18/02/09

how does this make sense?

nearly half of urban india wants to settle down in the u.s., says a survey conducted a couple of years ago. about 40% of india's farmers, according to another survey conducted a little earlier, would 'quit farming' given a choice.

the respondents in the first survey were people who belonged to 'lower middle classes and above'. you'll agree, india has been kind to those people: investing in their education & training etc., and offering them a far better quality and quantity of public services than those available to the rest of india. which helped them get better jobs.

and the finance minister has announced, a couple of days ago, a few more iits and iims for them. to improve their chances of securing american visas?

he has also announced increased spending on the bharat nirman programme and the nrega- most of that increased expenditure will finds its way back to the cities, of course. this would also improve the farmers' chances of moving up? to become wage labourers?

choice: the first category of respondents have it and the second don't. one would think the best way of creating choice for the farmers (or their children, actually) would be: investing in their education & training etc., and offering them a far better quality and quantity of public services (as available to the first class of respondents). so that they could move on to better jobs too (and to america, later?).

why doesn't that happen? one of the key elements is education. if the next generation of the second category of respondents, the farmers' children, have to move beyond farming, or at least get a fair chance at thinking of moving beyond agriculture, they will all need access to decent school education. the kind of education that's mostly unavailable to them now.

do you get any sense that the finance minister, or the central government, was thinking about that when he was making ritualistic allocations to that ugly, paternalistic sarva shiksha abhiyaan and grand plans for new iits while preparing this year's budget? did you get any sense that the issue seriously occupied his mind?

did you get that sense last year or the year before that or the year....?

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hello Sir,
How are you doing?

Completely agree with what you have said. But what are the alternatives/other options where money could be spent?

Praveen

Anonymous said...

When you have Mr. L.K Advani spending 250 cr on this Prime-ministerial Campaign and then praising opposition Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee for his budget presentaion... what's going on in this country?

Anonymous said...

More than half of the people in any place in the world wants to settle down in the USA not just from India. Middle East, Far East, China, Pakisthan, Bangladeshis, Eastern wuropeans, south americans and mexicans everyone wants to be in America.

kuffir said...

praveen,

sorry about the late response. alternatives? why does one need alternatives- they could be spent on existing schools and on new schools where they don't exist to improve their functioning so that nobody drops out. right now, enrolment in primary schools is over 95%, the maximum possible. kids mostly drop out by middle school (over 50%) by middle school because the schools fail to retain them. don't you think preventing that is better than funding quack cures such as the sarva shiksha abhiyaan? ssa isn't geared to provide quality education, only to pump up numbers.

kuffir said...

prashant/anon,

thanks for your comments.

 
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