Shining India or area of darkness?

Then, as I wandered down the dirt track that is this village’s main road, past diseased stray dogs lying sadly in the sun, past barefoot children scrabbling in the dirt and late rising fisher folk squatting in full public view on the village beach it occurred to me that we would not need to wait till 2050 for the economic boom if we could only get our social sector problems sorted out. Of this there is no sign with even an area as important as education still characterised by whimsical decision-making instead of serious attempts at change.

Within days of the report predicting our glorious economic future we heard that the government’s new brainwave is to reserve twenty percent of seats in private schools for children from below the poverty line. This amounts to an admission that government schools are so bad that there is no point in relying on them but, more than that, it is a stupid, unworkable idea that will lead mostly to more powers of interference being put in the hands of the very officials who have ruined the education system in the first place.

Is this what we need? Will the proposal benefit poor children whose illiterate parents will probably never know that it exists or will it simply make it easier for corrupt officials to sell off these twenty percent reserved seats to the highest bidder? If the government believes that schools like Welham and Doon should open their admissions to the poorest of the poor then there is a better way of doing this. It should be left to the schools themselves to select deserving students and provide the scholarships. If the state has any role to play it should be restricted to serious attempts to improve its own schools. Had Murli Manohar Joshi been a halfway good education minister we would by now have a white paper on the reasons why schools run by the state are so bad that even Indians living below the poverty line try to send their children to private schools. Judging from my own recent tour of schools in Uttar Pradesh may I say that the biggest problem is that Joshi’s emphasis has been on opening more and more schools without a thought for the end product: education. Children who emerge from schools set up under his grandiloquently named Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan will be lucky if they succeed in achieving functional literacy. Hardly sufficient preparation for 21st century employment.

The same approach is evident in healthcare. Hospitals and health have been built by the dozen, even in poor states like Uttar Pradesh, without anyone bothering to notice that most provide nothing resembling proper medical care. I have personally seen vast, expensive district hospital that did not have a single patient or even a fulltime doctor. The result is that most state hospitals are shunned by even the poorest of the poor unless they have no choice. As more than eighty percent of Indian diseases are related to bad water and unhygienic living conditions it should have been obvious long ago that if the Health Ministry could do nothing else it could at least invest in a massive television campaign to promote public hygiene. But, there is not a single state in India where anything like this has happened. The only people trying to do anything are NGOs and there are serious limitations on how much they can afford to do.

When it comes to toilets and toilet training it is again NGOs (like Sulabh Shauchalaya) who have tried to do something. Not a single state government has made a serious attempt to provide proper sanitation systems in rural parts or for that matter in our towns and cities so more than 80 per cent of Indians lack access to modern sanitation. Result? Not just those unsightly morning sights along our railway tracks and brand new highways but rivers poisonously polluted by the untreated sewage that pours out of cities like New Delhi and Varanasi.

When Rajiv Gandhi talked of taking India into the 21st century, all those years ago, I remember Atal Behari Vajpayee sneeringly ask this question at a public meeting in Delhi. Akeley hi ja rahey hain key humko bhi saath ley key chalna hai? Is he going alone or taking us with him. Well, unless we solve some of our basic problems it could be just a handful of Indians who go into that brave new India that the Goldman Sachs report predicts for 2050. If we deal with the problems we could all go together and perhaps even get there long before 2050.

Write to the author at tavleensingh@expressindia.com