this tyranny is okay- 2

according to the 2001 census 8,71,26,075 children of age 5-14 (of a total 25,31,63,648 children), or 34.4% of the total, were out of school. this figure (according to projections) fell to 4,32,74,861 (of 24,17,59,000 children of same age range), or 17.9% in 2006 [from page 6 of this paper: Abolition of Child Labour in India, Strategies for the Eleventh Five Year Plan submitted by National Commission for the Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) to the Planning Commission, India].

what could've happened in 5 years to bring down the number of children out of school by half? the ruling classes chant a three word mantra as an answer: sarva shiksha abhiyan.

could ssa really have worked the miracle of bringing down out-of-school kids by nearly half, just a couple of years after its launch? that's what an economic times article (dated november, 2006) scanned and offered as success story on the ssa website says: Out-of-school-kids nearly halve (by urmi a. goswami). let me quote a couple of lines from the article:

The number of out-of-school children in the age group of 6-14 is down from 1.34 crore in 2005 to 70.56 lakh in the current year. With this the national average of out-of-school children is down from 6.94% to 3.59% in the current year. There are some 19.63 crore children between the age group of 6 to 14 years. Over the last four years, since the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan was launched, the number of out-of-school children has been gradually reducing from 3.23 crore in 2001 to 70.56 lakh in march 2006.

because the ssa has proudly pasted this badly scanned news story on its website, it obviously approves of those figures. notice the difference in figures quoted by the first government agency (NCPCR) and the second (SSA)?

*out-of-school kids, according to ncpcr, were 8.71 crore in 2001.
*out-of-school kids, according to the article endorsed by the ssa, were 3.23 crore in 2001.
*out-of-school kids, according to ncpcr, were 4.32 crore (estimated) in 2006.
*out-of-school kids, according to the article endorsed by the ssa, were 70.56 lakh in 2006.

they don't seem to agree, do they? how about these figures?

*total number of kids between the ages 5-14 in india, according to ncpcr, were 24.17 crore in 2006 (estimated).
*total number of kids between the ages 6-14 in india, according to the article endorsed by the ssa, were 19.63 crore.

the ssa seems to have not only nearly halved the number of out-of-school kids in india it seems to have reduced their total population too by nearly one-fifth!

except for the census figures of 2001 on the number of children in india, i think all the other figures are wide off the mark. the ncpcr figures seem to be slightly closer to the truth. i think the number of out-of-school kids is definitely more than the 4.32 crore estimated by the ncpcr. most of those estimates follow the enrollment figures and the discrepancy between enrollment and attendance figures as estimated by other researchers is significantly high. according to Shelley Seale (The Weight of Silence: Invisible Children of India), the number of child labourers (i won't call them out-of-school kids because i don't think they're having fun out of school, even if the goi thinks otherwise) in india would be 100 million. and i agree with that figure.

the ssa is like the village deities of rural india or the godmen of the cities: they work magic when you're not looking, or they work magic when you're not ready to look (because you're too desperate). like many of those believers, the sainaths of india, you'll notice, also keep their eyes closed, mostly.

update: forgot to add- also on the ssa website, a report of a survey (conducted in 2005) which agrees with the economic times article on the figures.

this tyranny is okay

Any criticism of the market as God these past two decades led to being branded a heretic. The market had all the answers. There was no miracle it could not perform. Some, like Swaminathan Aiyer, argued that markets alone could save the environment. Others, like Time magazine, asserted that hunger was but a function of anti-market systems. Want jobs? Leave it to the market. The market wasn’t just good for democracy. It was Democracy. This was the baloney of the last 15-20 years. There were other possible positions. Such as that you might need the market. As a tool, not as a tyranny. As just one instrument amongst many, not as an all encompassing ideology. But that would have been blasphemy. [italics mine]

p.sainath in the essay 'The globalisation of inequality'.

