there is an employment market.
Classes must be held at a time convenient to the learners and the teachers. The location of the learning centre must be closest to the learner’s home. The span of the curriculum should be designed in such a way that it significantly reduces unneces-sary repetition, and the learners are encouraged to produce and earn. The earning part of it provides incentive to learn at a fast pace.
Focus must be on managing human resources available within the community, rather then creating new infrastructure and then raising finance to create it. The planning should focus on utilising existing infrastructure. The best part is to arrange for open air class rooms with bare minimum infrastructure and practically nil maintenance and overhead expenditure. All this and many more plans are not going to work unless and until, we Muslims address the important question: What role Almighty Allah wants Muslims to play in India? Are we playing the role assigned to us by Almighty Allah? The role assigned to the community is very clear. Refer to the Quran:
“And when Ibrahim and Ismail raised the foundations of the House: Our Lord! accept from us; surely Thou art the Hearing, the Knowing. Our Lord! and make us both submissive to Thee and (raise) from our offspring a nation submitting to Thee, and show us our ways of devotion and turn to us (mercifully), surely Thou art the Oft-returning (to mercy), the Merciful. Our Lord! and raise up in them a Messenger from among them who shall recite to them Thy communications and teach them the Book and the wisdom, and purify them; surely Thou art the Mighty, the Wise.” (Surah Al-Baqarah- 127- 129).
If Muslims supplement their efforts with the role assigned to us by Allah, then the issues of poverty and illiteracy can be taken care of easily. Without Allah’s help, no amount of planning and investment is going to change the community’s status quo.
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