Statues sans message

Symbolism is an important aspect in India's culture, it is evident in our great classics and in drama. While symbolism conveys its subtle message in lietrature and drama it is misused in politics and public life.

One of the symbolic aspects in our public life is statues of all and sundry at road junctions. There are so many of them they are an irritation and obstruction to traffic. This type of symbolism that should be used to convey a message has been abused. A statue of a great personality should convey a subtle message of what he/she stood for, for Ex Gandhi for non-violence, Ambedkar - uplifting the poor/downtrodden etc. Statue should stir your emotions, they should not make you disregard that personality, there are so many Gandhi statues no one cares for their maintenance, forget about his message.

Today we have statues of murderers, caste laeders, leaders who practice identity politics etc. They are all over the country landscape, those who have achieved little and had no universal message.

There should be a law to restict this menace. Ironically there are roads in the country named after tyrants, one of them is in Hyderabad in Banajara Hills - Ayotollah Khomenie road (former Iranian leader), does he stand for freedom of expression ? Is it not silly to have a road named after an Iranian leader who stood for what ?

Educating India

Governments across the country have abdicated their responsibility in the field of education. In fact they seem to have given up on improving education in public schools. Enrolment continues to drop in public schools with no improvement in Infrastructure and in teacher quality. The poorest in the society choose to send their kids to a private run school ( though they too provide questionable quality).

It is just one more of failures of governance in the country. Sarvashiksha Abhiyan program was supposed to be the initiative to provide ““Right of Children to free and Compulsory Education” while improving Infrastructure etc. Just last year this program was allocated INR 21,000 cr which is big by any measure. The bane of such progressive policies has been ineffective implementation, monitoring and measurement. I have seen as part of the Sarvashiksha Abhiyan many schools in the rural areas have been given Television sets and PC’s, both are not so useful in the rural areas since power in intermittent and teachers are not trained enough and of course there is not enough content to deliver. Example of lopsided execution of policies, wouldn’t blackboards, chocks, books and toilets help kids better. It is easier to dispatch a TV and PC and so a tick mark for the bureaucrat.

A recent study by Pratham throws depressing statistics-
“Government of India statistics show that 89 out of 100 children enter schools in India but 40% of those who join school dropout before completing primary education (grade IV or V). Another 30% of the remaining, dropout before completing grade VII or VIII. Thus nearly 80% of children in India do not complete elementary education in a country that has recorded 64% literacy. This is an indicator of the status of literacy in India in the third millennium.”
 Estimates suggest that the percentage of children who can read nothing and those who can read only alphabets is about 52%
 Across the country, 11% do not enter school and 40% children drop out before completing primary school. “

A huge problem at hand for the country, there needs to be no less than a mass movement to make India literate. Pratham has launched an initiative called Project Read India – it is about getting every child read in a short-predictable time frame” (www. Pratham.org).

I am doing my bit to make India read, please associate with any initiative that helps achieve the objective of 100% literacy. The deity of education “Saraswati” has left our shores, we need to bring her back.

Job Creation - Hardly anyone cares in India

One of the things that strikes me when i meet American clients on business is their concern for the community they operate in their emphasis on job creation, upskilling of their people etc. They are deeply aware about the need for their organizations to be efficient, innovative to survive the competition,at the same time they are ready to take hard decisions, all this keeping in mind job creation and what is good for the community. That is why American corporations are on the cutting edge.

According to statistics unemployment in the US is about 8.9 and last reported in India it is 9.4%. I think 9.4% unemployment in India is a joke anyway, department of labor must be churning out these meaningless numbers. If one were to look at the entire specturm of American politics all of them talk about job creation as the most important issue (some of it is obviuosly rhetoric) but still one cannot discount the political noise and its intent.

I wanted to contrast this with our political leaders, we can hardly find any of them talking about employment, job creation, industry growth,skill building, community etc. Our political space is so self serving and corrupt they do not have time for the most important aspect that drives country's productivity and economic growth. We can add the bureacracy to this list of self serving egoistic group that cares a damn for the citizen.

We should give a new syllabi to our political masters to talk about,for long they are stuck in their old rhetoric, we should force them to talk about the new agenda for India - education, health care, job creation should be the new topics they should accuse each other of failing to do much. Some thing will come out of such a battle.