Author: Tavleen Singh
Publication: The Indian Express
Date: May 21, 2006
URL: http://www.indianexpress.com/story/4824.html
First, let us drop the pretense that Mr Arjun
27 per cent was acting on his own when he announced his new quotas. In the
Congress party and the Manmohan Singh Government, nothing, absolutely nothing,
happens without Sonia Gandhi's authorisation. Everyone connected to political
Delhi knows this. Second, let us drop the pretense that the new quotas have
anything to do with education. They do not. They have everything to do with
next year's elections in Uttar Pradesh which, unlike anything you may have
heard about Rae Bareli, are Rahul baba's real political test. Fawning, sycophantic
political commentators have gushed over his having shown himself ready for
a ''bigger role'' by running Mummy's political campaign during her needless
re-election. But this is not true. If he wants to be our next prime minister,
he has to show that he can win back at least his home state for the Congress
party, and to do this he is in direct competition with 'OBC Maharaja' Shri
Mulayam Singh Yadav.
So, some cynical political pundits in the
backrooms of the Congress party came up with the idea of Arjun Singh's announcement
of a 27 per cent quota for Other Backward Class students. Set the country
on fire if this is what it takes to win elections. This has been the Congress
way for a long time, only India has changed and this kind of tactic no longer
works. But Indian education, already a mess, will end up damaged beyond repair
unless public opinion succeeds in defeating political cynicism.
The Prime Minister has set up a committee
of ministers to try and deflect the rage of students, but this is not enough.
We need to use the mess created by his Minister of Human Resources Development
to demand some real changes.
At the top of the list is the need for the
government to free private schools and colleges. The licences and quotas that
prevent a million schools and colleges from blooming across the country must
be removed now. Let them be allowed to decide their fee structures and their
academic needs without petty officials poking their noses into their affairs
at every step. If bad ones come up, they will die their own natural death.
We do not need corrupt officials to interfere on grounds of quotas and permits.
What India needs is the ability to educate the millions of young children
who are deprived of a decent education only because there are not enough good
schools.
Schools in urban India resort to the gratuitous
cruelty of testing the intellectual skills of three-year-olds before admitting
them. If there were enough schools this would not happen. In higher education
scarcities are even more severe and again it is because the government keeps
a tight control on how many colleges can come up, what their fee structures
should be and what they should teach.
The Government needs to concentrate on improving
the abysmal quality of the schools and colleges that it runs and unless we
abolish the HRD Ministry and bring back a full-scale Education Ministry, this
is not going to happen. State schools and colleges provide education of such
abysmal quality that almost no politician or bureaucrat sends his own children
to these institutions. Instead, as was revealed in the Rajya Sabha last week,
nearly Rs 30 crore of taxpayers' money has been spent on the Sanskriti school
in Delhi which was built to accommodate the children of bureaucrats and politicians.
It first drew attention when Atal Behari Vajpayee sent his granddaughter there.
Why should she not have been sent to a neighbourhood municipal school? Where
do the grandchildren of Arjun Singh and Sonia Gandhi study? Unless the state
stops its interference in private schools we must demand that their children
and grandchildren be forced to attend only state schools.
If the state agrees to stay out of private
education let it reserve as many seats as it wants to in its own schools and
colleges. Let it discover, as I did in a Gujarati village last week, that
in rural India people are not even sure what an OBC is. In the village I visited
I asked which castes would qualify for the new quota and they said Adivasis
and Dalits. When I told them they already had their own quota they looked
puzzled and said, ''We don't have any other backward castes in this village.''
When the 27 per cent quota starts being implemented,
though, we might find that everyone is suddenly an OBC. At a time when caste
divisions even in the darkest depths of rural India are beginning to weaken
whoever thought this one up has some really bad karma coming his way.
