A reductionist definition of democracy from Sir Bernard Crick’s book ‘Democracy: A Very Short Introduction’ gives us the framework to perform such an analysis in a simple, clear way. I will also compare India to the US, Pakistan and China, since for a lot of people, the meaning of terms like democracy are perhaps better understood in a relative sense than an absolute one.

Bernard Crick splits democracy into three components:

• Democracy as a principle of authority: This means that any political authority in the society should come via democratic means i.e. political power be allocated via free and fair elections at regular intervals.
• Democracy as a set of institutional arrangements or constitutional devices: This is the principle of checks and balances. An independent judiciary, a free and lively media and an independent bureaucracy are all part of such a democratic setup. In short, no single entity in society is allowed to function without oversight and become all powerful.
• Democracy as a type of behavior: Sir Crick describes this as “People acting and behaving democratically in patterns of friendship, speech, dress, and amusements, treating everyone else as if they were an equal”. This means that in civic interactions, material and social standing becomes irrelevant. Every human being is treated with dignity.

A simple democracy score for a country can be estimated by combining scores for each of the three components above. I feel that the first two components are of equal importance, while the third is more important than the first two. Therefore, I shall score the first two components out of 10, and the third out of 20, for a maximum total possible score of 40.

First, here are my estimates for the scores of America, Pakistan, India and China in 1960.
Democracy as a principle of authority: US: 6.5/10, Pakistan: 2/10, China: 1/10, India: 5/10
Democratic institutions: US: 8/10, Pakistan: 2/10, China: 1/10, India: 5/10
Democratic behaviour: US: 11/20, Pakistan: 4/20, China: 5/20, India: 2/20
Total score: US: 24.5/40, Pakistan: 8/40, China: 7/40, India: 12/40

In 1960, the US already had a long history of competitive elections, although they were obviously not fair because African-Americans were prevented from voting by various means. China was a totalitarian state in the grip of Mao. Pakistan was already under military rule. India had managed to hold two general elections, but social equality was a distant dream. The US society was quite democratic for the whites but excluded the blacks. China was quite socially unequal but was still more equal than India or Pakistan. Overall, the US was about 60% democratic, India about 30 % while China and Pakistan were not very democratic.

What would the scores look like today, on India’s 63rd Republic Day ?
Democracy as a principle of authority: US: 8.5/10, Pakistan: 5/10, China: 1/10, India: 7.5/10
Democratic institutions: US: 8.5/10, Pakistan: 5/10, China: 2/10, India: 7.5/10
Democratic behaviour: US: 18/20, Pakistan: 8/20, China: 15/20, India: 10/20
Total score: US: 35/40, Pakistan: 18/40, China: 18/40, India: 25/40

Today, the US is socially a very free and equal place. There is still some discrimination, but it is the exception rather than the norm. Pakistani society has moved forward as well, although at a disappointing rate. Chinese institutions and political authority remain undemocratic, however the Communist revolution has transformed the Chinese society. It is much more democratic today than it was in 1960. As for India, in terms of the protocols and hardware of democracy: competitive, free and fair elections and checks and balances, it is almost on par with the US. However, Indian society is far less democratic than the American or even the Chinese one. Overall, today India is about 60 % democratic, China and Pakistan about 40 % while the US is close to 90 % democratic.

In India, we have banked on democracy and liberty to reform society. I feel this incremental social revolution has worked in most parts of the country. And we have to keep this social revolution going. The idea of India was first and foremost about creating a great society, where people of any gender, religion or ethnic group would be equal citizens. Every voice and action against gender discrimination, caste/religious divisions, corruption and abuse of power adds a little bit to India’s democratic score, bringing us closer to the big idea.

Readers may also like to read a similar post on The South Asian Idea blog: http://thesouthasianidea.wordpress.com/2008/07/26/democracy-in-india-%E2%80%93-7/

One critical aspect of any quantitative analysis is the definition of variables; what to measure, where and when to measure it.  Clearly, one can just look at populations in rural and urban areas, and then compute the appropriate economic metrics for both. However, Krishna and Bajpai refine this process a step further by introducing a ‘distance from an urban centre’ metric. Basically they subdivide the population into four categories:

• Urban areas (cities and towns)
• Villages less than 5 km away from an urban area
• Villages between 5 and 10 km from an urban area
• Villages more than 10 km away from an urban area

The authors mention the rationale for such a subdivision as follows,

Distance from market, both physical and cognitive, can importantly influence an individual’s economic prospects.

The physical distance from the market here is captured by the distance from an urban area; since urban areas are the major market area in India. The authors then computed the change in income (adjusted for inflation) in each of the four subdivisions between the years of 1993 and 2005. The figure below summarizes their results,

Figure 1: Income growth in India urban areas, villages less than 5 km away from urban areas, villages between 5 and 10 km away from an urban area and villages more than 10 km away. The income growth figure for urban areas (not mentioned in the paper) has been estimated by using an average of 6 % growth in income overall.

The figure clearly illustrates that economic growth has been rapid and concentrated in urban areas and their peripheries. But alarmingly, in areas outside this urban and peri-urban circle, where the majority of population lives, incomes have actually fallen ! The authors point out that,

Being less well linked to towns is no longer a matter of merely standing still, of being a bystander left behind by the train of economic progress. Those who were left behind have tended to fall further behind.

Perhaps, the difference in the income growth rates between places in and around urban areas and the rural core would not be surprising for most readers. The serious question though is why have the incomes in rural areas actually declined. And the question becomes even more serious if we look at the changes in income for different income groups (very poor, poor, lower middle, middle and rich/upper middle class) within a single subdivision.

Figure 2 shows these changes for the population living in villages more than 10 km away from an urban area,

Figure 2: The growth (or decline) in incomes for different classes in the core rural areas of India where 52 % of the population lives

The figure above is shocking. The Indian government and media goes into a huff when the rupee falls or the stock market fluctuates. Analysts and experts predict dire futures if FDI inflows fall down or if ‘market sentiment is hurt’. But the wholesale impoverishment of the poor and very poor in Bharat, (who certainly make up a huge chunk of the population, if not the majority) did need not merit alarm ? The author’s point out,

To be further away from towns and markets is a bane in this era of market led growth, but to be poorer and further away is a recipe for disaster.

To see others get rich while not being able to improve one’s own income is irksome. But others getting rich while one gets poorer is usually seen as an injustice.  In my opinion, Figure 2 partly explains both the defeat of the BJP led NDA in 2004 and the rise of left wing extremism in the 2000′s.

Is there a silver lining ? If one sees the analog to Figure 2 for rural areas within 5 km from an urban area, we see perhaps a more promising picture.

Figure 3: The growth in incomes in the peri urban areas of India (villages less than 5 km away from an urban area)

We see that even the most poor section of urban and peri-urban Indians saw inflation adjusted incomes improve between 1993-2005. This shows that India’s growth can indeed reduce poverty and improve the lives of all its people, and achieve the much vaunted ‘inclusive growth’ goal. The NREGA (implemented post 2005) was an attempt in this direction. It would be interesting to see how the NREGA has affected Figures 2 and 3 since its inception. In its ideal form, the scheme provided a direct boost to the incomes of the poor and very poor in Bharat and in the process employed them to create the infrastructure for future rural economic growth. Perhaps, the Congress led UPA’s success in the 2009 election indicates that the scheme did indeed address some of these imbalances.

However, the NREGA will not form an engine for growth by itself. It addresses inequality by state investment, not actual wealth and job creation. Creating the conditions for such wealth and job creation remains a challenge for Indian society and its government.

Readers might also be interested in reading: ‘The Three Layers of Emerging India‘

(Thanks to Vinay Pandey for Figure 1, Akanksha Jain for Figure 2 and 3)

The inculcation of the incomprehensible into the indifferent by the incompetent. – John Maynard Keynes

India is starting to see the rumblings of discontent on various fronts. Corruption, farmer’s issues, tribal rights and increasingly, higher education. Reading the newspapers, one would think that the entire nation is singularly concerned about the fate of the IITs and whether Narayan Murthy finds their graduates of adequate ‘quality’. However, the vast majority of India’s graduates get their incomprehensible education from our state universities.

