Children’s Day (November 14) was celebrated with less than customary fanfare this year, indicating perhaps a belated awareness that post-independence India’s investment in educating and developing midnight’s children and Gen Next offers little cause for jubilation. The woeful neglect of education and health — the prerequisite of national human resource development — is testified by India’s 119 rank in the Human Development Index (HDI) of the United Nations Development Programme. In 21st century India, whose intelligentsia and middle class absurdly aspire to a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, over 350 million citizens are totally illiterate; 53 percent (105 million) of children in primary education drop out of the Central, state and local governments’ 1 million schools before class VIII; and 46 percent of children under five years of age suffer severe and potentially brain-damaging malnutrition. The aggregated outcome of this criminal neglect of public education and health is that the labour productivity of Indian industry and agriculture is perhaps the lowest worldwide, a depressing truth routinely brushed under the carpet.
Against the backdrop of abysmally low official concern particularly for the development and welfare of the 360 million children from socio-economically disadvantaged households who are forced by poverty to send their children to decrepit government-run anganwadis (creches) and primary and secondary schools, it’s hardly surprising that middle class India shuns government-provided K-12 education, preferring to sign up their children in the country’s 294,862 private schools including 175,885 financially independent schools.
Clearly the system needs an overhaul — and expeditiously — to sharply improve teaching-learning standards in Central, state, and local authority-run government schools if the modest hopes of the 160 million children stuck in these institutions are to graduate to become more than mere hewers of wood and drawers of water. For one, the time has come for governments to withdraw from K-12 education and devolve management and administration of its schools upon NGOs and professional education providers. Secondly, the content and curriculums of K-12 education need urgent makeover and upgradation, with the Central government playing a major role in standardising school curriculums nationwide. Third, mass teacher truancy in government schools needs to be confronted with powers of dismissal invested in school management committees decreed by the historic Right to Education Act, 2009.
Lastly, the Central government needs to triple its annual budgetary provision for building urgently required bricks-n-mortar and ICT (information communication technologies) infrastructure in government schools. Massive resource mobilisation for investment in human resource development is feasible through firesales of land and assets of the country’s several thousand dysfunctional public sector enterprises valued at Rs.2004,000 crore.
Bold initiatives are needed here and now to save another generation of India’s children being washed down the drain into the nation’s multiplying cesspools of poverty and ignorance. It’s time to invest pith and substance into the empty ceremonial ritual of Children’s Day.
Indian democracy comes of age
Amid a welter of scams and scandals indicative of the extent to which neta-babu socialism has corroded the base and innards of Indian society, the outcome of the legislative assembly elections in the Hindi heartland state of Bihar has come as a whiff of oxygen for a nation reeling under the brazen betrayal of public confidence by politicians of all ideological hues and stripes, and complicit bureaucrats. The rot within the 20 million-strong bureaucracy of the Central and state governments has spread so deep and wide that it’s entirely within the realm of possibility that there are 40 million scandals waiting to be discovered.
It’s against this backdrop of public angst that the electoral verdict delivered in benighted Bihar (pop.82 million) — unarguably the most unruly and socio-economically backward of the 29 states of the Indian Union (adult literacy: 47 percent; per capita income: Rs.13,663 per year) — assumes signific-ance. For the first time in any state legislative assembly election, the electorate was unswayed by appeals to religious, caste and particularistic loyalties and voted massively for the Nitish Kumar-led JD(U)-BJP alliance which fought the election in Bihar on issues of law and order and economic development.
This is a watershed in the history of post-independence India’s patchy democratic experiment and signifies the maturing of Indian democracy. If the scales have fallen from the eyes of the country’s poorest and most ignorant electorate which has ignored the anguished appeals of caste-based political parties — and caste loyalties were hitherto the determining factor in Bihar politics — and voted overwhelmingly for the JD(U)-BJP alliance on the issues of vikas (economic development) and suraksha (law and order) giving it a four-fifths majority, it heralds a beacon of hope for Indian democracy currently experiencing a dark age of scandals and loot of public treasuries countrywide.
There’s much that India’s major political parties — Congress, BJP and CPM — can learn from the historic electoral verdict delivered by the country’s most gullible, short-changed, uneducated and socio-economically backward people. First, that the era of low-equilibrium politics (in which the expectations of people are kept low, so that they are overwhelmed with gratitude for small mercies) is over. The media and communications explosion has introduced middle class life and norms to the subaltern classes, and has resuscitated the international demonstration effect exposing progress and development of countries round the world to the poorest households. Thus awareness is dawning that given good governance and clean administration, it is possible for entire societies to live respectably.
The great American president Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) was right. You may fool some people some of the time, but you can’t fool all the people all the time. The overwhelming vote for law and order and economic development in India’s most backward state indicates that the people can’t be fooled any more. Even if belatedly, Indian democracy has come of age.