Little Clear Notes on Indian Education

In India, education is a subject matter of regulation both by the Central government and the state governments. Education providers are both, public as well as private institutions. The predictable result is that richer and urban areas have better schools and that students in these schools have a better chance of going on to high education.

While right to education is a fundamental right and providing education the responsibility of the state, children from economically weaker backgrounds attend separate and entirely unequal state-government schools in the urban areas. In rural areas, where there are no private schools, the rural-rich send their children to the urban elite and private schools while the poor have to make do with schools without adequate physical and human teaching resources.

Access to primary and secondary education was and is unequal. The same inequality continues or rather increases for the post-secondary education.

As per a report of Ministry of HRD, Government of India titled ‘Analysis of Budgeted Expenditure on Education 2013-14 to 2015-16’ Elementary Education accounted for 50.96% of the total expenditure on education in 2015-16, followed by Secondary Education, which was 30%. The share of University & Higher Education and Technical Education was 12.84% and 4.60% respectively.

State universities, for example, educate 65% of students but receive only 45% of the various higher education grants from the states. The perversity of this is seen in this statistic: at the elite schools, students pay only 35 paise of every rupee to fund their education while at the large state universities they pay 55 paise of every rupee. Not surprisingly, the graduation rate for the elite institutions is above 90% while it is below 50% for the other tiers.

Elite state institutions are almost as lavishly funded as the old-line institutions such as BITS. The defence of spending more on these institutions and students is merit, of which, there are two kinds. Both are manufactured.

It is not that these institutions do not turn out good education work. Rather, in the battle for funding, they up their rankings by inviting more and more students to apply for a limited number of spaces – which allows them to prove their elite status by showing the small percent of applicants they actually enrol.

Elite institutions also manufacture their status through their reliance on admissions testing scores or percent cut-offs. India is famous for IIT-JEE or CPMT or CAT. There are a number of studies which prove that such tests miserably fail in predicting how students will do during their first year in the institution.

Anyone and everyone interested in higher education in India may like to read - Odile Henry and Mathieu Ferry, « When Cracking the JEE is not Enough », South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal [Online], 15 | 2017, Online since 22 March 2017, connection on 19 April 2019. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/samaj/4291; DOI : 10.4000/samaj.4291; not because I endorse the views therein, but because there is a point of view.

That we as a nation have created a ‘brahminical’ class of institutions called the IITs and the tier-1’s whose priests seem to control every regulation, every accreditation, every ranking and every policy making body on education, is not a matter of pride but shame that even in the seventh year of its rule, the NDA government is unable to finalise an education policy for the country. On the other hand, the world of knowledge has moved many leaps over these seven years and in all likelihood, India may have an obsolete education policy right on the day it is adopted, if that day ever comes.

(First published 07 June 2020)

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Was It A World War?

Geo-Politics is driven by Geo-Economics. Altering Geo-economics through peacetime efforts takes 30-35 years or consistent efforts of two generations as the Japanese growth and the Chinese growth would show.

Balance of Economics can only be disrupted by Wars. Wars are won by destroying lives and livelihoods. Firepower models of 105 year old and 75 year old World Wars and even the gulf war are obsolete. The modern firepower lies in information-weaponry and bio-weaponry.

There is a school of thought which believes SARS-CoV-2, irrespective of it being a synthetic or a natural virus, is a Chinese enterprise which was nearly always known to the US. Western World, particularly the US has been at cold war with China due to its growing economic might and influence. China purchased western consumption and sold them goods produced in China. These goods were produced by deploying western capital, non-Chinese materials, non-Chinese know-how but Chinese labour. In the process, the west not only shipped its capital but also its jobs to China.

With the cold-war with China heating up, Trump started arm-twisting China. And the day arrived when China pulled the trigger of its information-weaponry and bio-weaponry.

China meticulously exported the SARS-CoV-2 and fed the stories of untold-death from Wuhan and created a world-wide panic bringing nearly every country on their knees.

Since misery sells, media amplified the fictional stories of human suffering in Wuhan from where; the non-Chinese had already fled, lot of them carrying SARS-CoV-2 as accompanied baggage. Trying to make money out of the misery that it had inflicted, China tried selling Tests and PPEs. The disinformation machinery from China provided a noise-byte to the non-ruling politicians to coax their democratic Governments into more testing, more economic disruptions and more social alienation. The fact remains that testing only identifies the prevalence of infection and not the likelihood of death. The real mortality from SARS-CoV-2 is lower than even the recent pandemics. Current data shows – this is a disease of the High and Upper Middle Income, rich Western countries have higher Case Fatality Rate, and Western countries have followed intensive testing in few regions, not across the country.

