The Daily Indian

No political discourse in Tamil Nadu is complete without the mention of Kachatheevu, the uninhabited barren Island of 285 acres in the waters between Sri Lanka and India. When the maritime boundaries between India and Sri Lanka were settled in 1974, this small island, which belonged to the Raja of Ramanathapuram, was ceded to Sri Lanka by then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. But the traditional rights of Indian fishermen to take rest on the island were well in place in the agreement between both the governments.

But for the fishermen, the sea had no boundaries. They were going beyond Kachatheevu into the Sri Lankan waters to fish. They used to attend the annual festival on the island. Indians and Sri Lankans would come to worship at the St Antony’s Church. This small church was built by an Indian fisherman in the early 20th century who was believed to have survived a storm near the island when he prayed to St Antony.

There were no problems till 1983 when ethnic riots against Tamils in Sri Lanka first took place. The Sri Lankan government stopped the festival. The territorial waters were strictly monitored by the Sri Lankan navy. When Indian fishermen went beyond the Indian boundary towards Kachatheevu and adjacent places, they were shot at.
More than 300 Indian fishermen were shot dead in the waters near Kachatheevu in the last two decades as the Lankan Navy suspected them of supporting the LTTE rebels with supplies. As the civil war intensified, the number of deaths of Indian fishermen also rose. Tamil politicians were pressuring the Centre to take the island back from Sri Lanka. J. Jayalalithaa’s case in Supreme Court in this regard is still pending. Her contention was that New Delhi ceded the island by an executive order which violated Article 368 of the Constitution.

On last saturday morning, Fishing Boat no. 404, after getting essential clearance from the Indian Navy at the Rameswaram Jetty, was speeding past the Palk Bay waves. I was on it. The owner and driver of the boat, Sudalai Kasi, was an excited man. With over thirty years of fishing experience in the Palk Bay, he had seen the island many times but never could set his foot upon its shores in the last two decades. “Earlier, only a thatched shed was there as a chapel. Then in the 1970s, the tile-roof structure was built. Thousands of people from India and Sri Lanka would meet there every year. There will be exchange of goods and gifts,” Sudalai Kasi reminisced about the old times.

C. R. Senthil, another co-passenger of the boat actually had his relatives living in northern Sri Lanka. “We used to write letters to them saying what we would bring for them. They would also write to us stating what they needed from India,” he says. Senthil’s relatives, no longer live in Sri Lanka. The war made sure they were displaced and ended up as refugees in India.

Kittur Chennamma, an Indian Coast Guard boat, guided us past the international maritime border. After three hours of travel, we were near the shores of Kachatheevu. The Sri Lankan Navy boats were busy in transporting people to the shore as the fishing boats could not go near the land due to rocks in the water. We waited for three hours and a country boat transported us to the shores.

The concept of ‘homeschooling’ has not caught-on with parents in this part of the world. But then, in most of the developed countries the whole idea of homeschooling has gone beyond mere alternative education and has entered the ambit of politics and lobbying.
For the starters, homeschooling is the education of children at home and is seen as an alternative, in developed countries, to formal education. However, the surge in homeschooling is hitting the market of conventional education system in the US. A conservative estimate shows that over 50 million children are enrolled in over 100,000 schools in the US. The average per student expenditure in the US public schools is around $7,000.

In the US, where quality of formal education is quite worrisome, parents are largely opting for homeschooling. Take for instance, the IQ level (and maths skills) of an average American student is far too less than his counterpart in the developing countries. A 2007 survey by the Department of Education reveals that 88 per cent of homeschooling parents felt their local public schools were unsafe, drug-ridden or unwholesome in some way and 73 per cent complained of shoddy academic standards.

However, in developing countries, the practice of homeschooling is not so common. Reason being, that homeschooling is too expensive in metros (even surpasses school’s tuition fees). And in non-metros (or tier-II and tier-III cities) parents are not able to match up with modern education syllabi. Moreover, homeschooling is not encouraged at the time of college admissions. Unlike the West ­- where there is a strong network of activities and legal lobby that has ensured colleges/institutes to have a separate policy – developing countries do not have any body to advocate this concept.

Homeschooling in Africa is highly influenced by many missionaries, who are homeschooling their own children (due to lack of good schools and domestic instability). But there is an ongoing struggle between homeschoolers and the government over control of curriculum. Moving to Asia, there are a limited number of homeschoolers and many governments are against homeschooling.

On the one hand, schools in the West are lobbying with top officials to regulate homeschooling and discourage parents (of course, for obvious reasons!). Whereas on other hand, this concept can, to a large extent, compensate for lack of schools. This can also help those who are sole bread earners of the family and thus are not able to attend conventional schools. It will also help children in those parts of the states who can’t attend school because of domestic instability. What government needs to do is to recognise homeschooling (and standardise the syllabi) and make it acceptable during admission in college admission procedure. Moreover, with intervention of ICT (Information & Communication Technology) this medium can reach a larger audience.

