"The prospects of participatory growth in India and India's ability to make good use of the opportunities of integration with the world market are significantly compromised by the extraordinary backwardness of basic education in this country."
- Dr. Amartya Sen, "Radical Needs & Moderate Reforms"
Read the above line and think for a second of the lie we have been living in for so many years. Economic integration is a topic that we have heard thousands of politicians, policy-makers and other commentators talk about, and indeed, the scope and range of economic reform is one of the most widely debated topics in this country.
Before I begin to expand on this, I am very glad I am in this course called Social Development and Social policy, but at the same time, I am also very distraught, because it is telling me essentially what I have heard a thousand times and do not want to hear again - India seems to have gotten nowhere since 1947.
Often politicians and other people in power blame the markets for its tendency to benefit only a small fraction of the population, and for this reason, they believe, it is bad and must be restricted. Now read the line by Dr. Sen again and think - it is not as much the ability of a market driven economy to reach out to the population, but the inability of the population to grasp it for any tangible benefits. Now that this simple intuitional fact has dawned on me, the examples are so apparent. What good is a computer to a person who can't read or write. How will a newspaper benefit anybody who can only see black characters on a sheet of paper, unable to comprehend the weight, the context those words carry?
I have heard of this conspiracy theory many times - the decision makers of this country want the people to be poor and illiterate and poor so they can continue milking this country of its wealth and rob it of its opportunities. This sounds very far fetched and extremist no doubt, but what if it is true - the politicians of this country are now lambasting the free market for being exclusive to hide their own failure in making most of the citizens of this country capable of benefiting from it?
If UP were a country on its own, it would be at the bottom of the world's human development indexes. The state that spearheaded the first War of Independence, the state that had great institutions of learnings, the state that is at the center of Hinduism, one of this nation's most important food bowls is now a land that is stuck in time. UP has effectively stopped growing socially, it seems to me.
Muslim communities in the state refuse to give polio vaccine to their children because they believe it is a government conspiracy of population control, he great universities at the time of independence, such as Allahabad, Lucknow, AMU, BHU, etc have been overtaken by more technologically savvy universities while they remain imbued in student politics, and all across the state, there is a steady fall in the quality of life - be it in education, healthcare, law and order and nothing seems to be working.
Governments have come and gone, and this time when UP voted in Mayawati with absolute majority, as she rode to victory with a toned down Dalit rhetoric, I actually felt for a few seconds that maybe she might do good. She did good alright - but only for the artists who created the hundreds of statues of herself and her mentor all across the state, and defiling the once beautiful city of Lucknow with her likenesses in stone.
The reason I cry is because UP is India, and India is UP. It does not matter if people are divided, or being divided, into castes or into regional groups or into religions, the fact is that they are taking a step backward from a better life. The saddest part is that we all have forgotten what we started towards in 1947. Today nobody remembers the real ends of everything we do. The statistics that are presented today to show our education levels, our nutrition levels and hundreds of other indexes seem to have become an end in themselves. We rejoice when the stock markets reach many thousand points, or there is a percentage increase in a social index, but we forget what it actually means for our society and for our country.
I think our leadership has conveniently moved onto issues that do not affect this country tangibly because it is incapable of tacking the real issues of development - most importantly basic education, healthcare, housing and nutrition. But no matter how much our leadship may convince itself, and the rest of us, everything else was, and will remain secondary, and India will remain the poor country it is.
