Author: Tavleen Singh
Publication: The Indian Express
Date: August 18, 2008
URL: http://www.indianexpress.com/story/349709.html
As always I woke early on Independence Day
to hear the Prime Minister speak. I listened carefully as he reiterated that
the priorities of his government in the past four years, its 'seven sutras',
had been agriculture, water, education, healthcare, employment, urban renewal
and infrastructure. I wondered if he noticed that this could be a list of
his biggest failures. If his government had succeeded in making 'common minimum'
improvements in the areas he listed, India would not look as bad as it does
when cruel people compare us to China. What more proof of difference is needed
than the fit of national hysteria when we won our first gold medal at the
Olympics while China makes no fuss about winning the most gold medals at the
games. Personally, I found the hysterics over Abhinav Bindra's medal deeply
shaming. Why do we behave in this appalling way? Because we remain a Third
World third-rate country and the main reason is the failure of successive
Indian governments to deliver on the Prime Minister's seven sutras.
The day before his speech I drove down the
national highway that goes from Mumbai to Goa. I suggest that the Prime Minister
or one of his trusted aides drive down one of our national highways as a reality
check on the seven sutras. The 'national highway' to Panjim was so bad that
there were moments when my car seemed to be climbing in and out of shallow
craters. These were mega-mega holes, hence my hesitation to use the word pothole.
This was a small problem compared to the jam of articulated lorries that I
got stuck in for more than an hour. The lorries were the only 21st century
thing on this highway and they were forced to move like bullock carts because
the road was so hopelessly inadequate.
The hideous urban slums and villages I passed
bore powerful testimony to the failure of 'urban renewal' and the Prime Minister's
'new deal to rural India'. These changes have not happened at all. If they
had, Mumbai's outer suburbs would not look like hovels swimming in a sea of
garbage and our filthy villages would not look like settlements that should
be prohibited for human habitation. Clean water Prime Minister? What are you
talking about? When did you last spend a night in a village? Check with Rahul-baba
who may have learned from his poverty safari that even the poorest of the
poor buy bottled water in our urban slums because of the failure of Government
to deliver this most fundamental human need.
The key to change in the view of your ever
humble columnist is compulsory primary education and common, minimum standards
of public healthcare. Unless we achieve drastic changes in these two areas
we can forget about India ever catching up with the rest of the world. Education
and healthcare are state subjects, but if the PM had created a task force
to provide us with new effective models of primary education and primary healthcare,
there is no reason why state governments would refuse to accept them.
The Prime Minister's old friend, Amartya Sen,
put it more eloquently than I can when he said in a recent lecture in Delhi
that malnutrition and the absence of healthcare and education for the poor
were 'momentous manifestations of severe injustice' in India. The situation
is so bad that in the week of Independence Day a Mumbai newspaper carried
heartbreaking pictures of starving children in a city suburb. Their father
was quoted as saying that he could only afford to feed them on a day that
he earned at least Rs 50. This happened no more than four times a week.
What is the point of our economy growing at
9 per cent annually for four years, as the Prime Minister proudly said in
his speech, if we cannot deal with our basic problems? The Prime Minister
is an economist so he should be able to explain why his government has done
just as badly as those that went before. The only favour he did us in his
speech was that by mentioning his seven sutras he reminded us of the things
he did not manage to do. In his last few months as Prime Minister if he could
just set in motion the process of making primary education compulsory he will
be remembered with gratitude by future generations of Indians. Unless every
Indian child is forced to go to school for at least long enough to learn how
to read and write the future looks grim. Compulsory primary education shifts
the responsibility onto the state. It will be forced to build those schools
and with them will come playing fields without which there can be no gold
medals.