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 commonl 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 -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 , 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 ," 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. [Source: IRIN]