However, this form of education is not an answer to lack of good schools and quality education, but for the time being can solve the problem of education (and schooling) in rural hinterlands of developing countries across the world.

Ever heard of Bhint Budrak? If you haven’t, chances are that you have no idea of the enormity of what this tiny village in Gujarat’s Surat district has achieved thanks to the success of an unusual “bank” – a bank that collects gobar (cow-dung) from residents and then supplies it to a biogas plant that takes care of the hamlet’s energy needs. The people of Bhint Budrak deposit cow-dung in the gobar bank and receive biogas at a nominal cost in return.

Bhint Budrak certainly isn’t the only village in the state that provides biogas to its residents. What sets it apart is the spirit that drives the project. Every single household is actively supportive of the process of change.

The results that the experiment has yielded in Bhint Budrak is in sharp contrast to how other villages have responded to the concept. Sometime ago, the state government had helped several other Gujarat villages set up biogas plants of their own, but most of these plants ran aground in next to no time in the face of apathy on the part of the people that they were meant to benefit.

The village of Methan in north Gujarat’s Sidhhpur taluka has had a community gobar gas plant since 1987. Most residents here use biogas that is produced by the plant. The sarpanch of Methan, Sultan Momeen, says, “It is difficult, but definitely not impossible, to construct and operate a gobar gas plant. It is crucial to involve the locals at every step.” Both Methan and Bhint Budrak are living testimony to that truism.

In Methan, the seeds of success were sown by the village leaders, asserts Momeen. “Everybody was actively involved from day one. The Central government sanctioned Rs 19 lakh for the project. The design and technology was provided by GEDA (Gujarat Energy Development Agency). The people of the village toiled day and night to construct the biogas plant.” A gas connection was provided to every household in Methan with the help of the central government grant. A co-operative society was then set up for the day-to-day administration of the community gobar gas plant. It is still up and running.

Methan is anything but a conventional village. For one, it has never witnessed panchayat elections. The sarpanch and members of the panchayat samiti are nominated by the villagers and they assume office unopposed. The village, inhabited by a mix of Hindus and Muslims, has never seen any communal tension. The Muslim population here is very prosperous and they have provided plenty of assistance to the setting up of and running the gobar gas plant.

The president of the Methan gobar gas plant, Kasambhai Elimad Thuka, says, “In 1987, village leaders like Jaffer Mohammad and Rahim Karedia broached the idea of a gobar gas plant. It was very difficult in the beginning but every resident of the village contributed a lot.” For plant maintenance and gas usage, every household with a biogas connection is charged Rs 50.

But a huge question mark now hangs over the future of the biogas plant, which has been hit by a shortage of cow-dung. Says Kasambhai, “The younger villagers have migrated to foreign countries. These families do not own cattle anymore. Hence the quantity of cow-dung is dwindling. We once had 50 stables in the village. Now there are only about ten. So we have to often obtain cow-dung from nearby villages. But the supply can be rather irregular.”

The effects are being seen on the ground. Methan once boasted 300 households with a gas connection. Now only half that number use biogas. “The shortage of cow-dung has led to low-pressure supply, forcing villagers to opt for stoves or LPG gas cylinders.

Last month, the Obama Administration made it clear in no uncertain words that the companies which are recipients of money under the Troubled Asset Regulation Program (TARP) as part of the financial stimulus package will have to abide by the new restrictions imposed on outsourcing of work to destinations like India.

For many in India, it was nothing but an obnoxious move on the part of a dogmatic Obamasque US administration seeking the easiest (but definitely counter-effective in the long run) way to fix the problems of the US economy rather than dealing with the real structural problems plaguing it. Intriguingly, however much one might criticise Barack, the reasons for which Obama has taken this path are the same that come into play when Indians or Chinese thump their chests when companies of their country’s origin go out and handsomely acquire a US or a Europe based company. The string that binds both Barack and us is fanatic economic nationalism, for our respective countries of course.
Quite some time since the homo sapien race decided to exit forests and to materialize the concept of society, the concept of ‘he’, ‘his’ people and ‘his’ land have always been more important than ‘they’, ‘their’ people and ‘their’ land. Evidently, this philosophy hasn’t changed much till date. So, from the era of hostility between Sparta (present day Greece) and Troy, when Achilles decided to fight for his bête noire Agamemnon, the Spartan king, because Spartan ‘pride’ was at stake, to the era of the British, French, Dutch and Spanish empires, when they often fought prolonged and violent battles keeping imperial interests in mind, it was all the same nationalistic fervour in play.

