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The Government of India is in action mode on educational front. This is the result of the critical realisation that India’s further growth is severely constrained by the short supply of quality human resources. The government of India has responded to the crisis in the field of education and to the need of upgrading and expanding the system of higher education by substantially enhanced allocation for education in the union budget of this fiscal year. The allocation of Rs 34,400 crore for education is 20% more than that of the last year and Rs 3,440 crore for higher education is 17% upside. Even previous budgets had seen steady increases in allocations for higher education – Rs 2.774 crore in 2006-07 and Rs 2,278 crore in 2005-06. This is the recognition of the contribution of education in ensuring higher growth rates in the era of liberalisation. India’s advance to 8 to 9% growth rate was greatly facilitated by the information technology (IT) and the innumerable workers of the IT industry had been prepared by private teaching shops at city markets and street corners. This made people aware of the great potential of education. The IT revolution in this age of liberalisation and globalisation has metamorphosed the global economy and society. It is said we are now ushered in a new age – the knowledge age. In this age, knowledge is not only a critical issue but is concrete capital. Realising the demands of the age, the Government of India constituted the Knowledge Commission headed by Sam Pitroda in 2005. With the same objective, education has been made the main thrust of the 11th Five Year Plan. In this Plan the Commission seeks to allocate Rs 26,000 crore for higher and technical education which is three times more than that provided for in the 10th Plan.

In order to ensure India’s legitimate position in the knowledge age, the Government has embarked on an ambitious plan for the expansion of higher and technical education. The decision to establish 8 new IITs, 7 new IIMs, 30 new Central universities including 14 world class universities, 10 NITs, 3 IISERs, 20 IIITs, 2 SPAs and 370 colleges in the backward districts of the country is in the implementation stage. The Planning Commission is also targeting a gross enrolment ratio of 15 per cent by 2015. In the 10th Five-Year Plan, the ratio was 10 per cent. This would imply the government is looking at enrolling an additional 8-9 million students in higher education by 2015. There are other encouraging developments in the field of higher education. In Orissa, Anil Agarwal Foundation is setting up Vedanta University with the help of the state government. It is going to be a world class university spread on about 10,000 acres of land. Bihar Government is also in the process of setting up an international university at Nalanda. Similarly Mayawati Government has founded Gautam Buddha University at NOIDA. Besides, in the non-governmental sector, the expansion of higher education is anything but phenomenal.

In India the need to expand and improve the quality of higher education is now well recognised and efforts are visible. But without taking stock of the present state of higher education, particularly the factors which ail the system, expansion and other plans are hardly going to deliver. Even now despite increased allocation for education, the total allocation is only around 4% of GDP while it is expected from a developing country to spend at least 6% of its GDP on education. The target to achieve 15% enrolment in higher education is also hardly adequate as for developed countries the ratio is 40 to 50 per cent. All efforts with regard to education are in fact too little and too late. Is this not a painful irony that despite six decades of independence, India’s one-third population is illiterate? And more shameful is the datum that of all the adult illeterates of the world, one-third resides in India. Moreover the effective literacy is far less than the statistical literacy. As far as higher education is concerned, in global rankings only a few institutions like IITs, IIMs, JNU and Delhi University have been started to be included and obviously their placement is near the lower end. In the context of India, the topic of universities producing Nobel laureates and Olympians is irrelevant as these laurels are only a few for all Indians of the present or the past. Many of American universities alone have greater numbers than the whole country, for instance, MIT, Chicago University and Harvard University are credited with 61, 41 and 35 Nobel laureates respectively. In India even a university purely meant for physical education can not boast of a single Olympic medal or even lesser sporting laurel.

