Busy with petty politicking and primitive capital accumulation, the country’s numerous dynasties exemplified by the Ruling Dynasty of the Delhi imperium, seem unaware that a tsunami of long-suppressed anger and resentment against social injustice, the law’s delay, insolence of office and proud man’s contumely is brewing in the hinterland and in steaming ghettoes of urban India, where the great majority of the population scratches out lives of utter misery on per capita incomes of less than $1 (Rs.50) per day.
The insolence of office and sheer indifference of the ruling establishment towards the deplorable living conditions of the country’s poor was glaringly manifested in the notorious affidavit filed in the Supreme Court in September by deputy chairman of the Planning Commission, Montek Singh Ahluwalia — one of the most expensive ministers in the UPA-II government, who has winged abroad every ninth day in office at public expense. In the affidavit, Ahluwalia opined that all urban citizens earning more than Rs.32 ($0.60) per day and rural Indians earning Rs.26 ($0.51), are above the poverty line and can’t be classified as poor.
By this simple stratagem, the number of India’s poor variously estimated at 400-700 million, could be reduced to a more respectable statistic of 200 million. Although later the Union government was forced by outraged public opinion to concede that the Rs.32 and Rs.26 per day income benchmarks would not be applied to determine access to subsidised food and other entitlements, opinion is almost unanimous that the intent behind drawing this absurd poverty line (derived from a mechanical updation of the minimum income stipulated by the Suresh Tendulkar committee in the 1970s) was exclusion of millions of poor citizens from receiving food subsidies and other concessional entitlements in order to reduce the Union government’s huge fiscal deficit.
The top priority of the Union and state governments in this time of crisis and growing civic unrest, should be to pull out, all stops to raise living standards in rural India which grudgingly hosts 67 percent of the nation’s population and contributes a mere 17 percent of GDP. But to raise living standards in village India, the prerequisite is to sharply improve learning outcomes in the country’s 1 million mainly government rural schools. The root cause of India’s poverty and widening income disparities is that 67 percent of the population is insufficiently educated to read even simple instructions in fertilizer and pesticide leaflets, let alone comprehend complex rural development technologies necessary to boost agricultural productivity. This is why the per hectare foodgrains yield even in rural Punjab — which boasts the highest agri productivity in this country — is only half the average yield in China and 25 percent of American farmers.
This fundamental flaw of the Indian economic development effort which has persisted for 61 years after the introduction of Central planning, needs urgent redressal. Continuous refusal to accept this top-priority requirement of the Indian economy is an indicator of the massive disconnect between the ruling dispensations in New Delhi and state capitals, with the needs and aspirations of the nation’s poor majority. It bodes ill for post-independence India’s democratic experiment.
Deregulate India’s higher education system
It’s a measure of the fatalistic inertia and public apathy about education quality that the low rankings awarded to India’s best universities in the latest league tables of world varsities published by the London-based Quacarelli Symonds (QS) and Times Higher Education (THE), has not aroused even a whimper of indignation in any segment of Indian society. India’s top-ranked institution of higher education in the QS World University Rankings 2011 is the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi (IIT-D) ranked 218 followed by IIT-Bombay (225) and IIT-Madras (281). In the THE World University Rankings 2011-12, the only Indian institution ranked among the world’s top 400 universities is IIT-Bombay, awarded a non-specific rank of 301-350.
In this context, it’s pertinent to note that India’s much-hyped 15 IITs are — as implicit in their titles — specialist institutions of engineering and technology education rather than universities, which by definition are multi-disciplinary institutions. Going by this definition, India’s top-ranked varsity is Delhi University ranked 398th in the QS World University Rankings 2011 and unranked in the THE league table. It’s bewildering that India’s once-great metropolitan universities of Calcutta, Bombay and Madras, established in the mid-19th century, don’t figure anywhere in the QS and THE league tables and have been bested by several relatively new Chinese universities and a host of other varsities in Asia.
Quite obviously, the fault is not in their stars that India’s 533 universities are underlings, but in the overweening Central and state governments, and supervisory agencies such as the University Grants Commission (UGC), which rigidly control higher education. Indeed higher education, which has the capacity to absorb a mere 11 percent of the country’s youth aged 17-24, is so tightly regulated by the Central and state governments that universities haven’t been able to raise tuition fees in affiliated colleges since the early 1950s. The consequence of this faustian bargain, with which the middle class seems content, is that the quality of education dispensed in the country’s Central and state government universities has plumbed the depths.
It’s plain as a pikestaff that the Union and state governments — wrestling with massive fiscal deficits — can’t possibly augment the pathetically inadequate annual provision it makes — Rs.80,000 crore or Rs.77,000 per capita for higher education. Therefore the HRD ministry urgently needs to liberalise and speedily enact the long-pending Foreign Educational Institutions (Entry and Regulation) Bill while simultaneously removing the thousand unnatural impediments which inhibit private initiatives in higher education.
If HRD mandarins and time-servers of Indian academia are brazenly unashamed of the poor ranking of India’s crumbling universities in global league tables, they should at least feel the dint of pity for the nation’s unfortunate youth sentenced to spend time within them.