Teach them young

Britain is setting a new record every month but there are no reasons to cheer. Many more than a million people have been made jobless in the three months ending October. This despite all the tall talk of David Cameron and George Osborne that the British economy is gradually getting to terms with the new economic reality. What is more worrying is the continuous rise in youth employment, which now has reached a new height of 1.027 million.

The figures on rising unemployment (and also rising youth unemployment) were announced on the day when a BBC Radio 4 poll shows that parents in Britain are losing control of how their children behave. The survey also suggested that more than three-fourth of people interviewed think the way parents raise their children in Britain has deteriorated in the past decade.

Both the findings are seriously worrying for Britain but do we have reasons to equate them?

There is a structural side to the woes Britain is facing economically. The global economic balance has now significantly shifted towards Asia with the rise of  China and India. Technological changes have made sure that the chain of production continues uninterrupted. Abundance of labour force in China and India have transformed these two countries into global production houses. The huge internal markets have not only stretched the innovative and productive capabilities of the domestic industries and service providers there but also lured foreign companies. Anxious parents of school going students are now abandoning Latin and German for Mandarin and Hindi. 


The number of products and services that Britain can now sell to the outer world are very limited. Even its internal market is dominated by cheap Chinese, Indian, Malaysian and Indonesian  products. Large number of immigrants and a significant floating population are also draining out a  proportion of  British financial wealth outside its national territory. Dadabhai Naoroji had attributed India’s poverty to the drain of resources by the British. Had he been alive today, he probably would have been very happy to see some form of a reverse flow.

Britain has sacrificed its manufacturing heartland, citing the rise of  The City as the global financial capital. The so called British supremacy of the financial world is also not without risk and challenges. The neglect of the real economy in favour of  financialisation has created a pool of  workforce who have nothing to offer nationally and are also unable to compete globally. This is probably where Radio 4’s findings call for serious introspection.

"Three-fourth of the parents surveyed admit they have no control over their children’s behaviour and 65 per cent of the respondents blame the teenage gang culture on poor parenting". My hunch is that a survey on primary and secondary school teachers would have produced nearly similar results. Britain has chosen libertarianism overlooking the importance of discipline in individual life.

Given the decline of British manufacturing and the tumbling of the British financial empire, it seems Britain can now rely only on the knowledge economy  (using knowledge as an economic good). Even today  thousands of  foreign students make a beeline  for British universities, which are still considered to be of global standard. But for the knowledge economy to deliver in a sustained way, Britain needs to look internally and assess the standard of primary and secondary education that is on offer as compared to other leading countries of the world. Capacity building is the key to success of the knowledge economy in the long run, and this might take care of some of the economic woes Britain faces today.

To brave the current social storm though, a meaningful engagement with the youth is absolutely necessary.   This can take place by inculcating a sense of belonging among the disenchanted youth and impressing upon them, right from their childhood days, the virtues of  modern life and the challenges that lie ahead. 


A way out of the social mess coupled with the radical reform of elementary education system (leading to capacity building in the knowledge sector) could play an effective role in halting the current downturn of Britain. 


All comments are personal and have no bearing on others. 

Care without compassion

I am still finding it hard to reconcile with the fact that seriously sick people were virtually thrown to the throes of death at the very place where they had gone to revive their lives. Medical negligence is not uncommon in India and often people are forced to take it as part of life, yet what happened at the Advanced Medical Research Institute (AMRI) in South Kolkata is very difficult to live with.

About ten years ago, during a visit to Kolkata, I had to see a well known ENT specialist as I was suffering from serious sinusitis symptoms. I do not want to name the doctor, who was embroiled in a much publicised case of medical negligence, as he is no more. He suggested some tests, including an MRI scan, and kept insisting that I get them done from the now infamous AMRI hospital.

I was too ignorant then to understand the so called doctor-corporate nexus. However, the enlightenment came soon on my first visit to the AMRI on a December morning. Right from the reception desk I was swamped by a team of salesmen, who wanted to sell all sorts of policies and services. As I tried to avoid them saying that I lived abroad, they got even more interested in me, capitalising on emotional issues, like what would happen to my ageing parents when I was away to the difficulties of an outsider in finding a reliable doctor for proper treatment.Finally, I had to tell them, quite rudely, that I lived in Kolkata for three decades and the city where I belong to is no alien to me. 

