Fifth Column: A message from Gujarat

In Banaras Hindu University, during last year’s election campaign, I met students who said that one reason why they were voting for Narendra Modi was because they believed he was the only political leader who could end ‘aarakshan’. They told me that 70 per cent of the seats in their university were reserved and this meant that those who had only the ‘general’ category available had to compete much, much harder. When it comes to medical and engineering colleges, the problem is more serious, since if you are low of caste you can become a doctor or an engineer with half the marks that an upper caste student needs.

The Patel uprising is the start of something much bigger, so the Prime Minister must address the issue no matter how many bureaucrats try to deter him. He needs to remember that had P V Narasimha Rao listened to these exalted mandarins, he would never have ended the licence quota raj. Unfortunately, he stopped at abolishing quotas and licences for big industrialists. This gave economic reforms a bad name. Had he explained to street hawkers and small businessmen that reforms would help them escape the daily depredations of petty officials, they would have lent full support. His big mistake was to reform half-heartedly, possibly because he did want to risk straying too far away from Nehruvian socialism. He ended up reviled by his party anyway.

We now need the Prime Minister to go all the way. He needs to have the courage to end licences and quotas in education. If there are not enough medical and engineering colleges, it is because of this pernicious licence raj. If quotas must exist, they should be for economic and not caste reasons, and if within this category, there need to be special provisions made for castes that have been brutalised over centuries, then these should be in the form of extra generous student loans.

Had there been a new education policy, by now it should have included such measures, but the Minister of Human Resource Development seems to have focused her attention on other things. Newspaper reports last week indicated that there was a new education policy in the offing and that one of its objectives is to ensure that private schools and colleges become more regulated. Have we learned nothing at all from the disastrous Right to Education law?

This gift from India’s last government demanded such high infrastructure standards from private schools that many smaller schools closed down in despair. And, it imposed quotas in private schools for children from economically weak homes. The end result was that instead of government schools improving, interference in private schools did. The lesson for the new Minister of HRD should have been to refrain from meddling in private schools and concentrate on more important things. Alas, Mrs Irani has wasted a year tilting at windmills.

So please Prime Minister listen to the new leader from Gujarat even if his methods are questionable and please do not allow the mighty mandarins who enclose you prevent you from bringing ‘parivartan’. Keep in mind that it is the nature of high officials to insist on ‘maximum government’ even if governance suffers because their main objective is to hang on to their cherished power and privileges. Change frightens them.

@ tavleen_singh