Leadership Crisis in India - Yet, yet again.

In my last post I was talking about how there has been a change in the nature of population of cities in India, especially those in the Southern part of the country due to the large scale migration that took place due to reasons already cited. Let me now explain the nature of the change briefly. The spaces created by the migrating suave and urban Indian were replaced by a first generation of rural Indians who hitherto visited the urban areas, if at all, only to meet their relatives or to go sight seeing. These people do not possess either the suaveness of the original urban dweller or their liberal open mindedness. Before this statement is interpreted as racist let me explain in detail what I mean. One of the big differences in the mindset between the original urban Indian - OUI for brevity (I use this rather inelegant expression due to the lack of a better one) and later urban Indian LUI - also for brevity (again inelegance due to the same reason) is that the two went through different patterns of education. The OUI had access to good schools that were manned by well educated teachers who as a rule went beyond the brief of their work and successfully inculcated a globally and more importantly a necessary for India value system that enabled generations of students to put aside differences of caste and religion. This student also went on to become somebody who respected the idea of every one being capable of merit and that only merit should be the criteria for success or failure. This meant that they did not believe that lower castes or people of certain religions were doomed to be failures or that they did not deserve to succeed.

The rural education system that produced the LUI (and continues to produce the likes in the rural setting still) was a different situation altogether. The unwillingness on the part of the successful professionals, including teachers, to relocate to rural areas even for small periods decided that teachers should be recruited from the region itself. Herein lay the problem. The rural areas did not have the same percentage of literate populations and therefore in most cases seventh class and tenth class pass persons were recruited to teach the levels below them. The hope was that with time the teachers would also upgrade themselves with higher degrees and better learning. That did not happen simply because the "teachers" were contented with their jobs. From 1947 rural Indian schools have been a farce with neither teacher or student interested in true education. Students have been pushed to higher levels of study so as to not attract the attention of auditors who would question the logic of spending large amounts of money without there being any positive fall out of that. There are schools with no black boards, and there are schools that do not have buildings or there are schools with all these but with no classes happening since neither the teacher nor the student was willing to go to school. Degrees and certificates have gradually become pieces of paper with no significance. The fall out of this is "qualified" students who have carried on with prejudices born out of caste, creed and religion. These were untouched by any form of enlightenment and simply furthered stupid stereotypes in their daily lives. The quintessential LUI (yes there is one) is nothing but the extension of the rural Indian - lets call this one RI since we are abbreviating everything. This means that cities which are formally urban are actually substantially rural and carrying with them all the problems derived out of an improper education system and continuing prejudices. This has also led to a change in the composition of higher learning centres which today unfortunately have become breeding grounds for casteism and intolerance. The recruitment of local people for teachers and other jobs and that with lack of education contributed to the birth of micro regionalism which was essentially for the purposes of protecting their own interests. Needless to say these social changes have led to a new kind of politics and newer problems of leadership, which I shall speak about in my next post.

Leadership Crisis in India - Yet again

I seem to be apologizing most of the time for the delay in my posts. This time again I have been late. So apologies yet again. Now that the apology bit has been taken care of, I will get on with what I had promised at the end of the last post. I was examining what went wrong with liberal democracy in India and why. Without wasting time and say that what went wrong with Indian democracy is that over the years it has been lumpenized. And the reason for this? An education system that was not fully grown at the time of Independence and one that simply did not grow systematically. The government has focused a little too much on higher education with very little or no focus on primary education. India definitely has world class institutions in higher education such as the IIT's and the IIM's and some blue chip central universities such as the Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi and recently the University of Hyderabad and few more. In the initial years, say up till the late 1970's and the early 1980's there were students to uphold the greatness of these institutions and be their ambassadors globally. But from the 1980's onwards the picture has been changing gradually. The reason for the changes can be seen in what I said in one of the previous sentences, students who became global ambassadors. The problems really emanated when these people found that there were takers for their skills and qualities in other globally renowned institutions, especially those in the United States of America. Not only did these people go to the US of A for further education but they also settled down there since there was a market that could employ their skills and compensate more than adequately not only in monetary but also in terms of appreciation of their work. So when in the 1980's the then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi expressed concern about brain drain, he was right.

These people who started migrating were those who belonged to the upper castes and those whose parents and grand parents had benefited from the education system put in place by the British, a system that made a certain form of knowledge based in the sciences globally relevant. A trigger for this migration of such people was the following of the "socialist" pattern of economy and governance which was ushered in by the Late Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. This saw a great percentage of employment opportunities in the government sector, where the situation increasingly saw no reward for those who worked better than others. It was a system that could not distinguish the donkey from the horse. Not only did the USA offer better salaries and recognition, it also offered a better life style and greater creature comforts. India offered the opposite of all this in the wake of its pursuit of the rhetoric of socialism. This meant that those who left India came back only for the annual vacation. However, there were still a few people left and these came from the same upper caste background but were financially a little worse off than those who had already started migrating. These people too had skill sets that were globally relevant and the Y2K problem ensured that these people too had opportunities to migrate, which they did very diligently. The urban areas, especially in the South of India, began seeing a change in the nature and substance of their population and this holds the key to the problem of leadership. More of that in the next post which I hope will be sooner than what has been in the past.