03 The (near) certainty of being mistaken

One of the great puzzles of human intellectual history is just how mistaken most eras have been in retrospect. But with all this, the human race rolls on and fulfils its destiny…

When my generation was in college (the late ‘60s and early ‘70s), one of the main pillars of our intellectual edifice was the perniciousness of the “brain drain”. Of course, “drain” theories of imperialism are well known and ubiquitous, and all our subsequent problems have been attributed uncritically to the selfishness of the colonial powers. But after independence, it was the drain of our technically qualified young persons that was held to be part of the neo-colonial conspiracy that was bleeding our intellectual manpower and damaging our development.

Today, of course, all this has been forgotten, and we realize that our techies abroad are a great resource, an asset. These Indians have built modern, innovative enterprises abroad, and we are now hoping to rope them in and use their expertise, their entrepreneurial skills, their networks, their investment, in accelerating our own climb out of the poverty trap.

Not just technically qualified persons, but even artisans and other workers have been going abroad, to the Gulf countries, for instance, and wherever there has been demand for skilled manpower. Their remittances have also helped our own growth and development.

A number of beliefs of that era – when young persons ran off to join the Naxalite movement in West Bengal (some never came back) – are today being stood on their head. Thus, the population increase itself is no longer seen as  such a serious burden, instead we talk today of the “demographic dividend”, an idea expanded and explained by Nandan Nilekani, e.g. in his book Imagining India (revised edition, 2009, pp. 44 onwards). The developed world (the West and Japan), and even certain developing countries like China that undertook aggressive population control measures, are going to face a problem of declining proportions of young age classes, due to low rates of population growth for the past decades. They will have lesser and lesser proportions of earning, working populations and increasing proportions of old people to be looked after, who will be requiring pensions, social security, and other support, or will just be drawing down their savings. These countries will have to find novel ways to increase the productive population – perhaps by immigration, perhaps by exporting much of the non-contact work abroad (wherever possible). Countries like India, it is argued, stand to gain from this transfer of work, over and above the direct benefits from emigration of their surplus young workers to the developed countries. With India’s large base of technically trained manpower, this has enabled transfer of relatively high-end processes to centres in India, especially since the information and communication technology revolution. This is the essence of the “demographic dividend” so commonly talked about.

A couple of caveats are order here: one is that the huge population of young people will yield a “dividend” only if they are trained and competent enough to take up the opportunities presented by an ageing but rich west. Even domestically, the affluence of the upwardly mobile middle classes will provide jobs to the uneducated or poorly skilled rural masses only to an extent. So the burgeoning population of young people may well turn out to be a demographic time-bomb, if we are unsuccessful in improving their skills and abilities.

The other caution is that the job opportunities are going to be in new sorts of activities in the modern sector, rather than in the traditional rural occupations like agriculture. In other words, along with the demographic opportunity comes a requirement for openness, flexibility, and a lowering of our traditional xenophobic barriers. Within the country, the social and cultural barriers to mobility and cooperation between people of different backgrounds, languages, and communities will also have to be brought down. The gaps in education and employability will also have to be filled resolutely in the next generation if the large young cohorts are not to become a social liability.

The advantage enjoyed by India in the general opening up of the international economy and in the information technology revolution, suggests yet another area in which our past assessment has proven to be mistaken: that is, the support given to higher education, as against primary education. Of course, this does not excuse the failure to provide universal primary education and to ensure that there is no illiteracy; however, many outside experts used to advice us to cut down on university education, which (they said) was only producing an army of jobless ‘clerks’, and to focus on universalizing primary education. Gunnar Myrdal, himself, repeats this homily in his Asian Drama, and even goes to the extent of suggesting a freeze on expansion of the school system, even of primary enrolment, on the argument that quality has to be first ensured to obviate waste of scarce funds on schooling that produced only failures. Myrdal also has many good things to say about Gandhiji’s concept and model of “basic” education, learning by manual work rather than book learning, especially to break down caste barriers and increase the respect for manual labour (and by implication, respect for labourers).

