Editorial

It’s symptomatic of a cruel and irrational mindset. On October 2, 42 school children press-ganged into a cultural programme in Kanpur to mark the 136th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi, fainted due to exhaustion. The children assembled at 7:30 a.m for Gandhi Jayanti celebrations organised by the education department of the Uttar Pradesh government, were kept waiting in scorching heat for over five hours as the chief guest of the function — Samajwadi Party leader Amar Singh was inexplicably delayed. Unsurprisingly the children were denied drinking water and also forbidden to squat on the ground, while waiting for the mighty politico to inaugurate the function.

Unfortunately such open, uninterrupted and continuous institutionalised cruelty to children is depressingly familiar in professedly socialist India. When millions of such incidents of casual child neglect are aggregated, it’s hardly surprising that 175 million children (below 18 years of age) live twilight lives in utter poverty and deprivation, which is a standing indictment of contemporary India — a signatory to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, 1989 and The Millennium Declaration — as a society neglectful of children.

Regrettably provision of even the basic prerequisites of a secure and happy childhood for the nation’s 415 million child citizens, has always been a low priority of politicians and political parties of all hues and ideologies. Perhaps because children don’t constitute a vote bank. This is why government spending on education and health has never exceeded 4 percent and 1 percent of GDP respectively. On the other hand, defence spending has increased from 2.5 to 3.5 percent of GDP (Rs.77,000 crore in fiscal 2004-05) over the past quinquennium and non-merit subsidies to the middle class by way of electricity, water, cooking gas, higher education etc aggregate a massive estimated Rs.330,000 crore annually. A mere 2 percent reduction in defence spending and non-merit subsidies could free up Rs.80,000 crore for speedy universalisation of elementary education in India. The standard excuse of resource scarcity for education has worn thin. There is a growing countrywide awareness that high-flying India’s shameful child neglect — indeed abuse — record is rooted in lack of political and societal will.

When EducationWorld was hesitantly launched in November 1999, we defined our mission statement as "to build the pressure of public opinion to make education the No.1 item on the national agenda". Since then through six years of uninterrupted publishing we have unremittingly campaigned for universalisation of elementary education, a common school system and doubling of investment in education infrastructure. It would be foolish to claim that our effort which has attracted the contumely of many proud decision makers, has influenced public policy. But by a happy coincidence, education and child health are higher on the national development agenda than ever before. And this month as we celebrate our sixth anniversary, we take fresh guard and reaffirm our commitment to continue to build the pressure of public opinion to ensure that QEFA (quality education for all) becomes reality.

Spurious rural-urban development debate

The heavy artillery rural-urban political war that has broken out in the garbage — sorry garden — city of Bangalore, the epicentre of India’s high-potential IT (information technology) industry, claimed a third party casualty. On October 20 IT industry icon N.R. Narayana Murthy, an activist proponent of public-private partnerships resigned from his honorary position as chairman of the Bangalore International Authority Ltd (BIAL). Murthy resigned following charges of land grab and mala fides made by former prime minister H.D. Deve Gowda, whose political party Janata Dal (Secular) calls the shots within the incumbent coalition Karnataka government.

Murthy is a case of collateral damage in the war of words being waged between Deve Gowda and former Karnataka chief minister S.M. Krishna, over the issue of whether the greater proportion of taxation receipts and collective energy of the state government should be canalised into the growth and development of the rural hinterland where farmers eke out miserable lives, or into relatively affluent Bangalore. Gowda’s charge is that Krishna who demitted office last year developed Bangalore at the cost of rural Karnataka and that Murthy, chairman of the blue-chip Bangalore-based Infosys Technolgies who has been in the forefront of a citizens’ initiative to restore the city’s crumbling infrastructure, is hand in glove with Krishna.

Ex facie there is some substance in Deve Gowda’s contention that urban growth should not be at the expense of rural development and that equity and social justice considerations demand a balance being struck between the two imperatives. Yet to believe that development economics is a zero sum game in which rural growth is dependent upon urban decline or vice versa, is inexcusable naivety, particularly in an individual who has attained the office of prime minister of the nation.

On the contrary, widespread rural distress and penury demands that prosperity is facilitated in relatively prosperous cities so that governments’ augmented tax revenue flows are canalised into the rural hinterland. To permit capital intensive urban infrastructure to fall into disrepair on the plea that there is greater need in rural areas is faulty logic, and a prescription for levelling down and depressing standards of living in society as a whole.

If this self-styled humble farmer and rural leader really had the interests of Karnataka — and India’s — farmers at heart, during his tenure as chief minister of Karnataka (1994-96) and as prime minister of the country (1996-97), he would have taken some steps to develop a minimal post-harvest infrastructure by way of reliable transportation, storage silos, cold chain facilities etc for the benefit of the farming community. This would have reduced, if not eliminated the mass distress selling of rural produce which is a shameful, unaddressed injustice of the Indian economy and keeps the nation’s hard-working farmers in perpetual poverty.

It is possible that former chief minister and prime minister Deve Gowda’s heart is in the right place, but his head certainly is not.