The farm suicides epidemic sweeping the country is being ignored and/or mismanaged by the establishment and middle class India at its peril. Almost 250,000 farmers in the neglected rural hinterland have killed themselves since 1995, driven to extreme desperation not only by acts of commission and omission of the Central and state governments, but also by the indifference of the academy, intelligentsia and the urban middle class who have cornered all the gains of socio-economic progress in post-independence India.
I believe the most heinous of the numerous acts of commission and omission of government and society, which have belittled the nation’s rural citizens who constitute the overwhelming majority (60 percent) of the population, is education deprivation.
Sixty-eight years after independence, 300 million citizens — most of them in rural India — are totally illiterate. It can be safely presumed that an equal number are at best quasi-literate. The latest (2014) Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) published by the Mumbai-based voluntary organisation Pratham, indicates that 51.9 percent of class V children in rural primaries cannot read and comprehend class II textbooks and 73.9 percent cannot do simple division sums. Worse, the trends trajectory is downward.
Within Indian academia, the establishment and intelligentsia, there’s curious reluctance to correlate the rising incidence of farm suicides to mass illiteracy and the pathetically inadequate and indifferent public education post-independence India’s children have received, and continue to receive. In consonance with Marx-influenced socialist ideology imposed upon the subcontinent once globally reputed for its private enterprise tradition, farmers’ surpluses were sucked out of the rural economy and invested in showpiece public sector enterprises which have proved a miserable failure and failed to generate profits for reinvestment in the social sector.
The consequence is continuous and sustained under-funding of public education and health which has plunged farm productivity to the depths and disabled rural citizens from negotiating equitable rural-urban terms of trade. While learned economists and agriculture/social scientists ascribe rising farm suicides to several proximate and removed causes, in this month’s eve-of-monsoon cover story, we argue that the mother of all the trials and tribulations plaguing rural India is a pervasive primary education deficit. I welcome vigorous debate of this proposition.
And in our special report feature of this issue — enriched by insightful opinion essays by Dr. Geeta Kingdon of the Institute of Education, University of London and Raymond Ravaglia of Stanford University — managing editor Summiya Yasmeen presents a review of the landmark Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, 2009 which became law on April 1, 2010, from the perspective of school promoters, trustees and principals wrestling with the problems of implementing it.
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