STIFLING NATURAL ENTERPRISE

From: Dr. Jai Maharaj (usenet_at_mantra.com)
Date: 02/21/05 

Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2005 10:39:08 GMT

Stifling natural enterprise

By K. P. S. Gill
Editorial
The Pioneer
Saturday, February 19, 2005

At the very apex of technical and technological skills,
India has established itself as a world player - if not,
yet, as a world power. Freed, in some measure, of the
conventional impediments of the classical land-labour-
capital economy, India has embraced the new "information
economy", or more appropriately, "knowledge economy" and
scored significant successes.

The Indian information technology, software and services
market is expected to breach the US $20 billion mark in
2004-05, up from just over the $1 billion mark in 1995-
96, and $11.2 billion in 2001-02. Significantly, exports
comprise as much as $16.3 billion in the IT industry's
output in 2004-05.

This dramatic growth has been sustained despite strong
political reactions against "outsourcing" in many western
countries - especially the US, which constitutes the
largest market for Indian IT exports - and is expected to
register continuous growth over the coming years. At the
same time, India's has made major breakthroughs in the
manufacturing sector as well, including in the automobile
sector, as bulk drugs and pharmaceuticals, as well as
traditional areas of strength, such as textiles, and has
certainly increased its share of global exports - though
its absolute levels remain far below its natural
potential.

India is also making significant breakthroughs in a
number of other fields that demand a high measure of
technical and technological skills, for instance, in the
health services industry. Clearly, the trajectory of
developments promises a bright, even great, future for
India.

Yet all this is leaving out millions of young people
across the country, especially in rural India, and many
of these are, in frustration, responding to extremist
mobilisation and the lure of the ideologies of violence.
As we see the widening areas of political violence,
lawlessness, disorder and mis-governance in India today,
it becomes obvious that we are in a continuous and
uncertain contest between two competing trajectories -
one that leads to a prosperous and powerful nation, and
the other in which this prosperity is consumed by
insecurity, violence and disorder. In both these
scenarios, the driving force will be the colossal
energies of the young. Which particular scenario
eventually prevails will depend substantially on how
these energies are harnessed and canalised by our
policies, or diverted by our policy failures.

The greatest tragedy is that, over the decades, we have
misdirected the young by a continuous succession of
policy errors, transforming a large proportion of this
enormous and potentially productive resource into a
burden, even a liability. It is now among the most urgent
imperatives of governance that these errors be rectified,
and that efficient mechanisms be created to mine and
nurture the endless seams of neglected genius in rural
and mofussil India.

In the stagnation, chaos and poverty of our villages and
small towns, there are brains waiting to be discovered,
which could win innumerable patents and Nobels in various
fields of technology and science - but which die out with
their potential untapped for the want of a system that
could realise their promise. Occasionally, foreign eyes
recognise and foreign hands grasp such genius even today:
Witness the serendipity of Saurabh Singh's achievement,
as he topped NASA's International Scientist Discovery
(ISD) exam this year. Saurabh is a 17-year-old from a
small village, Narhai, in Uttar Pradesh, and had
reportedly not even heard of NASA before he sat for the
Indian Institute of Technology Joint Entrance Examination
(IIT-JEE).

He follows in the footsteps of India's scientist-
President, APJ Abdul Kalam - indeed, surpasses his
record. Kalam had come seventh in the ISD examination in
1960. It is interesting in this context, to trace the
route that brought the mathematical genius Srinivasa
Ramanujan from rural obscurity to Oxford University.
Unfortunately, we cannot even imagine such talent being
picked up and honed within our bureaucratised and
moribund University system.

Even as some of our greatest successes have been the
result of narrow developments in the educational sector -
the product of a handful of institutions of extraordinary
quality - our greatest failures have been the consequence
of the broader underdevelopment of this very sector.
Skewed policies have produced a sprawling infrastructure
that produces many millions of the educated unemployable,
as well as even more millions of "literates" whose
literacy has little or no impact on the quality of their
lives. Within this vast system, even basic mechanisms
that could selectively cull the greatest talent for
privileged access to the best education and care are
conspicuously lacking.

In the pre-Independence era, many great Indian talents
were extracted by the European Universities and polished
to perfection - and some of them achieved extraordinary
eminence, even winning the Nobel. Even today, many such
people have flourished when they have been taken out of
our rigid, derivative and uninspired educational system,
and placed in a more creative environment. At home,
unfortunately millions of gifted people continue to be
wasted in India's vast hinterlands, which remain
neglected not only in their lack of access to clean
water, transport, health services and other necessities
of life, but equally in the most basic opportunities that
could help them realise their natural potential.

Even where the most marginal opportunities arise for such
talent, it has flourished. Travel across the highways in
the remotest parts of the country, and see how car repair
shops and mechanics mushroom everywhere, manned by people
who can strip and reassemble your vehicle with ease, but
who may not be able to write their own names. They have
learned their trades without support and without formal
education. Some of them have gone even further, virtually
inventing improvised devices and technologies for local
use. In Punjab, the "Maruta", a vehicle crudely fashioned
out of a water pump, at one time threatened to become the
primary mode of transportation in the rural area, and an
ideal replacement for the bullock cart. But it was
quickly killed by a mulish bureaucracy that would not
allow these "unregistered" vehicles to operate on the
roads, and, thus, an extraordinary example of natural
enterprise and innovation was stifled.

There are many, today, including several political
parties and formations, that have built up careers and
electoral vote banks by extolling India's "ancient
wisdom". None of these, however, has ever sought to
recreate the enormous intellectual ferment that produced
the great movement of science in ancient India, the
mathematics, the astronomy, the medicine, the linguistic
rigour, the efflorescence of metallurgy, mechanics and
artisanship that created the wealth and prosperity of
sprawling cultures at a time when the people of Europe
were living out of caves. The great icons of ancient
Indian science - Aryabhatta, Susruta, Charaka,
Varahamihira, Bhaskaracharya, Brahmagupta - were not
asserting an orthodoxy or proclaiming fundamentalist
faiths, they were creating new sciences.

Our educational systems today must bring the average
Indian into the realms of science and technology, into
the intellectual excitement of our age. This, alone, can
help us reclaim a glory that we assert in our past; this
alone will give our incipient experiment in
modernisation, liberalisation and technological
transformation the successes we have imagined; this alone
will take India out of its present disorders to construct
the "great power" that we seek to be.

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The terrorist mission of Jesus stated in the Christian bible:

     "Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not so send
peace, but a sword.
     "For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the
daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in
law.
     "And a man's foes shall be they of his own household.
 - Matthew 10:34-36.

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