HUMAN RESOURCES development minister Kapil Sibal has summoned the appropriate sentiment and the right words in denouncing Thursday's horror in New Delhi when five schoolgirls were suffocated to death in a stampede on the narrow staircase of their school. Many more girls are said to be in a critical state from the injuries they suffered. Mr Sibal said what any civilised human being would in the circumstances -- that the incident was "shameful" and "unacceptable". But since he is in government, he needs to follow up his words with action, although education is a state subject and the basic responsibility of ensuring that children are in a secure environment when they go to school rests with the state administration. Typically, when disaster strikes, the motions of an investigation are gone through, narrow accountability is not arrived at, and the system reverts to its customary slovenliness and negligence, sometimes even criminality. This is the state of affairs in government schools in Delhi. There is little reason to believe that the situation is any better in other states. In Delhi in the past few years, there have been numerous reports of girl students in government-run schools being sought to be sexually exploited by unscrupulous teachers. Corporal punishment is rampant, and at least on one recent occasion it ended in death. Sometimes little girls are humiliated by being made to strip as punishment. In the end all such episodes are really hushed up. A basic fear of school gets to be ingrained in the girl child from an early age. This is bound to scar their personality for life and make them timid in facing the world, especially since in most cases they also come from economically insecure homes. Although the matter is still to be investigated, some reports suggest that Thursday's stampede in northeast Delhi's Khajoori Khas locality was triggered by rowdy boys physically misbehaving with young girls in a confined space.

Any which way one looks, government sector education, particularly schooling, is in a poor way. A forward-looking and progressive 21st century India cannot be built on such a basis. If China and Vietnam have made such huge strides economically in a relatively short time, it is because their school education did not go under even during periods of transition, and education of reasonable quality was universal. Even a generation ago, things weren't quite so bad in India although the school numbers may have been smaller. The long-term decline in administration cannot have left education untouched. But the general apathy of the political and the bureaucratic class to schooling in the government sector has ensured that even satisfactory school buildings do not exist. The quality of teachers is abysmal, and the curriculum is antediluvian.

In a broad sense, much of the time spent in school is a waste as it prepares students neither for university nor for a trade. This is where Mr Sibal can seek to make a difference. So much is said every other day from the highest quarters -- we heard the Prime Minister earlier this week and Congress general secretary Rahul Gandhi shortly after on overhauling the social sector, which means particularly education and health -- that it would be a shame if the HRD minister didn't seize the opportunity to get state education ministers around, think of a doable restructuring plan, and help states with additional funds, where needed. The mantra behind the Eleventh Five-Year Plan is uplift of the social sector. The shaftlight of education cannot be passed through India on the basis of the private sector alone, given the substantial levels of poverty and backwardness in the country. The government must come forward to be counted.