CDS (I) 2021 General Knowledge · Question 9 of 120

Correct — D, Gopal Krishna Gokhale. He was the member of the Imperial Legislative Council who carried the cause of compulsory free primary education into legislation, and a contemporary account by William Wedderburn, published in 1913, refers plainly to reformers 'supporting Mr. Gokhale's Bill in the Viceroy's Council for free and compulsory elementary education.' The proposal was of a piece with everything else he did. Elected president of the Congress in 1905, he founded the Servants of India Society in that same year with the expansion of Indian education as its central purpose, and the Society went on to run mobile libraries, found schools and hold night classes for factory workers. The bill was nevertheless defeated. The official reasoning offered against it, which UPSC has itself set as an examinable point, was that literacy among cultivators would breed discontent.

• (a)Dadabhai Naoroji — His legislative platform was Westminster rather than Delhi. Elected for the Liberals at Finsbury Central in 1892, he was the first British Indian member of the House of Commons and sat until 1895. He was a member of the Bombay Legislative Council in the 1880s, and by 1911 he was in his late eighties and long out of legislative work.
• (b)Bal Gangadhar Tilak — He could not have moved anything in 1911. Convicted of sedition in 1908, he was serving a six-year sentence of transportation in Mandalay from 1908 until his release on 16 June 1914 — which places him in a Burmese prison for the whole life of this bill.
• (c)Sir Harcourt Butler — The Government side of the argument, not the mover. Butler was appointed the first Member for Education on the Viceroy's Executive Council on 15 November 1910, so he was the official responsible for education policy at exactly this moment — which is what makes him a plausible-looking wrong answer for a bill that the administration did not want.

Colonial education spending was concentrated at the top of the system. The Despatch of 1854 had set out a plan from primary school to university, and the Hunter Commission of 1882 endorsed it with greater emphasis on primary education, but expansion at the base stayed slow and voluntary. Nationalist opinion by the early twentieth century held that mass literacy was the precondition for everything else, and Gokhale's move was the first attempt to make elementary schooling a matter of law rather than of grant-in-aid.

All four names belong to the same decades, so the item is settled by asking where each man actually was in 1911 — Tilak in Mandalay, Naoroji long since finished with Westminster, Butler on the Government benches, Gokhale in the Council and pressing the case. One honest caveat on the dates: the bill is standardly described as introduced on 16 March 1911 and defeated in the Council soon after, and UPSC's own 1998 assertion-reason item treats its rejection as having occurred in 1911, but accounts differ over whether the final defeat fell in 1911 or in March 1912. The contemporary source quoted above establishes the bill, its author and its forum; the exact date of defeat could not be confirmed from a primary record here, so treat the year of introduction as the examinable fact. The cause outlived him — Vithalbhai Patel carried compulsory primary education for the Bombay Presidency outside Bombay city from 1917, and free and compulsory education for children aged six to fourteen became a fundamental right under Article 21A only in 2002, with the Act giving effect to it in 2009.

• Gopal Krishna Gokhale, 1866 to 1915, moved the bill for compulsory free primary education in the Imperial Legislative Council; it was defeated.
• He founded the Servants of India Society in 1905, with the expansion of Indian education as a central object.
• Sir Harcourt Butler was appointed the first Member for Education on the Viceroy's Executive Council on 15 November 1910.
• Tilak was imprisoned in Mandalay from 1908 until 16 June 1914 and could not have moved a bill in 1911.
• Dadabhai Naoroji sat for Finsbury Central in the British House of Commons from 1892 to 1895 and died in 1917.
• Free and compulsory education for children aged six to fourteen became a fundamental right under Article 21A, given effect by legislation in 2009.

• Choosing Tilak because he is the better-known nationalist of the period; he was in prison from 1908 to 1914.
• Assuming a British official named as Member for Education must have been the author of an education bill.
• Confusing this defeated bill with the constitutional right to education that came almost a century later.

As a who-did-it item on colonial-era education legislation, or inside a chronology of measures from the Despatch of 1854 to the right to education.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Servants of India Society, whose stated purpose included the expansion of Indian education, was founded in 1905 by

  • (a)Bal Gangadhar Tilak
  • (b)Gopal Krishna Gokhale
  • (c)Mahadev Govind Ranade
  • (d)Pherozeshah Mehta

  Answer(b) Gopal Krishna Gokhale — he founded it in the year he was elected president of the Congress, and its members later included Hriday Nath Kunzru and Thakkar Bapa.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Bal Gangadhar Tilak spent the years 1908 to 1914 imprisoned in

  • (a)the Andaman Islands
  • (b)Mandalay in Burma
  • (c)Yerwada, Pune
  • (d)Ahmednagar Fort

  Answer(b) Mandalay in Burma — he was convicted of sedition in 1908, sentenced to six years' transportation, and released on 16 June 1914.