Could India have developed differently, and much faster?

The current excitement over the ‘Amrit Mahotsav’ marking the 75th year of our Independence has set me thinking about how much India has achieved since 1947 (I am the last to belittle all the magnificent achievements against what had once seemed insurmountable odds), where we have failed – often dismally, if not tragically – whether we could have done better, and how we can still change courses sharply in order to see a far stronger, healthier, more civilized India that we can be much more proud of  by 2047.

India has at least a hundred million intellectuals, especially highly concentrated in Bengal, if you include the sort who dominate the conversation at roadside tea stalls, TV quarrels (I hesitate to exalt them with the title of debates) and op-ed pages in regional newspapers. I shall not let myself forget that every one of them knows vastly more about the answers to the above questions than mere me, and is absolutely confident that s/he is right. Also, it will constantly echo at the back of mind as I write this essay that, as some famous man observed, whatever you say about India, the opposite can be asserted with equal authority by your interlocutor, if he is sufficiently informed and cunning. However, I believe, too, that fifty years of concentrated reading, observing, thinking, teaching, writing and debating has qualified me to contribute my mite to the argument.

I believe that, despite having a dazzling galaxy of great leaders at the helm when we set out to fulfill our tryst with destiny, we set our priorities wrong. To my mind, industrialization with the latest technology, setting up a chain of institutes of ‘higher’ education focusing on science and tech and medicine and law and accounting, establishing nuclear-and space research centres, building up a huge military machine, encouraging the proliferation of vast urban conurbations, carving up the states along linguistic lines, grappling with the ever brooding menace of casteism, fighting extreme left inspired terrorism – all these things might have been necessary and desirable, but they could have waited a few decades. Four things that should have been given the very highest priority right from the start are 1) fostering universal respect for the rule of law, to which every man from the highest in the land would have been as subservient as the lowest, regardless of differences in age, gender, education, wealth, social position, caste, religion, language and native place, 2) drastic control of population growth, so that the 300 million in 1947 could not have reached the monstrous and almost completely unmanageable level of 1400 million today, 3) complete removal of absolute poverty, with programmes focused on redistributing a very large chunk of national income and wealth from the richest ten per cent to the poorest, 4) universal free basic education for all children up to the age of 14 or 16, coupled with a 25-30 year long project that would have ensured a secondary school level education or its equivalent to all adults between 18 and 50 who had never attended formal school, the primary aim of this education being to make good citizens rather than those preparing to go on to making ‘paying’ careers for themselves.

Reflect on this quietly, attentively, for a considerable length of time. Wouldn’t you be persuaded to agree that if the four above criteria could have been met, say, by 1977, and only after that we unleashed full democracy and (state monitored-) capitalism, then within the next 45 years we might have actually surpassed China on every index of progress, including freedom and overall material prosperity by now? And who would argue that that would have been a bad thing?

Is this a pipe dream, something that could never have been achieved? I do not think so. Let me explain categorically why.

Napoleon made  fun of the British (half-seriously, actually with admiration), saying ‘They are a strange race. They make their own laws, and they are mortally afraid of breaking those laws’. As I said, from the lowest to the highest in the land. Churchill suffered a landslide electoral defeat after having steered Britain successfully through the Second World War, and relinquished office without demur. As someone observed, if there were popular elections in the Soviet Union at that time and Stalin lost, it would not even have occurred to him that he should relinquish office – he would instead simply have had several hundred thousand contrarian voters shot or sent to the gulags. And Jerome K. Jerome wrote (in Three Men on the Bummel) that the Germans were far more law-abiding than the British! At a much less exalted level, I personally know a rich and well connected middle aged lady who plucked a flower in a London park despite being aware that it was strictly prohibited, and was politely but promptly hauled away to the nearest police station to pay a fine and have her name and photograph recorded: her husband, knowing how the system worked, did not raise a finger to ‘save’ her. Suppose this had been imposed in India right from day one: MPs and MLAs and even local councillors would not have dared to behave like demi-gods (I won’t even mention CMs and PMs), and no one, bar none, could have avoided a hefty fine and at least a night in the lockup if he had dared to challenge a policeman over an obvious case of breaking some law by shouting ‘jaanta hai mai kaun hun?’ (or ‘…mera baap kaun hai?’) Would that have helped to make India a better place, and governance much easier, or not? Why did we spread among the elite as well among the masses the pernicious idea that our newly acquired freedom meant that from now on everybody could do as he pleased, cheat and hurt anyone he pleased as much as he pleased on his road to power and pelf as long as he had the right connections, and public safety, decency and welfare be damned?

