29th Convocation Day, April 13, 2010
The Moral Imperative
President of the Board of Governors, Professor Yogendra Alagh, Members of the Board, Director of the Institute, members of the faculty, and above all, graduates who are passing out of this great, well-reputed institution. The first thing I would like to say is that ever since your Director asked me to come for this very important occasion I have been searching around to find the right theme which I might speak on. Everyone who knows higher education knows that this Institute is different – although it is more and more becoming an institute of management, the original ‘ghuttee’ of rural management does not part from its apron strings.
While wracking my brain to select the theme of this Convocation Address, in the morning of the 5th April, about a week ago, I came upon the headline in the Hindustan Times: “Children in UP village eat mud”, the headline said. That story is really worth telling, even though everyday stories of Israel-Palestine conflict, rape in moving motor car and depiction of poverty are subjects most readers simply gloss over. For them, they have no news value. This story is grim reminder of the depth of deprivation which is widespread in our country. The story is about frail, malnourished children eating moist lumps of mud laced with silicon, a raw material used to make glass sheets and soap. This village is about 45 kilometers from Allahabad, a universally centre known for being home to Nehru family and a centre of the activities of national movement. In village after village in the vicinity of Allahabad, skinny, hungry children can be seen on the dusty edges of stone quarries chugging mud. “It tastes like pounded-gram, so we eat it” – this heart-rending statement was made to the newspaper reporter by a 5 year old child. A health volunteer surveyed 149 families, and found that children in all families were severely under-nourished – every second child had swollen eyes, protruding bellies and severe stomach aches. 30% of these families were tribal and an almost equal number belonged to the Scheduled Castes. Only 45 of these 149 families were provided BPL cards. This volunteer doctor said these people should get not just right to food but food as well. This is a basic question of rural management. This reminded me of the experience my colleagues and I had had in Kishanganj block of Baran district in eastern Rajasthan. When we started to implement the Doosra Dashak programme in that block we decided to work among the Saharia primitive tribe who comprised 40 percent of the block’s population. A couple of kilometers in the interior from a national highway in the Saharia colony we found that almost all infants and children below 5 years were suffering from extreme malnutrition. Lack of nourishment had made them listless and the infants were unable to suckle at their mothers’ breast, even if mothers at all had milk in their breasts. For weeks, our efforts at famine relief were of no avail because mothers as well as children had lost their appetite and ability to digest food. Before our eyes we saw children dying while we had come equipped with laddus made of roasted rice, jaggery and oil. It took us months to create a system of family-tracking to ensure that casualties due to starvation were prevented. But here is also a policy issue.
There are said to be more than 300 million poor in the country today and whatever food security is provided is the result of decisions of the Supreme Court which have appointed its own Commissioners for Food Security. Generally speaking, government’s stand is minimalist, ensure that people do not die of starvation, but the state can not take responsibility for nourishment for the poor. Whenever starvation deaths occur the reason given is its immediate medical cause – pneumonia or even heart failure! In the current year’s budget an amount of about Rs.55,000 crores is provided for food subsidy, while the requirement is Rs.72,000 crores. This includes subsidy in procurement, compensation for mismanagement of storage and transportation – indeed compensation for mismanagement which straddles all aspects of food economy. The attitude of the state governments is even more shocking. On the ground that they do not have enough storage capacity some states are providing subsidized food grains to distilleries to produce liquor. The moral imperative of the situation is obvious – the question is would government look at it as an issue of life and death of the people or will the hidebound and insular fiscal approach continue to prevail.
My task to prepare my convocation address was made easy by a friend having sent a copy of Harsh Mander’s book: Fear and Forgiveness: the Aftermath of Massacre, published last year, and its review by Upendra Baxi in the last issue of EPW. I can see on the face if some young people: oh no, not the 2002 carnage again. But this is my first visit to Gujarat since the year 2002. I just could not bring myself to come to this beautiful state known to me for Elaben Bhatt, Ramlal Pareek, Narainbhai Desai and you Sir, Professor Yogendra Alagh, the distinguished son of Gujarat who rightly resented it when referred to as Gujarat’s son in law! Talking of my memories of Gujarat I am reminded of Ravi Mathai who had close attachment with your Institute as well. For the 2-3 years that I worked with Ravi, that was late sixties, I was posted as collector of Ajmer and Ravi had chosen that district to give a taste of what real innovation could be – to give that understanding to officials of Rajasthan government, to confident young men and women from the Institute of Design and of course his students at the Institute of Management. Each of us was assigned a task, the details of which were spelt out and although most of us felt that we would not come up to the expectations of Ravi, we tried all the same. And in that process we changed the design (and marketability) of durries that were made in Beawar and Jawaja, a cooperative of sheep breeders came into existence and management did not seem like part of a complex corporate machine. It was a day-to-day affair when reflected upon the Ravi Mathai. And from these simple episodes emerged a new world of learning and management, referred by Ravi as the Rural University. But those horrific last few days of February and early March of 2002 changed it all. I had not had the stamina to come and serve the ghettoized Muslims in camps and the voice I raised with numerous other public men was shrill and ineffective.