And it is the state of these state universities that forms the subject of the paper: “Rise and Decline of India’s State University System: Neglect, Design, or Neglect by Design ?” by Dilip Kanhare and Mihir Arjunwadkar at the University of Pune, and Abhijit Vichare from Tata’s Computational Research Labs. The authors had written the paper in the hope that it would lead to some introspection and debate regarding the fate of India’s university system. Indeed, their paper does merit a lot of discussion, simply because of the importance of the issues they raise.

First, the author’s rightly recognize the importance of higher education for an individual. University education can be summarized as ‘learning to learn’. In addition to the acquisition of skills for finding employment, university education lays a foundation for life long personal, character and societal growth. The role of higher education is summarized by the authors as follows,

education should be seen as a long-term investment by a society in its own human resources for the purpose of ensuring its own survival, stability, and well-being. In the Indian context, education can also serve as an effective instrument for channeling social reforms and for strengthening our already weakened social fabric.

Unfortunately, India’s state universities remain neglected and are unable to nurture the human resources of the nation. And far from strengthening social reforms, our unequal education system is further dividing our society.

What has lead to this state of affairs ? The author’s highlight a litany of flaws and inadequacies in the very structure of the higher education system. According to them,

most alarming … is the declining quality of manpower (academic or otherwise) and even worse, the system’s inability to attract and retain quality manpower.

After all, great systems and great institutions are built by great people. A generation or so ago, the state universities of India had a decent position in public life. Employment as faculty at a state university carried a degree of social prestige. Today, how many young Indians would even want to attend a state university, let alone seek employment at one ? A cursory glance at the website of the most prestigious state engineering college in Mumbai (VJTI) reveals that most of its faculty do not have a PhD. Certainly, such faculty do not constitute capable manpower for an educational institution.

Sadly, the leadership at these universities seem to be uninterested in changing the current scenario. If only for pointing out that much better can be done, I would like to mention the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, a state university of Delhi, that under the capable leadership of Dr. Pankaj Jalote has recruited an impressive set of faculty, each member having a PhD and a diverse research program. However, in most state universities, academia itself is uninterested in change. The authors mention that,

Even a mechanism of mature debate amongst our academicians, and a process of consensus that would lead to policy frameworks to guide the evolution of our education system have not evolved in this country.

Further, the state government practices an extreme amount of control on the workings of a state university. The university bureaucracy dictates the faculty rather than them working in service of the faculty and students. As a comparison, the author’s note that the,

IITs are organizations with excellent support structures that do not dare to demean academics. They do an excellent job on the core value of (undergraduate) teaching.

What will be the consequences of the current trends ? The author’s say,

It is evident that India’s State Universities are rapidly degenerating into what can be described as municipality schools of higher education. The Centre establishes a few high-profile institutes of excellence to take care of the needs of the state of the art frontier research/education, and private schools satisfy the needs of the industry and the rich middle class. What is left for the masses is a neglected third-rate State education system.

It is evident that such a structure will reproduce the inequalities and hierarchies that have held back Indian society from reaching its full potential. In addition, the poor general quality of labor will prove damaging to India’s economic prospects. Finally, in such a setup higher education institutions and their faculty will carry little credibility in the public sphere. In this way, an important intellectual resource will be isolated from society, and informed opinions on social/economic/technological problems will continue to elude society.

Is there a way out ? The author’s say that “Fundamental Problems Need Fundamental Resolutions”. They propose the following concrete measures:

1. Complete autonomy for University campus without loss of financial support from the Government, and no control and interference from the state politicians and bureaucrats.
2. A conscious effort to bring in – at all niches in the organization – young, fresh, capable, wise, creative and dedicated minds that are capable of thinking differently.
3. Ending the isolation of education from society and people’s lives. The impetus for radically different modes of disseminating education can come only from NGOs and mass movements.

I think the Indian higher education system has tremendous potential for becoming a complete world-class system. I look forward to the day when our state universities are thriving centres of learning where great intellectuals push the frontiers of human knowledge, and where young minds, free to explore every subject from history to medicine to engineering are inspired to be part of a better, more learned society, not just a wealthier one. Our motto can then be,

The inspiration of the inquisitive by the ingenious.

Let me first present some examples that point to the assumptions I am referring to. Mitu Sengupta of Ryerson University writes,

His movement has been portrayed, so far accurately, as a narrow, middle-class, upper-caste phenomenon that is dangerously tinged with authoritarianism and Hindu nationalism.

Another commentator on The South Asian idea blog wrote,

The demand is real. But I have serious doubts on the moral fabric of the Indian crowd that is demanding this.

Similar ideas were seen in a number of articles and comments from academics critiquing the mobilization. I would summarize the key assumptions underlying their understanding of the middle class as follows:
1) The middle class is casteist.
2) The middle class is communal.
3) The middle class lacks moral values and is itself aligned with the corrupt elite.
Note that these assumptions might indeed be well justified but the task of verifying them is itself a rigorous academic exercise. Today’s scholars however, dont even agree on a definition for the middle class, let alone identify key characteristics of it.

Assumption one is perhaps the easiest to justify. After all, wasnt it the middle class that led the anti-Mandal agitations and the less violent 2006 anti-reservation protests ? I think that the middle class is indeed anti-reservation, often on quite flimsy grounds. However, this is not enough to derive the conclusion that the class is casteist. The opposition to reservations is driven more by the insecurity of scarce higher education rather than caste discrimination. Urban middle class India is indeed caste-insensitive but it is (mostly) not casteist. In fact, this section of the society possibly sees the most intercaste marriages !

The second assumption has a firmer ground, although, one would question how secular the Indian masses themselves are. A paternalistic view of minorities, homogenized within the Hindu mainstream seems to have found widespread acceptance in the middle classes. As I have said before, India’s secular space, constructed carefully over hundreds of years of co-mingling is being steadily eroded, with decreasing space for the non-urban and non-Hindu. I would still argue that the IAC movement is actually a secular one, however that is a separate discussion.

The last assumption is interesting. The silence of the middle classes on many issues has been galling. But does this silence imply complicity ? In fact, there is much anger against India’s corrupt elites within the middle class. The reasons are not hard to understand. The middle class is not immune to the excesses of the elite. A lot has been said about the Jessica Lall, Priyadarshini Mattoo and Nitish Katara murders, especially the middle class nature of the protests following them. However, these very incidents highlight how powerless the middle class really feels front of the political and economic elite. How much more vulnerable can one get than getting shot for not making a rich man a drink !

I think that India’s intellectuals need to evaluate the relationship of India’s middle class to the masses with analysis independent of their own ideological biases. My own opinion and experience is that, when properly informed and sensitized the middle class in India is a natural ally of the poor, and I think the IAC mobilization is an example of the same.

I asked the Office of Information Management and Analysis at the University of Texas at Austin for some data on PhD students in the departments of Computer Science, Chemical Engineering and Electrical Engineering. These departments are widely perceived as being dominated by Indian and Chinese students. I should mention that these departments of UT Austin are highly regarded, regularly finishing in the top 5 or 8 in rankings.

The IMA office provided me with the following data (from academic year 2001 to 2010):

1. Total Enrollment in CS, ChemEng and EE PhD programs for each academic semester by country
2. Average Cumulative GPA of the PhD students in CS, ChemEng and EE at the beginning of each semester by country
3. Average courseload (measured by number of credit hours) of PhD students in CS, ChemEng and EE for each semester by country

I have plotted the data for the enrollment numbers and GPA’s in the figures below. The course load numbers indicated that international students took somewhat heavier course loads, but the gap between them and American students was narrowing. I will begin with a discussion of enrollment numbers.

Total PhD enrollment in CS, EE and ChemEng in the 2000's decade

The enrollment numbers were the most interesting. We see that there always been more American PhD students than Indian and Chinese students. Also, the difference has been steadily increasing over the last ten years. The number of American students increased steadily from just under 200 in 2001 to over 260 in 2010. This growth has slowed in the last four years. The number of Indian students increased rapidly at the beginning of the decade but have stagnated at just above 100 since 2003. On the other hand, the number of Chinese students PhD has seen a decline in this decade. The number peaked at around 140 in 2003 but has now come down to around 70-80.

Clearly, American students find themselves motivated to attend graduate school. Of course, this data is only for UT, and one would have to get similar data from other universities for a comprehensive assessment. But at UT, the trend for Chinese and Indian PhD students seems to be one of stagnation and even decline. One reason might be the fast economic growth in these countries which keeps students in their home countries. We now move on to the GPA figures, which are a little less interesting.

