MPSC 2022 Prelims Paper-I · Question 88 of 100

Correct — option (3), Durgabai Deshmukh. The body the question refers to is the national committee on women's education that the Government of India set up in the late 1950s and which is universally known by her name; standard accounts record it as having been established in 1958 and as presenting its recommendations in 1959, while the paper prints the year 1957 inside the title. Whichever year is used for the constitution of the committee, the person who presided over it is not in doubt: Durgabai Deshmukh was its chairperson, and the report is remembered as the Durgabai Deshmukh Committee report on women's education. Its recommendations set the direction of policy for a generation. It urged that the education of girls be treated as a priority by the Centre and the States alike; that a department of women's education be created within the central ministry of education; that each State appoint a Director of Women's Education; that co-education be organised properly at the higher stages; and it led to the creation of a National Council for Women's Education as a standing advisory body. Durgabai Deshmukh was an unusually well-qualified person for such a task. Born Durgabai Gummididala at Rajahmundry on 15 July 1909, married as a child and separated from that marriage by her own decision, she left school at twelve in protest against the imposition of English-medium instruction and started a girls' Hindi school at Rajahmundry; she was a volunteer at the Kakinada session of the Congress in 1923, organised women satyagrahis during the Civil Disobedience Movement and was imprisoned three times between 1930 and 1933; she then completed her degrees and took a law degree from Madras University in 1942 and practised in the Madras High Court. She founded the Andhra Mahila Sabha in the late 1930s, sat in the Constituent Assembly as a member from Madras and was the only woman in its panel of chairmen, was nominated to the Planning Commission after failing to win a seat in 1952, and became the first chairperson of the Central Social Welfare Board created in 1953. She married C. D. Deshmukh, the first Indian Governor of the Reserve Bank of India and later Union Finance Minister, in 1953, and she received the Padma Vibhushan and the Nehru Literacy Award for her work on literacy and social welfare. She is therefore the answer, and it is option (3).

• (1)Anutai Wagh — Anutai Wagh belongs to education, but to a different level of it and to a different kind of work. Born on 17 March 1910 and active until her death in 1992, she was among the pioneers of pre-school education in India and is inseparable from Tarabai Modak, with whom she worked at Kosbad in the Thane district among Adivasi children. Their achievement was pedagogic rather than administrative: a curriculum built out of local material, teaching aids that cost almost nothing, and the taking of the pre-school out of a building and into the hamlet, the model known as the anganwadi and the courtyard school. She received the Jamnalal Bajaj Award in 1985. What she did not do was preside over a national committee of the Government of India, and the distinction is worth holding because Maharashtra's own educationists — Tarabai Modak, Anutai Wagh, Maharshi Karve — are examined for institutions and methods, while national committees are examined for chairpersons and recommendations.
• (2)Shantabai Dani — Shantabai Dani was an Ambedkarite leader and writer from Nashik, born in the second decade of the twentieth century and active until her death at the beginning of the present one. She was a follower of Dr Ambedkar, a figure in the Republican Party of India alongside Dadasaheb Gaikwad and others of that generation, and a leader in women's and Dalit organisations — she presided, for instance, over an all-India women's conference held at Nagpur in 1957. Her field was the Dalit movement in Maharashtra and its politics of land, dignity and rights, not the framing of national education policy, and she held no chairmanship of a central government committee. The option is offered because the stem contains the words 'female education' and a candidate reaching for the name of a woman social worker of the 1950s may pick any of the three Maharashtrian names on the list; the committee in question, however, was a Government of India body and its chairperson was Durgabai Deshmukh.
• (4)Durgabai Bhagwat — This is the trap the question is really built on, and it is a trap of the first name rather than the surname. Durga Bhagwat, born on 10 February 1910 and dead on 7 May 2002, was one of the foremost writers in Marathi, a scholar of Sanskrit and Buddhist literature and a folklorist who lived among the tribes of Madhya Pradesh to study their life. She is remembered for her prose, for her scholarship and for her fierce opposition to the Emergency, and she declined institutional and civilian honours including the Padma Shri. Her sister Kamala Sohonie was the first Indian woman to take a doctorate in science. She is not, however, connected with the national committee on women's education. Two women called Durgabai, of almost the same generation, with wholly different careers — one a scholar and writer in Maharashtra, the other a lawyer, constitution-maker and administrator from Andhra — is exactly the pairing an examiner reaches for, and the only defence is to attach the surname to the work: Deshmukh for the committee, Bhagwat for the books.

The education of girls was one of the first problems the Republic addressed by committee, because the gap it faced was enormous: at independence female literacy was a small fraction of male literacy, girls left school far earlier than boys, and in most of the country there were neither women teachers nor separate schools to make attendance socially acceptable. The Government of India accordingly set up a national committee on women's education in the late 1950s under Durgabai Deshmukh, which reported in 1959. Its central proposition was that the education of girls was not a subset of education in general but a distinct problem requiring distinct machinery, and it therefore asked for a department of women's education at the Centre, a Director of Women's Education in each State, priority in expenditure, and a standing National Council for Women's Education to advise the government. The committee stands at the head of a line of national exercises on this subject that a candidate should be able to place in order: the University Education Commission under S. Radhakrishnan in 1948-49, the Secondary Education Commission under A. Lakshmanaswami Mudaliar in 1952-53, the women's education committee under Durgabai Deshmukh at the end of the decade, the Hansa Mehta Committee on the differentiation of curricula for boys and girls in 1962, the Education Commission under D. S. Kothari in 1964-66, and then the National Policy on Education of 1968 and of 1986.

