Stephen Hicks, Ph.D.

Das on education in India

From Gurcharan Das’s India Unbound, on education since 1947, when India became independent of Britain and tried democratic politics mixed with heavily top-down, government-run economic planning:

“The story of education in free India is a sad one. The government created a vast number of schools, practically free, after Independence. But they were so uniformly bad that the middle class shunned them and scrambled for places in a few private schools. Thus there rose a situation of scarcity, and you needed either money or contacts to get it. If this is the plight of the middle class, the situation of the masses is tragic. The state has failed to provide both the quantity and quality of education” (p. 54).

Parallels to the American experiment in government education?

Here is my earlier post on the excellent India Unbound.

India Unbound

I am reading Gurcharan Das’s India Unbound, and it is fueling my longstanding fascination with India. Das is former CEO of Procter & Gamble India and currently a columnist for Times of India. He grew up under Nehruvian socialism and state planning and watched it become a crippling disaster, and he has seen the dramatic changes since the free market economic reforms after 1991 — the rising standards of living, the shift from poverty into the middle class, increasing literacy rates, and the strengthening of the entrepreneurial spirit, especially among the younger.

But India’s course will also be uniquely its own, Das believes, and in contrast to other east Asian countries’ transformations. He puts it wryly:

“The Economist has been trying, with some frustration, to paint stripes on India since 1991. It doesn’t realize that India will never be a tiger. It is an elephant that has begun to lumber and move ahead. It will never have speed, but it will always have stamina. … India might have a more stable, peaceful, and negotiated transition into the future than, say, China. It will also avoid some of the harmful side effects of an unprepared capitalist society, such as Russia. Although slower, India is more likely to preserve its way of life and its civilization of diversity, tolerance, and spirituality against the onslaught of the global culture. If it does, then it is perhaps a wise elephant” (xix).

Das weaves a tapestry of energetic individuals, bounteous natural resources, deep historical roots, traditions of religion, caste, ethnicity, and language. Optimism is tempered with a realistic eye to India’s weaknesses — often put amusingly:

“The paradigmatic story concerns two Indians who meet in New York and decide to form an Indian Association. When a third arrives, they form a Tamil Association; with a fourth comes the Bengali Association. And so on until there are fifteen regional associations and the old Indian association is forgotten. One day someone was the ‘brilliant idea’ to join the regional associations into an Indian Association. It’s a funny story and it makes us laugh, but it also illustrates our divisive character. A Swiss manager of a multinational company told me that a sure way to inaction is to put two talented Indians on a global task force. They will never agree and brilliantly argue the proposal to death” (p. 149).

(And I’m wondering if the title is an allusion to Aeschylus or Shelley. Das is extremely well read.)