Education for all: still a distant dream

As 8216;a grateful nation8217; paid tribute to Chacha Nehru on his birthday last week...

As 8216;a grateful nation8217; paid tribute to Chacha Nehru on his birthday last week, I read with unusual interest the quotations chosen by various ministries to remind us of the greatness of our first Prime Minister. The quotations were published in large, colourful advertisements in national newspapers and with Indian officialdom8217;s unique brand of sycophantic verbosity the sayings came accompanied with fulsome praise. Had Nehru not been there we would not have democracy, secularism, a planned economy or social justice. Overlook central planning and we have fine ideals as his supposed legacy. But, since none of these fine things is possible without education it was the quotation chosen by the Ministry of Human Resource Development that interested me most. 8216;No subject is of greater importance than that of education. It is the men and women in a country that make and build a nation and it is education that is supposed to build those men and women.8217; He had a way with words, our first Prime Minister, of this there is no doubt.

What puzzles me is why, with such eloquent understanding of the importance of education, old Chacha paid no attention to putting in place a workable, effective system of mass education. On account of this crucial omission the men and women who make up modern India constitute the largest illiterate population in the whole world. We recently made education a fundamental right to overcome this shaming problem, but with a justice system that will take more than 300 years to clear its backlog of old cases only an idiot would go to court to demand this fundamental right for his children. The solution lies elsewhere. Had Chacha Nehru insisted on compulsory primary education when he made our 8216;tryst with destiny8217;, we would today have had a fully literate population and a country with fewer problems.

Illiteracy makes a vast section of our population unemployable. Before the economic boom went bust, the captains of Indian industry used to search desperately for people to employ. At economic forums in the glittering halls of Delhi and Mumbai they talked endlessly of how the problem in India was not unemployment but unemployability. It still is. And, if the economic downturn continues, we are likely by the middle of next year to have both unemployment and unemployability on a frightening scale.

Even in the best of times illiteracy makes it hard for people to lift themselves out of grinding poverty. Our poorest states are those that have the largest number of illiterate people. The situation is so bad in some of these states that the Global Hunger Index recently revealed that there was worse poverty and hunger in Madhya Pradesh than in many war-ravaged countries in sub-Saharan Africa. On Chacha Nehru8217;s birthday, among the government advertisements was one that warned that using bonded labour was a crime. For such an advertisement to be necessary at the end of 2008 indicates that we have not done well on the social justice front despite talking about it since Nehruvian times. There is little point in talking about it any more unless we can solve the illiteracy problem.

There is little point in talking about improving the horrendous state of public healthcare too. Even if we had the best hospitals in the world, they would be defeated by illiterate mothers without an understanding of basic hygiene. The vast majority of Indian children who die before they reach the age of five die of diseases that are preventable elsewhere in the world.

In addition to our ancient problems we now have to deal with new, 21st century problems like polluted rivers, vanishing forests and climate change. We are not going to be able to deal with them because when you try to explain to someone who is illiterate, hungry and poor that he needs to worry about his carbon credits, he is likely to think you are mad.

Compared to some of our other prime ministers, Jawaharlal Nehru was a giant, one of our greatest leaders. Many Indians consider it sacrilege to criticise anything he did and I get attacked every time I dare to. So let me make it clear that my intention is not to attack the Nehruvian legacy but to remember it more meaningfully. If we want to pay real tribute to our first Prime Minister we need, by his next birthday, to come up with a new education policy that would give real meaning to his contention that 8216;no subject is of greater importance than that of education8217;. We make a mockery of his birth anniversary by celebrating it as Children8217;s Day when we know that half our children are malnourished, illiterate and deprived of their most basic right. Childhood.