China has managed to immobilise most national economies and their drivers of growth – oil, power, education, travel and tourism, informal economies, banking, social affinity, cultures and values. In one stroke, China has managed to put EU on ventilator. Not only did it start the World War, China has also achieved the strategic objectives in waging the war and to that extent it has won the war. Like any party in war, China will also have collateral economic damages and costs to bear. But the damage and costs which China has succeeded in inflicting on rest of the world is many fold.

The efforts are now on to exit the war zone and close the war. The irony is that in departure from the past neither China has to announce a unilateral cease fire nor does need to sit and negotiate across the table with anyone to end this war.

Of course, China will face the retaliation and retribution for its war crimes the intensity of which would be determined by the strength and resolve of the losers of this war. Meanwhile China would diplomatically buy or win the support from some of the losers.

https://youtu.be/BTLii-e_UtY

Am I just hallucinating as an effect of lock-down and imagining a war where there is none or is it that I just lived and survived through a war without even noticing it? If it be the latter, than I am an eye-witness who saw nothing of the war,  a war which shall go down in human history as a world war of smallest duration, with minimum casualties but maximum ruin.

(First published 26 April 2020)

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Globalisation: Did We Stretch It Too Far?

Globalisation refers to the integration of markets in the global economy, leading to the increased interconnectedness of national economies.  Markets where globalisation is particularly significant include financial markets, such as capital markets, money and credit markets, and insurance markets, commodity markets, including markets for oil, coffee, tin, and gold, and product markets, such as markets for motor vehicles and consumer electronics. Interconnectedness has also created inter-dependencies. The globalisation of language, media, information, attire, culture, food, sport, entertainment, taboos, behaviour and styles of human interaction is also a feature of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

After years of hedging or discounting the malign effects of free trade, it is time to face facts: globalisation caused job losses and depressed wages, and the usual remedies – such as instructing affected populations to accept the new reality – aren’t going to work. Unless something changed, the political consequences were likely to get worse.

It was only a few decades ago that globalisation was held by many, even by some critics, to be an inevitable, unstoppable force. “Rejecting globalisation,” the American journalist George Packer has written, “was like rejecting the sunrise.”

The decline and fall of the Soviet Union came about not because of any lack of its military might. Rather, it imploded because the West, and specifically the United States, used freedom of thought, capitalism and the enormous power of the free market to marginalize, reduce, and collapse the Soviet Union. They simply couldn't compete on any level with the West. From technology to the quality of life provided for its people, the Soviet Union became a nation without a future. United States has since then been leading a uni-polar world. The US dominance spread far and wide but did not see any interdependence.

China learnt from the Soviet collapse and decided to pursue the goal of global dominance, and become the second of the bi-pole. The first action was managing its domestic affairs. China imposed unprecedented restrictions on its citizens while introducing its version of state-capitalism. This combined thought control with billions in international trade that, in turn, has funded a growing and potent military armed with nuclear weapons. For China's leadership, however, that is still not enough. The United States continues to dominate the 21st century.

Trump was the first US President to acknowledge that globalisation had resulted into hundreds of billions in investment, manufacturing, jobs, and entire factories leaving the United States for China. This created consternation, alarm and quite a bit of anger in Beijing, which had not expected America ever to acknowledge that China benefitted due to US policies and thought. China quickly recognised that if the U.S. continued to demand economic reciprocity, China could easily lose its ability to claim solo superpower status for the remaining decades of the 21st century.

It is not certain that Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known as Lenin, actually said, “The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them,” but if he didn’t, he certainly thought it, and if still around would like to claim that foresight as his own. China's leaders have long believed that America's unsustainable trade imbalance with China is that rope. US have given its technology, its funds and its markets to China and China now has the rope round the US neck. And this has not happen for the first time. Eighty years ago, it was Hitler and Pearl Harbour, and more recently 9/11. US have been attacked using US technology and US funds.

The interconnectedness of the globe and integration of the global-supply-chain of the contagion has been demonstrated by the pan-world spread of Sars-Cov2 virus within a few weeks. Can one ask for any higher efficiency of exchange?

The entire World in general and the US in particular need to revisit the idea of globalisation and reorient it to interconnectedness of national economies minus the public welfare including but not limited to food-safety, national defence, healthcare and national-leadership. Dilution of nation-state which has taken place over the last 3-decades has to make way for a renewed sense of patriotism that will protect our nation today and far into the future. SWAADHYAAY, SWADESHI and SWAAVALAMBAN are the mantras which were never obsolete but forgotten in the allure of ‘wealth-creation’ for ‘shareholders.’

(First published on 09 May 2020 on LinkedIn)

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