It is possible that the farther away we are from the event, easier it is to demonize it, to quote a famous aphorism of Professor Yogendra Alagh. But, then, how far is really far? Those events, the depth of cruelty and the criminal role of the state - having worked in government for 37 years I was just not able to understand those things. Even now, it is not only the numbers of people killed, displaced, hurt and harmed by various forms of mayhem that bring sorrow and anger, but much more disturbing is to recall the means and methods of planned violence, and in particular the incidence of brutal acts of gang rape, smashing the skulls of infants in front of their mothers, and similar challenges to humanity. Indeed statistics of human and social suffering remain a poor guide to understanding the enormity – the scale and the depth – of human abuse and violation. Mander fully invites our consideration to more than 40 independent citizens’ committee reports that gathered systematic evidence on the enormity of brutality, advance preparations for the carnage, the deliberate subversion of relief, rehabilitation, and the legal process, and the comprehensive denial of the human rights of the persons internally displaced by violence. It was left to the National Human Rights Commission and the Supreme Court of India, energized by human rights and social movement activists, to redeem somewhat “the cumulative outcome of deliberately faulty police complaints and investigation, discriminatory arrests and bail and the intimidation of witnesses and biased prosecution and judges”. Mander recounts the climate of fear in which the Gujarat 2002 survivors had somehow to put together their wounded lives and shattered life-projects, further fully imperiled even till date by the virulent practices achieving extraordinary forms of social and economic boycott against the survivors. Mander also reminds us about the practice of social apartheid which still continue to consign many tens of thousands of survivors to ghettoized forms of existence, struggling to live with a government and neighbours that deny their losses and displacement. It is this denial of basic citizenship – via acts of social cleansing – which makes the aftermath of 2002 even more chilling. This is indeed a dreadful term to invoke! Yet, “neo-Nazi politics” is already a term in the study of politics in Europe, America and several third world states. Many a practice inviting this description remains writ large on the Indian political development. While there is much talk concerning the “criminalization” of Indian politics, its specificity is perhaps best captured by a more accurate naming of it in terms of the growth of neo-Nazi politics. To use another reference, Gujarat 2002 offers a demonstration of what Jean Francois Lyotard (1988:8) described as a “perfect crime”. He is quoted by Baxi as follows: It is in the nature of the victim not to be able to prove that one has been done a wrong. A plaintiff is someone who has incurred damages and who disposes of the means to prove it. One becomes a victim if one loses these means.
The perfect crime does not consist in killing the victim or the witnesses… but rather in obtaining the silence of the witnesses, the deafness of the judges, and the inconsistency of testimony. You neutralize the addressor, the addressee, the sense of testimony, then everything is as if there were no referent (no damages). All this epitomizes Gujarat 2002, and its continuing aftermaths and aftershocks. Mander’s effort is not to plunge in sullen remorse, but to move on to explore the limits of compunction. In this he was guided, of course, by the lofty Gandhian tradition, but more so by Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. I suppose I would be forgiven if I make another digression. Between 1990 and 1995 I served as a part-time voluntary consultant with Nelson Mandela Foundation and was asked to design school improvement in Qunu Sub-province in Western Cape Province. Almost every day that I was at Johannesburg I used to go and watch the proceedings of Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It was like a dream sequence – witness after witness coming to the witness box and recounting the work they did as underground combatants and the white Africans officials they killed. And also hundreds of secret police agents and ruthless detectives who sponsored killing of freedom fighters. I believe Harsh has not had this direct knowledge about Truth and Reconciliation Commission, but as the ancient Greek author Plutarch said: some events of history change the course of others simply by existing. Faced with the enormity of criminal impunity and immunity Harsh does not recommend a juridical solution, but rather a Gandhian one, or let us say something that Nelson Mandela would have commended. Eventually Harsh Mander poses this difficult quest in terms of a process of “acknowledgement, remorse, reparation and justice”. He is not unaware of the futility of such a solution in the present day Gujarat because he observes that: Instead of acknowledgement, there remains active denial and the blame of victim; instead of remorse there is pride for communal enmity; instead of reparation, there is economic boycott and state denial of rehabilitation; and instead of justice, there is active subversion of process of low.
