No Paperdart Policies In The Classroom

Measured by those yardsticks alone, we are still decades behind China. The dividend of having a widely educated population in East Asia led to higher productivity on the farm. But it also helped overseas Chinese entrepreneurs rapidly staff light manufacturing factories—from Indonesia's Java to China's Guangdong—making products as diverse as computer peripherals and sneakers in an era when global trade was expanding rapidly. Even if we were to accomplish long-delayed labour reforms in the next couple of years, our young people are handicapped by this deficit of education and our woeful infrastructure.

asheng Huang, an mit economist, observes that India and China seem determined to learn the wrong lessons from each other. Our political elite overlook the huge investments in education and primary healthcare made by Mao and Deng Xiaoping, and fixate instead on the shiny skyscrapers and highways of Beijing and Shanghai, which Yasheng says is increasingly wasteful capital expenditure by the state at the expense of investments in the rural sector. Inevitably, we have copied SEZs, a strategy Deng used in a Communist country that needed to phase in capitalism. (In India, our political and industrial class have conspired to use it as a way to bring back the worst sort of feudal land-grabbing in the name of industrial development.) In China, meanwhile, Yasheng says that its leadership looks appalled at India's noisy democracy and overlooks that it is a great strength, building cohesiveness and creativity among its people.

What the new UPA government (working with the state governments, for education is a subject on the concurrent list) must do is bring a focus to improving primary and secondary education that approaches something like a military campaign. I mean that quite literally—absurd as this may sound, we may have to deploy part of our army to help speed up the building and management of our village schools in the lagging BIMARU states. This could counter what economist Arvind Subramanian identifies in rural areas as the twin problem of "low competence and low accountability" on the part of local administration. More prosaically, we need cash vouchers for schooling, so that badly managed government schools are forced to compete for resources.

It is not clear that, beyond the prime minister, anyone in government in the last five years fully grasped either the scale or the urgency of the problem. Indeed, given the tolerance shown towards Arjun Singh's hare-brained idea of increasing reservation in higher education, one can only conclude that the Congress did not see education as a high priority and was content to play Mandal-style votebank politics.

In another sign that the status quo persists, politicians alone were among the candidates mooted for the post of hrd minister, whereas the new government could have had on its list of candidates such names as Pratham's Madhav Chauhan, Nandan Nilekani and Jean Dreze. The government should also create one-stop clearance windows for NGOs with proven track records so they can get the permissions and assistance they require to expand quickly. (Why should we assume only industry needs a fast-track?)

Finally, as those energetic children at the school run by Parikrma reminded me last week, this effort will need each of us. India will need a JFK-style Peace Corps initiative to improve government schools, with young citizens volunteering in cities and in villages. India will be adding a staggering 200 million to its workforce in the next couple of decades. No government—least of all our lethargic imperial governing class—can convert a looming demographic disaster into a dividend all on its own.