In fact, the time-line between the beginning of the First World War and the end of the Second World War and furtheron after it, has been the most intriguing period in terms of the transformation of nation states into nationalistic states. While four established empires — namely Russian, Ottoman, German and Austro-Hungarian — were washed away by the tides of the First World War, this period also witnessed the emergence of the violent form of ethnic nationalism which almost destroyed the world with the rise of the German Nazis and their fanatic obsession with the obliteration/subjugation of Jews and in fact anyone who — according to them — was not a pure Aryan.

Incidentally, the way Hitler galvanized a disparate Germany, which was humiliatingly defeated in the First World War, into a reckoning force vindicated the fact of how potent a force the war-cry to resurrect the lost pride of fatherland (or motherland) could be.
Nazis became a spent force for good after the defeat of Germany in World War II, but ethnic nationalism continued. Oddly, that the Jewish State succeeded to an extent against all ‘odds’ and emerged as a pioneer in high end technologies is also proof of how nationalism drives the fanatic passion to not only survive, but consolidate and fortify. Had it not been for the ethnic pride and the quest to wipe the humiliation of the past, Japan and Germany wouldn’t have had such incredible resurrections (both economic and political) in just a few decades’ time to become the second and third largest global economies respectively, their decimation in the Second World War notwithstanding.

Post-Ottoman Turkey’s dealings with the Arabs was summarised by a famous adage coined in the mid-20s-Ne Sam’in sekeri, ne Arabin yüzü. It meant “neither sweets from Damascus nor an Arab’s face.” And as it happened, in the next 90 years, neither any sweet made its way from Damascus, nor did Turkey have to join ranks with Arabs in the west Asian conflict. But things are changing. And ironically, the sweets that had left a bitter taste in mouth of the Western world indeed arrived from Damascus.

This transformation is momentous as it implies the commencement of a fresh politics, particularly in West Asia. Turkey’s foreign policy community has decided for fresh terms of engagement with both its western and eastern neighbours. While much of its new policy has alleviated conflicts and expanded economic and political collaboration, it has also shaped new fields of apprehension for the West, predominantly in the weakening association with Israel, the new-fangled tactical partnership with Syria, and the friendly dealings with Iran and Sudan. This has led to an increasing number of Western analysts asking whether Turkey will break its word on its conventional Western orientation, opting as a substitute, regional leadership and associations in the Muslim world. “The strategy is shifting at breakneck pace. If the Turks, only a decade ago, were in conflicts of varied intensity – particularly with Greece, Syria, Iraq and Armenia – today, merely the Cypriot hitch remains unsettled,” says Kerem Oktem, an expert on Turkish foreign policies at the European Studies Centre in the University of Oxford, while talking to TSI. The West is particularly rattled by its dealings with Israel. For years, Turkey has kept itself aloof from the Palestine issue partly because it did not want to get into the “bog” and partly because it never really pardoned Arabs for their “treachery” against the Ottoman empire, in collusion with Freemasons. After all, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has pressed some incredibly susceptible Western buttons: He has dismissed apprehensions over Iran’s civil nuclear programme, for instance, and called off a war game with Israel, holding one with Syria in its place. Turkey, Erdogan said, was merely acting, “in accordance with his people’s conscience.” His people, Erdogan assured viewers, “were rejecting Israel’s participation.” Additionally, Turkish foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu maintained that Turkey cannot afford to be perceived as Israel’s martial associate at a point when there are literally no efforts being made for peace.

Still, the Turkish-Israeli association is shoddier now than it had been many years ago. Ankara remains annoyed that IDF invaded Gaza-just as Turkey was trying to arbitrate indirect peace negotiations between Israel and Syria. Apparently, a few days before the attack, the then Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told Erdogan that no offensive was intended. Following that, in his visit to Tehran last September, Erdogan positioned himself overtly on Iran’s part, defending its nuclear programme and maintaining his view on Israel being the key source of conflict in the area.

Turks themselves were seldom excited about their country’s liaison with Israel. The military was, unfortunately for Turks, the final word on the nation’s foreign policy in the last few decades. Now, in a progressively more democratic Turkey, there are more than one power centre and the dynamics of the game has changed. It is also merely an illusion that the army will remain consistently pro-American. Older, higher-ranking officers do have a soft corner for the West.

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has changed, and how! The first national convention of the party took place in Mumbai in 1980 and 50,000 workers attended it, living in tents for the event. The then party president Atal Bihari Vajpayee addressed the inaugural convention, clad in his trademark dhoti-kurta ensemble.

Thirty years on, the symbolic simplicity of the tents and the ethnic attire of its tallest leader remain relevant. At the party’s three-day meet in Indore, the tents were up again, but the latter gave way to a flashier sartorial statement.

This year, too, there were tents, but the party’s national president came dressed in a pair of trousers and a shirt to deliver a Power Point presentation to a party that is struggling for survival. Also, among the largely ageing audience sat a few workers with goggles perched on their selves to go with colourful shirts, providing perhaps a subtle indication of where the party is headed.

