Opinion Monkey business

If the government is serious about leveraging the demographic dividend, it must put its minister to work on contemporary issues, instead of 19th century theory.

Minister of State for Human Resource Development Satyapal Singh has alienated the scientific community by trashing the theory of evolution, which is clearly beyond his grasp. His motive is unfathomable, though he may have felt a little left out by the talk of epic aircraft and primordial plastic surgery that has been heard in this regime. A minister should of course try to keep up with the latest trends in intellectual thought. But his sudden plea for taking Darwin off syllabi has had the unfortunate effect of diverting attention from the debate on education, which had taken on fresh significance following the publication of the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER), 2017. The discussion on what should be done about Indian education has been reduced to a tinier question: What to do about the junior minister for education?

The ASER study revealed black holes and asymmetries which were presumed to have been erased by the explosion in school education over the last decade, which now sees the majority of children enrolled. For instance, it found that one out of four children aged 14-18 cannot read their mother tongue with adequate fluency. Quite possibly, they cannot make sense of a newspaper. And the closer children are to majority, the wider is the gender divide between those who stay on in the education system, and those who vanish into the world of adult responsibility — presumably unprepared for the challenge. It is sobering that despite growing enrolments in lower classes, 30.2 per cent of people aged 18 are unschooled, eight years after the right to education was legislated. India had aggressively talked up the “demographic dividend”, but it cannot possibly be realised without schooling for all.

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The HRD ministry should be grappling with this problem instead of challenging Charles Darwin, whose methods and conclusions are sufficiently examined. Indeed, the theory of evolution is post-Darwinian now, and applied work points the way to the next industrial revolution, in the life sciences. Satyapal Singh’s job is to provide children with an enabling environment in which they could become qualified to contribute to this process. India is in urgent need of genetic engineers, for instance, but there will be precious few if, as children, their schools cannot even teach them the rudiments of language. The political forces of tradition are at play, too, and must be addressed politically. The ASER report has found, for instance, that boys are more arithmetically confident than girls, and that there is a gender divide in access to computers. Such divides would reduce the human resource efficiency of the population. If the government is serious about leveraging the demographic dividend, it must put its minister to work on contemporary issues, instead of 19th century theory.