Average Cumulative GPA at beginning of Fall Semester for CS, EE and ChemEng PhD students during the 2000's

Average Cumulative GPA at beginning of Spring Semester for CS, EE and ChemEng PhD students during the 2000's

Overall, it seems that Chinese, Indian and American PhD students in these departments have about the same levels of achievement in their courses. There seems to less fluctuation in the performance of the American students, their average GPA before Fall hovers around 3.65, while before Spring it is around 3.77. There seems to be more variability in the GPAs for the Indian and Chinese students. In the Fall, Indian student GPA’s varied from an average of 3.77 in 2008 to less than 3.3 in 2010. During the same semester, Chinese student average GPA’s varied from just over 3.1 in 2009 to about 3.6 in 2005.

Frankly, I found this variability puzzling. I am not sure it even makes sense to try and explain it. That would require further analysis of data segregated by individual departments. But it is clear that American, Indian and Chinese students are mostly ready for the rigors of graduate course work.

I hope that this data and study, although of course small and by no means conclusive dispels some of the notions a lot of Indians have regarding American universities and America’s education system. I also hope it provides them with a context to take a critical look at their own system.

First, just a brief overview of her life as described in ‘A Life Less Ordinary’. Baby Halder was born somewhere in Jammu and Kashmir, where her soldier father was posted. Soldier here means ‘jawan’ (जवान), not officer. From there, her family moved around several states, until they finally settled in Murshidabad, West Bengal. Here, her father started behaving erratically, leaving home for months on end, returning for a few days, promising to stay and then leaving abruptly again. Unable to bear the financial and emotional stress, Halder’s mother simply leaves, taking her youngest son with her. Halder and her two older siblings are left behind.

Halder’s life then follows a pattern of almost unending beatings and oppression, from her father, from her husband (she has her first child at the age of 14) and from society, which blames her even when she is the one harassed by other men. She endures somehow, narrowly escaping death after giving birth to her second child and finally leaves home with her three kids and arrives in Delhi. There, working as a domestic help, she is faced with her employer’s antipathy. She finally escapes her pre-modern life when her next employer, an anthropology professor, Dr. Prabodh Kumar, recognizes her desire to write.

Baby Halder with her employer and mentor, Dr. Prabodh Kumar (From 3 Quarks Daily)

One can comment on the various forces at work throughout Halder’s life. The most obvious and most important is family. This shouldnt be too surprising, as it is the case for most people. But Baby’s family dictates the pre modern nature of her early life. Her father is not interested in her welfare or her studies. Her innocent queries about why she simply has to submit to the will of her father and then her husband, are laughed away with alarming indifference. Society’s comfortable ease with a 14 year old marrying a 26 year old left me shocked. But family is also where Baby finds the most protection, from her husband and from a hostile society. Her brother especially stands out as a key support in her search for modernity. But he still cant see her through to the end and wants her to find peace with her brutal husband.

Religion and caste, do enter the equation, but barely. The spiritual remains somewhat detached from her material travails, but she does pray for strength from time to time. Halder does mention caste, but in an idle, matter of fact kind of manner. Perhaps, the transition to modernity in India is somewhat uncoupled from religion and caste ?

This brings us to the third force in Halder’s life, the state. On many fronts, the state’s modernizing influence is clear. It provides the schools where Halder is first exposed to modernity: the ability to read, write and be her own self. It provides the hospitals, without which her life would have almost certainly been cut short. Its vast expanse and political unity provides Halder with the physical opportunity of escape. Its railroads provide the means of her escape into more modern areas (here Delhi).

But on many other levels, the state comes up short. Most notably, on the issue of domestic violence. Halder’s family (on both sides) does stand in her defense when she is abused by her husband. But their authority is limited and they always operate with a notion that she would ultimately depend on him. Unlike the state, they have no punitive powers. The police, however, are simply absent in Halder’s story. They arrive when something very serious like a rape or suicide occurs, but otherwise they subside into the background. Apart from one mention of a ‘community leader’, local politicians are never mentioned.

Perhaps Halder’s story tell us something about the limitations of the post colonial Indian state ? It manages to do macro level things fairly well and provide an overall environment for modernization, but fails miserably at reforming society at the micro level. But her story makes it clear that only when the state gets its act together, will Indian women step confidently into modernity.

It is perhaps a bit unusual to dedicate an entire post to how the issue of property and land was handled by the Constitution makers. But land is the pivotal axis of contact and conflict between metro India and Bharat today. And as we shall see, land was important (for vastly different reasons) even during the framing of the Constitution, with land related provisions being the focus of intense debate and deliberations.

A simple but contentious issue for the Constituent Assembly was that of land reform. Simple because there was enormous anger against the zamindars and large land holders, and land reform had great support. As I have discussed in previous posts, the Constitution was framed with the goal of social revolution, and land reform was certainly one of the keys to achieving this goal. The difficulty was reconciling land acquisition with the right to property. How was the Assembly to establish a legal framework that would allow the state to expropriate large tracts of land from certain citizens while still respecting their Fundamental Rights ?

The Assembly went through a series of deliberations to arrive at a final consensus decision. The first proposal was that the Constitution allow property to be acquired for public use on payment of ‘just’ compensation. But this seemingly sensible position was untenable. The word ‘just’ would imply that virtually every instance of land acquisition could be decided in the courts, “paralyzing the functioning of the governement”. In response, K.M. Pannikar and Sardar Patel proposed removing just from the clause. Not surprisingly, only two members in the Assembly opposed this view due to the prevailing anti-zamindari mood.

However, there were serious differences of opinion in the Drafting Committee, in particular K.M. Munshi and Dr. Ambedkar were hesitant to include such a clause. The right to property was guaranteed in Article 19 and the new clause pertaining to land acquisitions would present a contradiction. The two other questions that bothered the Assembly were,

What sort of compensation was economically feasible and morally just ? And to what degree could the Union Government interfere in provincial actions to expropriate property ?

The Assembly was faced with a most vexing choice between Constitutional guarantees and expedited social justice. It considered suggestions ranging from full due process for acquisitions to complete legislative control. Others proposed ‘equitable’, ‘fair’ or ‘reasonable’ compensation. Perhaps ironic from the modern context, some members of the Assembly desired a measure of due process to ensure that the land acquisition provisions would not scare away capital. Ultimately, due process in matters of land acquisition was made secondary to social justice. As Austin puts it,

in the nine years from 1947 to 1956 had the demands of the social revolution taken the right to property out of the courts and placed it in the hand of the legislatures.

In the 1970s, Parliament went even further and the 44th Amendment removed the right to property from the Constitution. The state could now acquire whatever land it deemed necessary by law, with the citizen’s having no recourse to the courts¹.

Today, the same provisions that redistributed land from the zamindars and gave it to the farmers, are used to acquire land from farmers to be given to developers ! Sadly, successive Indian governments have shown no inclination to reinstitute the property rights originally included in the Constitution, while at the same time land reform has come to a virtual standstill. Provisions painfully justified to further social revolution are often used recklessly to expedite economic expansion. Ananya Roy provides a telling example in her essay on ‘why India cant plan its cities’,

One lawsuit holding up the expressway project concerns D.M. Dwarkanath, a retired executive of a state-owned company. He risks losing his small bungalow to make way for the route. A hospice for children with AIDS is also threatened. Such cases have sown deep resentment among many people here, who wonder: why do people have to make way for India’s frequent-flying classes, which are still relatively small? ‘It is only for the rich people’, Mr Dwarkanath said fuming. ‘They don’t have patience. They want to rush to the airplane. They want to sweep everyone out of the way. Why should we live? Sweep us into the sea!’

Needless to say, India needs a debate on the issue of the land. One which should draw a lot from the perspective of the Constitution makers, many of whom who regarded the right to property as fundamental.

1: Land is still a ‘constitutional right’ so citizens can still go to court claiming that their land was unfairly acquired but they cannot challenge the compensation given.

At this juncture, I would ask the readers a simple question. Suppose Jairam Ramesh had instead commented,

“Mumbai University is mediocre and should be called third class”.

What do you think the response would be ? My own guess is that the reaction would be something along these lines,

Yeah. Who cares ? The professors probably dont even show up.