Be it the party’s 30-year-old, progressive thinking MLA from Maharashtra Jaikumar Rawal or the equally forward-looking Delhi BJP secretary Virendra Sachdev, these scattered faces, looking as modern in their attire as they are known to be in their thought processes, bore testimony to the fact that a party wedded to tradition and the old order was willing to embrace change.

The process of change, of course, is neither easy nor natural. After the party’s drubbing in the 2009 Lok Sabha elections the BJP appears to have realised rather well that in order to strengthen its future prospects in the electoral arena, the young will have to be included in its ranks and be given more power.

In his two months in the job of party president, Gadkari has realised that the BJP has to develop a strategy to counter Congress MP Rahul Gandhi’s largely successful efforts to connect with the youth. In consultation with former party president Lal Krishna Advani and other senior BJP leaders, he has drawn up a road map for the purpose.

The key element of this road map is a proposed 50 per cent increase in party posts from block to national level to facilitate greater participation of the youth. The party’s constitution was amended at the convention to pave way for the entry of the younger leaders into the decision-making structure of the BJP.

BJP’s young leader Virendra Sachdev says: “There has always been theoretical talk of youth participation. But the message that came through in Indore was that the young have enthusiasm and energy which need to be harnessed. When young party workers fan out throughout the field, they are bound to encourage other youth to join the party in large numbers and strengthen the grassroots organisation.”

Sachdev is bang on. A country, of whose population two-thirds is young, the segment cannot be ignored. It would be fatal for a political party to disregard these dynamics. If the BJP is to come to power in 2014, the young will have to bolster it. Even Advani realises this pressing need and made it a point to stress it in his speech.

In the convention’s closing speech, Advani, well aware of his own lost chances, had said: “Nitin Gadkari is a representative of the party’s third generation. I have full faith that his team will have workers from the fourth generation as well. The party is also committed to identifying and training young, deserving candidates who will take the BJP forward.”

Raibhaga is a nondescript little town in Karnataka’s Belgaum district. If there is anything worth a mention about this place, it is that it is equidistant from Bengaluru and Mumbai – around 600 km either way. But Raibhaga could well lose its anonymity if some Dalit leaders of the town have their way.

On January 26 last, Raibhaga saw the formation of Neeli Sene (Blue Army), an outfit manned by young Dalits and run on the lines of the RSS. It is the self-defence wing of the Dalit Sangharsh Samiti (Bheemavada), one of the factions that represent the community.
Members of the Blue Army, men aged anything between 18 and 40, are up well before sunrise every morning. They head to Shahu Maharaj Ground in the heart of town to participate in a drill-and-parade exercise. Their blue uniform glistens in the first rays of the sun as the men march with intent, chest out, chin up and eyes fixed straight ahead. Left, right, left…. the Dalits of Raibhaga are bent on changing the direction of their lives.

Raju Talawar, a 33-year-old man who heads the marching squads, is thrilled at the way things are panning out. Talking to TSI, he says: “We’ve been coming here everyday since January 26. Every Sunday, after the march-past and drill, we host special lectures by specially invited resource persons who enlighten us on various themes, including social inequities, and narrate stories about the exploits of great men like BR Ambedkar, Jyotiba Phule, Periyar and Kanaka Dasa. The younger lot of Dalits are already beginning to feel a new energy and excitement course through their veins.”

The man in charge of the training is Dhanapal Gasti, a retired jawan of the Mahar Regiment. “As of now, we are imparting only basic army training. But in the long run we will go in for full-fledged weapon training, including lathi varase (cane fighting),” says Talawar.

Mohan Raj, state convener of the Blue Army, emphasises that the wing is not against any person, community or organisation. It has been launched purely to create awareness among the suppressed and backward communities about there constitutional rights. The idea, he says, is also to build a disciplined young generation among the community.

He says: “We have lost faith in the police force, which has repeatedly failed to protect us. Atrocities are being heaped upon Dalits at will in the state as well as across the country. Our representatives in the state Assembly and Parliament do nothing except making false promises. Officials belonging to our own community also join hands with forces that suppress us. We had no choice. A wing like the Blue Army was inevitable.”

The colour of the uniform has logic behind it. Blue is the colour of the sky, under which everyone, big and small, is equal. The uniform is given free of cost to the volunteers. The funds come from donations from symphathisers.

The plan to raise a Blue Army was drawn up three years ago. It took time to materialise. The army has more than 100 volunteer boys in Belgaum, Udupi and Bagalkot districts. “We are planning to expand it in all the 29 districts of the state within this year and across the country in the coming years. We are also planning to form a Blue Army women’s wing starting from Udupi. Along with men from the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, boys from backward and minority communities are evincing tremendous interest in our activities,” says Mohan Raj. To begin with, the organisation plans to have at least two volunteers in each village. It would be their job to mobilise the Dalits and conduct massive march-pasts wherever the community faces injustice or any form of humiliation.