After 1991 following economic reforms, growth rate has gone up and so the job opportunities. Presently 8 to 9 per cent growth rate for a number of years has created a peculiar situation. Though India has a large number of educated unemployed but there is a great dearth of employable educated persons. The large numbers of graduates are simply not worth employing. Many of the companies have even to depend on foreign recruits or have to spend a lot to retrain the new recruits. The lesser availability of skilled manpower has made skilled personnel very demanding and they hardly stay in any company for a good period. All these adversely affect the productivity and the cost of production of any industry. In fact the prevailing education system, a creation of colonial masters, is utterly outdated. Even earlier the system had hardly contributed as the development was negligible and now it is proving to be utterly incapable of meeting the demands of the development.

For such a dismal state of affairs in education, ideology was a major factor. The founding leadership of the country had a leftist bent. And logical to the ideology, their decisions and policies were political rather than rational. They hardly cared for cost and benefit dimension of any measure. Nonetheless they established a few exemplary institutions of higher education. The institutions were organised to attain excellence unlike the rest. In the massive desert of mediocrity these institutions were like tiny oases and became the refuge of the better talents of the country who constituted a minuscule minority of the large pool of potential talents; the rest were left to rot. The graduates of these institutions proved their mettle globally primarily because of their own merit and partly because of the education they received in these institutions. Again the tragedy was that the system was not capable of absorbing those graduates and there started a massive brain-drain. The scarce resources of a poor country thus were spent to nurture talents to being appropriated by the developed countries. Little care was shown for the quality of other institutions of learning as that hardly mattered. It was the government which imparted education and also provided most of the jobs. The private sector was controlled by the government and was protected from any competition. Quality in education was a non-issue in such a scenario. However expansion of education continued with growing population and with the advance of time. In the age of globalisation, the shortcomings of the system was bound to become severe handicaps as the quality is now not a matter of choice but an issue of existence. Now there is no place for the second rate or the substandard.

India’s participation in the globalization is not a matter of choice either. No country of the world can afford to be isolated nor is there any wisdom in this. The need of the hour is to ingrain new thinking and initiative in the field of higher education too and take lead and the point here is that establishing a few institutions of excellence is not the answer of the problem. A few more IITs, IIMs and Central universities only make mockery of the massive mediocrity which mark the general educational system. The question also arises, why efforts were not made to make all institutions equally good? Why was the same model not adopted for all like institutions? These questions expose the deception in the egalitarian claims of the ideology of the socialistic pattern of society. Under this scheme a few good things were showcased for display to generate faith in the utopia and divert the attention from the distortions of the dehumanized social realities.

Today the need before or at least along with further expansion is to make the existing educational system functional. Creating new world class institutions is imperative but leaving the existing to languish would be blunder. To let the world class to exist with the low class is hardly rational. A big army of unskilled or unemployable educated youths is a dangerous prospect for any society and to spend public money on a meaningless education system is nothing but a crime. It is true that the state may not have resources to raise all institutions of learning to world class in one go despite the fact that the attainment of excellence is mostly hampered by the lack of imagination and drive than by the lack of resources. However this handicap can easily be overcome by the private participation. The need is to leverage market for education. Education must factor in market in its operations. The so-called private institutions in fact work in the form of trusts or societies on the principle of no loss and no profit. But this is hardly the case; mostly profit alone is the motivation. The hypocrisy must be stopped. The field of education must be open to all. Charities or corporations, all have full opportunity to participate in providing education; the factor should be immaterial whether one treats education as service or business. This should not be forgotten that education is a huge global industry. According a report of the ASSOCHAM, students of India alone spend 13 billion dollars on education abroad. India can easily become a global player in this field provided it musters the will. India should not only allow the foreign universities to set up campuses in India but also should also facilitate Indian institutions to expand beyond national boundaries.

Developments in the field of education indicate that keeping the economic growth or market in focus, technical and management education are being prioritised. This thinking is erroneous. Growth rates to reflect India’s potential and keep material gains aligned with values can hardly be realised without nurturing culture. This cultural aspect is unattainable without massive investments in the fields of humanities and social sciences. Development and education are organically integrated. Without giving social sciences and humanities their due a country can never develop. And development without proper education only brings proportional moral decay and cultural chaos.

