Focus on rural schools

With the beginning of the academic year in Uzbekistan fast approaching, rural students in Central Asia's most populous state may well find themselves once again in the cotton fields, while their teachers struggle to make a living, complaining of low pay and poor conditions. THE COTTON FACTOR It is common for classes at rural schools not to proceed when the cotton harvesting season starts as pupils become engaged in agricultural work. "From September on, school students are involved in agriculture. Before that, the authorities have August meetings at which they decide where to send them to harvest cotton. The basis for this can be just a verbal instruction from the authorities," Erkin Usmanov, director of secondary school number one in the Nishan district of the southern Uzbek province of Kashkadarya, told IRIN. Schoolchildren and their teachers are forced into compulsory cotton labour by the local authorities, which receive approval from higher up, Usmanov said. Uzbekistan, home to some 25 million people, is a predominantly agrarian nation and over 60 percent of the population live in rural areas. Bakhtiyar Khamraev, chairman of the Jizak branch of the Human Rights Society of Uzbekistan (HRSU), a local rights group, claimed that secondary school students in rural areas were made not only to harvest cotton, but also to weed the country's main cash crop. Uzbekistan is amongst the world's five biggest cotton producers. According to the Uzbek Education Ministry, there are 9,727 secondary schools in the country, where more than 6.5 million students study. And though Uzbek law officially discourages child labour, the requirements of the national economy, with cotton still being the main cash crop, continue to outweigh Tashkent's obligations to international standards. In an earlier interview with IRIN, an Uzbek Interior Ministry official, who didn't want to be identified, noted that the government was aware of international criticism of its policy of utilising vast numbers of children to gather cotton, but argued there simply was no other viable alternative. "We are stuck with our history. Moscow made us the top cotton producer in the old USSR and until we can diversify our economic base we must produce and sell cotton like crazy. The harvest is hugely labour intensive, so we are forced to use kids," the official said. Other officials, however, were less forthcoming. "It is the children's parents who force them to work, and the government has nothing to do with it. Many farms have been already created in villages, and farmers have their children work in the fields," Aron Kalantarov, head of the department of monitoring and state educational standards at the Education Ministry, told IRIN in the capital, Tashkent. But working in the cotton fields has serious long-term implications, with rural children lagging well behind their urban peers scholastically, observers say. Usmanov, the school director, noted that because of cotton labour, deviation from the curriculum was very common among rural schools students, a claim denied by the Education Ministry. "Though our children spend a part of their academic year on fields, they are not inferior to their counterparts from city schools," Kalantarov claimed. PLIGHT OF RURAL SCHOOL TEACHERS However, it is not just school children that have problems. Teachers in one rural school told IRIN that many of them were being forced to leave their work because the pay was inadequate, a fact exacerbated by salary arrears of up to four months. This being the case, many of them try to earn extra income doing odd jobs during the summer holidays. "At present, 90-95 percent of teachers are engaged in such work. I earn money by building mud brick houses. I make around US $60-70 a month. With this money, we buy warm clothes for the winter, children's clothes and what we need most of all - grain," one teacher from the Karshi district of Kashkadarya province told IRIN. "I remember the Soviet times, when the trade unions provided teachers with tickets to sanatoriums or resorts in the Crimea, Yalta [in the Ukraine] during the summer holidays. At worst, they could have a rest in the resorts near Tashkent. And now, taking a piece of bread, we are leaving for Tashkent and other parts of our region [in search of work]," his colleague from another rural school said. "Because of low salaries and delays in these salaries, teachers have to work elsewhere, which does not correspond to their status," Shavkat Kamalov, a teacher at one secondary school in Kasan district of Kashkadarya province, told IRIN. Meanwhile, some school teachers in the Uzbek town of Tallimarjan bordering Turkmenistan are involved in petrol smuggling, the only way to earn some money, Khaitgul Babayeva, a local teacher, told IRIN. Babayeva lost her husband, also a teacher, in 2003. He was shot dead while delivering smuggled petrol across the Turkmen border. "There are many who go to Turkmenistan to buy petrol or cigarettes," Babayeva said. "Some people are killed, some are punished by the Turkmen courts and some are lucky. But the authorities are not interested in people's problems." But there is a glimmer of hope for more than 451,000 secondary school teachers in the country. On 2 July 2004, the Uzbek government issued a decree that is expected to raise the salaries of teachers, especially primary school instructors, from 1 September 2004, the start of the new academic year. Effective then, salaries are set to increase for all school teachers in the country, and the minimum monthly salary - without allowances and additional payments - is expected to be $46, good news for teachers in the former Soviet republic. Although the government has not ratified the project yet, Kalantarov said he hoped it would do so. But some experts said the government's increase wouldn't be enough. "Before we heard about salary rises, food prices had already increased. It is necessary to pay today's teachers at least about $80," Gulchekhra Koradjanova, a chief expert at the Nishan district education department, told IRIN. RURAL SCHOOLS IN DISREPAIR Meanwhile, most of the schools in rural areas need major repairs ahead of the new academic year. Usmanov, the school director in Kashkadarya, claimed that large amounts of money allocated from the state budget for the repair of secondary schools were disappearing and the school administration was forced to ask the parents of their students for help. "Thanks to parents and our salaries we repaired the school. The way it was under the Soviet times is the way it is now," he said. "Our school's heating system does not work. There is not enough water," Kamalov said. "For the last two years, finance was allocated from the budget, and we have repaired the school at the expense of teachers' salaries and money collected from parents." Echoing that view, the Uzbek independent Tribune.uz Internet media outlet reported that almost half of Uzbek schools did not meet the standard requirements and were based in inappropriate buildings. "Such a sad conclusion was made by a special national commission, which made an inventory and implemented the certification of secondary schools," the report said, adding that based on the completed survey, particular attention must be paid to Bukhara, Kashkadarya, Surkhandarya and Tashkent provinces and the Republic of Karakalpakstan, an autonomous entity within Uzbekistan. In Karakalpakstan alone, 82 schools have been found in emergency conditions, and should have been demolished a long time ago, the report added. Meanwhile, observers say the most worrying thing is the long term effects of the problems that rural schools face. "In the end, we will have an uneducated generation, and the real tragedy will begin when this generation comes to power," Khamraev of HRSU warned.