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Raghu Dayal



A land of myths, India takes mythology rather seriously till some myth-buster jolts it down to reality. We have not unoften deluded ourselves that we are intellectually up there with the best in the world till the OECD-conducted PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) of 15 year school children had Indian students scoring second from the bottom, only ahead of Kyrgyzstan, among half a million students from 73 countries.



While the PISA ranking laid bare India’s poor school education, the 2012 QS (Quacquarelli Symonds) World University rankings include none of Indian universities or institutes among world’s top 200. China has seven in the top 200 list. India has over 26,000 higher education institutes with 15 million students on rolls; a survey has found 92% of their graduates are deficient in programming or algorithms and 78% of them falter in English.



Although there are more children in school, they are now learning less. As per Annual Survey of Education 2011, only 48% of class V children are able to read a class II text, and less than 30% of those in class III can do a 2-digit sum. Some 1.25 crore students come to the job market every year who have no skills. Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen is at pains to lament, “education in India is in peril”.



Mere enunciation of rights to education can be no solution. Andre Beteille termed the UPA move as “the Marie Antoinette Solution” – “they don’t have schools, so give them rights…” India’s high growth potential is largely predicated by its assumed demographic dividend. This very demography appears likely to end up as the Achilles’ heel and worse, with country’s youth remaining inadequately educated and trained. There is serious dearth of employable technicians – plumbers, carpenters, electricians. India’s 1.4 million schools are in need of 4 million new teachers and 8 million more to be retrained.



Like education, health too has been a sad story. As many as 130 million of Indians have no access to basic health care; as Census 2011 shows, half of country’s population defecate in the open; 20% of households have to travel more than half a km for drinking water; more than two-thirds of houses (87% rural, 26% urban) use firewood, crop residue, cow dung, coal. The number of physicians per 1,000 population for the world is 1.5, for India it is 0.6; the number of hospital beds per 1,000 population in India is 0.9, much lower than the world average of 3.3. Almost 2 million children die in India before reaching their first birth day. The country boasts of more than 30 million tonne of grains stacked, some of which in open for want of warehouses; yet 40% of its children are underweight and 70% anaemic. According to a WHO 2000 estimate, of the annual 529,000 maternal deaths globally, 136,000 or about 26% of them occur in India.



Although some pockets of the country have experienced material gains and people now live longer, no fewer than 37.5% of countrymen are reported to remain mal-nourished, 41.6% of them subsisting on less than $ 1.25/day (The World Development Report, 2012). While, on one hand, the Global Hunger Index 2007 by International Food Policy Research Institute ranked India 96th among 119 countries, well below all its neighbours except Bangladesh, on the other hand, it imported 1,100 tonne of gold last year, valued at Rs 3.5 lakh crore.



When the wide world around said India had all the basic wherewithal of an emerging global economic powerhouse, we started behaving as if we were already there. The Pew Research Centre survey of 21 major economies just conducted has revealed how Indians have had their optimism faded, how they have lost faith in the Indian economy and its future. Along with a dysfunctional Parliament, country’s polity is mired in sleaze; a bumper crop of robber barons mulct the national wealth.



Albeit a vibrant democracy it claims to be, India remains torn by language, region, caste, religion, no less than by pockets of wealth. We took pride in the steel frame of governance we had; today, it is left to be a creaking bamboo frame. Symptomatic of a major myth, some erudite commentators have found in Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson a facile belief that India would ultimately outpace China by dint of its inclusive political institutions, China being pulled back, as they perceive, because of its extractive political institutions. This pervasive myth of the delusion of democracy, as in effect it is practised in India, engenders only derision. More and more of us keep striving to become more equal than others. Money and muscle rule the roost. An Election Commission analysis revealed that no less than 40 among Hon’ble MPs and 700 MLAs among the legislators had suffered criminal indictment.



India lays great stores by the world’s largest democracy it is with constitutional freedom of expression, yet it has no qualms in slapping a young cartoonist with a incredible charge of sedition. India’s parliamentarians, notwithstanding their hysterical avowals of its sovereignty, meddle in the minutiae of deciding which textbooks will have what text or which cartoons, exposing the hollowness of our democracy. With more than 30 million cases pending in courts, up to 26 years old, it takes an average of 17 years to get a judicial decision. What better embodiment of our enduring myths than Delhi being touted as world’s “most beautiful city”, or Mumbai outshining Shanghai, or, better still, Kolkata soon transforming, Mamata di-style, into “better than London”!



We generally like to believe nice things about ourselves – a kind of collective mythomania. We fancy ourselves as a tolerant society and yet we have cases like Rushdie, Taslima, M F Hussain, et al. We hold the teaching profession in reverence, yet we kill a teacher who says no to cheating. We similarly give our parents a pedestal just short of godhead but countless cases occur of old parents being dispossessed, cheated, even murdered in property disputes. We respect womanhood as nothing short of devi or Mother (yatra naryastu pujyante, ramante tatra devata) but cases of rape and other crimes against women, shameful treatment of girl child (in embryo and after birth) and the fact that no woman considers herself safe after dark in the capital of India show that this is the biggest myth of all. We believe in welcoming tourists and visitors to our country (atithi devo bhava) but few such guests would ever revisit after the harrowing time we give them.



Rabindranath Tagore's Tasher Desh has a message wherein citizens, who had lost their vitality and elan, and their capacity to respond to the rhythm of life, were played a magic flute whereupon their vitality flowed back. Some similar transformation India needs, a leader to play that magic flute, to turn some myths into reality.