49.5% Reservations: suicidal for the economy and for the Congress

Very often in politics, a party loses an election because of the mistakes it made; the cumulative negative impact on the mindset of the country over rides that of any good things they may have done. BJP’s loss began with the release of terrorists in the Kandhar hijacking.

The Congress/UPA government has been around for less than two years. But it has been itching to make a major mistake. With the announcement of the 27% reservation in all central education institutes, including the IITs and the IIMs, and potentially in the schools as well, they have finally done it.

The debate on the effectiveness of blind and perpetual reservations as an affirmative action is well settled. They don’t work. We have the post independent history to prove it. The reservation market has been cornered by a few hundred thousand families. In a country of over a billion and after 58 years, that’s too small a number to prove that our reservation policy has worked.

The move may also be, in the eyes of certain judges, a stretch on the constitution. There is an arguable contradiction between caste based reservations and the constitutionally mandated abolishment of the caste system. This is irrespective of any amendment to the constitution that may be put forth. It’ll be interesting to see how President Kalam grapples with his conscience while giving the inevitable consent to this bill. He may consult the PM; after all, Manmohan Singh seems to have made peace with this decision.

This is rather strange, because he, of all people, must realize that the class rooms are going to be the life blood of the new knowledge economy. I hold him guilty of choking the oxygen supply to the growth of our country. It will shave off a few percentage points, with all its attendant implications. On the other hand, it’ll not pay the rich political dividends that the Congress government would be hoping for. They have too many organizational problems in UP and Bihar, the key states they should be aiming for. In the polarization this decision will create, the Congress will have to fight others for a share of the OBC vote; the consolidation on the other side will be almost exclusively around the BJP/NDA.

Wars progressed from being physical to being economic. They will now be fought in the class rooms. The US is already concerned and debating about the best steps it can take. The industry is taking the lead. Andy Grove and John Chambers are speaking about it. Leading magazines are writing about it. China is going about it in its own regimental, but highly efficient, way. Korea may be small, but it may be the best prepared, hampered by language alone. At a time when a significant minority of the country is gaining the confidence to take on the world and succeed, we insist on, and are, busy playing politics and taking retrograde and divisive steps.

We should be thinking of ensuring real primary education available to all. We should be preparing a crack team and enforcing a zero tolerance policy towards corruption, apathy and indiscipline in primary education. We should be thinking about reclaiming the thousands of government schools across the country from the swamp of hopeless ineffectiveness. We should be trying to scale quality primary education opportunities to make the starting line equal for everyone; without any bias based on caste, colour, class or gender. Instead, we insist on playing politics and do our bit in the aiding and abetting the rot in the education system.

We should be thinking of building a higher education system that can scale up to meet the huge demand of quality talent. Make no mistake, the current growth in our economy will soon reach saturation, and then decline, if we can’t produce enough people who can do a job. There are just about enough good institutions to meet the current demand. The government should have a limited, and focused, financial role in higher education and absolutely no role that allows it any form of control. Private investment should be encouraged to create a few hundred competing centers of excellence and thousands of centers of competence. Instead, we insist on playing politics and turn our colleges into a breeding ground of cynicism, hopelessness, despair, anger, frustration, politics, violence, factionalism and aimlessness.

We should be thinking of introducing technological aids in the classrooms to assist the teachers and making comprehension more interesting and effective. The trick in the class room is to catch the student’s imagination. We are dealing with bright, young, restless minds. Technology exists to do so. What it needs is the imagination to leverage technology to change the presentation and make learning more interactive, more interesting, more tolerant of mistakes, more cognizant of an individual’s speed and more effective. Instead, we insist on playing politics and make sure that the worst specimen of teachers get to have the jobs.

We should be thinking of ways to make the teaching profession more attractive. Closer interaction with the industry, the usual driver, is difficult to achieve if we continue to attract second, third and fourth class talent into academics. Industry needs an academia that it can respect. We need to open the UGC’s grip on salaries allowed. Instead, we insist on playing politics and persist with salary scales that look like 111, 237/354 – 497/124, 356.

However flawed it may be, we have had a few things going for us in our education system. The rigor is an important asset to be preserved, not something to be thrown away because of liberal whims. The premier position of education as a passport to a better life is a state of mind that many countries, rich and poor, would be envious of. There is a large enough physical infrastructure which exists as a spring board. There are islands of vision. Our growth requires fixing and empowering our education system. Instead, we insist on playing politics and continue to attack the one system that’s our hope.

These things are well known to people who care about education in India and realize its importance. Based on the evidence of his political career, Arjun Singh obviously doesn’t belong to that group. Even the cricket team doesn’t look safe from reservations any more.

But maybe I am judging Singh and the Congress party a bit too harshly. It will take a Mayawati to do that. But, given the race to the bottom being indulged in by the Congress and the BJP, even that scenario doesn’t look so improbable after all.