Yea, that’s about where you started to lose me.

We know nothing about what we are not shown. Would the citizens of India have tolerated it if, say, Sanjay Gandhi had lived, converted the Congress party into a kind of authoritarian fiefdom, demolished slums and sent the dwellers back to the villages, forcibly stopped migration into the cities, sterilised millions of ‘non productive’ citizens, crushed the independent media and suppressed religion?

It is kind of funny that the same people who rail against certain parties for being “fascist” also seem to have no problem edifying some of the most oppressive leaders around.

This is in no way condoning our weaknesses and corruption, but I don’t think the situation is as bleak and hopeless as we often like to portray. Of course you can point out grinding poverty and inequalities, but I feel things are improving, and the pace will only quicken from here.

The pace happens despite India’s leadership rather than because of it. While certain people with an axe to grind like to imagine caste or religious conspiracy theories, I feel the core issue is just Indian institutions being simultaneously too majoritarian and too centered on narrow patronage networks. If you’re going to have an activist government, you need a strong centralized civil service without many local connections. Local connections tend to be cliquey and breed corruption. If you want to have a strongly democratic government that is responsive to the needs of people on the ground, you can’t have the government be all that involved in micromanaging issues, because the more it gets involved in the more incentive there is for government to be captured by these narrow parochial interests.

Also, in response to posters who have suggested that private education is somehow elitist- besides ignoring the fact that many private Indian schools are in fact quite inexpensive, they are also ignorant- willfully or otherwise- of the diversity of private education in the US. Again, I know of plenty of small private schools and education cooperatives here in the South whose students come from decidedly lower-middle class families, not the wealthy. Now, in some parts of the South there are private schools that are geared to the moderately wealthy white families, but they are almost indistinguishable from public schools. In most places the well-off white people have their own public schools, and the minority kids theirs.

And finally, as far as fear of religious institutions or whatever, private education is perhaps frightening to some because it takes the organs of control out of the hands of the government and gives it to the people (as in actually giving it to the people, not State apparatchiks leftists so often confuse with the people). People can be strange, weird, awkward, etc., and if you allow for choice and freedom in education you’re going to get some strange results, possibly some troubling ones. But no more troubling than the madness of handing every single child over to the State for indoctrination and a mediocre preparation for integration as a cog in the system.

your point about the lack of original research is very true, but has absolutely nothing to do with the lack of decently educated grads that would meet the needs of india’s engg and computer industries.

The end goal is that every Indian regardless of background gets a quality education, and is able to develop his/her skills and talents. What should be discussed is how to reach that. It may vary depending on the location in India, because the issues may vary. It would be better to see what is the state of the local school, what problems does that school face, and figure out solutions for that school and other schools who face similar strains. Assess the problem and brainstorm solutions. But this all begins with the desire to be better and provide better for Indians and India for no other reason than it is good for Indians and India.

Except the armed forces, maybe?

Another difference between privately and publicly funded schools, easily extrapolated from the dismal performance, is that learning is understood to be a distasteful experience in many of the government-run schools, no excitement. A private school has to sell itself, and the ability to generate excitement about the process of learning is key to marketing its offerings.

Or till a couple of decades ago saying that China will catch up with the West.

India won’t even have the spine to have a population policy which China has implemented long back.

Akash, I don’t want to get into a China v/s India argument here, as it does nothing for the thread under discussion, but I am glad that we didn’t have a Chairman subjecting us to hair brained great leaps. I am glad for the freedoms we enjoy, but never seem to appreciate. I am glad that the state generally tolerates dissenting voices, and intellectuals are not killed for criticising the government. Of course, we marvel at the pace at which things happen, the seeming efficiency with which infrastructure is being created, and focused(though thoroughly unscrupulous) nationalist vision. We know nothing about what we are not shown. Would the citizens of India have tolerated it if, say, Sanjay Gandhi had lived, converted the Congress party into a kind of authoritarian fiefdom, demolished slums and sent the dwellers back to the villages, forcibly stopped migration into the cities, sterilised millions of ‘non productive’ citizens, crushed the independent media and suppressed religion? I guess not. We have our own system, which is not as efficient, but has it’s own advantages. These advantages play out over longer time scales.

what matters for an Individual is how it performs during his lifetime.

These things change.Where one falls in this curve of development is a quirk of fate, or of random chance. For example a man living in China today may feel great if he lives in Shanghai, or crap if he is a rural poor. His grandfather in the 50s or 60s may have felt very differently about things. This is in no way condoning our weaknesses and corruption, but I don’t think the situation is as bleak and hopeless as we often like to portray. Of course you can point out grinding poverty and inequalities, but I feel things are improving, and the pace will only quicken from here.