I had requested Professor Vivek Bhandari to encourage students and faculty members to put questions to me, if they so wished. A few very interesting questions were remitted to me. As expected, a couple of them related to the new Right of Children to Free & Compulsory Education Act, the bill passed last year by both houses of Parliament and brought into effect from the 1 April, earlier this month. And I am happy to refer to that Act because for me that Act epitomizes the salient underpinnings of quintessential educational principles and also because to me if casts its option in favour of the moral imperative. Having learnt our educational lessons from Tolstoy and Gandhiji many of us have been opposed to compulsory education as traditionally understood. In that understanding, parents are obliged to send their children to school or suffer prosecution in courts of law. As collector of the district of Ajmer, where Ajmer Merwara Compulsory Education Act 1956 was in force, I recall to my utter dismay at the fact that implementation of that law had resulted in many more parents in civil jail than children in schools. It has always seemed atrocious to us that while the state does not run schools properly, parents are required to enroll children and ensure their attendance. I vividly recall a few incidents of in which I felt helpless in the face of that draconian law. I was an official of the state government and the officials implementing the compulsory education law were answerable to the central Ministry of Education. They were ruthless in their mission to punish absolutely every parent who did not ensure that his or her children were in primary schools. Often, the Attendance Offices, this is what the field functionaries were called, threatened gullible parents with prosecution unless they parted with some bribe money. When I made an assessment of the outcomes of this Act in the sub-divisions of Ajmer and Beawar, where the law was in force, I was repeatedly told that the number of children in the cities of Ajmer and Beawar did show our increase, but there was practically no increase in the rural areas. The number of defaulting parents who were sent to the tehsil jails, the saw called civil jails, numbered 300 to 400 on any given day. And since civil jails had no arrangement for providing meals to the interns, they waited for their families to bring them food which had to be handed over to the jail chaprasi who only occasionally had it delivered to the intended recipient.
The Right to Education law of 2009, imposes compulsion on the state to provide education in the neighbourhood of every child and further imposes an obligation on the state to ensure that the school must have an infrastructure, the details of which have been specified in the schedule appended to the Act. It is true that in the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa Nelson Mandela and his comrades had incorporated a right to education for every citizen, but the numerous education acts of the provinces of that Republic provide for punitive measures if the parents failed to send their children to school. Perhaps for the first time in the history of education, a country has imposed a compulsion on the state to provide free education for all children within walking distance from their homes. Admission of children in school, inter-school transfer and grade to grade promotion, have all been made automatic – to enable all children to learn in an environment free from stress and discrimination. As regards the parents, all that this Act states is that “it shall be the duty of every parent or guardian to admit, or cause to be admitted, his or her child or ward to an elementary education in the neighbourhood school”. It has rightly been said that what is wrong with Indian education is the stance of the teachers and their bearing. There are varying reports about teachers’ performance – their irregularity of attendance, unpunctual school arrival and casualness towards their professional responsibilities. On the other hand, teachers have their own grievances – unsatisfactory school infrastructure, lack of parents’ interest in their wards’ education, harsh and thoughtless school management and load of non-educational responsibilities, to name just a few of them. The Right to Education Act goes to considerable length to improve the working conditions of teachers and also to ensure that only qualified persons are appointed. In this sense the Act rejects denigration of teachers as para-teachers and various other ways. The Act does require teachers to be regular and punctual in attendance and to devote special attention to evaluate the performance of learners, but it does not lay down a punitive framework in case teachers are found delinquent. What is provided is an empowered School Management Committee, consisting mainly of parents, which is to oversee school functioning, including teacher performance. That, of course, is in addition to the existing rule that teacher committing default in performance of duties shall be liable to disciplinary action under the service rules applicable to them. It is the government, at the state as well as the local level, on which compulsion has been imposed in various ways. These include - opening of required number of schools in the neighbourhood; - provision of facilities as laid down in the schedule; - placement of qualified teachers on the prescribed numbers in every school; - provision of appropriate education for children with special needs so that they may also progress along with other children; - ensuring that every child admitted in a school complete 8 years of elementary education; - laying down of curriculum which is child-centred and which is in conformity with the postulates of our country’s Constitution; - ensuring that children from SC, ST and other deprived sections do not face discrimination or in any other way prevented from continuing their education. In these ways the Right to Education Act 2009 invokes the moral compulsion among parents, teachers and the state itself. The Act seems to believe that for too long has the Country taken recourse to ineffective goadings, to attract to schools which are characterized by their unattractiveness, in fact children are known to shun the school – if you want to see joy on their faces all you have do is to declare a holiday.
From this state of affairs to a situation where the law and rules themselves attempt to spell out what attractive and joyful learning is and create a system of parental participation in school management. So I close with congratulating the new graduates and their teachers for successfully completing the rigorous and practical courses of study and I wish all young men and women a very happy working life and many years of service of the people of our country.