We totally sympathise with Nostradamus, even though quite a few of his predictions have been as close to reality as US is to Venezuela! It is terribly nerve racking and mentally exhausting to predict the future with so much as a reasonable degree of certainty. As times change and newer trends emerge, the world only seems to grow in complexity. Indeed, in 2010, the world could well have a new set of challenges to confront, providing media with new piquant news to broadcast and analyze. But at the IIPM Think Tank, we are unanimous (well, almost!) on the prediction that certain fundamental issues will remain a challenge before policy makers and will continue to dominate the headlines even in the year 2010; irrespective of our aversion to them. Issues like terror atrocities and their perilous impact, human rights violations and the hue and cry associated with them, migration and violence, crime on the roads and domestic violence, disputes for water and last, but certainly not the least; global warming, which will continue to be discussed and debated in ‘mini-Copenhagens’ around the world. Interestingly, the Austin, Texas-based Global Language Monitor has found from its research that the top terms/phrases of the present decade on Internet and media are climate change, 9/11 or War on Terror, Tsunami, refugees/migration, and swine flu.

These issues will remain fundamental to the world even in this year because the severity of their impact is unfortunately quite global in nature. A few statistics will reveal more. There are 56.5 million deaths worldwide each year, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO); 60% of the death toll is because of diseases which are direct or indirect implications of global warming, migration et al. Climate change is to blame for some 150,000 deaths each year; which is estimated to reach 300,000 by 2030, according to the UN health agency. Horrifyingly, domestic violence claims the lives of two women per hour. One incident of domestic violence is reported to the police every minute. Thousands die and millions suffer from terror attacks and atrocities.

And then, media and technology have colluded and made the world much smaller. Local issues take precious little time to grab global attention; especially when we have governments like the one in China to filter news. Still, the globalisation of media has served to remind nations that issues that keep them together are far greater in number than issues that set them apart.

As our think tank was pondering over how these pressing problems were getting tougher to cope with, the first few days of 2010 have supported our fears. The world saw media reporting and broadcasting terror attacks in Pakistan and recently in Kabul, where Taliban has let loose a squad of suicide bombers. A child has been severely beaten, almost to death in a remote school of Maharasthra as more students of Indian origin are brutalised by some Australians. Every day, the media and the intellectual community are blaming global warming for unbearable heat in summer and brazen cold in winter or sudden droughts and floods. Global warming has such an epic fear factor that noted actor Danny Glover managed to blame it for the devastating Haiti earthquake. As all this happens, an accused of Indian origin in a Pakistani prison seeks Obama’s help for his rights. Indeed, there’s a lot in this world that needs to, but hardly changes.

Arindam Chaudhuri

“History is a race between education and catastrophe.” – HG Wells

“All who have meditated on the art of governing mankind have been convinced that the fate of empires depends on the education of youth.” – Aristotle

I think this is the first time I have started a write-up with quotes from famous people. I normally do not do that, because I usually feel so strongly and passionately about issues that I simply start writing and words just flow out in a torrent. But I am making an exception this time. And I have strong reasons for doing so.

Let me digress a little before stating them. This will be the 10th consecutive year that I have written and presented an ‘Alternative Budget’. This will be the 5th consecutive year that the ‘Alternative Budget’ appears in Business & Economy (Yes, your favourite magazine – when it comes to sharp, incisive and thought-provoking intellectual analysis – is about to complete 5 years!). For close to 10 years, I have been repeating ad nauseam that India can never hope to be a country that is respected in the 21st century unless there is a drastic and dramatic overhaul of social infrastructure. Apart from occasional good news on that front, budgets over the last decade have been largely disappointing when it comes to dealing with social infrastructure. Of course, lip service and wise quotes from historical personalities have always been offered by successive finance ministers. Of course, ambitious schemes with thousands of crores of budgetary allocations have been launched. Of course, well meaning policies have been designed and implemented. But has there been a really substantive improvement in outcomes? Do poor Indians actually have better access to healthcare now than they had when the 21st century began? Do they actually have better access to education? You know the answers as well as I do.

I have often been frustrated and dismayed by the answers. This prompted me to present an Alternative Budget in 2008 with a headline Ban the Budget. My logic was that too much needless attention was lavished on the Union Budget. My suggestion to the Finance Minister was to use the Union Budget to launch some path-breaking policies for the social infrastructure sector and let nitty gritty issues be handled through the year during the normal course. In 2009, I went a step ahead and presented an Alternative Budget with a headline Khao aur Khilao Budget. My logic was simple. I raised a fundamental question: How come China and South Korea with levels of corruption as deep and endemic as India have delivered fantastic outcomes in social infrastructure while India has failed to do so? I also argued that economics was all about incentives and if a Union Budget offered the right kind of incentives, stakeholders in India, too, could dramatically improve social infrastructure. Just in case you are interested in what the Khao aur Khilao Budget suggested, please visit www.businessandeconomy.org/09072009/storyd.asp?sid=4485&pageno=1.

