An Educational Hub

The city Gurgaon is well known for its growth in the IT sector. As such, it is equally famous for providing an unprecedented number of employment to the locals as well as the migrants from all over the world. The speciality of Gurgaon is that the city has blossomed in a promising way and disseminated the fragrance of a big city within a span of only twenty years, which no other city in the world can perhaps boast for. As the city grew to its height, thus entered an urban youth brigade who were highly educated, well earned and encouraged themselves for an ambitious life.

To cater to the demands of these youth, the city has flourished with many schools within a very short duration to give education to the new borns of these youths. Since 1990 onwards, all bigwig schools of Delhi and around have opened up their branches in Gurgaon. DPS has four branches in Gurgaon. Other noted names are the Springdales, Amity, GD Goenka etc. Besides, hundreds of nursery and middle schools have cropped up steadfastly to provide nucleus to these big schools. Sooner, the people of this new city felt happy to find their wards toddling to the schools that are nearby to their home.

Alongside this, many private institutions who extend coaching for the entrance tests for getting admissions to the elite institutions,gradually set up their branches in Gurgaon. Brilliant Tutorials, FITJEE, Naraina, Rao's IAS etc. have their units in Gurgaon. Even tutorials like Princeton, Barron's, Jamboree provide coaching classes for SATs, GRE, TOEFL etc. here. Considering the importance of this city, the collegeboard of US has identified Gurgaon as its examination centre for the North India zone.

Gurgaon has a mixture of talents within its children. The urban children are bookish, computer savvy and indulge in academic career seriously while the rural folks are inclined to the sport activities. The good schools have all the infrastructure required for the young children. The parents are equally broad hearted to splashing out money on their children. However, the results are not coming out as expected. Despite having all these, the schooling in Gurgaon has not yet caught the attention of people of other states. The city, the parents and the schools are providing all facilities to its children, but nothing substantial is yet to notice. As is known, the small cities like Kota, Pune, Chandigarh are famous for education hub, but Gurgaon did not match these cities. why? Even after contributing a large amount of infrastructure for nearly a decade, it has nearly failed to achieve the goal of making the city an educational hub. Except a few exception, no school or institution can claim that they crack so many distinguished national seats each year.

It seems that the problem lies at the mindset of the school and institution authorities. They look upon education as a commercial aspect, rather than committment towards the cause. Most of the big name schools have beautiful buildings with green fields, playgrounds for the kids, well designed air-conditioned school buses, computer rooms, auditorium for annual functions and some claim that the school is air-conditioned only to charm the new swankys. They have in fact deceived the people of Gurgaon who look nothing but fool. Most parents do not end up bragging for the schools their ward go to, but unfortunately they do not realise that they are living in a fool's paradise. Truly, these schools have deliberately ignored the most important aspects of education and i.e. the good faculty. All the good schools of Delhi vie to enrol specialist teachers for most subjects, but in Gurgaon, teachers keep moving from one school to another in search of better pay packages only. One cannot blame the teachers only, as they are part of ongoing system. It is the schools who are responsible for the outlook they preserve and uphold.

Gurgaon has ample opportunity to create an environment of upgrading the existing schools by inducting good teachers from within and outside the city, who are serious in their jobs and are result oriented. For that to happen, all the Principals and the authorities shall pull up their shocks and make the city proud by improving the quality of their schools candidly. IT sectors and other industries may suffer due to recession and other reasons, but if the city creates an atmosphere of providing of genuine education to the people of India, then Gurgaon will emerge as a city at par with Bangalore. Being a very progressive state, Haryana deserves a city of that stature.

Killer in the Neighbourhood

Prabhu, aged 32 years was the tobacco-seller who had been sitting in a kiosk at the T-point of Sector 15-II during the year 1997-2001, is no more now. He died, leaving his wife and three children behind. Then there was Balli aged 40 who used to sell fresh fruits beside Jharsa Road in Amar Colony. He was seen there in the year 2002-03, but is no more now. He also died only two years back. While Rajan was a salesman in a chemist shop opposite Jyoti Hospital, who was in his twenties only a few years from now. It is known that he is suffering from disease in a Mehrauli Hospital.

These three young fellows were in good state of health. The jobs they were involved in, required to stay long hours and they had little time to spare for the amusement. How come they were infected with lung disease at such a tender age? Serious fellows as they were, they had only their families at the back of their minds. They had two common idiosyncrasies in them. One, they were non-smokers and two, all three of them were diagnosed black lung diseases.

It's shocking to know that these unfortunate creatures died or are dying due to the dust clot surrounding their lungs called black lung disease. The disease had caused to them because of their accessibility to the huge dust piles lying on the streets of Jharsa Road. More or less, the whole of Gurgaon roads are filled up with the dust. People working on the roadside, walking on them, all are inhaling these killer dusts unknowingly and they are moving slowly towards death. Previously, this disease was only common to the workers of coal mines, but it is not unusual now in this rich city.

People migrated to Gurgaon during the1990s hoping to live a pollution-free life. That time, Delhi had earned a bad name to its credit for being the worst polluted city. The then visiting Cricket Australia team had commented that Delhi was at its worst level of pollution. Truly, many people in Delhi suffered from diseases like burning sensation in the chest and eyes, throat constriction, acute asthma and pneumonia caused due to the high contents of sulphur present in the air. Many people started looking for new destinations, and finally they moved and settled in Gurgaon.

May be Gurgaon had much less harmful elements in its air, but the migrated people did realise sooner that it's not a place where they could stroll happily. Piles of dust lied beside the roads. They put their hankies on their nose, believing that those dusts could be due to the construction of a new city. Fifteen years have passed. The killer dusts still occupy the most of the roads. To add to the injury, the running of ugly looking autos of Gurgaon on every road has made uninterrupted flow of these dust. The pedestrians curse and foulmouth the rowdy drivers and their filthy autos. No city in the world is as dusty as our beloved Millenium City. Scores of malls, few green parks do not make a city. It is the roads, its alleys, passages, highways, people, their behaviour, cleanliness, markets make a city liveable.

If the authorities, the NGOs and the residents keep their eyes away from this scattered clouds of dust, the day is not ahead when people would call this cyber city, the Gurgaon, a Dhoolgaon. Till any remedy is found in removing the killer dust from our neibourhood, people like Prabhu, Balli and Rajan would keep dying.