Nov 30, 1998

Linking Indian agriculture with global trade makes economic--and political--sense

Charlie Chaplin's enduring portrayal of hunger in The Gold Rush -- chewing on a boiled shoe as though it were a succulent chicken -- may regain topicality in India '98. The 8.4 per cent annual rise in inflation does not capture either the intensity or the specificity of price rise because the real culprit, food articles, are given a relatively small share in the overall weights. It is the food price that burns the largest hole in the pocket of the average citizen. In the past year, the wholesale price of food articles has shot up by 20 per cent -- the sharpest annual rise in a decade. The deleterious impact of this climb in bulk prices on the retail market is evident from the ballistic movement of prices of such everyday eatables like the onion, potato, cauliflower, pulses, even salt and green chillies. The price rise is playing havoc with the cost of living indices. For industrial workers, this has risen 15 per cent over one year and for urban non-manual employees by 12.7 per cent.

For the failure of the vegetable crop, the Government has an obvious whipping boy in the weather -- the unexpectedly hot summer and the untimely rains of September-October. If the weather gods continue to be unfavourable, even the rabi crop output will be reduced. However, there is little in evidence yet that the eight-month-old Government of A.B. Vajpayee has factored the cyclical nature of food into its projections of supply and prices. It has begun importing onions now, which should have been done in June. The BJP is anything but a helpless inheritor to the dirigiste philosophy of its predecessors which held that food should be religiously left out of the reach of global trade. Instead of importing food items as a firefighting measure, the agricultural policy should be adjusted to the cost advantage for export or import of each crop. Food remains the largest globally traded item -- more than oil -- and India will pay a high price if it sticks the swadeshi label on its barn doors.

Medium of Discord

Is there no more to good schooling than the 'regional language vs English' debate?

If the purpose of language is to enhance mutual understanding and simplify life, India has obviously missed the point. Four decades ago, the country upturned every tenet of good governance by carving out new states on the basis of language rather than administrative convenience. In more recent years, the medium of instruction in schools has instead become the medium of discord. A couple of weeks ago, the human resource development minister sought to make Sanskrit a compulsory subject. Now the Tamil Nadu Government has decreed that all schools owned or recognised by the state must teach their students Tamil as well as teach them in Tamil. The second clause, however, is limited to a few subjects. This will lead to the ridiculous anomaly of a child learning mathematics in Tamil but physics in English. Schools which go the whole hog and use only Tamil have been promised financial benefits.

Tamil Nadu's predicament is not unique. Schools in Mumbai, which prides itself as India's most cosmopolitan city, have been known to be cussed when it comes to Marathi. When a migrant from Gujarat sued the state secondary education board the Mumbai High Court upheld his case, terming the "insistence on Marathi arbitrary and unreasonable". Admittedly, there is a difference between forcing students to learn a language and making it the medium of instruction. Even so, these are both manifestations of the same pigheadedness: one which denies English its due place. By all means promote regional tongues, even revive classical languages like Sanskrit -- but not by enforcement. To deprive schoolchildren of adequate English-language skills is to handicap tomorrow's Indians. West Bengal, which banned English from primary schools 20 years ago, now wants to make amends. Does the rest of India too want to learn the hard way?

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