Secondly, education can not be improved without making teachers central to the process. Creation of a culture where teachers can fully devote to teaching and research is the first need. What is happening is that teachers of universities and colleges waste most of their energies fighting the scarcity of resources, obstructing rules and bureaucracy. Besides, the processes of recruiting, promoting and giving incentives to teachers are so discrepant that they hardly nurture talent and often demoralise the talented and committed.

The problem of higher education in India is that they have nothing to engage with except their own debilitating problems. And one of the problems is that teachers are paid insufficiently. If you pay peanuts you get monkeys to work, the saying is well-known. Remuneration is never a pull factor for seeking jobs in education, only commitment brings in some worthy souls in the profession. A junior-most executive of a reputed company is paid more than the senior-most in the field of academics. The teachers of universities, colleges and schools are though paid comparably to the class of employees in the government where they are placed in but only from the viewpoint of pay scales. Now the compensations of government employees are estimated on the pattern of cost to company in the case of private sector employees as the cost to government. But this is not a proper method. The government employees enjoy security of job and influence which cannot be accounted in the cost to government estimation. Apart from that, a government employee, even an honest one, extracts a lot of perks and privileges from society, which are not available to a private sector employee. As far as government employees in education are concerned, they are exceptions in this case. On the other hand, from universities to schools, teaching jobs are assigned on the basis of daily wages, part-time or contractual teaching. This worsens the precariousness.

In our country the problem is not only the low compensation for the educational professionals. It is only a smaller part of a big problem. There is a big confusion in the operative thinking of the establishment with regard to the means and the end. They seek an end in the means and often substitute means for the end. Pertinent here is the example that for seeking social justice and welfare they have targeted education including higher education. Here education is not treated as means of welfare or social justice but an end of these goals. Education is not seen as a means for generating skills, employable graduates, leaders of society and expanding the horizons of knowledge but as a sector for employment. Further educational institutions are being replaced from being places where social schisms reduce to irrelevance to places which reflect and sharpen social divisions. Moreover the powers that be treat educational institutions as resources for extending favours and patronage. They invent rules and regulations to interfere in their functioning and keep a tight leash on their operations. This fact is totally overlooked that education is the source of stability, efflorescence and excellence in the society.

The time has come that every Indian must think about the importance, the need for quality enhancement and expansion of standard higher education. The thinking must be free of prejudices and ideological inclinations. The representatives of people must feel that their constituents are really concerned about education and they take up the issue seriously. Ultimately they are the persons who are going to benefit most from India’s growth and prosperity. For India at this stage of development the issue of education has become anyhow critical. In ancient times, India’s attainments in the fields of knowledge and sciences were so glorious that many claim India to be vishvaguru even today. Again after millennia of stupor India is awake to redeem its place in the comity of nations and among civilizations. At this stage, India’s owes to the world to lead it out of its present predicament. India can not afford to escape this responsibility as there in no other civilisation is capable of meeting the crises of humanity. India must provide a moral leadership to the world and it can do this mainly through education. India has initiated to establish world-class educational institution but she needs institutions of their own class in order to lead humanity.

Politics and Politicians in India

When an Indian looks at the political scenario of his/her country, two opposite emotions grip the person simultaneously. First is the overwhelming sense of pride for being a citizen of the biggest democracy - successfully functioning in the most unviable conditions and second is the feeling of disgust. People hopelessly watch the great potential of the country callously being wasted endlessly. This story of missed opportunities and unrealised potentialities is embedded in the nature of political processes of the country. Politics is the most dominant aspect of human life. Politics is something which involves everyone, whether willing or not. And the orientation of any person in a democracy, i.e., his/her understanding and actions which may include even absolute non-understanding and total inaction and the person concerned no matter how marginalised or unconcerned s/he may be, do affect politics greatly. In this sense every person is a participant in politics but by a politician one means a person who is associated with the core of political processes directly, i.e., with governance. This categorisation excludes people manning administration as non-elected government employees. These are people who man the government through elections or contest for the same. They are also the people who mediate between the government and the citizenry excluding those working for trade unions, associations, other interest groups and civil society organisations. They may be freelancers or working through political parties but political parties and electioneering are their main platform and concern respectively.

