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VIEWPOINT: FIFTH COLUMN
Lesson In Education
Why can't our leaders see what even Clinton can--that
education should be top priority?
By Tavleen Singh
Bill
Clinton came to India to do good work but judging from the national obsession
that developed around his culinary tastes you could have been forgiven
for thinking he was here to write a Good Food Guide to Indian cuisine.
Before he arrived, various chefs of five-star hotels supplied newspapers
with intricate details of the menus they were preparing and after he came,
front pages of major newspapers were filled with accounts of the meals
he ate and did not eat-he left Sharad Pawar's breakfast untouched but
feasted on vegetarian delicacies at the Ambani lunch. Pawar's chefs then
gave interviews expressing their sadness that the former president had
not touched their fare. We thought he liked kebabs, they said, and all
he did was drink a glass of papaya juice. Some newspapers disputed this,
their investigative journalists reported that he did not even drink the
juice.
In the process of following Clinton's culinary
journey, what got almost totally ignored was the single most important
comment he made on Indian soil. "No nation in the world," said
Clinton in the small Uttar Pradesh town of Rampur-Maniharan, "has
so much potential as India as long as education reaches every boy and
every girl."
 He
was gracious enough not to add that if we did not succeed in doing this,
then we are looking at another wasted Indian century. God knows we have
had enough wasted centuries already and yet we continue to treat education
as if it were one of our less important concerns. How else does one explain
the complete absence of the drastic changes that are not just required
but necessary? How else does one explain the continuing absence of an
education minister at the Centre? In his place we have a minister for
human resource development whose main obsession is to instill what he
thinks are Indian cultural values when what he should be doing is giving
us a policy that would make primary education compulsory. Ask them about
it in Delhi and they will tell you that nothing more can be done because
primary education is a state subject. If the Centre is so powerless, why
is Dr Murli Manohar Joshi attempting to make any changes at all?
The truth is that A.B. Vajpayee's Government
is treating education with the same disdain as its predecessors. In the
old days, there were explanations for this attitude. We were largely an
illiterate nation led by mainly upper-caste leaders who seemed to believe
that it was not such a bad idea for lower castes and Muslims (who constitute
the majority of illiterate Indians) to remain sunk in ignorance and poverty
because they constituted important vote banks, and vote banks cease to
exist when people get a little education. Also, the electorate was so
steeped in illiteracy that building schools did not necessarily bring
in the votes.
Since then, though, things have changed dramatically.
It is hard to find a village that does not list schools-along with roads,
electricity and drinking water-as the most important items on their election
wishlist. So, building schools bring votes and yet the attitude of our
political leaders remains unchanged. They continue to fiddle around with
silly schemes and "cultural" changes when what we need is a
new policy backed by enough money to implement it.
Nobody is suggesting centralisation of primary
education, but once a policy-a clear road map-is in place, those state
governments that need help can be given it. By now it should be clear
that states like Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan have failed completely
on the education front and desperately need
help and money. If Joshi was serious about bringing changes he
" would at least have done something to change a system that spends
more on the salaries of officials than it does on building schools. On
paper we appear to have made progress but anyone who visits a village
school will confirm, usually it is a school in name only. When it comes
to literacy rates it is pretty much the same story. Anyone who can sign
his name is considered literate so our literacy rate percentage is now
in the sixties but everyone knows that the reality is quite different.
When it comes to higher education there is as
much need for change. Joshi has supposedly been in the process of
encouraging private investment in higher education but try
setting up a college and you will find it is not encouragement you get
from the government but obstacles. Meanwhile, our once fine universities
are in a state of decay because nobody dares raise fees which have remained
virtually unchanged for 50 years. Joshi, unbothered, concerns himself
with introducing astrology as a subject at the university level and making
Sanskrit compulsory in schools. Can we please just begin by getting every
Indian to read and write? What a shame that a political leader from a
distant land can see so clearly what our own netas remain blind to.
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