The classroom crusader

One of the profiles I loved doing. For the story, I had almost 5 hours of audio tape. Will upload soon.

The edited version of this profile appeared here.

ANIL SADGOPAL
Born: 1940

The Classroom Crusader

Pallavi Singh
August 5, 2009

Every campaign, for Anil Sadgopal, has its notes in a classroom. Typically, for a 17-year-old aspiring Botanist, he says he wouldn’t have done today what he did five decades ago at the St Stephen’s College in 1957. ``I know they would not admit me today. Those days were different, considerate.’’
Before an interview panel of academicians including a Britisher, which resisted taking a student from the Hindi-medium of education, he insisted on being interviewed again until he was told, through a chit of paper, that he was rejected. ``I moved back that chit again and asked them to stamp their decision on an official letter, explaining the reasons why they were denying me admission,’’ he says. The jury was appalled and he offered to explain: ``I would take this chit, take a bus direct to the Raashtrapati Bhavan and ask the President why did we ever have to fight for Independence when I do not even have the freedom to study in my mother tongue?’’
In the next ten minutes, Sadgopal, a Hindi-medium student of Science from Birla Vidya Mandir in Nainital was admitted in the St Stephen’s College to study Botany and Biochemistry, among other subjects, and to kickstart the beginning of a life that was later to become a string of small and big protests and the Jamnalal Bajaj award for pioneering work in the field of education.
Five decades later, the eminent physicist turned educationist has quietly settled in Bhopal, the scenic capital of the state of Madhya Pradesh state, in a tiny, creeper-lined house after two busy decades in a small village in the state trying to teach Science in government schools and a brief stint at Delhi University, the institution where he studied through the 1950s, and long tenures as member of various government-appointed committees including the Central Advisory Board of Education (CABE), to recommend academic reforms for India’s education system.
Lately, since the time a legislation of the Indian government to ensure free and compulsory right to education for children between the age group of 6-14 years picked momentum after hanging fire for years, there has been noise all around him. Newspaper editorials, cover stories in the alternative media and street conferences are full of his note of dissent, true to his innate ability to critique and express a difference of opinion on the legislation described as ``a law to snatch away the rights of children’’ by him.
Sadgopal, now 69, says he is just part of a larger struggle for basic constitutional rights. ``I fear the possibility of individuals getting bigger than the causes they espouse,’’ he hands out a note of caution as I meet him at his home in Bhopal’s inconspicuous Sahkar Nagar on a Sunday. With a khadi jhola stitched in places and a bunch of files, he alerts that a public meeting on the proposed legislations is about to begin in the next 30 minutes. ``Let us get there on time first,’’ he says.
In the next ten minutes to Rahul Nagar, which begins at an alley consumed by squalor and open drains, a group of young men help him park his mud-coloured Maruti next to a heap of garbage. The meeting is in the verandah of a temple, where 35-odd people gather slowly and settle down, all of them from the neighbourhood.
There are a variety of complaints on the floor of the house – government schools charging tuition fees, denying admission and being outright commercial with admission interviews. Sadgopal, with an intense gaze and disarming candour, begins simplifying awareness concepts: government schools have to provide free education, no child can be denied admission and that the `biggest court’ in the country has banned admission interviews in junior sections.
As the crowd listens intently, Sadopal’s gifts in interpretive clarity, communication and commitment to education comes through. His thoughts and tireless campaigns in Madhya Pradesh over two decades have made him a trusted arbiter of ideas ranging far beyond education as one knows, with his organization Kishore Bharti carrying out welfare programmes at a national level, and particularly in the state.
In 1961, when he left for Caltech for research in Molecular Biology, this was not the course he had planned for his life, though. A wrong subject selection led to Sadgopal flunking the qualifying exam for a PhD there. ``I flunked paper on Geneties at a time Jagdish Khurana was getting Nobel prize in the subject. I have never been so depressed ever in my life again,’’ he says.
His second attempt at the qualifying exam was a return to excellence. It led to a 150-page paper on genetic code, which got published in the United Kingdom-based international journal Annual Review of Genetics in 1968. ``In the paper, I even critiqued the genetic code of Dr Khurana. Normally, people get into this stuff after years of work but I was just a student,’’ he says.
This led to plenty of job offers in the United States and fat pay cheques by the time he was completing his research, but a group of Indians at Caltech, then moved by the severe Bihar famine of 1965, decided to return home. ``In our common room those days, all American television channels broadcast the famine news and our American friends would ridicule us for not returning home for relief work. Those days, I understood very little about the villages,’’ Sadgopal says.
So, in 1968, Sadgopal returned to India with his American girlfriend Meera, and got married that very year in a simple ceremony in Pune. ``That was also the time I began tour of villages and remote areas to understand them better. Meera joined a hospital in Bombay as a doctor and I joined the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research here. It was a life-altering experience,’’ he says.