Having digressed a little, let me come now to the theme and headline of my Alternative Budget this year. It is called A Budget for Three Idiots. You guessed it.

It has been inspired by the iconoclastic movie that revealed how hollow our education system is. It also offered us hope and redemption. And it told us poignantly that the biggest challenge for India in the 21st century is to transform its education system. The quotes that appear right at the top of this write-up tell me that thinkers and philosophers throughout history have consistently argued that a society, a nation or a civilisation simply cannot survive – far from flourish – without the right kind of education. Aristotle mused about the power of education to sustain an Empire more than 2,000 years ago. And in the 20th century, George Orwell, the author of timeless classics like Animal Farm and 1984 highlighted the importance of education in an equally compelling manner.

Of course, you don’t need to be a philosopher to understand the value and power of education to make or alternatively mar the future of India in the 21st century. And the way things are going at the moment, only the naïve will believe that India is on the cusp of an era where it will reap the much talked about ‘demographic dividend’. Just a few days ago, the international body UNESCO released a report called ‘Education for All Development Index’. It tracks the progress made by various nations on the key Millennium Development Goals of achieving universal education by 2015 from 1999 to 2007. The results in the report are sobering, if not disturbing for those who keep prattling childishly about India’s demographic dividend. The rank given to India is 105, below Bhutan, Zambia, Vietnam and Ghana to name just a few. That is not really surprising since India is consistently ranked pathetically when it comes to human development indicators; and justifiably so. More disturbing are results buried in some tables in the 300-plus page report. A staggering 49 per cent of the children drop out of school before they reach elementary level. And before you start talking about some sinister western conspiracy to show India in a poor light, please remember that the report is based on government released statistics.

Let me present some data in a different way to puncture this triumphal talk about India’s demographic dividend. The total number of illiterates in India (as per the official definition of literacy) is more than the combined population of England, France, Germany, Italy Spain, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, South Korea and Japan. If you take a more realistic definition of literacy, the number of illiterates in India would be more than the entire population of the whole of Europe. Each year, the number of children in primary school who drop out altogether is more than the population of Australia. Each year, the number of Indian children who fail to go beyond class V is more than the population of South Korea. Each year, the number of Indian children who cannot cross the secondary school barrier is more than the population of Japan. Look at it in another way; the number of illiterates in India is more than the population of India in 1947, when Jawaharlal Nehru sought to make a tryst with destiny. What’s more, the number of places of worship currently stands at 2.4 million, whereas the number of places for education stands at 1.5 million! I am sure that things would not have improved since 2000, when the Planning Commission reported that almost 44 per cent of all workers were illiterate and some 22.7 per cent had done schooling till primary level! One would be really optimistic to talk about the demographic dividend in the face of such humiliatingly distressing data. And unless a drastic overhaul is launched right away, hundreds of millions of young Indians will be condemned to live on the margins by the beginning of next decade; and India will be condemned to remain a third rate power!

That brings me back to the Budget for Three Idiots. If things are as bad as they seem, how can Indians like me have even an iota of hope for the future? Actually we can, and we should. Every crisis is an opportunity, as they say, and this could be a game-changing opportunity for the Finance Minister. Often, the right set of people under the right leadership at the right time trigger changes that can have seismic impacts. It needed a Rajiv Gandhi in the 1980s to rope in Sam Pitroda from the United States to launch technology missions that could change India. Pitroda faced insurmountable challenges from vested interests and even quit in a huff. But it was his team at C-Dot that had sown the seeds of the telecom revolution that is sweeping across India. In 1991, on the verge of defaulting on its debt obligations, a shaky Congress regime under P. V. Narashima Rao made Manmohan Singh the Finance Minister and gave him a mandate to dismantle the license permit raj and unleash the entrepreneurial spirits of India. The results are there for you and me to see and marvel at. The current regime – the second term of the UPA – has a similar mix of people who can deliver change. In a stroke of inspirational genius, UPA Chairperson Sonia Gandhi and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh have made Kapil Sibal the Union HRD Minister. And with a pragmatic, seasoned and wise Pranab Mukherjee as the Union Finance Minister, one can definitely be hopeful.

