Independence Day stirs nationalistic emotions even in the cynical heart of your humble columnist so I want to begin this Independence Day piece with good news. It comes from the Human Resource Development Ministry. Incidentally,it should go back to being the Education Ministry because there can be no human resource development without education. Ever since Rajiv Gandhi changed the nomenclature,this most important of all ministries became a place of dead wood and rotten political games. If Arjun Singh spent his tenure promoting dodgy Leftist ideas,his successor,Murli Manohar Joshi,spent it rewriting history to prove that Hindus in ancient times did not eat beef. That Kapil Sibal has understood that his real job is to ensure that every Indian child has access to a decent education should be good news enough but there is more.
Not long ago I went to meet our HRD Minister for a chat about his efforts to improve Indian education and I came back feeling quite cheerful about our future. If Kapil Sibal can do half of what he plans to do then we could have a fully literate India by 2020 and this would dramatically change the fortunes of our ancient land. The Minister has understood the importance of real education,versus minimum literacy,and he has understood that we need millions more schools,at least 700 more universities and 35,000 more colleges. He admits that government cannot pay for all this and that private investment must be allowed. These are not small things if you keep in mind that Arjun Singh did not even understand what compulsory primary education meant. I asked him a question about it in a press conference long ago and he said,But,we have compulsory primary education in India already.
That is the good news. Now the bad news. A child who is hungry is hard to teach and 45 per cent of Indian children are malnourished which means child malnutrition in India twice as high as sub-Saharan Africa. This is shameful. Nearly seventy years after Independence,1.5 million children die in India of causes directly related to malnutrition even as millions of tonnes of grain rot in open fields. Last week,the Supreme Court was so appalled by this situation that it advised the Government to distribute the grain free to the poor. Why is this not already being done? Why is it not possible to have free kitchens run by village women in every village in India so that no child goes to bed hungry at night? Having studied closely the reasons why children die of hunger in India,I can tell you that it is only because of bad policies. Huge welfare programmes like the ICDS (Integrated Child Development Scheme) have proved to be a total failure.
This programme was started on Gandhijis birth anniversary,October 2,1975,in an act of tokenism typical of Mrs Gandhi when she was briefly Dictator of India. According to government propaganda,it is the most unique programme for childhood development,pre-school education and breaking the vicious cycle of malnutrition,morbidity,reduced learning capacity and mortality in the world. If there was a grain of truth in this claim half of Indias children would not be malnourished.
As an optimist and a believer in Dr Manmohan Singhs fundamental decency and economic common sense,I have continued to hope that he would realise that schemes of the ICDS kind are a total waste of taxpayers money. I have continued to hope that he would have discovered in his sixth year as Prime Minister that if he can replace tokenism with some concrete,workable schemes to end poverty and malnutrition his name will be written in Indian history in letters of gold. But,to conclude on a cheerful note,he has given us Kapil Sibal in the HRD Ministry so all he needs to do is put all child welfare programmes under this ministry. And,perhaps by next Independence Day we could have something to really celebrate: every Indian child in school and every Indian child with access to at least one hot meal a day. Now,that would be a real tribute to Mahatma Gandhi instead of the tokenism of naming useless schemes after him.
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