Electoral price of rural neglect
The vital disconnect between Indian industry and Indian education is being belatedly highlighted by the prolix fees subsidisation battle between the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) and the Union ministry of human resource development. Despite the faculty and particularly students, who actually assume the fee payment burden being stridently opposed to the 80 percent reduction in the tuition-cum-residence fees, business leaders on the governing boards of the IIMs — long accustomed to genuflecting before government — have recommended acceptance of the fees slash order of February 5 even though it is painfully obvious that lower fee incomes will increase the dependence of these highly-rated B-schools upon government handouts and whittle down their autonomy.
But then until the recent row over IIM fees (and IIT donations) corporate India has never bothered to address the reality that university and college fees have been virtually frozen for half a century resulting in the nation’s institutions of higher education being dumbed down to an unimaginable degree by interfering politicians who have converted them into their happy hunting grounds.
Unfortunately lack of sequential logic capability and fudging of vital issues is a common failing of post-independence India’s elites who constitute the Indian establishment. Therefore it’s hardly surprising that the political class as a whole has exhibited a similar disconnect, a blindspot which is likely to cost it heavily in the forthcoming general election: rural development.
It is — or should be — common knowledge that almost 70 percent of the nation’s population lives in rural India. Yet the liberalisation and deregulation of the Indian economy which began in the early 1980s and received a massive boost in 1991 has — it is now painfully evident — almost completely bypassed the rural economy. Consequently, deprived of infrastucture, affordable transport, warehousing, cold chain storage facilities, organised markets and/ or a downstream food processing industry, rural India has remained a stagnant backwater of the Indian economy. Supposedly astute politicians cutting across all major parties have failed to appreciate the importance of giving priority to the needs and wants of this chronically neglected majority. Hence the phenomenon known as the anti-incumbency factor.
And this time around as well the anti-incumbency factor is likely to topple several state governments which have failed and neglected to extend the logic of economic liberalisation and deregulation to their rural backyards where licence-permit raj and institutional corruption keeps the majority of the population mired in poverty and misery. The rising incidence of farmer suicides in reputedly progressive states such as Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh should have served as a warning to their ruling parties. But disregard of this obvious logic of democratic politics is likely to extract a heavy price from the political class in assembly elections in particular.
Reducing slaughter on the roads
The declaration of world health day (april 7) as road Safety Day by the Geneva-based World Health Organisation (WHO) is an overdue initiative to focus public opinion upon a phenomenon which is assuming the proportions of a global epidemic. According to UN secretary-general Kofi Annan, annual road accident fatalities around the world exceed the number of HIV/AIDS deaths and have disrupted family units while damaging national economies.
The incidence of incremental slaughter on the roads is particularly acute in the developing countries of the third world which tend to be under-governed, under-educated and generally unaware of the disciplinary demands of the automotive revolution which is overwhelming their inadequate road networks and infrastructure. Against this backdrop it’s hardly likely to surprise any demi-intelligent monitor of third world societies that the hugely under-governed and under-educated Republic of India with a toll of over 50 road fatalities per 10,000 automotive vehicles suffers the world’s highest annual toll of deaths and disability on its anarchic roads and highways. It’s a measure of the economic loss and damage that households and the entire Indian economy suffers every year that the corresponding statistic of the US is four and Britain 2.5. It should also be noted that these countries have a far greater number of automotive vehicles than India’s 51 million plying the roads.
Quite obviously the nation’s road planning and traffic regulation and management systems are grievously faulty if with less vehicles on its roads network, India has twenty times the number of fatalities and accidents of developed countries. Therefore there is an urgent need to intensively educate school children about the fundamentals of surviving the mayhem on the nation’s roads and highways, especially in the light of the WHO forecast that by the year 2020 road accidents are likely to become the third leading cause of physical disability worldwide. Simultaneously it is also vitally important to mount a concerted nation-wide campaign to educate the growing number of truck, omnibus, car and automotive two wheeler drivers about the reality that apart from being transportation conveniences the vehicles they drive are also lethal objects which can destroy entire families and inflict widespread productivity loss upon the economy.
However it isn’t enough to merely educate children and adult drivers to observe the rules of the road. An education campaign must necessarily be orchestrated with strict enforcement of traffic management laws which are currently practised more in the breach than observance. It’s hardly debatable that in the matter of enforcement of traffic rules and regulations, contemporary India fully lives up to its reputation of being a quintessentially soft state. It’s high time that traffic police forces across the country are augmented and that the law begins to disqualify dangerous drivers for several years at a stretch.
It’s all very well to make cars and two-wheelers easily available to the general public through easy loans. But there is a concomitant obligation upon state and local governments to ensure that public safety is maintained. That’s the implcit social contract between government and the tax-paying public.