Opinion Legally obsessed
Speaking about our useless Right to Education law,this is what Lant Pritchett told this newspaper
The wisest comment on Indian governance that I have heard in a very,very long time came from a member of the faculty of Harvards Kennedy School of Government. Speaking about our useless Right to Education law,this is what Lant Pritchett told this newspaper. The RTE is one of the most massively ill-conceived things that happened. At a time when India should have been thinking about the evidence on the table of learning problems,you have just enshrined an additional legislation,an input-led approach and focus to schooling that we know will fail.
In simple words,what this means is that children who go to the average government school usually end up finishing school without being able to calculate a simple sum or read a childrens storybook. This is our real problem. What we need is not a right to this kind of lousy education but a serious effort to improve our government schools. They are so bad that the poorest Indians try to send their children to private schools that now exist even in remote villages.
It is not just in education that we think legislation is a panacea. Our political leaders appear to believe that a new law is some kind of magic wand in every area of governance. The Sonia-Manmohan government has shown a special weakness for new laws. So they made a law guaranteeing employment and spent more than Rs 40,000 crore on it at the outset. Without noticing that it mostly ended up misspent, they expanded the programme. Then,there was that law giving Adivasi communities the right to cultivating forest land. I was in a Gujarati forest at the time and saw local officials go mad trying to prevent combine harvesters from mowing down trees.
Now,we have a spurt of new anti-corruption laws in the hope that a new satyuga awaits. This we cannot blame on government so much as Anna Hazare. But the mistake was to let him get his foot in the door of Parliament in the first place. The Lokpal law,when passed,will do no more than create a vast new policing bureaucracy. When Arvind Kejriwal was asked at last weeks Jantar Mantar rally how he could be sure that Lokpal 40,000 officials would be paragons of honesty,he said,We believe that if an institution is good then the officials in it are automatically good. Did this man grow up in a cave?
The food security law has been put on hold but only temporarily. It is the most insane idea that has so far emanated from the National Advisory Councils ivory tower and must be stopped because there is not the smallest chance it will work. And,it will cost taxpayers an additional Rs 100,000 crore that could be much better spend on improving our abysmal schools,roads and hospitals.
If the NACs jholawalla advisors were from the real India instead of starry-eyed urban do-gooders from academia,they would know that schemes of this kind never work. They are too centralised and too dehumanised to be effective. Government midday meal schemes are a fine example of what goes wrong. The grain is nearly always stolen and if it is not,children end up being fed inedible gruel. But hand the scheme to an organisation like Akshay Patra,as happened in Karnataka,and it works so brilliantly that school attendance rises and children suddenly start performing better in class.
The food security law provides for the distribution of colossal amounts of food grain through a public distribution system that is broken beyond repair. It is like pouring gallons of water into a sink filled with holes. Instead,what we need is the simpler solution of getting city and village governments to run feeding programmes especially for children. In Jaipur,where Akshay Patra was given charge of the midday meal scheme during Vasundhara Rajes government,they found that the kitchens were idle after school hours,so they added a programme called Akshay Kaleva that provided an evening meal on the citys pavements. It worked so well that destitute,homeless families came every day to eat their one nutritious meal of the day.
The point I am making is that we do not need more laws. We already have too many. It is very sad that the leaders of our second freedom movement (groan) have as much faith in new laws being magic wands as our political class. Now that Anna Hazare has succeeded in blackmailing the government into passing his new law,I am secretly quite pleased. It will not be long before his ardent,apolitical followers discover that instead of reducing corruption,it will end up raising the price for official transactions and will slow these transactions down to a standstill. I look forward to having some fun when this happens.
Follow Tavleen Singh on Twitter @ Tavleen_Singh
Share