Many are actually pointing to the fact that most M.Tech and PhD students at the IITs are ‘non-IITians’. Apparently, this is evidence for the non-world classness of IIT research.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of India’s engineers will not be from the IITs. Virtually none of India’s doctors, nurses, economists, politicians, statisticians and journalists will be. But the kind of education these hapless, ‘non-world class’ folks might receive can be aptly summed up by this assessment of our university system,

In our collective experience of past two decades or so as teachers, we observe that the great Indian undergraduate education system, on the average, serves to effectively curb independent thinking, self-study skills, resourcefulness, intellectual maturity, academic confidence, and the very motivation to learn with excellence.

- Mihir Arjunwadkar, Abhay Parvate, and Dilip G. Kanhere, University of Pune, Current Science, October 2009

The question then is: Why does an offhand remark about the IITs generate more debate than an official report by three professors at the University of Pune ? Isnt this equally or even more important to our collective future than the ‘world classness’ of the IITs ? Perhaps, the current debate about the IITs reveals more about the Indian middle class than the IIT system.

A comparison with American public universities can point out how naive our discourse about higher education really is. IIT Madras professor PV Indiresan says,

Most teachers in the IITs are inferior to the students. And the reason is simple. Every IIT student is one out of 100 people who took the entrance exams. [And the teachers are not]

Now, lets take a look at the acceptance rates of some well known American public universities,
University of Michigan: 51 %
University of Illinois: 67 %
Purdue University: 65 %
The undergraduate alumni of these schools include the developer of information theory, the co-founders of Google, Oracle and the inventor of the wiki concept. So, America’s public universities had a pivotal role in the creation of the mobile, networked society we live in today. How did they produce a world class workforce without being anywhere near as selective as the IIT system ? Could we have done better with our own universities of Pune and Madras ?

Indeed, we could have. Ironically, India’s state universities had a pivotal role to play in the creation of something far more fundamental to Indians. India itself. Is no one alarmed by the palpable decline of the same Mumbai university that produced both Ambedkar and Gandhi ? What about the once proud University of Calcutta whose halls Rabindranath Tagore and Nobel laureate C.V. Raman roamed ? In fact, all of India’s Nobel Prize winners have been produced by state universities. The last one graduated from the University of Baroda in 1971.

Simply put, the debate about India’s higher education scene has been extremely narrow, centred around the IIXs and reservations. The fact remains that today, none of our state universities comes anywhere near the top 200 ranks of any list. In the last 25 years, India has produced almost no globally recognized mathematicians, physicists, economists or historians. But then again, who really cares ? Arent they building more IITs ?

(Below, I have posted an article originally written by Siddartha Mitra of AID – New York, with his permission. Siddartha travelled to the camps housing displaced persons fleeing the Salwa Judum and Naxalite violence in southern Chattisgarh, a state in Central India. 

The Salwa Judum is a state sponsored militia consisting of young men and boys (often under 18) who have been given weapons, ostensibly to fight the left wing extremists (so called ‘Naxalites’) operating in the region.

The conflict has lead to atleast 300,000 people fleeing their homes to camps in neighbouring Andhra Pradesh. Neither the Chattisgarh government, the Andhra government nor the Union Government of India acknowledge the existence of these refugees. No assistance is provided to these persons and they are routinely harassed by the Salwa Judum and local security forces.)

The lost people of Khammam

      Speaking about the atrocities he witnessed during the time he spent in the concentration camp in Auschwitz, Primo Levi said – “Today, at this very moment as I sit writing at a table, I myself am not convinced that these things really happened.”

      As I write these words, sitting in the middle of a busy city, far from the forests of Khammam, I find it hard to believe that I actually saw the camps in the forests there. That the insensitivity to other human beings, so grotesquely played out in the Nazi concentration camps, could occur in a more sinister manner, outside of history books, in todays world. I grew up with the basic belief in human compassion to other humans, and with the notion that the state is an entity, notwithstanding its defects, has the objective of the betterment of all in its territory – a collective reflection of the individual compassion of human beings. What I saw in the forests stood in stark opposition to that understanding.

     

      There are more than 16000 people, displaced from the violence in Chhattisgarh, who stay across 203 scattered settlements in the Khammam region of Andhra Pradesh (AP), India. Some of these camps are in plain sight, near villages; some in remote reaches of the forests, far from any habitation. There location and presence is well-known, and has been documented by human rights groups. Yet the Indian state denies the settlement camps actually exist. The fact that these 16000 odd people in its own territory can live or die as they choose to while the state can look away, pretending that they are simply not there. It is a disappearing trick that even the greatest magician can be proud of. You can try to look at official records, but none will mention these nameless people.

     

      Why, you might ask? What is lost in just accepting that these people and their camps exist? It is not that they immediately have to be provided with food and shelter by the state; lip service on such matters by the Indian state to its many of citizens has been the norm rather than the rule. They why this exception?

     

      Perhaps there is a greater secret to hide?     

     

      The secret that these displacement camps are just a tip of the iceberg, the remains of a great atrocity that has been perpetrated by the state, a shameful fact which must not get known?

     

      Chhattisgarh is one of the most mineral rich areas in the India and in the world. And what a wealth! Tin, dolomite, diamond, uranium, iron-ore, coal, to name a few. After the creation of state in 2000, state government has signed 100′s of MOU’s with different mining companies, to the tune of many billion dollars, with investments projected to exceed trillions. And in no place in the state is the mineral wealth concentrated as in Bastar, the southern tip of Chhattisgarh. The Bastar craton, in which a violent upheaval deep in  the bowels of the earth millions of years ago thrust minerals in precious lodes up to the surface, holds riches beyond imagination.

      And it is also poor beyond description. 

      Heavily forested, with an overwhelmingly indigenous population, is also perhaps the poorest in India in terms of human development. There are 1200 villages there, distributed across the forests, with only having 50 medical centers, many of them unattended. With one of the lowest life expectancies of any region of India, and more than 60% of the population living in a state of chronic malnourishment, the people of Bastar live now in the stone ages even decades after India’s independence, in conditions similar to that in the poorest sub-Saharan Africa. Instead of helping them, the state has implemented policies that further affect their livelihood and causes displacement. The callous treatment by the state is one of the factors that has led to the strong presence of Naxalism in the region. The Naxalites are an armed group, mainly consisting of tribals who have vowed to fight against the state, supposedly in protection of the rights of the poor people there and elsewhere in India.

      Yet life went on in the forests. Despite the poverty, the indigenous people were at least able to live in their natural surroundings, living with the forests, the land and the water that nourished them and gave them life. But that was about to change.

      In 2005, the Tata Steel company signed a 2 billion $ contract for mining iron ore in Bailadila in Bastar. The iron-ore there is stated to be the best iron-ore in the world because of its sulfur free nature. The very next day, a private militia, Salwa Judum was formed, and was openly backed by the Chhattisgarh state government. In appearance to fight the Naxalites, this militia, armed with Swiss made guns and backed by the state police and the central paramilitary , burned down more than 644 villages of tribal people in the Bastar district, killing and raping countless hundreds of villagers, sending 300000 fleeing from there homes. Some 50000 went into displacement camps created by the the Salwa Judum, 200000 disappeared into the forests, and 50000 fled to the neighbouring southern state of Andhra Pradesh (AP). Of the 50000 that fled to AP, some 16000 people live in the camps in Khammam. It was the presence of this last group that caused discomfiture to the state, as the results of its shameful policies were now for all to see. Instead of redressing the wrongs, the state simply refused to recognise the existence of the camps in Khammam. Such recognition would inevitably lead to the entitlement of the Internally Displaced People (IDP) status to these people, making them eligible for aid.

  

      Not only would recognition by the state make them eligible for aid, it would have opened the whole can of worms about why the displaced got there in the first place. It would expose the bloody trail that leads to Salwa Judum, the mining giants, and to the highest echelons of the state in the home ministry. Accepting them as displaced is also acceptance of the fact that they are the rightful owners of land that is worth billions. Accepting their presence would put flies in the face of corporate greed.

     

      “To government maante nehin hain kya yeh log hain? In logon ka NREGA nehin milta hain”? (“So the government does not accept the fact that these people exist? Do not these people get NREGA?”)

