this tyranny is okay- 3

The numbers consolidated at the government of India level show that there are only eight million children out of about 200 million children in the age group 6-14 years who do not go to school as on December 2004. The State Project Directors of SSA submitted this data. This means that only 4 per cent of all children are out of school according to the SSA estimate. Furthermore, the total number of children accounted for by the SSA does not match the number of children enumerated in the 2001 Census of India. For example, in the state of Andhra Pradesh, the SSA has declared that there are 1.53-crore children of school going age while the corresponding figure according to census data is 1.77-crore. The figures simply do not add up.

Where have these missing children gone and who accounts for them? [emphasis mine].

i'd pointed out in this post, the difference in figures published by two different agencies, the sarva shiksha abhiyaan (SSA) and the national commission for the protection of child rights (ncpcr), on the number of out-of-school kids in the country and even the number of kids in the country. now in the nearly three year old article i've quoted, shantha sinha, child rights activist and magsaysay award winner puts across her own doubts on the issue: The figures simply do not add up.

more than two million children missing in one state (discovered through piecing together gaps in official estimates), how many more were/are missing nationwide? read the article to discover how many ways in which the state, as dr.sinha says at the end of the article, pretends:

If only the policy-makers and those in the helm of bureaucracy are genuinely interested in the protection of children’s rights they would understand the indispensability of correctness of information on children, work towards ensuring that all of them come to schools and not just pretend that every child is already in school.

why does no liberal journalist ask the government on how many children are actually are out of school now?

here, siddharth varadarajan talks about how the current government won't abandon welfarism. what's welfarism? not, according to him, the rent-generating, corporate handout-driven route which the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance followed to disastrous political effect from 1998 to 2004 but an expenditure-driven expansionary fiscal strategy with the emphasis on expanding the consumption entitlements of the poor.

that's what the left liberal in india is really about: scoring points. if the welfarism he is gloating over doesn't include concrete measures to address such issues as primary education or health, two of the most basic concerns of the poor in india, how sincere should we consider it? are we to assume he thinks the new consumption entitlements of the poor will enable them to buy education for their children from the market? why does the state's great disinterest in such basic entitlements as primary education not bother mr.varadarajan?

and what is it about the nrega that makes these warped liberals go so weak at the knees and lose perspective altogether? the nrega until now hasn't ever gone beyond 2-3% of the total annual budget of the government of india. can these 2-3% expenditures endow 70% of the population with anything that even remotely resembles real consumption entitlements?