JRD Tata had once observed “
I don’t want India to be an economic superpower. I want India to be a happy country.”
Currently, there is the alienation of students from the ground realities of India. In the race to become technologically advanced, we have given no attention to social science and the rural sector. See, everyone knows and has seen the fact that if the rich sell a gun, the poor use it to destroy them. As long as the idea of 'potential resource' is equated to power and control, development will always be about money. Never about people or real social development perhaps. Deep Joshi, Magsaysay prize winner in 2009 points out the fact that
"Development work is considered intellectually inferior, unlike high science, industry or diplomacy. We want to prove that it is both a challenging and a noble choice."
The lack of social scientists is hurting the growth of India. There is a lack of serious study of economics and social science in India. Read
Fractured Social Sciences for a detailed view.
There is a huge lack of awareness among youths about our own country. I once commented in desperation "
When youth do not associate their identity with the social and cultural fabric of their country, nothing is going to change. People from UP do not know about Vijay Tendulkar and people from Tamilnadu do not know about Amrita Preetam. A whole English medium-oriented generation has no idea of the ‘Samporan Kranti’ movement by Jayaprakash Narayan and Ram Manohar Lohia. They will die to see MTV Roadies or Splitsvilla but do not have heard names of Carnatic or Hindustani classic music."
The whole system has failed to equip students with either reasoning, language, or logic skills, this is the effect of putting a premium on mediocrity over the last 60 years. Indians have fallen in love with selectivity. Everyone loves rejecting everyone else. Infosys selects 1% (
link), jobs paying 100 rupees a month claim 5% selectivity (
link), police jobs claim less than 1% selectivity (
link), and becoming a police constable in Bihar implies you belong to the top 0.7% out of 130000 applicants (
link) and the list goes on. Unfortunately, no one asks what the standards of our top institutions are.
Technical growth was the main area of progress along with learning English as a medium of communication. We are ahead in the service sector more due to our efficiency with English rather than technical super skills. What we are waiting for is, for the whole of Africa to learn English and adapt to technology. Then these MNCs will switch their production and services to Africa and the third world for the search of cheap labour and we will become a leading developing country with 100 million consumers and a very tiny contribution to world trade. Our country has turned into a dustbin of MNCs as a country of mass consumption rather than mass production. This growth will not long last if we don't invest this wealth in the production/ manufacturing sector. For example: We need to create tech companies like Google, Microsoft, and Adobe from the generated money through the IT industry.
There is a great paradox of what economist A.K. Shivakumar points out the children of the rich go to public universities and children of the poor go to private money-squeezing institutes. These second-rate institutes turn out second-rate students, condemning the peripheral to further periphery. The lack of scholars from our universities is stagnating our chance to grow as a developed nation.
A blogger correctly pointed out the fact that:
In the humanities, we need a William Dalrymple to teach us about the history of the Deccan, or Delhi. There are many economic and social factors involved in this sad state of affairs, but one of the most prominent of these factors is the utter lack of a vibrant university system fostering unfettered interaction and exchange of ideas among people of widely disparate interests and expertise. All this affects another important part of the higher education system of the country – Graduate School. We are creating more PhDs than any other country in the world with the possible exception of China, but are our PhDs really worth the title of “Doctor of Philosophy”? I am not sure. Are our research institutes producing loads of doctorates who are nothing but highly trained technicians or are we producing leaders and thinkers who can cross boundaries of discipline and think creatively?
Regarding education in the liberal arts, you have to admit there is a certain class element to those who choose to/can pursue serious study in its various fields. For example, someone who is a first-generation college student, i.e. first in his/her family to pursue education beyond high school, would much rather choose a ’safe’ field such as engineering or medicine or aim at clearing the IAS exam, simply because it makes the most economic sense to do so. I would even go so far as to argue that for a country to have a vibrant intellectual environment in the liberal arts, a substantial middle class is a pre-requisite; the liberal arts being a more likely choice of perhaps the 2nd or the 3rd generation college student. Now whether the second or the third generation born in India post the 1991 reforms demands better avenues for education in the liberal arts remains to be seen.
India is and has been a banana republic where organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy. Our populace never felt to be really democratic; it is dishonest, corrupt, and opportunistic. The middle class has degraded to rank money making without ethics, businessmen profit without quality, and at our basic nature in the country, we are becoming aware of rights but unaware of duties. It has eventually led to politicians and bureaucrats who are liars and hypocrites with additional power-hungry nature. The increasing disparities between the rural and urban sector is creating a big vacuum in the development model. The irony is that nobody bothers about the poor anymore or needs a real change. The most basic need is urgent and inexpensive medical care. There are teachers in private schools who don't get even 4,000 a month. And so many other people working in hundreds of other unorganized sectors. A serious illness or an operation in a family is enough to give them a financial jolt for several years. As the vocal middle class has abandoned places like government hospitals and schools, nobody takes up these issues as newspapers and mass media only listen to this class of the software techie, the BPO guy, a businessman, or an IIM graduate. It is this particular section of the urban class, which constitutes less than 5% of the population, that gets disproportionate coverage. Job shredding at the airlines becomes a bigger issue than the mass suicide of farmers in our country.
We as youth are the tools of change. We have to raise voices for our countrymen who are fighting for their survival daily without any representation. And I don’t want to be a product of an environment where only no. of zeroes of your salary will reflect your potential & prestige in relatives and society. The environment of society should be balanced by giving empowerment to women and removing caste discrimination. Dalit, farmers, and women's social empowerment embedded with democratic values can only guide India towards integrated development. How India uses health care, consumes energy, and educates the next generation, the future will be determined. No raindrop blames itself for the flood, we as citizens are that rain drop...
