Passionate About India

The Elementary Education in India 2005-06, a report presented by the National University of Educational Planning and Administration (NUEPA) was not surprising but has been a befitting embarrassment for the Ministry of Human Resource Development, for the report has been a blatant blueprint of the failures of this critical social indicator, sustained over years. In one of my earlier editorials, I had mentioned that creation of impediments in provisioning education to masses had been a calculative conspiracy of successive governments, for it always served their purpose. In the same lines the report reveals that there are more than 32,000 schools (i.e. 3% of all schools) in this country which do not have a single student and no wonder that half of such schools are in rural India (with Karnataka being one of the worst performers with around 8,000 schools without a single student). In addition to this a little more than 6% schools have less than 25 students! The report goes on to state that ...

Whenever it comes to issues of critical importance, our general administrators, both at the Center and the state level, have been in a state of perpetual amnesia. For India, floods are nothing new, as every year, year after year, it is around this time that nature in its fury gobbles up thousands of lives, particularly in the states of Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Orissa, West Bengal and Andhra Pradesh; yet, nothing is done about it. It is no secret that we have been the most flood affected nation after Bangladesh, accounting for almost 20% of global deaths due to floods alone. This apart, on an annual basis, more than 30 million people are displaced from their homes, on account of floods, yet our administration, year after year, stands as a mute spectator counting the number of lives lost. Instead of looking for some long term solutions, the customary aerial surveys and announcement of aid packages are made by the central ministers and the powers that be, only to be hit by the same ...

With the Parliament set to resume its monsoon session by the next fortnight, the media would have a new series of pandemonium after the one which just got over with the election of our first woman President. Well, if not anyone else, at least the electronic media would find it delicious fodder, as their crew would ceremoniously wait outside the Parliament to capture ‘that’ moment whereby some non-descript Minister of some worse non-descript Ministry (we had around 53 Ministries, till the last count!) or a Member of Parliament pops out. What follows is a volley of rhetoric, from both sides, relating to topical issues pertaining to the nation. Well the honourable Parliamentarians cannot solely be blamed for such rhetoric as after a ‘consuming’ session, they are often too engaged with the thought of eating delicacies steaming in the highly subsidised Parliament canteen or cooling heels in the luxury of the opulence that the government has provided them for being the elected or selected re...

So the Presidential election is finally over (Sigh!), and with this, India creates history by appointing the first woman to its highest office! Undoubtedly it is a commendable achievement in itself, knowing the fact that most of the other relatively older and stronger democracies across the world are still struggling to elect a woman to their highest offices. Also historical is the fact that this election, in particular, has been the most hyped-up and murkiest of all Presidential elections of independent India, for – unlike the respected Mrs.Pratibha Patil – there has not been a single President who has been elected to the honourable office with so much mud on his (in this case, ‘her’) face. In fact, for most of India, Mrs.Patil was a thoroughly non-existent entity before the Presidential elections. It is only while digging into her past – when some newspapers, for sweet mercies, reported how she had also been the Governor of Rajasthan – that people got to know about her. Then again, b...

While the country was engrossed in sticky issues – like that of Indians for the first time being involved in a global terror plot, or our Presidential elections, or even the daily rumbling of our polity – the Sensex quite surreptitiously surpassed the magical figure of 15,000. It was barely one and a half years back that it crossed the 10,000 mark and brought India to the league of nations with the highest market capitalization in the world. Though for any lay Indian, this milestone might not make any sense as stock markets were never a barometer for social performance of any country, the essence of this particular milestone cannot just be ruled out as a mere mindless gambling of punters. One of the most interesting facets of this meteoric rise of the Sensex is a killing dichotomy – while on one hand, India Inc. has gone about in a spectacular manner successfully tapping this boom, on the other, our ‘efficient’ government and ‘more efficient’ public sector enterprises have spectacularl...

Since the story of India’s apocalyptic growth rate and its inclusion in the coveted and prestigious BRIC Report of Goldman Sachs became a daily affair, another issue that became equally regular, is the Great Indian Rural-Urban Divide. Though ironic, there has been reality in this evolving contrast, and much of it also has been substantiated by empirical studies across the nation. It is also true that this divide has not been brought about by default, but more of a manifestation of policy designs. This “intellectually safe and morally right” issue is becoming more ‘passé’, particularly after the Planning Commission stated that poverty is on a decline in rural India and the trend is reversing in the urban areas. To understand this conundrum, one doesn’t need to have access to the most confidential governmental files. A simple walk around the A-plus category metros of the newly crowned trillion dollar economy would suffice by itself. Whether it is Dharavi of Mumbai, the Jhuggi Jhopdi colo...

The recent suicide of Capt. Megha Razdan again brings to the forth the pertinent and tragic issues of fragging, chronic depression and mass desertions, which have been marring the Indian Armed Forces since long. Even though the death of Capt. Megha Razdan is yet to be confirmed as a suicide, that there is a grave problem with the armed forces of our country cannot be ignored. In the last year itself, it has been reported that almost 100 soldiers have taken away their lives. In addition to this, another 32 have been killed by their colleagues. In fact, the spate of suicides, particularly within the Army, had been on the rise. Reports state that since 2004, of the 408 soldiers that died, around 333 killed themselves. International media too has put forth the concern that Indian Army is loosing more soldiers by the way of suicides than fighting on the borders. So what has gone so wrong that soldiers who were supposed to guard the nation against contingencies, have started pulling the trig...