Committees and commissions are among the most reliably examined topics in the general studies paper of any Indian commission, and they are examined in the simplest way: the chairman, the year, and the one recommendation the body is remembered for. MPSC follows the pattern and adds a Maharashtra flavour to the distractors, which is exactly what happens here — the correct answer is a national figure from Andhra, and three of the four options are women whose names a Maharashtra candidate will recognise from the State's own social and literary history. That combination produces a specific kind of error: the candidate recognises three names, does not recognise the fourth, and chooses one of the three he knows. The defence is to prepare committees as a table with the chairperson's name attached, and to accept that the chairperson of a national committee is often someone with no connection to Maharashtra at all. It is also worth noting the printed year. The paper writes '1957 National Commission for Female Education', while the committee chaired by Durgabai Deshmukh is generally recorded as constituted in 1958 and reporting in 1959. The identity of the chairperson does not change with the year, and the question is answered on the person.

• Durgabai Deshmukh chaired the Government of India's committee on women's education of the late 1950s — recorded in standard accounts as established in 1958 and reporting in 1959 — and the report is known by her name.
• The committee recommended priority for girls' education by the Centre and the States, a department of women's education in the central ministry, a Director of Women's Education in each State, and the proper organisation of co-education at higher levels; a National Council for Women's Education followed as a standing advisory body.
• Durgabai Deshmukh was born at Rajahmundry on 15 July 1909, organised women satyagrahis in the Civil Disobedience Movement and was imprisoned three times between 1930 and 1933, took her law degree from Madras University in 1942 and practised in the Madras High Court.
• She was a member of the Constituent Assembly from Madras and the only woman in its panel of chairmen, founded the Andhra Mahila Sabha in the late 1930s, was nominated to the Planning Commission, and became the first chairperson of the Central Social Welfare Board set up in 1953.
• She married C. D. Deshmukh, the first Indian Governor of the Reserve Bank of India and Union Finance Minister, in 1953, and received the Padma Vibhushan and the Nehru Literacy Award; she died on 9 May 1981.

• Confusing Durgabai Deshmukh with Durga Bhagwat, two contemporaries sharing a first name whose careers have nothing in common — the first a lawyer and administrator from Andhra, the second a Marathi writer and folklorist
• Assuming the chairperson of a national committee must be a figure from Maharashtra because the paper is a Maharashtra paper
• Attaching the committee to the year printed in the stem rather than to the person; standard accounts date its constitution to 1958 and its report to 1959
• Mixing up the education committees of the 1950s and 1960s, particularly the Durgabai Deshmukh committee on women's education and the Hansa Mehta committee on differentiation of curricula

Commissions and committees are asked in three interchangeable forms — name the chairperson of a named body, name the body a person chaired, or name the year — and the answer in every case comes from a single table. For education the table should carry the University Education Commission, the Secondary Education Commission, the committee on women's education, the Hansa Mehta committee, the Kothari Commission and the policies of 1968, 1986 and 2020. MPSC compounds the difficulty by drawing its wrong options from the State's own history, so that recognition alone cannot decide the question; a candidate should therefore hold, alongside the chairperson's name, one sentence on what each of the commonly used Maharashtrian names is actually known for. Questions on women's education specifically tend to alternate between the national committee asked about here and the Maharashtra reformers, and both belong in the same page of notes.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which of the following recommendations is associated with the committee on women's education chaired by Durgabai Deshmukh ?

  • (a)Abolition of co-education at every stage of school education
  • (b)Appointment of a Director of Women's Education in each State and a department of women's education at the Centre
  • (c)Transfer of school education from the State List to the Union List
  • (d)Introduction of a common national entrance examination for teacher training

  Answer(b) Appointment of a Director of Women's Education in each State and a department of women's education at the Centre. The committee, set up by the Government of India in the late 1950s and reporting in 1959, treated the education of girls as a distinct problem needing distinct machinery. It also asked that the Centre and the States give priority to girls' education and that co-education be properly organised at the higher stages, and a National Council for Women's Education followed as a standing advisory body.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Durgabai Deshmukh was the first chairperson of which body established in 1953 ?

  • (a)The University Grants Commission
  • (b)The Central Social Welfare Board
  • (c)The National Commission for Women
  • (d)The Planning Commission

  Answer(b) The Central Social Welfare Board. Nominated to the Planning Commission after failing to win a parliamentary seat in 1952, she used that position to press for a national policy on social welfare, which resulted in the creation of the Central Social Welfare Board in 1953; as its first chairperson she worked through voluntary organisations on the education, training and rehabilitation of women, children and the disabled. The National Commission for Women is far later, established under an Act of 1990.