For most of the past 20 years or so, the Arjun Singhs of India have been HRD ministers. And both you and I know what they did with and to the education system in India – running patronage networks that were doling out deemed university status to fly-by-night operators as if there was no tomorrow. As against that, just recently, Mr Sibal outlined his vision as the HRD Minister in an exclusive write up for The Sunday Indian dated February 7, 2010 (you can read his exclusive write up at www.thesundayindian.com). Quite clearly, Kapil Sibal has the mandate from Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh to play game-changer. And in Pranab Mukherjee, he has an ally who can come out with the right mix of policy instruments and initiatives in his Union Budget. There is another fact I must not forget to point out. The UPA has appointed the same Sam Pitroda (the man behind the telecom revolution in India) as the Chairman of a newly formed Knowledge Commission. Predictably, he and the Knowledge Commission have been persistently hamstrung, criticised and sabotaged by vested interests. It is time now for Kapil Sibal and Pranab Mukherjee to examine and implement the proposals that have been suggested by the body in tandem.

And now for a Budget for Three Idiots. Who are the ‘Three Idiots’ who will play the key roles in this transformational exercise? The stakeholders, of course. The first set of ‘idiots’ would be the students (and their parents) who can actually help India reap the demographic dividend in the next two decades. The second set of ‘idiots’ would be the teachers and administrators, whose job is to ensure that Indian children and youth get the kind of education and skills that will make them human resource assets in the 21st century. The third set of ‘idiots’ would be the regulators whose job is to ensure that schools, colleges and universities – both in the public and the private sector – deliver the kind of education and skills that India needs in the future. As Finance Minister, Pranab Mukherjee can partner with his colleague Kapil Sibal and implement a set of bold policy initiatives that will simultaneously target all the ‘three idiots’. Piecemeal efforts targeted at one set of ‘idiots’ have been tried in the past. But clearly, they have failed. That is why the school dropout ratio remains so alarmingly high despite schemes like Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan and Midday Meals. The basic problem is, the latter two sets of ‘idiots’ simply haven’t been doing their jobs, leading to untold misery for the first set of ‘idiots,’ which is the students and their parents. Quite simply, in most cases in India, the teachers don’t teach and the regulators don’t regulate. As per reports, there is an estimated shortage of around 25 lakh teachers! Worse, the State has been perpetually reluctant and has been suicidal in withdrawing from its most fundamental duty – of imparting primary education.

So the Budget for Three Idiots should start with the basics and keep it simple. Though accurate data will be available after the actual Budget is presented on February 26, 2010, the government will spend approximately Rs.25,000 crore on Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan and the Midday Meal scheme. In consultation with Kapil Sibal, the Finance Minister must quadruple the allocation to Rs.100,000 crores. You think that is too much? Think again. The National University of Educational Panning & Administration conducted a survey of 1.1 million primary and upper primary schools across 604 districts of India in 2007. The survey found that close to 100,000 such schools did not have a single functional classroom. About 14% of such schools in urban areas and more than 9% of schools in rural areas did not have any classroom. Another 100,000 schools were in desperate need of urgent repairs and were literally crumbling apart. How do you expect children to come to schools and get even a semblance of education without classrooms – forget about libraries, laboratories and toilets? And where would the midday meals be cooked and where would the children eat those meals? As such, our budgetary allocation on education, as a percentage of GDP, is a meagre 3 per cent, whereas for a nation like Cuba, it is around 18per cent; clearly indicating the priority they attach to education as a whole.

The Finance Minister can tweak the crucial NREGA and make it mandatory for the funds to be utilised for productive assets like durable buildings and classrooms for the more than 1 million primary schools in India. Not only will at least one member of a poor family get 100 days of employment; but children of such families can then hope to go to functional schools with physical infrastructure. This is not a complicated policy initiative; but it will be game-changing. Functional schools with physical infrastructure will ensure that future generations of children will have access to schools, while their parents have earned a livelihood constructing those same schools. In effect, the actual allocation for Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan and Midday Meal schemes will not be Rs.100,000 crores, as a large part of NREGA funds will be utilized for this. More importantly, since parents will understand that the very future of their children lies in those modest buildings, they will gladly take all help they can from activists to ensure that corrupt contractors do not cheat their children. It will be a classically win-win policy, even with the notorious corruption that is associated with the implementation of such schemes. The same model can be subsequently implemented for secondary schools too, where the problem is even more acute (as per World Bank, gross enrollment ratio in secondary education is lower than world average, even less then East Asia and Latin America) with the same transformational results – a classic mix of NREGA with Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan.

Now that the first set of ‘idiots’ have a school to go to, the challenge is to make teachers and principals actually work in those schools. One huge and persistent problem has been the tendency of teachers and principals to simply not show up at schools. The best and most innovative way to tackle this is to use the same NREGA and Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan funds to implement a carrot and stick policy. The Finance Minister should announce a cash incentive of Rs.1 lakh for teachers who deliver the best ‘pass’ and ‘student retention’ ratios in their classrooms. Similarly, an incentive of Rs.2 lakh should be announced for principals whose schools deliver the best ‘pass’ and ‘student retention’ results. There are about 4 million such school teachers and principals in India. Even if only one in 10 gets that kind of incentive, the total funds spent in a year would not be more than Rs.5,000 crore. And the fact that only one in 10 will get that incentive will make teachers and principals compete to deliver better quality education. And how do you check fudging? Quite simple actually – the incentives would be given only after 5 years of results have been demonstrated, both for primary and secondary schools. So, a teacher would get the incentive only after he or she has successfully steered students from class I through class V. It would be very simple for the UID project being piloted by Nandan Nilekani to keep and monitor the data.