To the population question next. Consider this: if we had been able to achieve the degree of development that we have already done, in terms of overall national income and social infrastructure (roads, schools, houses, hospitals), to name just two major indices with a population which had stabilized at about one-third of the present number, wouldn’t we have been vastly better off already? (the simplest of arithmetic would tell you that our per capita income would have been three times its current value, which would have placed us comfortably among the middle income countries of the world, rather than still among the poorest!) And isn’t it an unarguable fact that we have left far too many problems – from jobs to availability of the most essential commodities to pollution to caste wars – to fester and grow steadily worse and insoluble simply because the sheer number of people scrabbling for a bare sustenance, at which level no moral or legal bars can stop them from doing what they do, from stealing to rioting to cheating and fighting for more and more ‘reservations’, has grown relentlessly larger over the decades? It would have taken so little of concerted and well-meaning effort, really: significant material rewards for birth control to the poorest, who would have grasped them with both hands, combined with mild punitive measures for parents who have more than two children (withdrawal of ration cards and tax concessions, no permission to stand for elections, things like that): no draconian measures, and some thousand crores of rupees spent – we have spent vastly bigger amounts on prestige projects galore, and are still doing so! – which would have rewarded us by creating scope for much easier governance and faster economic growth later on, and brought back the investment many hundredfold. Even as I write this I am reminded of the German poet lamenting ‘against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain’…

To come to the third point now. This is truly tragic, because we started off by promising ourselves via the Constitution, and our first prime minister reiterating in his first and most famous speech to the newly free nation, to make the removal of extreme, centuries-old poverty, which reduced millions of human beings to the level of neglected and abused beasts, our highest and first priority. Then we lost our way. I shall not go into the very vexed question of apportioning blame – I have heard about every kind of panacea, including turning India into a communist or military dictatorship, and learnt how silly they are – but the fact remains that after ‘developing’ for 75 years, India is still home to almost half the total number of extremely poor people in the world (meaning, by World Bank standards, those who have to survive on less than two US dollars a day). Anybody who dares claim, despite knowing this terribly shameful fact, that after all we should take note of all the other kinds of ‘advancement’ India has made, is one who has either never known or seen such poverty first hand or simply doesn’t care, because he knows that he and his family and kin will never be affected by it. Could extreme poverty have been removed early? I believe yes. True, India between 1947 and 1977 remained overall a very poor nation, but if you take note of the top ten per cent (and even more so, the top 1%), there were a lot of obscenely rich people around even then, from business tycoons to ex maharajas to film stars and the mahants who ran the biggest temples, and if a stern government – say, cast in the Scandinavian model – had taxed away much of their wealth to feed, clothe, house, heal and educate the poorest, I believe the worst of material misery would have become a thing of the past by 1977, though it is true that the rich would have had to wait much longer to live in palaces, drive luxury limousines, go holidaying on the Riviera, deck their wives in gold and send off their children to greener pastures in phoren lands. Our ruling elite, from Nehru to Jyoti Basu, for all their fancy rhetoric, didn’t bother to pay attention, because they simply didn’t care, and the masses never really had a voice: that’s all. Sad, because today those vast unwashed masses are eating away so much of our resources through their incessant demands on the national purse (look at the intense competition going on among our state governments to launch ever more lavish ‘welfare’ projects to buy the next vote) that there are virtually no resources left for anything more worthwhile, from building infrastructure to supplying the military with new age arms and technologies! (our mainstay  fighter aircraft is still the forty-plus year old MiG 21, the ‘flying coffin’ – one air force chief has publicly complained that no one would drive a forty year old car – and the government, according to a now-retired army chief, cannot afford more than ten days’ ammunition for his soldiers in case of a full scale war).

So we come to the last point. Education. The one thing about which almost everybody who knows me will admit that I know a thing or two. Nothing shows how elitist and undemocratic India’s governments have always been – no point carping about whether the Congress was a little better or the Janata governments or the BJP – than how we have neglected basic education in favour of the ‘higher’ version. From Finland to Japan to New Zealand, I have learnt enough about the most ‘advanced’ countries of the world to be sure that they have done just the opposite, and prospered that way. And yet the Father of the Nation had wanted otherwise. He insisted so hard and so long that the requirement that the State shall provide universal free education up to the age of 14 was enshrined in the Constitution as a Directive Principle of State Policy, but then it was quietly and by near common consent forgotten. Why did he ask for it, and why was it forgotten?

To explain how I have understood him, I must be forgiven for a little dissertation on the side here. Do read it with the foreknowledge that I have not only read extensively about the right purposes and methods of education but personally taught at all levels from primary school to post graduate students of many disciplines for more than half a lifetime, while continuously reflecting on our real job all through.