     

      The cool morning breeze was blowing across my face as the motorcycle sped through the bumpy, muddy road. The fields were still wet with the recent rains. Rains had unexpectedly come in December, destroying nearly half of the freshly harvested paddy crop that had been left out to dry in the fields. 

      Mr. Prasad, who worked in the Agriculture and Social Development Society (ASDS), was taking me on his motorcycle was to be my guide today. We had just started earlier in the morning from the ASDS office in Rekhapalli, and were headed to some of the nearby “IDP” camps.

     

      “Kuch logon ko NREGA card dilate hain, lekin” … (“Some people do get NREGA cards, but..”)

     

      I had heard about these camps, and had also read travelogues of people who had recently visited some of them. Of course the wretchedness as described was not as bad as those in a concentration camp. Instead, the death was more of a slow kind. It was through hunger and malnutrition and despair, and the death of a way of life. It had been difficult to read the reports and see the pictures; I  wanted to get a first hand account, to see for myself what it was really like.

      We were nearing our first destination, which was a camp that was being held near a busy marketplace by a village. In the distance, I could see the forested hills that separated Andhra Pradesh from the neighboring state of Chhattisgarh. It was only around a year ago that I had visited a few rehabilitated villages on the other side. But now that was a no-go zone, thanks to the Operation Green Hunt (OGH), the massive military and paramilitary operation that had been launched in these forests, supposedly to clear the area of Naxalites. No one knows how successful it has been, or what its measures of success are. But the wake of the the “hunt” had recently resulted in a new wave of displacement among the tribals, fleeing the violence.

      This was only one of the 203 encampments that were already there in the forests. The people staying there were mostly Muria’s and Gotti Koya’s who had fled from Chhattisgarh. Some of the camps were deep in the forest. ASDS, along with ActionAID and Echo (European Commission of Humanitarian Aid and Civil Protection), was working in providing some form of aid to 146 of these camps. The condition of the remaining 57 is not known.

Fig 1. The map is shown here. The first map shows where these people have fled from in CG, and the second map shows where they have set up camps in AP.

      As we neared the marketplace, Mr. Prasad met an ASDS volunteer by the roadside, and stopped to talk with him. Then he turned to me and said “Abhi idhar OGH chal raha hain, jo camp hum jaane waale the udhar ja nehin sakte.” (Right now OGH is going on, we will not be able to go to the camps we were planning to visit).

      “OGH idhar?” (OGH here?). I was surprised. I thought OGH was a distant nightmare in the in Chhattisgarh, and in the forests of Jharkhand and Orissa. But here in AP? In the middle of a bustling marketplace?

      “Idhar bhi search hota hain”, he said. “Naxal log kabhi kabhi Chhattisgarh se adivasio ke saath idhar chale aate hain”. (The search happens here too. Someimes the Naxals come here with the adivasis).

      OGH is here. In the cities, in villages, on the roads that go through and beyond the forests.

      It is everywhere now.

      The authorities claim Naxalites come with the adivasis into the marketplace. Who is to be believed? One thing is certain, of the 200000 people who fled their homes when Salwa Judum burned them down, many went into the forests. There is nothing to eat there, and one cannot survive beyond a few days. Sometimes the people who hide there do indeed come into the marketplace to get food, and creep quietly back into the forest. Are they Naxalites? The authorities claim that sometimes Naxalites come with the adivasis to kill the police. There was apparently a shootout in the marketplace a month ago which left one “Maoist” dead.These claims very difficult to ascertain.

      But one thing is certain. Life is no longer the same. There is a atmosphere and fear, suspicion, that now hangs like an unseen shroud all over, in the forests, in the villages near the forests, over the lives of people who live there. Even beneath this seemingly friendly bustle of marketplace, there ran that skein of terror.

      Mr. Prasad asked me to wait at a nearby tea-shop, while we went to discuss with his friend which places I could go to.

Red, green yellow – the marketplace shone with the colours. The gaily clad vendors, women and men who had walked long distances to sell vegetables and forest produce.and also the produce. Deep red, tamarind seeds, succulent yellow mahua fruits, roots of different kinds. It was a busy day. Both locals and tribals who had come from Chhattisgarh had set up shop by the roadside.

While waiting by the tea-shop, I noticed a group of around 12-15 people, wearing blue pants, but otherwise not in uniform, carrying rifles, walking towards the marketplace. 

     

 They did not appear to be the private militia Salwa Judum; at least not they did not appear as threatening and lawless as Salwa Judum seemed in photographs. And so far away from Chhattisgarh, I did not expect that they would be active.

I realised that this is the OGH that was being referred to. Contrary to popular notions, OGH does not consist mostly of commando style operations in the deep jungle. It also consists of these “search” operations, in seemingly normal areas. Curious to know what they were doing in the marketplace, I followed these men at a distance, to have a first hand look of what it is like. They went from vendor to vendor, checking through the produce, searching their belongings, questioning them. Discretely, I took a photo of them, and then decided to go closer and take some more photos of them making an actual search. However, before I realised it, they had headed to right where I was standing. There was just time to put away the small digital camera I was using into my hip pocket. The leader of the group, a jaunty young man no more than thirty, was carelessly carrying a sophisticated pistol in his right hand. I stood quietly, hoping they would just pass by me, but that was not to happen.

As he passed me, he looked at me sharply, and stopped. So did the police with him. He stood by my side, and two policemen, with rifles, stood just in front of and behind me.

There are 2 kinds of people in the forest, as per Mr. Amresh Mishra, SP Dantewada. Either naxal sympathisers, or naxalites.  Presumably tribals who were found in the forests fell into this category. The other more insidious group of people, in the eyes of the state, were those intellectuals and academics who would come and try to foment a revolution among the masses. It was in this latter category that he suspected of me being in. A rabble rouser who had ventured into the marketplace hoping to incite the adivasis who had come there.

 I was feeling nervous, but with a determined effort, I tried not to manifest it externally. The last photo I had taken was of the police walking with rifles, something that I would have been hard pressed to explain if questioned about.

      “Aap kaha sein aayein hain?” he asked me, looking at me suspiciously.

      “Kolkata”, I replied.

      At a nod from him, the officer in front of me conducted a preliminary body search. It appeared he was looking for hidden weaponry. In that process, he overlooked the obvious, which was the digital camera in my pant pocket. Soon after, the person standing behind me also conducted a frisking to see if I had any weapons on my shoulder, back. They also looked into my backpack. It had the Sanhati Booklet published in 2010 book far, which had among other things a  “Statement against Operation Green Hunt”. I had carried it with me with a vague idea of sharing it with ASDS workers on the ground. Thankfully, they overlooked that too. All that they were looking for was explosives, and maybe pamphlets.

     

      After the search, the two armed police stood close to me, front and back, while the inspector, pistol in hand, stood by my side.

     

      “App kya karte hain?”

     

      “Computer programming”.

     

      His next question caught me entirely off-guard.

     

      “Aap ka kaun sa laptop pasand hain?”

     

      “Laptop?” I was incredulous.

     

      He edged closer, with renewed suspicion written all over him.

     

      “Kya aap ko laptop malum nehin?”

      “Haan haan, laptop. Sony, Dell, Toshiba .. “

     

      This pacified him. But he was not done.

     

      “Sony laptop kitne mein milti hain?”

     

      I had no idea. 1000 $? “Challis hazaar?” I hazarded a guess.

     

      It seemed to be in the range. Now tending to thinking that I was what I claimed to be, and not one of those preachers of Maoism, he still continued “Kaun si brand ki laptop achcha hain?”

     

      “Sony thik hain, Dell bhi, ..”.

     

      Lets remember that this conversation was not about laptops. But that is what it had become!

     

      At this point, Mr. Prasad, arrived at last, accompanied by a friend. Seeing me being questioned, he hurried up, with a large ingratiating smile on his face.

      “Aare kya baat hain ji. Ye aadmi hamara saath hain, camp dekhne ke liye aaya”.

     

      “Camp dekhne ke liye?” The inspector frowned, and looked at me with renewed suspicion.

     

      It turned out Mr. Prasad knew someone who was a friend of the inspector. In a few minutes, our meeting was concluded, and then at last we headed to the camp.