Politics is largely the management of public affairs in a polity. The politics of a polity depends a lot on its political culture as the actual politics does reflect that culture, particularly in democracies. But the actual politics which does include the inputs from the public and its outcome as policies towards people is largely shaped by these politicians. This may be through acts of commissions as well as acts of omissions. Nonetheless they are the most powerful agents of social dynamics. And the good of all other aspects of social life ultimately depends on their deeds. The wisdom is that politics may not be able to deliver the good, but it is certainly capable of preventing the good. Hence good politics is crucial to the social good and good politicians are needed for good politics.

Politicians in a democracy
In democracies people are at least theoretically masters of their own destinies and they have vital discretion with regard to the politicians. The exercise of this discretion is institutionalised and how do people live largely depends on their exercise of this discretion. The citizens therefore must do a careful scrutiny of the politicians they have and be very discerning about whom they are extending their support to. This discretion on the part of citizens is fundamental in a democracy. Democracies are for all practical purposes representative democracies and these politicians ultimately man the apparatus which stands in the name of ‘by the people, of the people and for the people.’ Ultimately politicians are the persons who represent people or contest to represent them. Hence people must understand their politicians; they must be very watchful of persons who are in politics and who want to be in.

The people’s control over politics, though never substantial in practical conditions, is not important only from the national viewpoint. Today this responsibility has global ramifications and it is to the extent that it involves the very survival of humanity. First as today, economy is global and in this scenario a laidback nation is bound to lose.. On the negative side the global order throws immense challenges too. Today every nation is caught in a peculiar war – a war between global hegemony and its dissenters but this is not a war between good and evil. It’s a war between evils threatening each and every one with their menacing manoeuvres. Today every national of any nation is in the firing line in battles which are waged internationally - very literally as the terror attacks on unsuspecting civilians anywhere in the world have shown.

It is not only the security threat posed by the militaries, militias, terrorists and others like drug traffickers or diseases such as AIDS or natural scourges, there is another threat which is more ominous. It is the threat of environmental degradation, which has pushed humanity to the brink. Global warming and ozone depletion are threatening the very survival of humanity. Today every human inhabitant of the planet needs to think very seriously about how do they want to live together on this planet? This issue has reached a level where the option of survival is really getting tougher with ecological imbalances becoming severer day by day.

Environmental problems are after all manmade problems and can be resolved through human actions. It is ultimately politics which have almost all levers of societal engine under its control and all problems ultimately need political resolution. Thus for the sake of survival and for living better, every human being must be dead serious of politics as this is a question of life and death, not only of individual persons but of the whole humanity, very literally. And the question of politics inevitably involves politicians.

In the context of India, this issue has become more pertinent as she is growingly getting integrated into the global economy and it cannot avoid its expanded role in international politics. Even otherwise, greater responsibilities beckon her for being the biggest democracy covering the one-fifth of the humanity. India’s recent strides in economy and phenomenal successes of her business leaders have engendered hope and confirm India’s great potentials. So that India can fulfil its responsibilities and realise its potential substantially, she needs nothing more than men and women of substance in politics. This is not going to happen on its own. Citizens therefore need to exercise their faculties and act sagaciously. This demands an understanding of politicians and their ilk.

