Too Many Primary Schools?

We are now faced with the very legitimate question of whether we have many more primary schools than we need for Assam. According to reports, there are about 48,000 government lower and upper primary schools in Assam. Out of them, there is zero enrolment in more than 500 lower primary schools. Since there are no reports that these 500 LP schools have not been closed down yet, the obvious conclusion to draw is that these schools are deemed to be functional, with no one within the government talking about schools without any students. These 500-plus schools without a single student continue to have one or two teachers on their rolls. There is an expenditure of public money on the maintenance of these schools. Salaries have to be paid to the teacher/teachers appointed as well as to the non-academic staff. A sensible course of action for any country would be to close down these schools without even a single student and to spend public money only on schools that continue to function. Unfortunately, schools that teach with the use of atrocious English as the medium of English are in greater demand than schools where the teaching is in the mother tongue. There is, thus, the preference for atrocious English as the medium of instruction rather than the sensible choice of the mother tongue as the medium of instruction. Considering how bizarre and irrational our preferences can get, it might make more sense to be talking about one’s ‘father tongue’ rather than one’s mother tongue.