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Destroying the Country from Within

By Atanu Dey in Deeshaa: Destroying the Country from Within

This is a rant. Displaying equanimity in the face of adversity is an admirable quality. I am afraid that there are times when one has to give vent to one's true feelings and come out openly and call a steaming pile of excrement a steaming pile of excrement without mincing words. I am refering to the recent Supreme Court decision to support the reduction of fees for the IIMs from Rs 1.5 lakhs to Rs 30,000.

Today's Times of India editorial calls it a senseless subsidy. Nicely put but surely it would be more accurate to call the worthies of the SC a bunch of retarded asinine lobotomized cretins. If those idiots who sit on judgement on matters of the utmost importance cannot understand elementary reasoning which should be a no-brainer for a primary school dropout, what chance do we have of them ever ruling sensibly on issues which are complex and involved? And if the highest court in the land cannot be trusted to reach somewhat reasonable conclusions, does India have a snowball's hope in hell to pull itself out of the self-imposed abyss of underdevelopment?

India is poor by choice. The policy of subsidizing higher education and neglecting primary education is one such policy choice that has condemned India to being a poor third-world irrelevant nation which has the highest number of impoverished illiterates in the universe.

We are poor by choice. We don't need adverse external shocks to keep us illiterate and poor; India's leaders and its courts will do the job of keeping India a chronically ailing over-populated collective of starving illiterates without any help from abroad.

The importance of primary education cannot be overstated -- ever. No amount of India Shining campaigns can paper over the fact that India is doomed unless it focuses on primary education.

"The worst educated province in China is better than the best educated province in India. Indian universities are better than Chinese universities but more people are in Chinese grade schools than are in Indian grade schools. This will hurt India and you cannot allow this to continue in the long-run. You have a top-down strategy versus the bottom-up strategy that China has. You better have a strategy that gets everybody educated," he says.He praised China's approach of getting everybody educated up to the third grade, then to the sixth grade, tenth grade, twelfth grade and so on. Globalization strategies have to carry the masses with it or they would not succeed. A knowledge based economy is not one where only the elite get educated.

Our education system, our national IT strategies are all deeply elitist. As a country, we need to broadbase our education system and leverage IT for the dispersion of knowledge. Instead, what we have are crumbling schools, absent (and often underpaid) teachers, and students who will emerge completely unprepared for the kowledge economy. And what we have is a thin elite layer that is happily using IT as a milch cow that showers dollars and pays scant attention to how it can be deployed for our country's benefit. India shining? Not unless you are smoking pot!

I really have to thank Atanu for making a realistic case against the court judgement.