The class of professional politicians
Indian democracy is generally run by a class of professional politicians. Their main, whole time occupation is politics. They seem to be quite normal and even inevitable. But their existence is not functional to democratic processes. This is antithetical to the spirit of representative democracy. Representations are always of interests. The representative democracy is true to its nature and purpose only when people from different walks of life become members of legislatures and political executives. The democratic politics is/should be open to all peoples. The politics is proper if people of different social backgrounds, education and occupations become active politicians. But the existence of a class of professional politicians indicates that the political system, particularly the system of governance has its own interests distinct form the interests of the citizens and their groups. In this situation the government is not a system wherein interests of different sections of society and of nation as a whole are placed, articulated, adjusted and pursued but the government has its own interests which are actually the interests of its personnel, elected or selected, which undercut the interests of all other sections of society. The government does not remain an agency for the general good but becomes an entity by itself. If the nature of government is such, a very powerful class of professional politicians is bound to emerge. They instead of serving the people lord over the masses and amass enormous riches by virtue of being in and around the government. In a truly democratic regime, public spirited persons and persons of eminence would have been needed to be persuaded to assume government offices and this would have been quite a temporary assignment for them. At more mundane level, various associations would have been cajoling one of their members to fight elections to espouse their interests in the governmental decision making processes. These are possibilities of an ideal situation which perhaps exists nowhere in the world but the size of the class of professional politicians and the degree of their predominance are proportionate to the power of government at the cost of the general good.

Good politics can easily be identified by knowing the politicians. In good politics, academicians, public intellectuals, true trade union leaders, business leaders, genuine farmers, professionals, social workers and for that matter any public spirited person would be getting in and out as per the requirements of their own occupations and their commitment to the public good. But who do dominate Indian politics today? Who are the professional politicians? For most of them, politics is a life time occupation which is also inheritable to the family members. Politics is a family or clan occupation. Their declared occupations may be anything but they are only meant to be cover-ups and used for parking ill-gotten money. These politicians do germinate from social movements, trade union politics and students’ politics etc and these are very legitimate mode of entry into professional politics. But mostly such politicians are feudal landlords, contractors, local bullies, dons and ex-personnel of bureaucracy, entertainers, shady businesspersons etc. Once any person who establishes himself as a politician, whatever may be his background, he becomes the founder of a dynasty and politics henceforth becomes the main occupation of his family. Such powerful political families behave kingly and even their relatives, regents and retainers are awarded with political posts and favours as rewards of loyalties.

Even apparently legitimate looking routes to political career via social movements, students’ politics and trade union movements are not assuring. Often social movements are guided by regional chauvinism, primordial values and parochialism. Mostly their mooring are retrograde and orientations anti-civic. The thin line often blurs between caste and community leaders on one hand and criminals on the other. True trade-unionism has perhaps yet to take roots in India. Mostly trade union leaders are politicians and fixers. They have least to do with the trade which they seek to espouse. Trade unions are mostly extended arms of political parties and are meant to benefit the political class rather than workers and professionals. Student’s politics is one area from where larger numbers graduate to active politics but the interference of political parties makes student politics pernicious like the mainstream politics.

In contrast, politics as family profession is a very attractive proposition. Mostly they are highly educated. Their top class upbringing and family name offer them immense influence and access. Such politicians inherit the political position and clout from their families. But their apparent demeanour is misleading. Today’s young generation of politicians of this variety shows the political moorings and orientations of this category of politicians. They are not young Turks – vociferous, impatient and seething with angst, as youths as they are expected to be. The present younger lot is suave, articulate and well versed in the rules of the game. They can outwit and beat any of the old guards in sycophancy, one-upmanship, primordial appeal, patron-client politics and penchant for good things of life.

The culture of the class of professional politicians
It is primarily the nature of governance which breeds this class of professional politicians. In India, the government is an all powerful organisation. The organisation is a cross product of medieval feudalism and modern colonialism and is entrusted to be ‘the emancipator of the wretched masses’ as ‘the vanguard of social revolution’ in independent India. Such governance positions their functionaries as masters and emancipators. It is highly gratifying and rewarding to be a government functionary and to be at the highest level ensures unquestioned mastery over people and untold riches. This situation has germinated a powerful group of vested interests who by all means stick to the governmental apparatus. They are neither the people who are moved by the spirit of public service nor they are persons who are persuaded by the public to represent them. Rather they employ all means mostly retrograde to be in the helms of governmental affairs.

