This week I celebrated my birthday, one of my most embarrassing days! I invited only three of my closest friends for drinks and dinner and my wife cooked delicious food on that scale. To my surprise twenty friends showed up. I had to share a cake three feet in diameter with twenty five friends! To add to my agony these friends insisted on having a bite of a delicious south Indian sweet that my wife had prepared after several hours of labour.

I did my best to be as socialist as possible and ended up giving each a taste of a molecule of the offerings. Had any more friends landed up I would have had to resort to atomic fission with Indian, Iranian or North Koran nuclear technology.
It drove home to me a bitter lesson— carving up a cake into slices cannot go beyond a point.

I wish Mr. Kapil Sibal the new Human Resources Minister has a similar experience on his birthday. This was one man from whom I had great expectations. I felt that it was impossible to be worse than his predecessor Arjun Singh. But I was disappointed. The very first statement he made in his new assignment was that he was considering introducing reservations in private unaided schools.

I believe that affirmative action involving reservations is inescapable but I feel we are fast finding ourselves in the situation I found myself on my birthday—too many people vying for a miniscule cake .Let me quote some shocking information from the Economist magazine.
“About 27 million Indians will be born this year .Unless things improve almost 2 million of them will die before the next general elections. Of the children who survive more than 40% will be physically stunted by malnutrition .Most will enroll in a school but they cannot count on teachers showing up. After 5 years of classes less than 60% will be able to read a short story and more than 60 % will be stumped by simple arithmetic”.

In the light of such a shocking and painful reality I expected the erudite technocratic Kapil Sibal to announce a massive urgent plan to train a million teachers and set up a half a million schools across the country with the avowed intention to enlarge the cake and empower our kids to take advantage of the many emerging opportunities. Whenever such suggestions are made and these are commonsense ones the immediate response is predictable, a response that is the hallmark of the Indian mind. I refer to the Indian tendency to indulge in endless argumentation often centering on wordplay, definitions, jurisdiction, silo defending, etc.

The response always has been ‘but education and health are state subjects’. The states will in turn say that they do not have funds. All discussion on this critical subject ends there and we go back to our dream of becoming a superpower.

I have two points to submit in this context: No country has prospered or can even dare to call itself a civilized one if a large proportion of its population is illiterate, Starving or malnourished. Secondly it is stupidity to think as we have always done and expect different results.

For too long our leaders have been giving us this ‘jurisdiction’ argument. The states in turn tell us that they have no funds. The arguments can be endless. Is it any wonder that Burundi, Rwanda and Congo do better than India on the human development index?
K.R.RAVI