The overarching mandate of any ministry of human resource development should be to integrate the country’s social development with its economic needs, and the country’s economic development with its social needs. Any HRD ministry’s long-term strategic vision should be cyclical so that social and economic imperatives feed into each other. Very broadly, its goals should be: to strengthen the country’s social fabric by not only educating and empowering its citizens to have diverse skills and knowledge but also reducing barriers to achieving this education; to strengthen the country’s economic fabric by reducing unemployment and systematically integrating skilled and trained citizens into the workforce; and to strengthen the ministry’s ability to achieve its overarching mandate by not only supporting research and development in disciplines directly related to social and economic development but also constantly evaluating the role of institutional mechanisms in integrating and balancing these two components. Healthcare, the other major social development concern, should also be addressed in order to achieve sustainable development in the country.Yet, in India, the focus of HRD ministers has been to rewrite textbooks, especially history textbooks. If rewriting history textbooks — and, therefore, history — according to their ideology of choice indeed satisfies the social and economic needs of our country, HRD ministers should show the Indian public — not just tell us — just how and why doing so will improve overall student participation and performance in India, or reduce unemployment, or strengthen Indian communities in the long run. Furthermore, while it is understood the world over that interpretations of history contest for legitimacy within a given temporal or spatial framework, it hasn’t been made clear to the public why it is in the best interest of Indian students to be subjected to either/or readings of the past. In any event, every time their history syllabus and textbooks are made over, Indian students are already learning from lived experience that history exists in a politically disputed realm of discourse.Put another way, the crux of the issue is that any kind of public-related decision-making in India should be much more open, inclusive, and democratic than it is at present. Developing core curricula and syllabi for Indian schools and universities, therefore, should be far more transparent and democratic than it has been so far. Instead of serving special — and sometimes self-serving — interests, Indian education should be made to represent the needs of a wide set of stakeholders — that is, the needs of the Indian people, not those of its political or professional elite. The core curriculum for various disciplines should be based on consensus arrived after thorough public debate and discussion. To do so, seminars should be conducted in various parts of the country and round tables consisting of people from various walks of life, including representatives from different levels of government, the private sector, civic sector, students, heads of university departments, should be created to steer the overall vision. The role of the HRD ministry should be to co-ordinate varying stakeholder interests, and to establish partnerships with the private and civic sector for service delivery; not thrust its own political agenda on the nation.In the interest of accountability, the HRD ministry should offer a reader-friendly service plan to the public that determines, among other things, its strategic vision, its goals, its performance targets, performance indicators and measures, both quantitative and qualitative, and outlines a budget and time frame for achieving these goals and targets. At the end of that time period, the HRD ministry should offer for public scrutiny an easy-to-understand annual report of its performance. The annual reports that are currently offered on the HRD ministry’s website are not only incoherent, they also do not offer concrete performance standards, targets, measures or indicators, nor do they offer timeframes.Shutting down the HRD ministry, as has been suggested, is an extreme and unnecessary step. Its mandate, after all, plays a crucial role in the country’s overall development. Disinvesting from the HRD ministry and transferring its mandate and role to the private sector, or a professional cadre of managers serves no purpose either. It only transfers power from one group with special interests to another. In a democracy, real power should lie in the hands of the public. The real remedy for curbing the “big brother” tendencies of various Indian ministries including the HRD ministry, therefore, is to make democracy more participative.
