Letter from the Editor
Perhaps it was inevitable that many things would go wrong and several wrong turnings would be taken when 60 years ago on August 15, the union jack was hauled down from the ramparts of the Red Fort, New Delhi for the last time, and replaced by free India’s tricolour. Especially because flying in the face of the conventional wisdom of the time, the founding fathers of free and independent India chose the difficult path of universal adult franchise, democracy and rule of law as the nation set about the task of national development. In retrospect the first major wrong turn taken was to adopt the socialist development model with the State dominating "the commanding heights of the economy". This translated into massive deployment of national savings into huge public sector enterprises (PSEs) managed by business-illiterate bureaucrats and clerks who quickly transformed them into national liabilities. This Left turn was particularly unfortunate as pre-independence India had a three thousand year tradition of private enterprise and mercantilism which was ignored and dismissed as inconsequential. The fallout of this wrong Left turn taken six decades ago was that the State or government which started promoting and running power and steel plants as well as hotels, restaurants and bakeries, dissipated its energy and neglected its primary duties of maintaining law and order, and providing basic education and health services to the people.
The consequence: contemporary India is been lumbered with the world’s largest number of illiterates and functional illiterates whose number aggregates over 600 million. Moreover, deprived of meaningful education and thereby the capacity to fend for themselves, the great majority of the population is in poor health and characterised by low workplace productivity. In truth, as Nobel laureate economist Prof. Amartya Sen remarks (see p.13), India cannot describe itself as a socialist society because it has none of the attributes or achievements of socialist societies which for all their faults, established durable basic education and health systems.
Yet perhaps the most sinful act of omission and commission of the post-independence Indian state and establishment is the neglect of its children. Currently one-third of the under-weight children born around the world are Indian and 47 percent of under-five children in India are moderately or severely stunted. Moreover 53 percent of the 200 million children in primary school drop out before they make it to class VII. Mainly because the quality of education dispensed in the country’s 800,000 government-run primary schools is abysmal.
Unsurprisingly in a recent poll conducted by AlertNet, a humanitarian website of the London-based Reuters Foundation, contemporary India was listed sixth among the world’s most dangerous countries for children. Official and lay reaction to this damning indictment of this country which hosts the world’s largest child (below 18 years) population, has ranged from indifferent to indignant. Just how dangerous is the society fashioned by our socialist masters and central planners for children? This is the subject matter of our cover story this month.
Entirely by coincidence, our second lead feature reports on growing disillusionment with co-education worldwide and a resurgence in the number of single-sex education institutions being promoted in India and abroad. Discerning readers will detect a fine thread linking our two lead features.
Dilip Thakore