Education in India

Shekhar Gupta at Indian Express writes about the need for reform and revamping of Higher education in India:

Just as the licence-quota raj created self-inflicted scarcities of telephones, scooters and cooking gas, our utterly authoritarian, cynical and intellectually bankrupt higher education policy has created humongous shortages. We all know the odds for a candidate to qualify for premier engineering, management and medical colleges. Those with means now pay their way to colleges in Australia, Singapore, Qatar, besides indeed the traditional “exporters” of education to India, the US and the UK ....
....Yet, do advertise for a security guard on naukri.com and see how many applications you get from MAs, MScs, even PhDs. These are young Indians who have invested the most valuable years of their lives collecting degrees but no knowledge, education but no skills. Unless this disaster is stemmed now, these numbers will multiply faster than you can imagine, and they will be angrier than you wish to imagine. But if you can fix it, the dividend you reap will be not merely demographic, but even economic and political.

Studies estimate that our education system churns out nearly 3.2million graduates of whom about a tenth or 350,000 are from engineering. But even a cursory examination of the graduates reveals that most of these graduates pay by the noose only to get a paper certification but no real addition to their skills. Most of the so called engineering colleges are blocks of apartments run without laboratories or even proper lecturers. In many cases, the students graduating out of these colleges are employed back as lecturers as they are unable to fit anywhere else in the industry, and the colleges unable to get worthy lecturers, leading into a vicious circle.

The answer is not setting up namesake IITs in ordnance factories or forcing the existing IITs to increase reservations and acceptance rates. It involves giving more importance to autonomy of existing institutions and doing away with the redtape that deters from quality individuals and institutions from coming into the academia. I don't advocate for exclusivist policies with regards to IITs, IIMs, but setting up proxies sans the quality will lead to further devaluation of these last bastions of credibility in Indian higher education system. We need more IIT like institutions not just IITs, and in all spheres of higher education.

If cases of competitive intolerance like this and this don't wake us up to the need for liberalisation in education in general and higher education in particular, nothing ever will. In 2004, I thought that the only upside of NDA defeat was end of Mr.Joshi's hold on HRD but unfortunately he was followed by a catastrophic Arjun singh. Here's to hope that this term may turn out to be different from with Mr.Kapil Sibal as the HRD minister.

Poverty and Wealth

I wanted to write this post a long time back, but now is just as good a time when the calls for coronation of the prince have reached a crescendo. During the election campaign Rahul Gandhi had said, "We believe in the poor people of India and they are ashamed of the poor in India." It is part of electioneering, I agree, but in order to gain votes and power the Nehru-Gandhi family and by extension Congress has equated Poverty with virtue and wealth to a vice. Add to this the famous Nehru quip, "Profit is a dirty word" and we have generations condemned to poverty. Sarojini Naidu once famously observed of Mahatma, " It costs a lot to keep Gandhi poor," only half in jest. Now, Mr. Rahul Gandhi says, " we should not be ashamed of our poor."

Perhaps, but we should be ashamed of the fact that such a large number of our people are condemned to poverty. Instead we are ashamed of our rich."Any wealth gotten is at the expense of someone else, therefore the rich deserve to be stripped off their wealth" is a tenet of socialism that has chained our wings. Instead, our aim should be "wealth creation." The Poor don't deserve to remain "poor" for such a long time. We should have taught ourselves how to fish, rather than take fish from one fishermen, cut them into pieces and redistribute it to others while taking a few pieces for doing the work of distribution. This leaves everybody but the distributer poorer.

When even the Communist party in china embraces free market and shuns socialist policies to achieve tremendous growth, it speaks of the rot that has set in that we regress time and again to our socialist policies, Unless, we see past the halo of our erstwhile leaders whose ideas have long past their shelf life(if they ever had one), we cannot identify this rot and will be incapable of eliminating it.

Here Atanu describes the tale of two countries, comparing U.S - Argentina at the start of last century to India-China in this century. Yet, the illuminated want us to believe that this is "really" a reform oriented government which was impeded only by the left with only a few sane voices questioning this hypothesis. Whatever growth we have achieved so far is despite the government, not because of it. The sooner we realize it, the better. After all, "Socialism is a luxury to the wealthy, but a suicidal creed to the poor"

These idiots!

Some people have way too much time on their hands. Of all the things to be "offended by", statue of Charlie chaplin near a temple !
I have held the UPA bunch of communal goons in great contempt for the past few years because of the way they've gone about dividing the society for minority vote politics. I admire some of the NDA leaders for having an intellectual capacity and a backbone to stand up for their ideas like Mr.Arun Shourie, Mr. Jaswant Singh, even L.K.Advani.
But these idiots lower down have gone about the past few years thoroughly dismantling any and every opportunity handed to them on a plate by the UPA. It is sad to see that the leaders don't condemn these ideas either.
Some BJP leader said in this context:

The local head of the Bharatiya Janata Party, a Hindu nationalist and India’s main opposition party, said there was no place for Chaplin in the region. “If the locals are against such a statue, I am also against it,” he told The Times of India. “Why should one bother so much about Charlie Chaplin, who was not even an Indian?”

That explains the motivations. It doesn't matter whether it is right or wrong, politicians formulate policies that get them votes. Similar is the tale of N.Chandrababu Naidu and TDP in Andhra Pradesh. He was a pioneer in bringing about reforms and cutting down on the bureaucracy etc. But he was voted out in 2004 and he is now driven into an unholy alliance with the very parties that he had made thoroughly insignificant - the CPI, CPI(M).

Government

Governments around the world are just a huge waste of time and resources primarily trying to create more work to justify their existence (or atleast justify their huge budgets).
The latest offering comes from the Government of Scotland - a Sin tax on chocolate:

A controversial call for a tax on chocolate to curb obesity was narrowly rejected by doctors today.Lanarkshire GP David Walker led calls for an increase in chocolate prices as a way of tackling weight-related conditions like diabetes.

But delegates at a British Medical Association (BMA) conference in Clydebank, West Dunbartonshire, today voted down the plan. The motion was lost by two votes, the BMA said.

I hate it when government tries to poke its nose into places where it doesn't belong. Whether I starve or stuff myself should be my choice and not that of a hundred other people who have nothing to do with my life! Of course, the extra money generated by such a tax would only serve in the government having to find more reasons for its existence and a vicious cycle of interference and "Big brother" hood.

Money

There are four ways in which you can spend money. You can spend your own money on yourself. When you do that, why then you really watch out what you’re doing, and you try to get the most for your money. Then you can spend your own money on somebody else. For example, I buy a birthday present for someone. Well, then I’m not so careful about the content of the present, but I’m very careful about the cost. Then, I can spend somebody else’s money on myself. And if I spend somebody else’s money on myself, then I’m sure going to have a good lunch!Finally, I can spend somebody else’s money on somebody else. And if I spend somebody else’s money on somebody else, I’m not concerned about how much it is, and I’m not concerned about what I get. And that’s government. And that’s close to 40% of our national income.

While Friedman may have been generous to suggest that government spends somebody's money on someone else, in Indian context I'd be happy if the government spends money for somebody else instead of on itself. I'm no economist, but a fiscal deficit amounts to borrowing money for current spending. In this light, the projected deficits of 12.3% GDP in the US and as much as 10% of GDP in India make for a very sorry reading. And the claim of 5.3% growth rate seems highly inflated as it is primarily driven by 17% growth in ‘community, social and personal services': in other words government sops ahead of the parliamentary elections.