Recently, one of my relatives was diagnosed with cancer and had to be admitted to the AMRI. Those who get their patients admitted to hospitals like the AMRI know fully well the financial burden they have to undertake, but what you get as a bonus is the inhuman behaviour meted out both by the staff and the doctors. The attending staff had no clue when my relative passed away in the early hours of a day in mid October and didn't even have the courtesy of informing my sister in law, who was waiting downstairs. Moreover, they charged Rs 1200 just for releasing the body. 

Mine are no exception. The out pour of public anger over the past couple of days in media outlets, social networking sites and even in interpersonal conversations are testimony to the fact  that many others have had similar experiences in some of the private hospitals in Kolkata and elsewhere. Despite such anguish we were unable to do anything that would put a check on the heartless actions of the wily traders of the health business. 

My friend Parthapratim Mandal has raised a very pertinent question. Partha asks, when so many private hospitals have come up in Kolkata over the past few years, why not a single government hospital was built. Not that we get any better service at government hospitals, but it seems that the entire health business is leased out to the private sector.

Whenever there is any incident like the one that took place at AMRI recently, we start talking idealism. The media tend to capture the moment, overlooking the systemic problems. And there are people who find morbid pleasure in getting embroiled in blame game along party lines. After a while, as the dust settles down we tend to leave the personal tragedies with those who suffered and life moves one.

People forget to  ask some of the vital questions like: why the poor and middle class people are forced to go to private hospitals like the AMRI even at the cost of selling their assets, why the salesmanship dominates over compassion in the health sector and why the doctors prescribe the same tests over and over again as patients move from one medical unit to another. These are only a few that comes to my mind now. There must be plenty more unanswered questions to deal with.

All comments are personal and have no bearing on others.  

Left lacks political imagination

Ever since the decline of the Left in West Bengal was evident in public eye, I have tried to reason it as a 'crisis of hegemony', 'failure in governance', compromise with the inherent left ideology and embracing neo-liberalism to match up with the inter-state competition following economic liberalisation. Following my recent interface with 'time' as a historical entity, I am now tempted to revisit my arguments about the decline of the Left after being in power for over three decades. This, however, presupposes the argument that I do not consider the recent trouncing of the CPI-M as an after effect of anti-incumbency. Had it been so it could have had happened after 10, 15, 20, 25 or 30 years and not at this moment in history when the mainstream left ideology is facing a global crisis.

Before making the case using time as a historical entity, let me enumerate my thinking so far about the decline of the Left in West Bengal, which has seen electoral manifestation since the Panchayat (local government) elections in 2008.

My understanding is that the assumption of power by the Left in West Bengal was solely a political project and the leaders barely had any economic or developmental objective in mind. This was evident through the various measures taken by the CPI-M, the dominant partner of the Left Front and also by the Jyoti Basu-led government. This includes land reform - providing land rights to the tillers like the small and marginal farmers and sharecroppers, basic improvement in minor irrigation, enhancing the salaries of the teachers in government schools and other employees in the state sector without ensuring that they are held to account etc. These measures in a way created a sense of belonging among the poor and the lower middle class Bengalees in favour of the government, without outlining the broad economic and developmental policies of the Left Front.

They also created an internal chain of support in favour of the CPI-M, which later gave way to the formation of a beneficiary class; in line with the patron-client relationship, which helped the Left to set up an internal mechanism to retain power. This patron-client relationship later turned into party-backed promoters in the urban and semi-urban areas and non-farm actors - like the primary school teachers, owners of rice mills, distributors of seeds and fertilisers etc. - in the rural areas.

Land reform on the other hand ensured a strong political support base for the Left in rural Bengal but the fragmentation of land created impediments for capital formation which was so essential for industrialisation. I have a suspicion that the Left leadership never had industrialisation in mind when they assumed power in 1977 and this only speaks of their failings in political imagination and also about their commitment to long term economic development in the state.

Lack of industries created a population of jobless and this led to draining out of talents to other states within India and also abroad, and West Bengal at one stage assumed a moribund identity, although the Left leadership would immediately denounce it. However, following economic liberalisation in India, globalisation of production chains and technological development, the population in West Bengal, especially the youth, were exposed to the fascinating changes that have been taking place both within India (in other states) and also abroad.

To cope with these challenges and that of inter-state competition to attract capital and also to cover up for years of non-performance, the Left leadership hurriedly tried to deliver some results. This in a way resulted in the Left embracing Neo-liberalism as a dominant economic doctrine, despite their ideological opposition to it. This initially created confusion within the traditional support base of the Left but the leadership mistook their 'hegemony' as a way of negotiating such a problem without proper debates within the party and the state. This eventually led to resistance and conflicts finally resulting in the Left being booted out of power.

