Growing pains

In the 61st year of Indian independence, we can with some justifiable pride reflect on the high annual growth rates India has been witnessing for more than 20 years, particularly the spectacular rates achieved in the recent years of the new millennium, hovering around 8-9 per cent of GDP. What makes this achievement even more commendable is the fact that this growth was achieved with a functioning democracy.

However, the failure to make this growth sufficiently inclusive is rapidly leading to a situation where both growth and the sustenance of a healthy democracy are seriously threatened today. A growth which fails to take on board the central demand for education and health of the vast multitudes of the poor (over 300 million today) is not likely to be sustainable either economically or politically.

Nearly 40 per cent of our children do not go to school, which by a definition increasingly accepted globally, means that this percentage are working children, or child labour. This, when many studies have shown that the poor and illiterate see in education their only hope for upward social mobility and the possibility of a life of dignity for their children, a life which they themselves were denied. This also when decades before independence our social reformers and leaders of the national movement including the tallest amongst them, Mahatma Gandhi, had been insisting on the necessity of universal education as one of the steps towards creating a just and equitable society.

Yet it was nearly half a century after independence that the Supreme Court of India in a historic judgment in 1993 admitted the right to education of all children up to age 14 as a fundamental right, a right which was to be made accessible by the state, with no argument of lack of economic capacity being admissible. It appeared the national conscience had finally been aroused. In less than 10 years, (some improvement in speed and a sense of urgency!) the 86th Amendment of the constitution in 2002 made it the responsibility of the state to provide education to all children from age 6 to 14.  However, apart from consigning the fate of children upto age six to the grace of God almighty, the Amendment made the implementation of its provisions contingent upon a law being enacted by the state. Since then the Indian state, irrespective of which government was in power, has reflected its elite character by refusing to introduce the Right to Education Bill in Parliament and get it enacted. It seems that despite the hopes of pro-poor activists in the field, the Bill will yet again not be placed in Parliament in the coming session.

Lack of funds is often cited as a reason for the governments dragging its feet on this question. The ‘shining’, fast-growing India has money for everything else, for swanky malls which create a first world illusion for the yuppies, for modern international airports situated miles away from the city and raised corridors to the heart of the affluent part of the city so that the well-heeled reach their destination without being unpleasantly distracted by the nasty poor, for the mushrooming of numerous air-conditioned ‘international’ schools where the rich send their children in air-conditioned buses to somehow get by till they achieve salvation by going ‘abroad’, but there is no money for a room, a blackboard and a teacher for our poor.

Our poor must make do with government designs of Sarva Shiksha with para-teachers who themselves are yet to finish school providing ‘education’ on salaries lower than that of domestic servants in middle-class mohallas. If even this does not make these ungrateful wretches happy then the government turns social justice on them. It plays caste politics, and reserves seats in IIMs and IITs for certain castes and insists that the creamy layer benefit from it so that their less fortunate brethren, a whopping 40 per cent children of schoolgoing age, who have never been to school or have been chased out of them, and to whom therefore these reservations mean nothing, can feel empowered.

If this situation continues, the state will soon lose legitimacy among millions of its own people. This does not bode well for democracy as people then seek solutions outside the democratic state framework as they are doing in a shockingly large number of Naxal- affected districts. Besides, even economically the current high rates of growth cannot be sustained in a global situation where knowledge is increasingly becoming the key factor of production, with a large illiterate population. India’s much touted ‘demographic dividend’ of having a very large young working age population is of no use if the bulk of it is unfit for even minimally skilled labour.

In this depressing situation, there are rays of hope. Popular movements such as the one  led by the Magsaysay award-winning Shantha Sinha (currently chairperson, National Commission for the Protection of Child Rights) are finding ways of bringing hundreds of thousands of working children back into schools and keeping them there, that too with little or no state support. But that is a story I must tell on another occasion.