The order of the Gujarat High court of April 20 striking down a resolution of the board of governors of the Indian Institute of Rural Management, Anand (IRMA), undoubtedly India’s (perhaps Asia’s) most respected B-school for rural economics and management, sacking its executive director K. Prathap Reddy, has landed its octogenarian founder chairman Dr. Verghese Kurien bang in the middle of yet another controversy. A single judge of the high court ruled that the board meeting of April 15 to which several directors supportive of Reddy were denied entry, was illegal and hence the resolution of the board sacking Reddy was null and void. However Kurien’s last stand involved persuading the court to stay its order until May 2 to allow him to appeal the court’s ruling.

Though the print media has reported extensively on this contretemps and implies that the 84-year-old Kurien has lost his marbles, at the heart of the stand-off between Kurien and Amrita Patel chairman of the neighbouring National Dairy Development Board (NDDB) who was appointed to that position by Kurien himself, is this visionary pioneer’s fierce opposition to government bureaucrats such as Reddy being allowed to rise to the very top in any of the outstanding Kurien-promoted farmers’ organisations, viz, NDDB, IRMA or GCMMF (Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation) which owns the famous dairy products brand Amul.

A life-long foe of post-independence India’s politician-bureaucracy conspiracy which he blames for the country’s- especially rural India’s- pathetic under-development, Kurien strongly believes that these institutions should be controlled by proven farmers’ representatives. It is pertinent in this context to recall that NDDB, GCMMF and Operation Flood were conceptualised and actioned in 1970-80s, in the teeth of violent opposition from bureaucrats and the establishment.

It is this intense and justifiable suspicion of bureaucrat Trojan horses which has prompted Kurien to fight perhaps the last battle of his life against neta-babu incursions into IRMA. Almost a decade ago he took on the establishment in getting his protégé Patel, a non-bureaucrat, appointed chairman of NDDB. But quite obviously Patel, the daughter of former bureaucrat the late H.M. Patel who rose to the position of Union finance minister in the post-Emergency Janata government in 1977 has gone soft on civil servants. Hence Kurien has donned armour to once more unto the breach.

Premji’s priorities

Like God, India’s rich and super-rich move in mysterious ways their wonders to perform. One would have thought that the best way to help the cause of Indian education would be by way of providing moral and material support to ill-equipped government and village schools merrily dispensing sub-standard education to the children of the poor and socially disadvantaged.

But that’s not the way the think-tank constituted by billionaire IT tycoon Azim Premji repeatedly adjudged India’s richest individual (net worth: Rs.30,000 crore) cerebrates. A self-proclaimed champion of primary education, Premji is helping the cause of education through two organisations promoted by him the Azim Premji Foundation (APF) and the Wipro Applying Though in Schools (WATIS) programme. The differentiation between the two organisations is that APF focuses upon upgrading government schools while WATIS run by Premji’s flagship Wipro Corp, concentrates upon upgradation of teaching-learning standards in private schools.

Therefore one would presume that the greater portion of Premji’s moral and material provision would go to APF whose corpus is reportedly Rs.50 crore, allocated from the IT tycoon’s massive personal fortune. On the contrary, APF maintains an arm’s length relationship with a mere 1,900 of Karnataka’s 43,000 government schools, rewarding those which through self-development efforts achieve APF’s learning guarantee programme criteria with cash prizes ranging between Rs.5,000-15,000. No direct help in terms of teacher training or classroom equipment is provided to the government schools covered by APF.

On the other hand Premji’s generosity to students of private schools is more munificent. Teachers and faculty heads of private, including genext five-star schools who enroll for experiential, outdoor leadership training camps of new age private sector teacher training companies such as iDiscoveri India have two-thirds of their participation fee (Rs.35,000) paid by WATIS with the remainder payable by the sponsoring schools. Given that most private sector especially the new genre international schools charge mind-boggling tuition fees, one would imagine they need Premji’s largesse much less than government schools which usually lack proper buildings, teaching aids, drinking water and toilets.

Quite obviously piling on non-merit subsidies to the middle class isn’t only a government infirmity. The class bias of the private sector is just as pronounced.

Also read: Wanted! Charged education leaders

Oceanic gap

It’s a statistic which could make grown men weep, if they had a social conscience or felt the dint of pity. The 2005 election manifesto of Britain’s Labour party whose leader, incumbent prime minister Tony Blair won the last general election in 1999 by spelling out his top three priorities as “education, education, education”, promises to raise the per capita outlay per student in the UK from the current £3,850 (Rs.3.15 lakh) to £5,500 (Rs.4.51 lakh), if Labour is re-elected for an unprecedented third term in office.

Inevitably corresponding statistics reflecting how much the ruling Congress or any other party is willing to invest in education, are conspicuously absent from the election manifestoes of political parties which have joined hands to transform high-potential post-independence India into a hopeless also-ran in the global development race. Nor for fear of suffering severe embarrassment have the mandarins of the Union government’s human resource development ministry shared per capita education spending data with the public. Incredibly neither has the incrementally Page 3 obsessed media bothered to disclose this vital statistic. Unsurprisingly the nation’s sheep-like intellectual community went to town hailing the Union budget as the most pro-education ever.

Yet the pathetic bottomline of India’s national education development effort is that the per capita government (Centre plus states) outlay for the education of India’s 375 million children of school-going age (below 18) is a mere Rs.2,940 (£36 ) per year. And if college and university students (age group 18-24) are added to the number of children, per capita government spending falls to Rs.2,857 (£34.84) per year.

The gap between the UK’s £5,500 per student outlay and India’s £34.84 is as wide as the Indian ocean even after adjustment for purchasing power parity. The nation’s benighted politicians and conformist intellectuals who entertain ideas of transforming India into a knowledge economy with a seat in the United Nations Security Council, need to reflect deeply upon it.