These proposals, implemented through a Budget for Three Idiots, will actually lead towards universal primary education. But then, what will poor students do when they pass out of school and seek education that will help them build a career? Are there enough opportunities and capacities for higher education? Not really. Currently, around 10 million (according to the last report by Ministry of HRD, 2005-06) students apply to colleges every year. And there are only 20,769 colleges in all, and just 490 universities. And mind you, here we are referring to just general education. The situation gets worse when it comes to professional education. The second question is that can these poor students afford higher and professional education, even if the capacities are created? Quite simply, they cannot. The Budget for Three Idiots must increase the allocation for post-matric scholarships by more than 10 times to about Rs. 20,000 crore. This will ensure that no poor student fails to get a decent professional education for want of money. Along with scholarships there should also be a provision for unsecured education loans through banks on relatively low interest rates. Probably India is the only nation in its league, which still offers education loans against collateral security!

And what about the third set of ‘idiots’. I am even more optimistic here because Kapil Sibal has already initiated steps to dismantle corrupt and dysfunctional regulatory bodies like AICTE and UGC with something better, more efficient and transparent. The Finance Minister just has to tweak a little and simply transfer the funds allocated for such bodies to a super regulator that will soon be in place.

Agreed, even though the proposals in this Budget for Three Idiots are simple, they will not be easy to implement because of vested interests. But I think if anyone can do this, it is the current team! And please don’t even think of whining about where the money will come from. I have been saying ad nauseam for almost a decade that abolishing direct and hidden subsidies for the middle class and the rich will easily generate the funds required by a Budget for Three Idiots.

Our education system has been churning out idiots for a few generations. Don’t you think it is time we changed that? All we need is the will to re-orient the existing programs like NREGA and Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan. Really, it could be as simple as that. And India could well be on its way to miracle!

We totally sympathise with Nostradamus, even though quite a few of his predictions have been as close to reality as US is to Venezuela! It is terribly nerve racking and mentally exhausting to predict the future with so much as a reasonable degree of certainty. As times change and newer trends emerge, the world only seems to grow in complexity. Indeed, in 2010, the world could well have a new set of challenges to confront, providing media with new piquant news to broadcast and analyze. But at the IIPM Think Tank, we are unanimous (well, almost!) on the prediction that certain fundamental issues will remain a challenge before policy makers and will continue to dominate the headlines even in the year 2010; irrespective of our aversion to them. Issues like terror atrocities and their perilous impact, human rights violations and the hue and cry associated with them, migration and violence, crime on the roads and domestic violence, disputes for water and last, but certainly not the least; global warming, which will continue to be discussed and debated in ‘mini-Copenhagens’ around the world. Interestingly, the Austin, Texas-based Global Language Monitor has found from its research that the top terms/phrases of the present decade on Internet and media are climate change, 9/11 or War on Terror, Tsunami, refugees/migration, and swine flu.

These issues will remain fundamental to the world even in this year because the severity of their impact is unfortunately quite global in nature. A few statistics will reveal more. There are 56.5 million deaths worldwide each year, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO); 60% of the death toll is because of diseases which are direct or indirect implications of global warming, migration et al. Climate change is to blame for some 150,000 deaths each year; which is estimated to reach 300,000 by 2030, according to the UN health agency. Horrifyingly, domestic violence claims the lives of two women per hour. One incident of domestic violence is reported to the police every minute. Thousands die and millions suffer from terror attacks and atrocities.

And then, media and technology have colluded and made the world much smaller. Local issues take precious little time to grab global attention; especially when we have governments like the one in China to filter news. Still, the globalisation of media has served to remind nations that issues that keep them together are far greater in number than issues that set them apart.

As our think tank was pondering over how these pressing problems were getting tougher to cope with, the first few days of 2010 have supported our fears. The world saw media reporting and broadcasting terror attacks in Pakistan and recently in Kabul, where Taliban has let loose a squad of suicide bombers. A child has been severely beaten, almost to death in a remote school of Maharasthra as more students of Indian origin are brutalised by some Australians. Every day, the media and the intellectual community are blaming global warming for unbearable heat in summer and brazen cold in winter or sudden droughts and floods. Global warming has such an epic fear factor that noted actor Danny Glover managed to blame it for the devastating Haiti earthquake. As all this happens, an accused of Indian origin in a Pakistani prison seeks Obama’s help for his rights. Indeed, there’s a lot in this world that needs to, but hardly changes.