the indian left liberal, or whatever anyone whose politics hovers around the same concerns and interests as sainath voices would like to call himself, is quite a character. he would look away when the market is allowed free play in schools and health, but would object strongly if airlines or hotels owned by the government are privatized. it's okay to throw small change at farmers to get them to ensure your food security, but it's irrelevant how big a role nonexistent public healtcare (or expensive private healthcare) plays in driving farmers to suicide. in a country where the unorganized sector forms 93% of the workforce (almost half of those workers, i think, have to look for a new job, if you could dignify the worst kind of manual labour with that title, every day or week or month or couple of months) the best kind of social security he can offer is a job scheme that involves worse than the worst kind of manual labour (because it offers no scope for learning about new tools or technologies, no training or retraining and not even minimum wages most times) and reaches not more than 2 to 5 percent of that 93%,..the point i am driving at now (as i did many times earlier), is that that the indian liberal is not a mere hypocrite. he is much more lethal.

one reads swaminathan aiyar and understands what kind of people he's concerned about. swaminathan aiyar recommends a bigger role for private players in schools, swaminathan aiyar thinks the family is the best social security an indian worker needs, swaminathan doesn't seem to care about public healthcare because i've never seen a column by him on the subject.

swaminathan aiyar likes private schools because the india he lives in doesn't need government schools (except of the kendriya vidyalaya kind), swaminathan aiyar doesn't care about social security because his kind of indians mostly work in the organized sector where they have job security, pensions and benefits and insurance coverage (insurance penetration is less than 5% in india- most of it is bought by aiyar's india). and they also have urban and rural property-for them private healthcare can never cost the earth because they can always hike its price.

what does sainath think of schools, social security and public health? except in a very general sort of way i don't think he has ever wandered deep into those mostly rural hells- like swaminathan aiyar, he doesn't seem to care. i suppose the tyranny of the market can be an effective tool in those areas?

kapil sibal seems to have stirred no one except a few trade unions.

mp slaps bank manager

google using those keywords and you'll come up with thousands of search results. and most of the initial pages contain relevant news stories. try with these keywords: 'j.c.prabhakar reddy abuses officers' and you'll come up with 33 results, not all of them very relevant. the second incident happened around an year ago, it involved an andhra pradesh minister's brother- he used choicest gaalis against two state government officers (who had objected to his company running buses on unauthorized routes), in full view of television cameras. somewhere in there, in the flow of his eloquence, he also seemed to inquire, not very solicitously, why a toddy tapper and a barber thought they were competent enough to become officers.

what does all that mean? not many people seem to be curious about how an upper caste politician abused lower caste individuals even if they had earned what could be termed positions of respect (if i remember correctly, one of them was an ias officer). a dog-bites-man kind of news? which also means the news media lost interest in the subject after the first few days.

the dalit mp who slapped the bank manager (because he was denying loans to some of the mp's lower caste constituents) was earlier in the telugu desam and had switched sides during the trust vote on the nuclear deal (some say, for a large amount of money and the promise of a congress ticket in the elections). not a very upright character, but there is still the question of the search results- why are so many people curious? or rather, why is the news media so generous in its coverage?

the second incident never made it to the national news on television (correct me if i am wrong), but the first seemed to hog prime time news and debates yesterday. why?

a cure for that madness

“She is spending Rs 1000 crore on establishing statues of elephants and herself. Can there be something more shameful than this in Indian politics,” he asked.

