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.
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