Mr Prime Minister of India,
Being a technocrat, it would have been more sensible of you to think about the practicality of increasing the seats in IITs, IIMs and other higher educational institutions by 50%, before making such promises like a seasoned politician.
Just to eyewash the protesting students against caste based reservation (which of course does not make any sense), you are making promises like increasing seats by 50% which even more do not make any sense.
First and foremost, in all the higher educational institutions there is already an existing problem of shortage of teaching faculty by 30-40%!! Ask IISc director for instance and you will know the facts!
Given this fact, how on earth will you get the faculty to teach for the increased number of seats?? You definitely can’t grow quality faculty on trees like mangoes nor can you manufacture them in factories.
Then comes the infrastructure question. How on earth can you create the infrastructure to this whopping increase in seats? Laboratories and Libraries are not luxuries. This will just create a severe stress of existing facilities and will deprive students of their quality laboratory and library hours. When you talk about 50% increase in seats, it obviously means 50% increase in available space in all these institutions. Have you done any study or analysis on the feasibility of this in all higher educational institutions?? Can you please make this report public? Have you calculated the timeframe required to build the infrastructure for the additional 50% seats? Or have you left it all for the next governement as you are sure of not coming back after the next general elections??
Next we have the question of funds for all this. This requires atleast 8000 crores. From where will these funds come Mr Prime Minister? Till today not a single politician nor the finance minister has commented on from where the funds will be made available. While the same Finance Minister was brave enough to say that the nonsense promises of free gold chains,free televisions and free rice made by DMK in Tamilnadu elections were economically feasible!! Government is not a charity institution nor is the finance minister paying from his pocket. Instead of giving free things and converting people into zoo animals who cant hunt and depend on free food, empower people so that they can earn and buy these things on their own like how animals in a forest hunt on their own. But you wont do that because, the moment people can live independent of you, you will be voted out of power.
Coming back to the funds required for implementing the increase in number of seats and given the fact that the government still does not know where the funds will come from, how can you promise something which you have no idea of how to deliver? Again the people have been taken for a ride.
The recent proposal to increase the tax on salaried employees by removing all tax benefit schemes, is this part of an action plan to try to gather the funds for the proposed increase in number of seats?? Do you think we are a bunch of jokers sitting here who can be used in any comedy show run by you. Dont you think then it is high time that we again start looking at west and move out of India, in west atleast we are assured of respect for our knowledge, and are paid more compared to what we get here and more than anything there is true democracy and each penny of tax we pay is worth there.
Finally, you have lost our respect of being a right person in a wrong job by making these wrong promises and by being a part of this divisive and votebank politics. Any reasonable person understands in two seconds that if at all reservation is required then it should be based on economic backwardness ONLY as anybody can be poor irrespective of their caste and religion and only financial background based reservation will mean true social justice.
So the conclusion is there are two categories of people in India, one section which is highly intelligent and progressive and democratic, and the other which is full of fools,autocrats and uneducated literates. Unfortunately, the latter is ruling over the former.
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While I agree with your point of view that reservations based on economic background would make a lot more sense than those based on caste, I have a more fundamental problem with all forms of reservations. If the objective of the government is to bring the economically (or socially) backward sections of the society at par with the rest, then why are they not focusing on expanding and improving the country’s primary and secondary education system? Wont this eradicate the problem from the root?
If each and every child, regardless of his cast, creed of financial background has an equal opportunity to go to school and receives good quality education which makes his application to college as stong as that of any other student, then where will there be a need for reservations to exist at all? Surely the Cambrdige educated PM and the Harvard educated FM have figured this out. Surely they also know the the government does not have the required skills, machinery or the motivation to make this happen by themselves, and therefore primary and secondary education will have to to be contracted out to the private sector and merely regulated by government. Why then is privatization of primary education such a taboo in our country? How is it any different than the government alloting contracts to private parties for wiring villages as part of the Rural Electrification programme? Just like the CERC sets guidelines for electicity, a government appointed can regulate primary and secondary education.
But ofcourse there is a catch to all this, even the mightiest attempt to tackle the problem in the logical way (as stated above) would take 5 -6 years to implement, and our government will be long gone by then as they would have either lost in the next elections or lost the support of thier communist allies. So Mr. Singh is in a bit of a catch 22 situation (never read the book so dont know whether than an appropriate metaphor. He can either choose to take the path less travelled (sorry to use the most cliched line of all times) and implement a primary education programme at least 10 times larger than the Sarva Shiksha Abhyan, or he can implement caste based reservations which gives him some chances of winning the poor vote in the next elections.–>
While I agree with your point of view that reservations based on economic background would make a lot more sense than those based on caste, I have a more fundamental problem with all forms of reservations. If the objective of the government is to bring the economically (or socially) backward sections of the society at par with the rest, then why are they not focusing on expanding and improving the country’s primary and secondary education system? Wont this eradicate the problem from the root?
If each and every child, regardless of his cast, creed of financial background has an equal opportunity to go to school and receives good quality education which makes his application to college as stong as that of any other student, then where will there be a need for reservations to exist at all? Surely the Cambrdige educated PM and the Harvard educated FM have figured this out. Surely they also know the the government does not have the required skills, machinery or the motivation to make this happen by themselves, and therefore primary and secondary education will have to to be contracted out to the private sector and merely regulated by government. Why then is privatization of primary education such a taboo in our country? How is it any different than the government alloting contracts to private parties for wiring villages as part of the Rural Electrification programme? Just like the CERC sets guidelines for electicity, a government appointed can regulate primary and secondary education.
But ofcourse there is a catch to all this, even the mightiest attempt to tackle the problem in the logical way (as stated above) would take 5 -6 years to implement, and our government will be long gone by then as they would have either lost in the next elections or lost the support of thier communist allies. So Mr. Singh is in a bit of a catch 22 situation (never read the book so dont know whether than an appropriate metaphor. He can either choose to take the path less travelled (sorry to use the most cliched line of all times) and implement a primary education programme at least 10 times larger than the Sarva Shiksha Abhyan, or he can implement caste based reservations which gives him some chances of winning the poor vote in the next elections.