Passionate About India

Sample this! Oct 2013: The Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), one of the most coveted agencies in India, started excavating at the fort of the former king, Raja Rao Ram Bux Singh in Daudia Khera village at Unnao in Uttar Pradesh in search of gold supposedly worth Rs 30,000 crores, and all based on a dream of a sadhu! Where other nations invest money in excavations only after research and geographical surveys, the premier national excavation agency, which operates under the Ministry of Culture, relies on dreams of seers! If you found that rollickingly laughable, the dents get more visible when one browses through the recent CAG report that states that when asked by CAG to give details of past excavations, ASI could not give any details about 458 excavations that had been approved by ASI in the past five years. If you wanted to search for evidence of mismanagement and fraudulent investments, one needn’t go far. It doesn’t stop here. CAG also found out that out of the sample ...

This December, I am supposed to be speaking on education in a summit in Africa. As I was researching on what to speak, I realized that while the entire world is leapfrogging to state-of-art technology to impart education to their children, there are a few unfortunate countries – rather, almost an entire continent – still struggling with blackboards and chalk pieces. On the one hand, developed nations are all set to impart knowledge through varied technology platforms, and are modernizing their syllabi to suit the new learning curves; on the other, we have Africa, a continent that has still not been able to teach basic reading, writing and arithmetic to its children. The continent is still lagging behind the rest of the world in school enrollment – evidence to the fact that dramatic global improvements in education haven’t touched the continent yet. In the last 40 years, while most of the world improved its enrolment trends by leaps and bounds, Africa could only showcase discomforting e...