      The camp was partly empty as many had gone to the marketplace. Mr. Prasad did assemble a few of the camp-dwellers, who told us their stories. Most of the stories were the same. They had fled the Salwa Judum. Accounts that I had read predominantly had the same narrative, though there were also accounts of people fleeing the Naxal violence,  All the people I talked with in this camp here had the same story.

      People in this camp had arrived from different villages. After all, this was a camp, not a village where different families have close ties that span generations. A living, breathing entity that thought as one, lived as one, and shared each others happiness. This camp was more like a resting spot, a place where people waited till either they could return to their homes or perhaps could go into another life. Meanwhile, these people, faced with the same predicament, had learned to coexist with each other.

      At least, living near a village, people in this camp had access to possible employment. For most camps in the interior, that was not even an option.

      There was a couple that was standing next to their home near where I say. I spoke with them to learn more about their lives.

      “To aap kyan karte hain?” I asked. (What do you do?)

      “Kuch majuri karta hoon, dhaan kaatneka – kaam milta to din mein 60 Rs milta hain”. (Some labour work. Like cutting grain. If I get work. That might bring me 60 Rs per day.)

      60 Rs per day is below the minimum wage of 100 Rs. Who cares? These people were “illegal” anyway.

      “To usme khane ho jata hain?” I asked. (Is that enough for your meals?)

      “Din mein ekbar khana hota hain usse”, he sadly replied.(We get one meal a day with it.)

       

      Just then, someone, a younger man in jeans and t-shirt, came in from the market, holding a little plastic bag. Look, what I have got, he said with a broad smile – “Ginger, garlic. All for Rs. 20!“

     

      60 Rs a day earns just about a meal for the family. This year, food prices have reached a record inflation of 17.5%, partly due to effects of climate change, and partly due to financial speculation in market.

      Noticeable in his purchase was the lack of onions. Already under strain due to market pressures, unseasonal heavy rains in the Western Ghats had driven the price through the roof. Onions, reaching 80 Rs a kg, had essentially left the common mans plate. Seasoning of food, was now to be done with by ginger or garlic, or by dried flowers.

      Flowers used for seasoning 

      And after food, what remains as saving? Even on a good day? Maybe 10 Rs?

     

      In the main hall of the Indira Gandhi International Airport in New Delhi, there is an advertisement for a real estate company, marketing bungalows outside of Delhi. A prominent Indian cricketer, wearing princely clothes, leisurely reclines as he smiles at you. The bungalows starting at only 48.5 lakh Rs * (~ 100000 $). A great bargain! Perhaps for a little more, you will even get eco-friendly bamboo flooring, made by Radius Corporation India Limited, which has brought, yes purchased, the Sheonath river in Chhattisgarh, to manufacture the flooring. Sheonath was the first river to be privatised in India, at terrible cost to the communities living downstream the river who lives were destroyed when they could no longer access the river.

      Though the rest of India does not see the people of Chhattisgarh, they certainly use the things that come out of this region!

     

      I wondered if the person I was talking to would be ever able to afford the  bungalow that had been advertised. At Rs 10 savings per day,it would take this person hundreds of years before he can think of buying this place, or even making a down payment.

      Unfortunately, it is unlikely that he will live beyond 60. I had seen report on the demographics of the camps. I had wondered why the age group 60 and above had so few people. The demographics in the camps reflected of what it was like in Bastar.

      These are the two Indias that Dr. Binayak Sen, the doctor and human rights activist who had spent decades in Chhattisgarh, had spoken about years earlier. One of immense riches, and the other of untold misery, living in distant worlds. One India which relies on the resources that rightfully belong to the other.

      Some more people had gathered around. One of them pointed to hut behind where he sat. A woman lived there, a single mother. Desperate for food, she had ventured into the forest in the hills that we saw in the background, to pick some berries to sell in the marketplace. Picked up by a patrol, she was jailed in the Konta police station for a month on suspicion of being a Naxalite. Only repeated entreaties by other camp members, when they had finally learned of her whereabouts, secured her release. They had pleaded that her child would die if she was not freed.

      Presumably they did not bother to question her about laptops. In any case, in the forests, if you do not have “business”, you are a Naxalite or a Naxal sympathizer. Does not matter if you were a tribal who has lived there for generations.

      After this visit, we headed next to the next camp, which was in reality a food center. Mr. Prasad referred to it as a “feeding center”. No, in case you were wondering, it was not for pigs or cows, but for tribal people. A place where the most vulnerable, like pregnant or lactating women, and children who were severely malnourished, were given food once a day.

      These centers form a core part of the ASDS effort to help the IDP’s. Without it, many children and women in these camps would have perished.

      The food center also served as a school for the children. They were provided basic knowledge of Telugu. Charts, hanging from a clothes line, had pictures of what the external world looked like.

A chart of world leaders, featured, in the same panel, Gandhi, Prince Charles, Mao De Zhong and Hitler. It seemed indeed a unfortunate tragedy that while most upper and middle class Indian’s think of the tribals as Maoists, most of the camp members would not be able to recognise their supposed ideological leader. There was also a chart showing different electrical appliances. Not to mention the fact that there is no electricity in these camps, and most of these people have never seen any electrical equipment, and would have no idea how to use one were they to see one. At least, they could get a view of why they have been evicted from their lands.

On the wall, there was a chart of the women that recorded the heights and weights of the women who were being helped in the feeding center. Among them was Madkam Masaiah, pregnant, age 26, weight 38 kg.

      38 Kg(84 lb)? Pregnant? What was the BMI, 15 or 16?

      Below 18.5 is a sign of chronic malnourishment.

      How long Makam going to she live? What will be the future of her child? If that child is not born deformed or stunted?

      Madkam is that 33.5 % of the adult population which has a BMI < 18.5. Or rather, As Dr. Binayak Sen had mentioned, the 60-70% of the people of Bastar who were in this category. What according to WHO guidelines falls under the definition of famine, and as per the definition of UN, marks the state as committing genocide against its people. If these people belonged to it or ever will. Not Congo, orRwanda, where conflict was over resources has ripped apart so many lives. The structural violence in our land is a far more deadly exterminator of the unwanted.

     

      And was this daily struggle to feed oneself, the terror stalking when they try to venture in the forests to get some produce in trying to make a living, was that all the suffering they needed to go through?

      There was a far greater existential threat. Talking with Mr. Venkatesh the next morning, I first learned about the “reconciliation camps” and why they were vital.

      “In logon ke liye reconciliation meeting sabse kaam mein aata hai”, he explained to me. “Us meeting mein sab aatein hain. Forest dept sein, panchayat sein, local leader, aur camp sein cluster leader. To in logon mein baat hone sein samjhauta hon sakta hain. Nehi to bahar ki log inko rahne sein bura maante hain.” (The reconciliation meetings are the most useful things for these people. Everyone comes there. From the forest dept. from the panchayat, local leaders, cluster leader from the camps. It is these camps that promote and understanding of the situation, otherwise the locals are in deep distrust of the outsiders.)

      The locals perceive these outsiders as a threat. Being of a different cultural background, they cannot relate to these people. And then there is the issue of resources. The forest department officials have to find a reason to allow these people to set up camp in the forests. They have worked out a system, though not officially. They take a certain amount of money, from each camp dweller, 1000-2000 Rs, to allow them to stay. At the same time, the IDP’s would need to periodically report to the local authorities, who seem anxious that these people do not attempt to return.

      The forests of Khammam, though not having the splendor of the forests of Chhattisgarh, still have very many trees that provide expensive wood to be used in furniture. Many such trees, like teak, are felled in the pretext of setting up the camps, and are likely smuggled out of the region. The deforestation is blamed on the IDP’s; at least to get to stay in the forest.

Felled teak tree, by a camp site

      By noon, I was on the way to visit two more camps.  This time, I rode pillion on a motorcycle with Javed. These camps were more in the interior, in areas of cleared forest.

     

      The first camp was seemed well established. It had been around for some time, since the early days of the Judum. There was even a bore-well, the construction of which needed to have special permit from the forest department. This camp had a food center, and was also the place where a health camp would be held later on in the day.

      As I entered, a girl passed by, herding some cows out of the camp. These people had been lucky. They had been able to get some of their livestock with them. Many other villagers in the camps had not had the same luck. Either they had fled in a hurry, or the Salwa Judum systematically killed their livestock when they attacked their villages. The Salwa Judum would not only kill the cattle, they would eat them too.