In Bihar and West Bengal, Sadgopal met activists from the Communist party of India and, as he puts it, learnt the basic core of inequality : land relations. ``Though I remained a Gandhian in pedagogy, I developed a Marxian perspective into things.’’
At the peak of a very fruitful stint at the TIFR, an organization that carries out research in Social Sciences, where he even set up a tissue culture lab, Sadgopal quit his job and came to Hoshangabad district, a hundred odd kilometers from Bhopal, to launch, with a handful of friends, the phenomenal Hoshangabad Science Teaching Programme, which brought teachers from Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and the Delhi University to introduce innovations in Science teaching in government schools.
``The idea was that children should learn Science through experiments with ``their own hands’’ and not rote method. In 1978, we expanded the programme to all upper primary schools in Madhya Pradesh,’’ he says.
But for every recognition, Sadgopal’s vision was collaborative. The year the Jamnalal Bajaj award was announced for him, he refused to accept the award alone citing invaluable contributions from his colleagues at the Department of Social Work, DU. Later, all faculty members from the department received the award together.
In the years that followed, Sadgopal wrote half a dozen odd books on education, focusing on working of government committees, specific education schemes and policy analysis, in particular, his meditation on the meanings and dangers of World Bank’s structural adjustment programme, which in simpler terms means getting developing countries to cut back on their social sector spending as explained by him.
Sadgopal, through a brief association with the People’s campaign for a Common School System in 2006-07, also proposed setting up of a common school system that would mean setting up of more neighbourhood schools and abolition of ``divisive’’ classifications between a government-run and a privately-own school, as part of a re-draft of the Right to Education Bill. On the other hand, government describes it as a pioneering legislation to ensure a right to free education for India’s children.
In the midst of his zeal for activism, Sadgopal is always reading and petitioning the government, just to mark his dissent. ``Dissent is the most important of democracy,’’ he says, recalling his various furious submissions at the CABE meetings where his dissent over the draft RTE Bill was not recorded. ``I want to be remembered in history as a member who spoke his mind.’’
In 1984, Sadgopal also resigned from the National Commission of Teachers, even as he recalled an official in the government remarking that his presence in the government-appointed committees meant ``lesser damage’’ than the potential dangers he could pose if he were left out of then. ``My experience at the last CABE committee taught me that committees were not a way to formulate policies for this country,’’ he says.
But his disappointments with government-committees continued. ``To my objections, there was abject silence in the government. No one took a stand,’’ he says.
To someone whose disagreements began as small fights in university classrooms, those were rare days. As a young student of Botany, Sadgopal once asked his teacher at DU why he only taught Aristotle and not Charak and Sushurut’s Taxonomy whose theories were equally good. ``In Theology classes, I didn’t like reading lessons and no one could make me do. I asked too many questions too, which wasn’t allowed,’’ he recalls. ``Still, from then to now, I have seen a loss of concern in the middle class about social issues. Twenty years ago, a public hearing will give people at least three minutes to speak. In today’s neo-liberal society, I won’t get this space.’’
One of his earliest campaigns advocated learning in mother tongue and even endorsed the three-language formula of education as recommended by the Kothari Commission of 1964 (pls check). This could be traced back to his experiences in class VI, when shifted to an English-medium school in Nainital, he kept on reading out Hindi poems to his teacher till the time she asked him to leave the class. ``I ran and did not stop till I reached home. That was perhaps the beginning of a turning point in my life,’’ Sadgopal says.
Then came two blinding flashes of light: the two women in his life, Meera, the first he married in the 1960s and later separated, and Shashi Maurya, the other social activist he met in Hoshangabad in the 1980s and married in 1993, with a conscious decision to not plan any children ``since both of us are too committed to our work to think about children’’.
Nonetheless, with both the women in his life, Sadgopal says he also learned a great deal about gender issues and even worked with Meera for welfare of Bhopal gas victims in 1984.
These days, most of what consumes Sadgopal is his writing hours, his public meetings and his zealous work to protest the RTE Bill in its present form. In the colonies where he spends even his Sundays motivating people to send their children to schools, he is deeply admired for his vigour. ``There is nothing that stops him. He is tireless,’’ says Ram, his associate and second wife’s son from her first marriage.
Sadgopal is convening a national seminar on Right to Education Bill in Bhopal this month and another sit-in protest in New Delhi. But turning down a Rs 7,000 contribution from a local private coaching institute to get an advertisement published on the pamphlets meant for both the occasions as a mark of his in-principle opposition to coaching institutes and private players in the education sector, Sadgopal is again ready with his begging bowl. Just like ten years ago when he pulled out of a long association with a welfare initiative simply because they agreed to accept monetary help from an international agency.
``I am just happy and content that debates on structural adjustment, Right to Education Bill and privatization of education are issues that have become part of public discourse. That’s where I see my gains,’’ he says.

EoM.