Right from the start of my career as a self-styled development journalist in Business India and Businessworld more than 30 years ago, I have advocated policy priority for agriculture and rural development. The logic of this advocacy is that the greater proportion of national savings/investment should flow into the most people-intensive sectors of the economy. In the 1970s, more than 70 percent of the population was engaged in farming and agriculture and produced half of the country’s GDP. Today, almost 60 percent — over 650 million citizens — still lives in rural India, but contributes a mere 13 percent of India’s GDP, a telling statistic of the low productivity of post-independence India’s poor and neglected rural hinterland, and a huge missed opportunity to develop the nation’s human capital.
If instead of the capital-intensive Soviet-style public sector heavy industry model, independent India had adopted the South-east Asian wage goods model of development with prime focus on education, agriculture productivity and employment generation in light industries, India — like the US — would have emerged as one of the bread-basket nations of the world. Unfortunately, because of continuous under-investment and neglect of primary education in rural India, per-hectare yields of all major crops — wheat, rice, cotton — countrywide are a tenth to one-fifth of yields in the US, China and European countries. Moreover, because India’s (now mercifully abolished) Planning Commission, which regulated sectoral investment flows within the economy, neglected the agri-produce or food processing industry, the Indian economy, i.e, farmers, suffer an annual loss of Rs.40-50,000 crore because of spoilage of fruits and vegetables before they reach market.
Therefore, when your editors received grapevine news that trustees of the well-known SVKM trust, which has established 26 education institutions including the NMIMS University in Mumbai, have also engineered an education, water management and light industries development miracle in Shirpur, a small town in northern Maharashtra, and transformed the Shirpur taluka (sub-district) which includes 72 villages, into arguably the most prosperous taluka countrywide, we were excited to write about it. Unfortunately, your editor was suddenly laid low by dengue fever, but this extraordinary story of organic rural development has been adequately narrated by our films and books editor Bharati Thakore, who stepped into the breach.
There’s much else in this seemingly endangered issue of EW. Our special report focuses on the imminent Moocs (massive open online courses) revolution which is a lifeline for 27 million students floundering within India’s obsolete higher education system, as also for working professionals struggling with low workplace productivity. Also check out our Eyewitness Report on Vidya Vanam, another rural education initiative, and the supplementary second issue of ParentsWorld, prompted by the logic that education shouldn’t be confined to schools and colleges. It’s also a parental obligation.
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