Such behaviour of the political class is testified by the nature of political parties. The political parties in India are hardly public platforms for political actions. The organisational chain of any party starts from bottom and reach top on the basis of the relationship of patronage and loyalty. The lack of internal democracy in parties is a well known fact. Every organisation has a high command, which is the last voice on any matter of the party. This is not something which is informal and latent but is accepted and proclaimed very openly even by the bigwigs of any party. Parties are in fact contraptions to meet the goals of their leaders. To be more precise, the elite of political class have their own parties to fulfil their personal ambitions. They form, dissolve, split, merge and change parties at their convenience. Many of the political leaders also treat parties as vehicles of their political ambitions. They change parties with the drop of a hat. This is the worst degradation of the party system in a democracy. The parties do not enjoy the level of sanctity from its member which even a smaller firm may enjoy from its stakeholders or any association from its members.

This class of professional politicians and their venal and haughty ways is sustained by the poverty of civic culture. The political class takes all the pains to nurture a subject political culture wherein people do not behave as sovereign citizens but as dependent subjects. They often talk of the deliverance of the damned. This is deceit at its worst; the parasite proclaims to be the guardian of the host. However they often espouse pious sounding but hideous ideas and ideologies – caste pride, community interest, regional identity, lingual superiority, peoples emancipation, nationalist resurgence, social revolution etc. The idea is always to make the citizens lesser citizens and keep them dependent. They never talk of freedom, of full blown citizenry – where everyone, whether in government or outside, are no more or no less than fellow citizens. When politicians say they want to serve, they intend to deceive; when they say they want to emancipate, they mean to enslave; and when they say they are helping, they are in the process of robbing. The professional politician would never say, ‘we should work together for improving our lot.’ The citizens also tow the line as they are confused as a result of the indoctrination by the propaganda apparatus of the state, which includes the whole paraphernalia of education and are afraid of the intimidating coercive arm of the state. At the same time their minds are clogged by centuries of iniquitous existence and they fail to recognise their own dignity and worth.

The outsiders
Apart from this class of professional politicians there are other persons from non-political backgrounds who get in politics or brought into politics. The most noticeable among them are the people from the entertainment world – the leading actors and actresses. They are instant hits in this field too because the people have tremendous tendency of confusing the life on reels with the real life. They also evaluate the worth of an actor by the fictitious roles s/he puppets on payment. This exposes the enormity of the crisis of political culture. At another level, masses too distressed of destitution in real life are fanatical of drama which they witness on screens. They do what looks the best to them – superimpose the drama on the dread of reality.

If the actors are the most noticed players in politics, the antisocial and criminals command the most ominous presence in the Indian democracy. They are quite unworthy of being in democratic processes but they have the wherewithal of being there. They have money, muscle and political patronage to sail through in a system where the rule of law prevails only in the law books. They are in politics because of the failings of politics. The collapse of the criminal justice system, of governance and of the party system makes them flourish and even win respectability. They have even a very humane job on their hands. They are dons – godfathers – who sometimes provide succour to the suffering lot and by their highhandedness make the administration deliver, which command most of the deliverables and is very reluctant to do so.
Besides jesters and lawbreakers, peoples from various other occupations like bureaucracy, professions like law, engineering, journalism and medicine do join politics. But they do not seek to represent their vocational interests or act as vanguards of public interests but they in a forthright manner seek to consolidate their positions in terms of wealth and prestige by having political power. The pursuit of power and power alone brings almost all of them in politics.

Liberalisation, vibrant civil society, decentralisation and far greater expansion of quality education can improve the civic culture. Only with enlightened civic culture the country can get rid of its rogue politicians. But for the time being people must be made to realise that the success of India and Indians depends much on the kind of politicians they can churn out. They must set aside their primordial and selfish loyalties and look for persons who are mentally sound, morally unwavering, intellectually profound and professionally competent to represent them. The politics must have the best persons participating in it. It is shame on the part of Indian citizenry that India despite its rapidly expanding economy and its rising international stature is far away from having a decent class of political leaders and activists. People must mend their political orientations and act as sovereign citizens so that they do not suffer the indignities of being lesser human beings as dependent subjects.