I hope to keep this post really short. However, the key word there is hope and not promise. My arguments about Indian society and its educational system becoming illiberal have been vindicated by some unbelievable developments concerning the publication in an NCERT text book of a cartoon from 1948 in which the cartoonist has depicted the movement towards creating a new constitution as the slow movement of a snail. In that particular cartoon there are references to Ambedkar and Nehru. And now that Ambedkar has been elevated to the status of a God, there has been a furore about it and some of the members of the text book committee have resigned and have been attacked by various lumpen elements of Indian society. Educational institutions and their functioning has been disrupted and academicians who normally lead non-descript lives have started making headlines of newspapers. What kind of a society are we if we cannot poke a little fun at ourselves and have a good laugh? The abhorrent caste system has now been inverted, with those at the bottom in the past now at the top and those at the top now at the bottom. What kind of emancipation is this? Instead of doing away the terrible system that has stratified society and humiliated generations we have only succeeded in iterating a newer version of the same.
Another development that I would like to comment on is that the topper of the Union Public Service Commission's recruitment is a woman, which is very good. But she is a qualified MBBS doctor from no less an institution that AIIMS in New Delhi which is very bad. For those of you still trying to understand what I am saying here is the explanation. Education in India, especially higher education is very subsidized. Every student who goes through the educational process for professional courses in higher education is subsidized to the tune of millions of rupees. Now the top ranker of the said exam studied medicine in arguably the best medical education providing institution in India. By quitting medicine and become a general administrator the lady in question apart from wasting the nation's money (which was used for subsidizing her education) has also made sure that there is one less qualified medical practitioner. That means that someone who could have studied to become a doctor and may have become a good doctor probably was deprived of that medical education which would have been of use to the country.
This yet again vindicates what I have been saying about the Indian education system. It just trains students to crack entrance examinations without gaining any substantial knowledge. So if you take the case of this AIIMS student who has spurned her medical education, you can see the story of a person who had no interest in medicine being forced to study it by her parents or whoever and when she gets an opportunity to dump it, she does so without too much of a problem (I assume). If she was confident about her ability as a doctor and enjoyed being one, she would not have thought about the Civil Services examinations at all. So now let us take this story one more step forward. What if the said person is only good at cracking entrance exams? She could very well have cracked the Civil Services exam but just as she did not have confidence or attitude towards practicing medicine she suddenly finds that she has no attitude for administration either. Then what? You take your own thoughts forward from there.
However, I would like all of you to ponder upon this question? Do we need so many engineering graduates and people unfit for medicine becoming doctors? Ultimately all of them are writing the civil services exams. The third ranked person this year is an engineer. And when some journalist asked him what his plan B was if he did not crack the civil services exams, he said he was focussed singularly on the civil services exams and therefore there was no plan B. So what was this person doing studying engineering? Professional courses attract greater subsidies from the government and at the end of them engineers, doctors, lawyers take the UPSC examination with Sociology, Public Administration, Anthropology as their subjects why did they study these professional courses at all? Why could they not have done a BA which would have cost the tax payer less money to pay for subsidies and helped the government bring more deprived and needy children into the education system. So I end by reiterating what I have always been saying. The government should take over education from the Primary to the PhD level. It should provide it free of cost to all citizens. It should cut engineering seats by 90% and it should take undertakings from those who pursue professional courses that they will take up research and teaching in their professions. Look at what happened to the IITs. They have become graduate shops. Where is research happening in engineering and medicine? In the medical field sundry doctors are simply following the protocols laid down by the WHO which is controlled by medical research that is happening mainly in America and to an extent in Europe. Most of the big contracts for engineering go to foreign companies because Indian companies do not have the knowledge base to take up challenging projects. Our doctors and engineers are nothing but glorified technicians who are following protocols laid down in other countries and perpetrated across the world through world bodies. Think about it, especially the young people among you who think the world would shut down without your services in call centres and BPOs. Those who think along those lines are suffering from a delusional and completely false sense of entitlement.
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