http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/felling-the-straw-man/
Having grown up on stories of Bunker Roy’s
admirable work in Tilonia, I was distressed to read his article, “The Barefoot
Government”. If this inconsistent, empirically flawed argument is any example
of the kind of thinking he wants our educational system to encourage, there is
something ‘dreadfully wrong’ with his proposed reforms.
To begin with, he sets up a straw man to
attack – the “foreign returned degree-wallah” in the previous UPA government,
whom he blames for all of India’s anti-poor policies, and in particular, for
“almost strangling NREGA”. If he wanted to, why not just attack the troika of
Manmohan Singh, Chidambaram and Montek Singh Ahluwahlia, instead of clothing it
in an impossibly generalized argument?
The most elementary reflection on the origins and formulation of NREGA
would have shown the leading hand of the not just foreign-educated, but
foreign-born economist, Jean Dreze, as well as the role of the foreign-born
Sonia Gandhi in pushing it through. There are also any number of
foreign-resident scholars like David Shulman or David Lelyveld to name just two,
who know Indian history, languages and culture much better than the Indian born
and Indian educated “graduates who roam the streets of small town and cities by
the thousands… and who practice the worst forms of cruelty, slavery and crimes
against humanity.” This latter description covers not just past ministers but
includes ministers of this government who have been accused of enabling communal
carnage. So, the issue then is not where one is born or where one is educated,
but what attitude one has towards the rest of society. It is true that the way
certain disciplines like economics and political science are headed, with their
over reliance on number crunching and faith in the free market, is likely to
produce people ignorant of society (not just Indian society but any society).
However, to blame the disciplines would itself be too broad a generalization.
There is a struggle that needs to be waged over what should be taught and how, and
this needs to be fought not just from outside but within the academy. Education
does need to be responsive to society – not only to its immediate need for
jobs, but also its long term need for critical thinking, innovation and beauty.
Whole-scale uneducated attacks that do not recognize this knife-edge function,
hardly help.
Roy’s diatribe against Vice-Chancellors and
his description of a “Class 12 pass minister speaking as an equal to almost 120
heavily qualified, on paper, vice chancellors”, is foolish. Ms. Irani may be
equal in gender terms and more than equal in power, but is certainly not equal
in terms of qualifications. Is Roy
saying that we should abolish all educational qualifications? Why then is it
relevant whether the Minister is even 12th class pass? When I see
how hard some of our students struggle, their diligence in learning a difficult
academic language, the financial problems they suffer - and not just for the paper qualification but
because they genuinely believe in getting and generating knowledge - I refuse
to accept that degrees don’t matter. Our highly educated HRD Ministers may not
have done much for the education sector, but to then argue that it was because
of their degrees is a straightforward logical fallacy. A degree may not be
sufficient for being HRD minister, but it certainly helps to have one.
The more fundamental question that Roy
raises, of course, is how to transform not just our education system but also
our governance system to learn from the rural poor. But neither this government
nor the previous one seriously cares about this issue. I am sick and tired of
bureaucrats, industrialists and others saying that ‘people like me’ – anthropologists
- want to keep adivasis in museum cages. Does wanting to harness their
ecological knowledge and preserve their languages while providing them the best
possible education in formal biotechnology and world history, sound like
keeping anyone in a museum? Does asking for peace and not war, for the
acknowledgment and celebration of diversity, sound like a policy for
fossilization? It is those who want to displace villagers, destroy the
environment and introduce uniformity in
language and religion - thus extinguishing the very bases of deep local
knowledge - who want to keep adivasis backward. Neither Narendra Modi, Smriti
Irani, and certainly not Dina Nath Batra have any vision on this issue, and to claim otherwise, betrays Roy's own ‘moral and intellectual
fatigue’.