To start with, then, the greatest authorities in both the east and west, from Russell to Vivekananda, have always given far more importance to school education rather than what passes for ‘higher’ education. There must be a very good reason for that. A schooling for at least ten years is essential for everybody, whereas only a tiny minority in every country goes for higher education, because they neither understand the need for it nor want it, nor have the aptitude for it nor can afford it (the vast majority of the millions in highly subsidized Indian colleges, whatever they are formally ‘studying’, are actually just killing time and scraping through exams somehow until they can get a job. This is an open secret. In any case, no country needs millions of new doctors or lawyers or engineers or historians or mathematicians every year – if some country, such as ours, is still churning them out, there is something very seriously wrong with the system).

Secondly, we must be very clear-eyed about why a certain period of schooling for everyone is needed, what it should seek and hope to achieve.

One very noble and desirable purpose of education is, certainly, nurturing the original creative urges of people born highly talented in every field. Two things, however, must be remembered in this context: one, that people like Mozart and Michelangelo and Lincoln and Tagore are so energetic, focused and self-directed that they do not really need a formal schooling, and that a formal schooling is actually often irrelevant, unnecessary, a burden and a bore to them, and may actually thwart and dampen their finest innate talents; two, the present day schooling system, which is designed for very average people working as teachers in a bureaucratic setup and dealing with vast numbers of pupils who are born and destined to be very average adults, is simply not capable of handling geniuses, so the less time, thought and money that is wasted on this goal the better – as most geniuses have shown, they can make their way through life very well on their own.

Two other, much more practical aims of universal schooling are a) to make good citizens of the future (reasonable, fairly well informed, non violent, polite, cooperative and law-abiding people, as long as the laws are obviously designed to serve the greatest good), and b) to give everybody some saleable skills that they can make a decent living with later on. Now I agree entirely with Gandhiji’s view (and not his alone) that ten years of sincere and intelligent schooling is quite enough to achieve both the above purposes (a certain small section will be found to be simply uneducable – how they can be dealt with is beyond the scope of this essay). Remember, indeed, that the best results for (a) can be achieved only when you start with very young children – I have always maintained that it is stupid to introduce a course in ethics to MBA students – and 90% of jobs in adult life do not need any ‘education’ beyond ten years of good schooling followed by a few months of technical training, whether you think of a shopping mall supervisor or optician or petrol pump manager or bank teller or policeman or low level IT worker (I say this last on Sudha Murty’s authority). It is a shameful waste of national resources to ‘educate’ millions of youngsters who will turn up in those professions in how to read Shakespeare or do integral calculus, or how the Krebs cycle works in your body cells or how plants and animals are classified in the Linnaean system. If millions of parents still send their children to college, they do so firstly because they associate a college degree with a silly thing called ‘status’ (which nobody really believes in anyway), or because the unemployment situation is so bad that they keep hoping that more degrees will finally fetch their children some halfway respectable job (and are then horrified to hear that a crane driver in some places earns far more than their ‘engineer’ children!), or because they are simply too ashamed to admit publicly that their children are really unemployed, when they have the option of calling them ‘students’ instead. But the long and short of it is that if 90% of youngsters could be employed after ten years of schooling and at most a year of professional training, not only millions of families but the whole nation would have benefited hugely (just think of lafungas on motorbikes posing a menace on the roads and their female counterparts burning their parents’ money at restaurants and beauty parlours and you will get what I am driving at).

Education has one more purpose: to give people a much wider appreciation of life and its treasures, by means of all the precious products of civilization, namely literature, art, music, sport – not its horribly caricatured professional version but sports for pleasure and comradeship – justice, true spirituality and so on. This is so neglected in our country that I have often been heard to say that if many people do manage to become educated in India, they do so not due to but in spite of the schooling they have received, so I shall not belabour the point here.

Finally, the fact that this kind of universal basic education has not happened in India, I am convinced, is because of the very deeply elitist (partly casteist, partly sexist, partly economic) bias built into the Indian system of governance right from the start, in open defiance of that famous Directive Principle in our Constitution. Perhaps if Ambedkar or Subhas Bose had been at the helm at the start things would have been very different today – or perhaps they would have been assassinated! In any case, the fact that it has not happened very largely explains why India is so backward still, for all its IITs and IIMs, and why our ‘educated’ population’s highest dream remains to run away to Umrica or failing that, to work for an MNC. As Tagore wrote: poschatey rekhechho jaare, sey tomare poschate tanichhe… the one whom you have shoved behind you keeps pulling you backwards.

Now think: if you broadly agree with this thesis, wouldn’t you also agree that if just these four things had been achieved by 1977, India would have found it far easier to race ahead on the road to progress thereafter, and been in a far more admirable position today?

[I deliberately wrote this essay to mark the day Gandhi died]