Instead of leaving the task of promoting and managing industrial and business enterprises to entrepreneurs and businessmen who had a 5,000-year record of establishing the subcontinent as the world’s richest region right until the mid-19th century, post-independence India’s Central and state governments wasted taxpayers money and the huge amounts that our great leaders received as foreign aid immediately after independence, to promote massive, capital-intensive public sector enterprises (PSEs) managed by business-illiterate bureaucrats and clerks. Inevitably, this Nehruvian experiment to establish “a socialist pattern of society” in which the State would “dominate the commanding heights of the economy” has proved a dismal failure.
Naturally, the colossal national resources invested in non-performing PSEs resulted in other sectors of the economy being starved of investment. Indian agriculture and rural agri-businesses in which 60 percent of the population is still engaged, is several centuries behind developed OECD countries in terms of technology and per hectare productivity.
Yet undeniably, the sectors worst hit by perennial shortages of investible resources, are public education and health. Despite the country hosting the world’s largest child population, annual investment (Centre plus states) in public education and health has averaged a mere 3.5 percent and 2 percent of GDP respectively, for the past 68 years since independence. Against this, global average expenditure on education and health is 5 percent in each sector, with OECD countries routinely spending 6-7 percent of their GDP in these sectors. But for India’s much-pilloried 300,000 private schools and an estimated 2 million voluntary organisations (aka NGOs), the country’s education and health systems would have collapsed entirely. And even private tuition-fees charging schools have limited impact as the great majority of impoverished households at the bottom of the country’s iniquitous socio-economic pyramid cannot afford their fees. In the circumstances, NGOs which provide qualitatively acceptable free-of-charge education and health services to the poor majority, play a critical role in national development.
Therefore, it’s regrettable that NGOs, which have never been popular with the Central and/or state governments because they ipso facto highlight their failures and shortcomings, are experiencing unusual pressure and scrutiny under the BJP-led NDA government which was voted to power in Delhi in 2014. Several NGOs and/or their promoters such as human rights activist Teesta Setalvad are being persecuted, and foreign fund flows of 14,000 NGOs have been proscribed.
Against this backdrop of politicians and hindutva ideologues propagating hatred, ridicule and contempt for voluntary organisations, our cover story reminds the public of the commitment and dedicated contribution of the country’s most respected NGOs to the cause of public education.
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