“Of what use will be the statues in UP. The Rs 1000 crore could have helped wipe out poverty of thousands of people, provide basic amenities and education,” he said, addressing a meeting to thank voters of his constituency Sivaganga last night.

this from the leader of a party which has named universities, museums, planetariums, zoos, sanctuaries, sanatoriums, hospitals, art galleries, theatres, dams, power projects, schools, colleges, awards, streets, highways, bridges, poverty alleviation schemes, employment schemes, farmer support schemes, housing schemes, health schemes, loan schemes, airports, railway stations, bus stations, sanitation schemes, social security schemes, industrial townships, parks, elephants and tigers and other faunae, educational scholarships and fellowships, research grants, stadia, gyms, traffic junctions, office buildings etc after members of one family. with public money. apart from encouraging all kinds of congressmen, once-congressmen, also-congressmen, never-congressmen and all kinds of other slobbering enthusiasts to further spread the disease across the land, christening every kind of recognizable public nook, cranny and wilderness in the country after members of the same family.. pockmarking it with likenesses in stone, cement, plaster, metal..of that holy trinity. with money mostly stolen from the public.

i might not agree with mayawati's method, but she is desperately trying to find a cure for that madness, which is itself a new variant of an ancient plague, i think.

does kapil sibal pat his kids through the internet? or does he need private partners to do it?

using the internet to improve access to education in villages. what an idea sirjee!

look at the problems. for instance, the minister or his boss can't go to lalgarh without a few hundred soldiers going in first, before them. and there are over 200 such districts across the country. so the internet is the safest way to travel in india these days. or teach.

cynics would say: if in the last sixty years, more teachers had travelled to those villages- would the army be there now?

what was the minister for education trying to do on television today? making an admission that the government of india has given up on the people of india. thrown in the towel. we're inviting any and every kind of entrepreneur (or snake oil salesman or rural warlord or dotcom veteran or religious warrior) to become the indian state's private partner in... . education? do whatever, but come tell us you're doing education in the villages and hand in your vouchers etc and collect your money. we want to forget about the whole business, okay?

we're done with it. we've many more revolutions to cook- many new universities and elite institutions to set up, more loans to give away to rich kids, more regulating of higher education to be done. so many new tasks for babus and so much new business for corporate india. and it isn't going to be all fun, i promise you. schools are no longer our business.

in a few more years, hopefully, another 200 districts in the country would also be accessible only through the net. and we'll expand education in those parts too.
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when it comes to schools, who's the bigger prophet of the free market: milton friedman or the government of india? in my view, that isn't really a tough question to answer.

disgust

what's more disgusting than the state of government schools? school vouchers. what's more disgusting than vouchers? iits. what's more disgusting than iits? that i should also pay for air india (never mind if i haven't ever seen the inside of a plane). what's even more disgusting than that? that i also pay for the salaries of certain dons in jnu who think i belong in the middle ages.

why can't they let the bjp die?

why are so many journalists worried about what's happening in the bjp?

vrinda gopinath tells you everything you wanted to know that’s happening in the party. barkha dutt asks: Will the right find its centre again? ashok malik in the hindustan times says: the transformation in the BJP has to be both ideational and generational (what does that mean, i wonder).

actually, i seem to have come rather late to this bjp bachao party in the media- a lot more seems to have been written on the subject since elections. one does expect openly hindutvavadi journalists in the media to shed a lot of bitter tears, but why are the so-called secularists so interested in its survival as to offer tips and advice? some have even hinted that the country needs the right (by which they mean the bjp) just as it needs the left (the communists, of course) to keep the centre (the congress) on its toes. why?

because they're talking about their country (or nation)- the one that's shining or is singing jai ho! they wouldn't want any regional or other casteist parties to lay any claim on the centre, take control of the hidden state. all the three national political formations share a somewhat common vision of the indian nation- its social boundaries are defined by the upper and intermediate castes, its economic boundaries by the organized sector, the professional middle classes (again mostly from the same castes) and a section of the prosperous farmers, industrialists and businessmen. in the interested eyes of the international business and finance community, they're the indian market. not big, in terms of per capita expenditure, by the standards of developed countries, but definitely much more stable (because the state supports their incomes, in many ways, directly and indirectly). and their incomes might look small, in dollar terms, but how many government clerks or even doctors or lawyers or factory foremen in the west can afford cheap domestic help, for instance? their privileges can't be measured, and the workers in the informal economy (representing all those divisive aspirations which need to be kept out), who pay for them can't really refuse to oblige- there are just too many of them ever willing to be suckered.

so it makes sense for the national media to talk about their parties- and about the need for diversity and balance (as represented by the right, left and centre of their politics) in their democracy. why should they not worry about a member of their parivar slipping behind?

mamata shall outdo laloo?

