EDUCATION

On the dry plains of Orissa, there is a village school with just one teacher -- for seven classes (I-VII) -- two classrooms and a cracked roof. The teacher is a good man though: he does not cheat the children of their government-sponsored mid-day meal of rice and dal. For the village, this is blessing enough. And their education? Now, that's asking for too much.

It's time to be outraged by the dark statistics that drag India into an educational abyss: more than 50 million children who don't see the inside of a school ever, and at least another 50 million who drop out of school before Class V. The result: about 400 million illiterates, larger than the US population, and India's largest impediment to advancement. It's time to do something about it.

Much like at the other end of the spectrum, higher education, which is also flawed; students fail laboratory results because colleges can't afford instruments. Some educationists blame the crunch on moving the emphasis from higher to primary education (in 1986 higher education got a quarter of the total education budget; today it gets less than a tenth). But with a 60 per cent drop in middle schools, and crumbling primary schools, the emphasis isn't going to change.

It shouldn't. The root cause of the problem in both primary and higher education isn't just the lack of money, but also the lack of a streamlined system through which the government and a community works together. Primary education works best when parents are involved and success stories from Kerala, Himachal Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh, where a programme has communities asking for schools, must be replicated.

With higher education, the state subsidises many institutions needlessly -- the taxpayer pays for 95 per cent of the budget of more than 9,000 colleges. This cannot be sustained -- should not be sustained. The government must force through a number of changes. Among them, reinforce a programme to distribute UGC grants on the basis of performance. Alternatively, put a tax which will fund subsidy, a moral debt, so to speak, for people who pay a pittance for college education. Though the most practical solution is for a college to market itself to survive, most can't. They must be merged to remain viable. It's better to educate a smaller number well and nudge others towards vocational training rather than increase the army of half-baked graduates.

-Samar Halarnkar and Subhadra Menon

DEFENCE

Every day, India's borders are criss-crossed by smugglers, insurgents and gun-runners. Bomb blasts rock cities and trains are blown up. Two-fifths of the Army is out fighting them. Two-thirds of the tank force is obsolete, forces rely on the 7.62 mm self-loading rifle in Kashmir to combat insurgents. They shoot back with guns that can fire 20 bullets in the time it takes army guns to fire two.

Meanwhile, the government lacks any concept of what Indian defence is all about. After trying to find out, in 1992, Parliament's prestigious Estimates Committee was constrained to comment: "The committee is therefore not able to fully comprehend the statement that Indian Defence Policy has been to defend her territory. This, they feel, is a needless oversimplification." Bureaucrats providing the answers were unable to see how global and regional trends, especially those of nuclear power and missiles, impacted on India's security. For this reason, the armed forces headquarters and the Ministry of Defence need to be integrated as is the practice in other countries. Since 1990, three impartial committees, including the Estimates Committee, have recommended it, but the IAS-dominated government system is resisting it claiming that things are fine. Change is needed so that headquarters with civilian and uniformed personnel focus on issues relating to equipment and training of the armed forces as a whole, leaving the operational issues to the various field army commanders. Bureaucrats are simply not up to the job.

An example of the poor relationship came through recently when the army chief offered to cut personnel by 50,000 if the money freed was ploughed back to modernise the Army. Though the prime minister, defence minister and finance minister approved of the idea, the Defence Ministry denied any approval for the scheme on the specious plea that such a decision could only be taken on a note prepared by the defence secretary and duly approved by the Union cabinet.

The government's management of the defence department has been abysmal. Defence plans are supposed to be coterminous with national plans. Yet, the Seventh Plan (1985-90) got approval in its last year. The Eighth Plan (1992-97) simply failed to take off. The Ninth Plan doesn't even exist on paper. Meanwhile, the Army, Air Force and Navy are severely short of equipment and spares. So much for defence preparedness.

BASIC NEEDS

A great thirst is upon us. Since 1951 over Rs 15,000 crore has been spent on rural water supply and sanitation, but piped, safe water is still a dream in more than 65,000 villages. Worse, nearly 7,000 of these villages once had water sources, but now have none, reveals a recent study by the Programme Evaluation Organisation of the Planning Commission.

The reasons for this regression are falling levels of groundwater, contamination of sources and failure of existing water-supply systems. The giant storehouse of underground water, which is used for urban and irrigation bore-wells, has fallen by 13 to 20 ft in the past two decades in many problem states. By 2000, warns a Birla Foundation study, parts of India will exhaust 80 per cent to all of their groundwater. But no government has had the courage to regulate the hydraulic drills that bore into the earth and suck up the water, or curb wastage by charging more, or privatise water supply. The approach needs to be recast, and urgently.

First, there is no option but to privatise urban water supply, charge realistic rates for water from users in all towns and cities, and enforce collection as with taxes. Second, rural water-supply systems must be localised. States must only provide funding, then involve village communities, revive traditional storage systems and make all local financial records open to inspection.

With sewage, Central, state and local governments have to work together -- to raise funds, beg or borrow, to invest in sewage-treatment plants, force residential complexes and industry to invest in treatment plants. That is, if the country wants to avoid a public-health disaster. Only eight out of 3,119 towns and cities have full treatment facilities, 209 treat it partially, the rest, not at all.