Exactly 17 years ago we launched EducationWorld — The Human Development Magazine with the avowed mission to “build the pressure of public opinion to make education the #1 item on the national agenda”. Quite clearly that mission hasn’t been accomplished because public opinion is insufficiently, if at all, aroused. Therefore, neither the Central nor state governments have pushed public education significantly higher up their socio-economic development agendas.
However, there has been some progress in the direction of attaining our mission statement. EW has made an impact on India’s influential and growing middle class which has welcomed this initiative to raise K-12 and higher education standards to global norms.
Proof of this assertion is provided by the unprecedented enthusiasm exhibited by private education institutions, pre-primary to K-12 English-medium schools in particular, for this publication and its several initiatives to acknowledge excellence and innovations in education. The readership of EducationWorld — arguably the sole publication of this genre — is estimated at over 1 million per month.
Moreover, the annual EducationWorld India School Rankings Awards, flowing from the annual EW India School Rankings, have generated tremendous enthusiasm, transforming our awards function into perhaps the largest celebratory conclave of school promoters, trustees and principals of reputed schools worldwide.
But given that there are 1.40 million schools including 320,000 private schools, 37,000 colleges and 800 universities countrywide, self-evidently we haven’t succeeded in getting EducationWorld, which debates root and branch reforms in Indian education, to a critical mass of policy formulators, educators and students. As an English language publication, we haven’t been able to get our message across to the vast majority unfamiliar with this link language of India. And despite our offering almost free-of-charge translation and publishing rights to vernacular and multi-language publishing media companies, there’s been no response from their purblind managements who can’t seem to grasp the elementary proposition that a better educated populace is in their interest as it will boost the circulation and readership of their flagship publications. Moreover, post-liberalisation India’s smug middle class which has en masse enrolled its children in private schools, has little interest in public education. It also fails to grasp the elementary proposition that the higher productivity of a universally educated citizenry will make India an economic super-power again.
Nevertheless in EducationWorld, we draw some comfort that due to our sustained efforts, education has moved from the bottom of the national development agenda to the middle. Therefore on our 17th anniversary, we reiterate our resolve to continue to beat the drum of access, equity and quality across the education spectrum. We are confident that governments and the public will soon see the light.
Unending agony of benighted Bihar
With the state’s overweening and ill-educated politicians riding roughshod over them, there seems to be no hope for the people of benighted Bihar (pop. 104 million). On October 19, the son of a prominent state politician of Gaya district was granted bail by the Patna high court despite his having brazenly shot dead a youth in broad daylight for the latter’s effrontery in overtaking his motorcar on a state highway. A fortnight earlier, the state’s high court had granted bail to Mohammed Shahabuddin, a notorious gangster and member of the state’s legislative assembly who had similarly shot dead a journalist in 2004.
Crime and criminality have cast a pall over business and enterprise in this state, where misrule, lawlessness, pervasive corruption and pernicious castesim have become normative. Unsurprisingly, on the metrics of per capita income (Rs.22,890 per year) and illiteracy (36 percent), Bihar is ranked last among India’s 29 states and seven Union Territories.
Open, uninterrupted and continuous corruption is a legacy issue in Bihar. In the 1970s, the great socialist leader Jayaprakash Narayan came out of retirement to lead a nationwide anti-corruption revolt against prime minister Indira Gandhi which culminated in the country’s first and as yet only internal Emergency in 1975. After that, political leadership in the state devolved upon a succession of self-styled socialists who have reduced the state to penury. Masters of divide-and-rule caste-based arithmetic, several populist chief ministers — Karpoori Thakur, Laloo Prasad Yadav and latterly Nitish Kumar — paid no attention to education and allowed party cadres and supporters to run riot even as they packed the police and lower judiciary with caste kith and kin, regardless of merit.
In 2015, the desperate electorate of Bihar elected a coalition formed by Nitish Kumar, leader of the Janata Dal (U) party and the RJD, led by disgraced former chief minister Laloo Prasad Yadav, which campaigned the state legislative election on the platform of economic development and progress. However, one of the new government’s first initiatives — against all informed advice and precedents — was to introduce draconian liquor prohibition in the state which has resulted in hundreds of people dying due to spurious liquor consumption, and the government suffering a tax revenue loss of Rs.4,000 crore per year.
Chief minister Nitish Kumar’s rationale is that the overwhelming majority of women citizens are in favour of prohibition. Consequently, even after the Patna high court struck down the law enacted by the JD(U)-RJD government, new equally draconian prohibition legislation has been reintroduced in the state. Shockingly but not surprisingly, Nitish Kumar isn’t aware that the role of political leaders is not to pander to illiterate rural women, but to educate and lead them. Bihar’s agony seems unending.