Malda, May 24: Expectations are running high in Malda with Mamata Banerjee taking charge of Rail Bhavan.

From newly elected Congress MP Mausam Noor to the merchant chamber of commerce — everybody has drawn up a list of demands for Mamata, especially since the Trinamul Congress chief is known to have shared a rapport with A.B.A. Ghani Khan Chowdhury.

Mausam, Ghani Khan’s niece, will demand a Rajdhani from “Mamatadi”, a pair of superfast trains between Calcutta and Siliguri via Malda, besides introduction of electric trains in the division. “I am very happy that Mamatadi has become the railway minister. The neglected Malda division will definitely get a better deal. We want a Rajdhani and a pair of superfast trains, connecting Siliguri to Calcutta via Malda. We also want electric trains,” she said. In Malda division, trains run on diesel.

in the eighties, when ghani khan chowdhury was the minister for railways, wags in the press used to remark that the name 'indian railways' was a misnomer, because all the action seemed to happen in malda and and bengal. in the nineties, jaffer sharief, ram vilas paswan, nitish kumar and laloo yadav- all tried to follow his outstanding example of never looking beyond one's own family, village, district and state while ruling the railways.

now, it looks like mamata banerjee plans to outdo all of them- flagging off new trains in her home state just a couple of weeks after assuming office, promising relief to supporters and even checking the menus on trains to see that they're bengali enough. does one have to wait for the railway budget to realize that there'd be nothing in it for people living beyond mamata's fiefdom?

the railways is just one large business among many that the central government in delhi owns- i wouldn't say manages, governs etc., because that'd indicate an objective, professional approach to managing the affairs of those businesses. the people who seek and are offered these top posts run, and are allowed to run, these businesses like shopkeepers who are given charge of their rivals' businesses, temporarily. they run down these business in the process of running them for their own special interests- the larger public interest be damned.

one reason, actually two reasons, why no national party wants the government to withdraw from these businesses and get down to the serious business of governance is that these businesses help ruling parties to 1) build and foster patronage networks across states and 2) make a lot of money.

if public sector businesses are one way of achieving those two objectives, ministries that oversee and regulate industries are another, more subtle and unobtrusive way. why do so many contenders for ministerial posts want information technology and communications, chemicals and steel, petroleum and surface transport etc?

and why does no one want women and child welfare etc? or education without higher education? if control over the health ministry didn't mean control over large government hospitals like aiims, or over countless corporate hospitals and colleges- who'd want it?

indian institutions of dissembling

In a presentation to the IIM-B Board of Governors (BoG), Dean (Administration) Prof B Mahadevan said that the funds were necessary for “strengthening research activities, enlarging the scale of internationalisation and for enhancing support to students.” The presentation also made it clear that the government, despite committing Rs 30 crore towards other backward caste expansion plans, could not be looked into for funding.So far, the government has released only Rs 10.67 crore to IIM-B towards this cause.

Rs.30 crores for other backward caste expansion plans? the funds were promised because the number of seats were to be increased. and the seats were increased because the government didn't want any reduction in the general category seats because of increase in reserved seats. so the expansion was to accommodate the general category seats- where do the backward caste students come into the budgeting picture?

if the increase in budget was to be apportioned, by any truthful accounting norms, only a small portion of it could be pinned on the obc students (the increase in overall number of seats would mean that a few of them would also benefit from it) because most of it would go towards ensuring that the same number of general category students, as earlier, would get admitted.