Independent India was led of course, not by Gandhians, but by technocrats, and resolutely turned her face away from the siren call of such utopian ideas. And the middle classes marched enthusiastically into middle schools, into higher secondary schools, into degree colleges, and into institutes of technology, and went on to provide the base for the astonishing success we have seen of Indians on the modern world stage. The IT world seems to have been made especially for Indians, almost as if this was what we had been waiting for. What Myrdal and others of his background may have missed, is the ground reality that India has been always a thought- and knowledge-based civilization, and in a way it may be said has been waiting for the “barbarian” west to catch up all these centuries. It is another matter that only a small percentage of the entire population may have been a part of this higher culture, and it is our duty to see to it that the rest of our own population also catches up; but even this minority constitutes a large national mass, and the perceived elitist nature of our ‘high’ culture is no argument to call for the dumbing-down of the whole society. We should continue to support the excellence of thought and intellectual effort in the higher levels of the educational system, while resolutely expanding the base.

Another example of how mistaken we have been is afforded by our socialist ideals of our youth (I am referring to the age cohorts that were in the universities around the 1960s and 70s). One of the dearly-held tenets was the need for self-sufficiency, self-dependence, or even a form of autarky in the economy, that is we produce everything we consume, and we consume nothing that we do not produce ourselves. As Neelekani and other pioneers in the IT world have written, this imposed enormous barriers to importing the simplest of equipment and components, or foreign exchange for travel, even up to the mid-80s, which kept us from advancing technologically. It was only after the mid-80s that this started getting liberalized, thanks probably to Rajiv Gandhi. I myself remember that when I returned to India in 1989 after three years in the UK, I carted things like a PC, a VCR and a colour television set (these being almost obligatory for returning Indians), only to find even more up-to-date models were already available in the market for more or less the same price (with customs duties etc.).

Another favourite dictum was that the rural population has to be kept in the villages, and migration to towns prevented by creating more and more jobs in the rural areas. Gunnar Myrdal has much to say about what the rural children should be educated for. There are still such arguments heard every day (especially in respect of “tribals”), but the growing reality is either that young people flock to the towns, or that the urban areas themselves are expanding and swallowing up villages. Some states like Kerala are one continuous semi-urban landscape, and no doubt parts of Tamilnadu, Punjab and Haryana also are getting there.

Yet another massive mental pothole is about language. Every day one or the other politician or general busybody inveigles (in English) against English, and demands that education should be in the mother tongue. Even Myrdal talks about the heavy linguistic load on the children of India. However, the people want English, they want bookish education and drilling, they want multiple language competencies. Of course this does not please the theoreticians, and even Myrdal in exasperation talks about the “determined resistance on the part of students, parents, and, frequently, teachers”  to the types of reform that the educational experts advocate (Asian Drama, Vol.III, Chapter 33, p.1817 in my edition). Myrdal specifically upbraids the south Asian countries of being “soft states” in the context of educational reform of the type advocated by experts (ibid., p.1820-21).

Today, far from being a burden, English is giving us a specific advantage on the world stage. If only we could combine this with a better environment for starting and doing business, better maintenance of public services and public spaces, and a general respect for the rule of law and more helpful processes and support for the novice and outsider, India would be able to compete with most other developing countries for international investment funds without giving up its basic cultural moorings.

What I have tried to argue so far is that many convictions that appear self-evident due to some ideological conditioning actually prove to have been quite mistaken. I have purposely termed this the near certainty of being mistaken, since we can’t be a hundred percent sure even of this dictum! But I think sufficient examples have been paraded to illustrate it and establish its basic soundness.

What should be our response to such a bleak conclusion? It is not that we should desist from taking policy decisions, but that we should do so with a certain sense of humility and even scepticism. That is where a “soft” state may actually prove more sensible in the long run. Countries that pride themselves on being “hard” may be super-effective in installing a particular policy in the short term, but they are prone to violent twists and turns because, more often than not, national policies have to be changed after some time and the transitions become traumatic because of the hardness of the state. A soft state, on the other hand, finds such changes easy and almost natural, because that is the expected state of things. No single measure or policy is ever going to be valid for all time or all over the country, so space is always left for deviations, even from the established laws (again something that Myrdal rails against). India has flirted with a top-down imposition of policy on occasion, with disastrous results (such as the family planning drives under Sanjay Gandhi). India has usually rejected such regimes, and instead honoured the quester, the questioner. That is its strength, and that is the legacy India’s thinkers have left to the world. Truth has to be sought somewhere in the shadows between darkness and full light, and is neither absolute nor valid for all time and all people, much to the chagrin of the more dualistic west.

References

Myrdal, Gunnar. 1968. Asian Drama. An Inquiry into the Poverty of Nations. Twentieth Century Fund, Inc. Reissued 1982, reprinted 2004, by Kalyani Publishers, New Delhi.

Neelekani, Nandan. 2009. Imagining India. (Revised edition). Penguin Books, New Delhi.