The sequences of events described so far shows that the left leadership were manipulative in using various social elements to their political advantage, but were not imaginative enough to bring about desired socio-economic development in the state. The rhetoric of the leaders like Jyoti Basu, claiming West Bengal to be the best in the country in terms of agricultural productivity are not backed up by sufficient empirical evidence.

The dearth of political imagination of the Left leaders was also evident in their lack of understanding the difference between homogeneous and heterogeneous time. Although homogeneous time is utopian, yet capital and market have a tendency to negotiate with homogeneity rather than dealing with heterogeneity, which is more realistic. (This could be one of the reasons behind our fetish with growth.)

Capitalistic principles would possibly see growth and industrialisation as possibilities of economic improvement but constituents of heterogeneous time could very well disagree. The population within heterogeneous time might still prefer the traditional agrarian way of life over industrialisation. The broad identity of the population, which got disenchanted with the drive for industrialisation by the Left Front government, bears testimony to such an argument.

The Left being a political entity of grass root connection has failed to identify this element of heterogeneous time. The reasons for such failure could be lack of political imagination. Although they claim to portray a socio-economic and political thinking which is alternative to the mainstream discourse of capitalism, yet the events in West Bengal show that the thinking of the Left is heavily influenced by the way capitalism functions within utopian homogeneity.   

*I owe my thinking on using time as a framework of analysis to Partha Chatterjee of the Centre for the Studies in Social Sciences, especially his book 'The Politics of the Governed.' 

All comments are personal.

Learn the hard way

The United Kingdom government is planning to limit the use calculators in primary schools to encourage children develop skills in basic maths. This comes a year after the school league table produced by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) ranked the United Kingdom 28th for maths skills across the developed world. Too much dependence on the gadget has created a generation of children who are unable to do basic maths using reliable written methods of addition, subtraction, times tables etc. Now the government wants to correct the mistakes of the past by introducing time tested methods of arithmetic.

It is not only in maths that average students in the UK fare poorly, I have hardly seen any person who has been educated in the UK schools with reasonably good and legible handwriting. A recent study has also highlighted the pathetic literacy standard of children leaving primary schools in London. 

I am not an expert, but my apprehension is that there is a serious structural problem in the school education system in this country.

The experience of dealing with my daughter over the past three years has shown that the curriculum relied more on packaging rather than the content and there is always a tendency among the teaching community, with due respect to them and their hard work, to be 'politically correct'. By being 'politically correct', I mean that teachers shy away from candidly highlighting the shortcomings of the students and delve more on some generalised observation. The reasons could be the fear of offending the parents, as is the predominant culture among the wily politicians now not to antagonise anybody, or may be the thought that any such blunt yet honest comment would be construed as a failure of the teachers themselves. After all, many things in Britain are now measured by the fulfilment of certain set targets. 

At the end of every term, the parents get a chance to have a 15-minute audience with the class teacher. In every meeting that we have attended so far, the teachers have tried to impress upon us how good our daughter was (and this is pretty much the experience with most of the parents of school going children we know of). Such has been the experience, that now at the beginning of every meeting we tell the teacher that we want to hear about her drawbacks so that we could work around those issues.

I'm not denying that encouragement and praise are necessary for a child's physical, psychological and intellectual development, but just for the sake of being 'politically correct' the teachers should not refrain from calling a spade a spade.

I still remember how my late grandfather ensured that I wrote a page everyday in English and Bengali to improve my handwriting, which in the first few years was pathetic to say the least. Now I realise what an asset a good handwriting is. I do not support regimentation as a way of life and am all for attitudinal choice and freedom of thoughts, yet the importance of a degree of discipline cannot be denied in the formative years.

Lack of discipline has produced a generation in the UK, who is totally insensitive to the virtues of modern life. Britain's obsession with unqualified freedom, without any compulsion of sharing responsibility has created citizens who are wrapped in cotton wool by the state but have no stake in the well being of the country. Till recently, it was profitable to receive benefits rather than going for jobs.

Those who abuse the system of social security in Britain or circumvent rules to lead a lazy life are probably oblivion of the hardship that ordinary Britons have undergone during the post-war period. 

Aspiration for a better life and commitment for the well being of the society are something which Britain needs today. The primary school teachers have a lot to offer on that front. The success, however, depends on the support the teaching community gets from the government in particular and the society in general in  mentoring young minds, rather than meeting 'faceless numerical targets' to serve certain 'political purposes'.  

All comments are personal and have no bearing on others.