unless the government of india and the iim-b believe the obcs are foreign nationals from, say, pakistan, and are being admitted as a part of a confidence building measure to improve relations betwen the two countries. and because indian nationals cannot be deprived of their seats, the overall capacity of the institution is being increased, and hence the increase in budget.

this isn't the first time- the media has consistently tried to play this ugly game of reminding the people of the costs of the government's reluctant positive discrimination projects. if the obcs, as the media seems to suggest, should foot the bill for the increase in seats, who were paying for all the seats until now? the people of india or only the members of certain meritorious castes?

or, are only members of certain meritorious castes the people of india?

finally, what do these budget-increasing-students expect to learn at these places where the teachers spout such half-truths and lies? if they haven't already learned the one valuable lesson that's already being repeatedly taught, through the media, even before they enter these institutions: that they're not wanted, are a burden? that their citizenship is provisional, at best?

shame on the obcs. shame on the obcs for not realizing that these are the kind of institutions that keep them obcs.

merit without antecedents

So I try not to get angry when they ask me for my antecedents, though I still stick with the “I don’t know.” And when others flaunt their identities based on anything but their merit, I still squirm but let it be.

shobhana bhartia. samir and vineet jain. n.ram and n.murali. vivek and saroj goenka. t.venkatram reddy and....

there's so much merit in the media.

not so modern

Call it the meltdown effect. The fear of unemployment is forcing even educated, upper caste and dominant backward caste youth to take up these secure, but menial, jobs.

even educated, upper caste and dominant backward caste youth are taking up these menial jobs? find some educated, upper caste and dominant backward caste youth among these contract labourers.

while the media makes concerted efforts to play down the role of caste in allocating misery by playing up the role of class in distributing merit (if only the rich among the lower castes and the upper castes make the cut, why build institutions which favour only the rich?)- i wonder if the editors of these national rags ever bother to check what proportion of upper caste youth work in the insecure, unorganized sector.

2,800 rupees a month if the contractor sticks to the rules (which 90% of them don't), no paid leaves or holidays, no pensions or social security, and no.... weighed against 7,000 rupees a month and more and all the benefits (holidays, breaks, pensions, social security etc) plus the always available option of not working and still enjoying all those benefits or also working on a second job or a business (check the findings of this field study on benami sweepers) and still enjoying all those benefits- even the most broadminded of editors should understand the difference between those two career options.

a fact which neither the capitalist mouthpieces like the times of india and hindustan times nor socialist trash dispensers like the hindu will ever acknowledge: the modern indian state is not so modern in distributing security. or filth.

the badlands

"There's such a big difference between life in New Delhi and life in the Chambal Valley ravines. There are two codes, two sets of mores, customs, and legalities. In New Delhi people are so much more duplicitous: they promise you things, and then behind your back they do precisely the opposite. In Chambal they'll say things openly, they'll shout it from the rooftops, and then they'll follow through. City life is very different; you have law courts. But out in the valley you can do things your way, and by the will of God."

phoolan devi, who escaped the chambal valley to die in delhi. and he survived kargil, only to die in delhi. an old story and a new one, picked randomly at the end of a lousy day and they seem to convey the same ominous message.

and this guy thinks india trusts delhi. just as many senile commentators in the media- if this was a vote against regionalism, why did the two national parties together poll 2% less votes than in 2004?

somebody tell these guys, democracy starts in the states and a fat delhi means more chambals.

the rigid flexibility of caste

"Earlier, people were changing their religion but now people are changing their castes also", said a vacation bench of Justices Markandeya Katju and Deepak Verma. [italics mine]

note what the judges said: now people are changing their castes also. what does the headline say? SC surprised at people changing castes frequently.

judges find people, not a person or two, can change caste. progressive reporter notes, without surprise, people change caste frequently. what the judges or reporter didn't say explicitly: we always knew people from the lower castes were great whiners.

elsewhere, a story on some rigid dalit believers in caste who would rather change their religion than their caste, frequently.