      Javed had gone to find out some camp dwellers I could talk with. Meanwhile, I decided to take a walk through the camp, through the muddy road that went through it. It was early in the afternoon; thenoon sun had warmed up the day. The night had been very cold, part of the unseasonal cold weather sweeping India. There were some people walking around, and a few taking an afternoon siesta outside their huts. I wondered if these people had been able to sleep in the night, in their reed huts, which did not quite stop the wind from getting in.

       Being far from a village, there was no employment that the people could get. A few children, some with tell-tale swollen bellies, signs of severe malnutrition, played around.

      Walking past a house, I noticed a tribal girl, maybe ten years old. Wearing a blue dress, she was standing by the gate to a house. There was a far away look in her face; she appeared to take no notice of me. But there was something about her, that made me stop and take her picture.

 A tribal girl in an IDP camp

      I often look at that picture now. I wondered what she had thought of me passing by. Did my passing by matter at all?  Perhaps with good reason. She might have seen many human rights-wallahs come and go. But had her life changed? Perhaps the faint memories of the past in the home in the forests were still fresh in her mind. The happy times that now seemed to be lost forever. Maybe she realised that the outsiders would never be able to restore that life, despite their assurances? And they could not bring back those whose lives had been extinguished by the Judum. Would the visitors even pause to reflect on that?

     

      The film “No one killed Jessica” made the headlines recently. Vidya Balan, who had played the part of the sister of Jessica Laal, had been nominated for awards. The film, which traced the intrigue surrounding the murder of Jessica Laal, an upper class socialite, had resonated with middle and upper class Indians.

      But will there ever be a film – “Who killed Soyam Jogi?” A film with the title “Where is Sodhi Sambo?”

      No. Possibly never. For the simple reason that for the rest of India, these people are not human. They simply do not exist. They do not look like you or me. A Bollywood actress with the features of this tribal girl will never me able to get a role in the mainstream films. The dark skin, the thick lips. And of course, the inability to speak Hindi. A girl lacking any of the appurtenances that go with the slick, “civilised” city life of modern India. In the chapters of history, these tribals will possible never have a mention. Perhaps they are doomed to die as they had lived, in their own worlds, in the only environment they ever knew.

      “Chaliye, aap se baat karne ke liye kuch log aye hain”, Javed said as he met up with me. I went over to the food center, where people had assembled. (Come, some people have gathered to talk with you.)

      It is difficult to have these conversations. Yes, these people have an existence here. In this camp, they had cleared a nearby area for farming, and they grow some rice and pulses there. Again, this was very much an exception, most camps were located such that the people there had neither a way to make a living o grow their own food.

      Some were even reconciled to the life in the camp. But the elephant in the room remained. This was not their home. Moving to the camp was not the same as relocating from one city to another. These people had left the land they worshiped, the land they felt one with that land that was life to them. The future remained only with an unknown anxiety, with fading dreams of a return. What hope could I give them?

      Thinking of it, what hope should we give them? What are these people to us? Let us revisit the whole debate surrounding indigenous people. Are not they backwards people, who live in forests. Perhaps you are not willing to say this loud, but is not that how most people view them? As people who have not seen the light of civilisation, people who are unable to fully use the resources that their lands might contain?

     

      So they should be brought to civilisation, yes? And what do we need to bring to them? Electricity? Washing machines? A malaria vaccine? Concrete houses, filtered water? Cars, factories, smoke, dust, destruction of ecological niches? Or perhaps the opportunity to live in the broken fringes of the cities, working as construction labour or doing other small jobs? Is that fair? Do we have nothing to learn from them? The people who have been in the landmass we call “India” far before most modern day Indians ever came here?

      It was in the next village, the last one I visited, that I found an answer to this question. That last camp was a more remote encampment, around 10 minute bike ride from the camp I just visited. There was no road to speak of that connected these. The bike we were on swerved and rattled through what appeared to be a dry creek bed.

      “How do you go in the rains?” I asked Javed.

      “Now you see why my mirror is cracked?” he smiled, pointing to the side-view mirror.

      Of course, that did not dissuade him from taking a phone call on his cell while controlling the bike with one hand.

This camp was also smaller than the previous one, and lacked a bore-well. For water, the villagers needed to walk half a mile to a stream, which flowed over a gravel bed. There was a small stagnant pool on the side of the stream, which served as the source for drinking water.

“Filtered” water in a gravel bed

      “Look, naturally filtered water”, Javed said.

      True, there was some filtration. How much? But this is the kind of water that is used for consumption in many villages in Bastar today. Though hilly streams are perhaps less polluted than the one in the plains, they are never entirely safe. Bloody diarrhoea is endemic in Bastar, and last year, a cholera outbreak killed over a 100 people in Chhattisgarh. News of the outbreak had been deliberately suppressed to present the WHO from calling it an epidemic. Such news would be dim the shining light of the Chhattisgarh state.

      “We are trying to make a well – at least ten feet deep”, Javed commented. “This way, the pure groundwater will seep in”.

      The “well” consisted of five concrete rings, stacked over each other in a hole in the ground. The hole was around 10 feet deep, and some groundwater could be visible below. It was not as safe as a bore well, but seemed a better option than the shallow gravel bed.

Testing the depth of the well

      “The rings had to be carried by hand, because there cars could not get in there”, Javed mentioned.

Water 10 feet deep in the well

      After visiting the well, I came back to the village. As I was walking past a dwelling, Javed said – “look, he is making a traditional seed pot”.

      We walked over to the family, seated outside the hut. The man was busy making a traditional seed basket, while the mother was rocking her baby to sleep in bamboo crib, suspended by a rope.

      I had never seen the likes of the seed basket before. It was made entirely of leaves, whose ends had been sharpened by snipping them off, and it was woven in an intricate manner. He had just finished making one, and at my request, he started to make one more. In any case, he would have to make another one.

 The seed pot, and the sleeping baby girl (Sunitha)

      It was fascinating to watch him weave the leaves together in an intricate web. I tried my hand at weaving the basket, but just was not able to do it. It certainly was not easy. Once completed, the seed basket was quite sturdy, and held at least 3 pounds of the grain without breaking. The grain was mixed with some ash, and some leaves, prior to storing. The basket was suspended from the rafters by a strip of very sturdy bark, which was incidentally from the same tree as the leaves were from. This seed basket would store food for up to two years.

 Weaving together leaves (no thread) to make the pot

      When have you last even imagined that food grains can be stored in a non-plastic, non-metal container? BPA, or lead free? Let us not talk about half the food grains that rot in lack of adequate storage in the godowns. Let us just talk about food storage in individual homes, in peoples larders. A storage mechanism that has has no environmental impact; storage boxes that are completely recyclable, and need no power to generate?

      What happened to our much-hyped technology? The modern miracle?

      You can argue that this is not for mass production. Agreed. But it is a solution for these people. And could be a solution in many villages where such trees are available. It can also be an alternate to plastic in many such places. And this is not the only thing that we can from the indigenous people. Certain tribal customs, like water conservation and diversion for agricultural needs, as practised among the indigenous tribes living in the Himalayas are superior, sustainable solutions compared to “modern” mass irrigation methods like channeling water through long plastic pipes. The indigenous people have been the stewards of the land for millenia. Of course, certain of their practices, like slash and burn agriculture, could be reduced through proper education. There can be a give and take. But ignoring their ideas entirely could be a great loss to our society. And a loss to the environment.

      Can we not learn? What is the arrogance that makes us think that we are superior in every way? Look at the crib. Would it rather be a plastic crib, that rocks rhythmically on a battery run motor, which a mechanical voice singing a toneless lullaby?

      Most people think that tribal people are not willing to embrace change. This is not true. Those people desperately want help in many areas, like health-care, education, like having access to safe water. But most of all, like any other human being, they crave for dignity. The dignity that they have known as human beings living in freedom. They are smart enough, even without education, to realise that the life we are offering them after displacement does not have that dignity. And unless we can address this, they will fight for survival, holding on to the only fragment of life they know.

 

      After talking with the family for a while, I left, and returned to the village I had started from earlier in the day. The medical camp was in sway. A doctor performed medical checkups of men, women and children, accompanied by a team of experienced nurses.

