Is there anything called pure education?

Education standards as such can’t do much to improve the standards of living or the quality of living. For the later virtues we have to search for salvation, not in education but in economics and culture. Here in a perceptive review of an education report just published in the UK, the author examines education reforming. And comes to the inevitable but sad conclusion that no prodding of children or parents to go (or send their children) into schools would do.

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Microcredit gets  the  Nobel Prize! Will micro enterprises in agriculture gets recognition?  If the leadership motivates the people at the grass roots, there would be tremendous response.

The Nobel Prize for Peace had justifiably  been given to the Bangladeshi economist and  innovative entrepreneur Prof.Mohammed Yunus for his  justly famous micro credit innovative business model and his Grameen Bank. This is a badly needed recognition in a field like micro credit which by any stretch of imagination no one in India would have thought to deserve such a high recognition.

In India, we need to replicate the micro credit model for agriculture sector so that that the much talk about failure of the agri sector to perform can be partially reversed. The 11th Plan draft talks of agriculture as the most critical sector. But the PM’s remarks are lacklusture. He doesn’t seem to recognize the gravity of the situation. Agriculture sector would undo his government’s otherwise more credible achievements.

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Putting agriculture  as “one of the central elements” of the  Plan  would be a challenge.  The 11th Plan is to start from April 1,2007. The next General Election is due in 2009. So, the 11th Plan document is both politics and economics! Readers can draw their own conclusions! Populist language abound in the document, at the same time we get the usual percentages debate!

The full meeting of the Planning Commission had discussed the 11th Plan draft. The goals are all fine, a progressive rise in the rate of economic growth. The growth has to be inclusive, every segment of the economy and society must benefit.  The Commission’s proceedings as briefed by Ahluwalia were rather routine and dull in the sense it covered the subject of planning process in so many separate compartments like finding resources etc. The usual ego clashes between the Finance Minister and Ahluwalia over whether to implement the fiscal responsibility bill etc were just as routine. So, were the PM’s usual non-committing remarks like making more credit accessible by farmers, by bringing in micro finance, regulating the private money lenders in the rural areas etc. These are all extremely complicated issues.

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Has the government any clear vision?

Let the government at least now onwards say clearly that the one common goal before Indian agriculture is to achieve food self sufficiency alone, before any other things are talked about. There has been of late much concern about the poor growth rate in agriculture. This has baffled everybody, the government and the experts.

Once you become dependent upon imported food then you get these uncomfortable situations. India has had a lot of experience in this food import business. That is one reason why so much emphasis is put on the national goal of food self sufficiency. But unfortunately, of late, under the present regime somehow the food situation had got out of control. There is no point in blaming anybody. It doesn’t help matters clarified. On the contrary, it only helps the really guilty to get away. We feel everyone who is claiming to speak for the farmers or food policy strategies must share the blame.

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Something somewhere has gone wrong! Farmer’s interests to be safeguarded first. SEZs are now the buzzword that had created almost an earthquake of sorts! Everyone who is anyone in the government or outside in the corporate sector is pitiching for vast acres of land, prime agricultural land in most cases for what seems to be a still undebated case for creating so many SEZs!

What has caused genuine concern is the fact that there has been a flood of sorts in “grabbing” so many SEZs. All over the world there are only 400  SEZs and China has only 6, India has already crossed 200 approvals within a year, 48 of them in Maharashtra alone. Given the sort of controversies the SEZs has created and the involvement of companies like Reliance, there is reason to think that something somewhere has gone wrong.

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Truth seekers defy conventional wisdom!

Truth seekers are two kinds. Those who advance knowledge and those who advance our morality! Truth seekers are the most god-given people. Or, the chosen people, we can say without any religious overtones!

Just now I read about Francis Bacon, the founder of modern science. Born on January 22, 1561, he was many things, politician, lawyer, and a brilliant essayist and moralist. After an adversity that saw him with lot of time and he devoted his time to do well. This for Bacon meant to promoting science. Though success in this enterprise didn’t come in his lifetime, he inspired many with his dream of improving the lot of mankind by scientific method. He found followers all over the Western world; consider the times, the 16th century and yet here we find Bacon questioning the philosophy taught in his time, the old scholastic philosophy. It was tied to theology, taught by Christian clerics; it was a Christian view of life. He sought to understand the universe, as Newton did later and he sought scientific evidence to the existence of God.

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How Winston Churchill was denied a unanimous honor by the famous Oxford Union Debating Society!

Street fighting years

An autobiography of the Sixties-by Tariq Ali,PP 381,2006,Seagull,Kolkatta

This is by any account a great book. A book that is youth idealism personified. Tariq Ali, the author was a sort of hero to my own generation in England. He was just two years junior to me, if I can say so, in Oxford. In Oxford he took everyone by surprise by getting elected as the President of the famous Oxford Union (Oxford Debating Society, a great honor for any Youngman and young woman (Benazir Bhutto followed him as the first, I think, Pakistani woman student to get that honor). Yes, Benazir made it to the Prime Minister of Pakistan. Tariq was equally capable, in fact might be more capable but he was cast in a very different mould, in a heroic mould. He came from well off family and could have followed the usual Oxbridge bourgeois tradition of kushy government job, could have been ended as the top man in Pakistan. But he didn’t.

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Yet, the Indian mindset, our mentality remains the same!

Large scale Indian migrant population today.

Large scale racist, religious abroad, violence against fellow Indians in the Indian states!

Has the dominant Indian mindset changed?

A caste society might become progressively a class society?

Indians seem to be living blissfully unaware of the world outside, also the country inside. There is violence, racist attacks against Indian students, across the global arena where the Indians these days are jealous migrants!

Inside India, our selfish political locals has crafted a political culture of exclusion,anti-North,anti-Hindi,anti-Brahmin(TN),anti-Biharis(Maharashtra),anti-”foreigners” as ULFA does in Assam. So, where is India in all these chauvinistic politics, this fascist mindset? So, what Indian mindset we are witnessing or aspiring for? Who can ask such questions? Who can answer such questions either? So, every one of us seem to be living for ourselves, our families, building our own little dynasties?

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Private schools vs. Govt schools

Rich schools vs. poor schools

English medium schools vs. mother tongue schools

School education defines a country’s unique strengths and character! Teachers’ lives these days have become socially downgraded, poor pay, poor motivation and insecure future!

Indian schools system must become internationally rated. Like the English and French schools. Towards this end our curricular reform is important, more so our educators mindset to deschool the formal system we have inherited from the past. The Indian middle classes, in the past and now in the present, shaped our educational beliefs and also ruined our Indian mindset by creating a cringing society of submissive class. The bureaucratic class. The unquestioning mindset. That is the dominant Indian mindset. So, we don’t see any merit in tinkering with the current curricula content where we don’t change the mindset.

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