Bharati Thakore interviewed Amrish Patel, founder-president of the Shirpur Education Society, chancellor, NMIMS University and president SVKM trust, in Shirpur. Excerpts: During the past almost seven decades since independence, several rural development and regeneration movements have been started but have achieved limited success. Among them Operation Flood started by Dr. Verghese Kurien in the 1970s in rural Gujarat, the Shetkari Sanghathana movement begun by the late World Bank economist and farmers’ leader Sharad Joshi, Bunker Roy’s Barefoot College, Anna Hazare in Ralegan Siddhi. Why have none of these movements captured the public imagination and spread countrywide? What Dr. Kurien did was remarkable and I don’t think anyone can match the achievement of Operation Flood which transformed milk-deficient India into the world’s largest producer of milk within two decades. The movement worked because he got the support of the milk producers of Kaira district and Anand town. Some governments and cooperatives across the country did succeed in replicating it in some other parts of the country. The Amul/Anand model didn’t succeed in horticulture and oilseeds because state governments couldn’t support it, and there was no one of Dr. Kurien’s stature and vision to carry his mission forward after he passed away. Transforming rural India requires sustained education of farmers, organisational effort, infusion of technology and creation of rural-urban linkages. One person cannot do this for the whole country. Others have to be enthused by the model and replicate it as happened in the case of Operation Flood and the Amul model. Continuous under-investment in rural India by the Central and state governments, lack of rural leadership, commitment, under-investment in public education, teacher absenteeism, and poor quality government schools have stifled growth and productivity in rural India. The original mistake was adoption of the Soviet-inspired centrally planned economic development model which sucked away rural savings for investment into a capital intensive public sector, neglecting agriculture, rural development and social sectors. What’s your comment? I’m not familiar with the Soviet development model. But I believe that right from early 1950s, our Central planners should have allocated maximum investment to agriculture and education for India to succeed. Unfortunately, this mistake has been uncorrected for the past seven decades. Even today, the Central and most state governments are perpetuating this error by giving low priority to human resource development and investment in the agricultural sector, with disproportionate focus on urban development. Yet the plain truth is that no country has attained developed nation status without investing 6-8 percent of GDP in education, especially primary-secondary and skills education. Against this background, you have engineered the education-driven Shirpur Education Society (SES) rural development model in Shirpur. What are its distinguishing features? The distinguishing feature of the SES model, which has brought prosperity to this region, is focus on education and irrigation. Over the past three decades, we have established 85 education institutions including 77 primary-secondary schools and eight higher education institutions in Shirpur that are qualitatively comparable to the best in Nasik or Pune. We have developed…