      I asked the doctor what were the major medical problems there. He replied that he had seen several cases of cerebral malaria, in this camp, and in neighbouring camps. The other more prevalent problem was that of skin infections, from poor sanitation. I was not sure if the closely packed residences, and lack of potable water, compared to the spread out village homes in their ancestral land, contributed to spread of disease.

 That evening, I returned to ASDS, and left to take the night bus back. As the bus rolled out of Rekhapalli, the sun set over the darkening forest, shooting one last ray before sinking behind the nearby hills, their tops turned red by the setting sun. A full moon, riding last rays the dying sun, buoyed above as darkness fell. As the night wore on, the moonlight bathed the landscape in a magical glow. The fields glistened in the soft white light, and the hills, now fading in the distance, stood silhouetted against the starry sky, like silent sentinels. Yet the forest that draped the receding hills remained dark and impenetrable. Even then, I could see a distant light or two beneath that dark canopy. Perhaps they were small fires, signs of people who were living there?

      I wondered what it was like in the camps now. Camps in the dark forest. Did the people there light a camp fire? Cluster around in small groups, cooking a meal, if they could, huddling around, trying to find warmth? Or were they, just waiting, waiting for another day, a new dawn? Hoping for the justice that might never come?

      There has been much talk about the massive theft of public money, through scams like the 2G scam, Commonwealth Games scam, Adarsh Housing scam. Without doubt these are great drains of the exchequer. But no one seems to raise questions when the property of indigenous people or the poor in India is stolen from them by force, in the name of development. The Special Economic Zones (SEZ) scheme itself is supposed to have cost the exchequer 160000 crore Rs, a number comparable to the money supposedly lost in the 2G spectrum scam. Is not the amount stolen from the tribals and farmers in India, in the name of development, far higher? The development that has led to their forced eviction and inundation of vast tracts of their lands? Even the POSCO project, which affects both farmers and tribals, will lead to a loss of 20000 crore Rs to the state. And how can one even put a number on such figures, which do not take into account the lives lost and societies fragmented? Yet the upper and middle class could not be  bothered less. When money is stolen from the farmers and tribals, it is no longer theft, but appropriate use of resources for the nation. The same nation that the those people supposedly belong to.

      We need to stop stealing their lives from them. For our sake and theirs.

      There is a legend among the Maadia Gonds that the world was created when the supreme being threw down an iron anvil with great force into the ground. There was a great upheaval, and when things became calm again, life grew on the hills, water flew down in rivulets, animals took up shelter, and there came to be came living, breathing communities. Today it is as if the end of those people has come. The same anvil that had cast down is being wrenched out from the heart of their homeland. And with them, many lives, hopes, and desires. The tsunami of destruction, far more earth-shaking the wave of creation, is upon them. A great fissure has been rent in the earth . Flames that have sprouted up by the fissure. And we, in our far off city vistas can only watch it happen; the distant dark jungles, that forbidden yet fabled land, the land of the black gold, where scattered fires burn in the night. We reach out to grasp that precious prize, yet at the same time hesitate when faced with the fires. The fires that might become an all-consuming inferno and destroy us all.

–
Siddhartha

In our collective experience of past two decades or so as teachers, we observe that the great Indian undergraduate education system, on the average, serves to effectively curb independent thinking, self-study skills, resourcefulness, intellectual maturity, academic confidence, and the very motivation to learn with excellence. Academic excellence is often identified, wrongly, with performance in examinations that tend to assess mostly memorization skills of a student, and the true measures of academic excellence such as depth of understanding, originality, authenticity, creativity, and perseverance are systematically discouraged.

- Mihir Arjunwadkar, Abhay Parvate, and Dilip G. Kanhere, University of Pune, Report to the UGC

Philip Altbach, professor at the Center for International Higher Education in Boston College recently published his assessment of the future of higher education in India: “One-third of the globe: The future of higher education in China and India“. My thoughts on this important question are derived primarily from my original posts, the subsequent comments and the article by Dr. Altbach. As a producer of knowledge, India’s higher education system is in a state of extensive decay. And this decay is likely to be perpetuated further in the future, in no small part due to the preference for small, highly specialized institutes, over centralization and the disproportionate importance of examinations.

The culture of the ‘Institute of Technology’

The Indian higher education enterprise has a public and private sector component, with the majority of students being enrolled in private sector institutions. Most of the private institutions are focused on engineering and technology, particularly electrical and computer engineering. In fact, virtually all the top ranked educational institutions for engineering in India are stand alone institutions. Almost every young student studies in a narrow, specialized institution.

This contrasts greatly with the situation in the US. Most of the top engineering colleges are part of universities that have similarly excellent colleges in other fields, particularly colleges of science. It is not uncommon at my university to see Electrical Engineering PhD students take very advanced mathematics courses, and Chemical Engineering PhD students taking advanced Chemistry and Physics courses. Increasingly, American universities are seeing the development of interdisciplinary PhD programs, where students and faculty are immersed in an environment that encourages contributions at the intersection of the various engineering and science disciplines.

It is difficult for me to see how the small, focused technical institutions proliferating in India would be able to generate this kind of atmosphere. And it seems that the Indian government is further exacerbating the situation by creating more small and specialized institutes and not improving the existing universities. It is not my claim that the evolving Indian system is without any benefit, it certainly seems to allow for the quick production of a large technical workforce at a cheap cost. But it certainly inhibits the creation of comprehensive research universities. The small, specialized nature of most higher education establishments inhibits their capacity to create knowledge and produce a well rounded student body. I will quote Philip Altbach,

Its [India's] current top institutions, the Indian Institutes of Technology and a few others, are too small and specialized to become world class research universities, and current plans do not show that India is developing a realistic strategy.

Over centralization and unfair funding policies

Although many Indian universities have considerable autonomy in matters of curriculum and administration, the central government (directly or indirectly) controls virtually all the supply of money. Severe restrictions are placed on the ability of universities to rationalize fee structures and reward superior performance by faculty. Altbach notes,

building competitive research universities requires a reasonably well paid professoriate with working conditions at least somewhat comparable to global standards, since top academics are part of a global labour market. … India has no such policies and as a result, is unable in most cases to attract its best scholars to return home

Further, the Indian government follows vastly discriminatory approaches in financial support for universities. For example, the Indian Institutes of Technology receive about 7-8 times more funds than non-IIT colleges. This is despite the relatively small student body at the IITs, and contrasts greatly with the situation in the US. For example the University of California system spends $ 90, $ 77, $ 80 and $ 48 per student on its Los Angeles, Davis, San Diego and Berkeley campuses. Every state in the US has the autonomy to set up and fund its own universities and develop its own institutions uniquely and in consonance with local conditions and goals. The involvement of the central US government is mainly through insitutions like the NSF and NIH which fund research based on the merits of individual proposals. This is to be contrasted with the Indian model of funding institutes like the IITs disproportionately a-priori, without assessment.

Narrow, exam centric modes of entry and assessment

I have written earlier about exam centric evaluation in India. In his golden jubilee assessment of the IITs, IITK alumni and current director of the IISc, P. Balaram states,

With the IITs becoming the institutions of choice for all aspiring engineers, thousands of students flock to preparatory coaching classes for a year or two before venturing to appear for the JEE. This method of selection ensures a certain academic homogeneity of IIT entrants, which may not be an entirely desirable attribute in an institution of higher learning.

The high stakes, high stress environment created in the years before entry into higher educational institutions turns many young Indians into lifelong competitors. Competitive exams, with their ruthless ranks instill a lifelong sense of victor and vanquished in many of those that are successful. A hierarchy is created in virtually every arena. Everything from the choice of one’s major to one’s college becomes a statement of what one’s status is, rather than who one aspires to be. And the narrow and one for all nature of these tests have lead to a severe decline in the vitality of India’s high schools and their capacity to teach. Such is the importance of entrance exams, that many students even stop attending high school in the year of the these tests !

In the current scenario, I have little to disagree with Philip Altbach, when he says,

Despite the use of English as the main academic language and the existence in India of many extraordinarily well trained and bright scholars and scientists, it seems unlikely that India will have internationally competitive research universities in the coming several decades.

As creators of knowledge, the future of Indian universities seems rather bleak. No surprise then that not a single Indian university features in the Top 200 ranked by the Times Higher Education supplement.