The Rediff Special /Nani Palkhivala

'Education is the rock on which India must build her political salvation'

Bill Gates could have referred to the fact that at an international conference in the United States held some years ago to decide which language is most suitable for the computer, Sanskrit was chosen as the one language which seemed to be the most suitable. It is lucid, unambiguous and a language in which the most intricate steps can be expressed easily and precisely. No country can wish for a higher tribute to its ancient, basic language which is the foundation of its heritage.

There is a debt side to the balance sheet, which has been there for years, and which needs to be highlighted in fairness to foreign investors.

First and foremost, in the words of Bill Gates, the first necessity is to spread education more widely among our people. Today, India is competing, with only half its manpower, with the rest of the world, -- since half on the Indian population is literally illiterate. We must make education the priority of priorities. The real resource of any country today is knowledge.

Instead of capitalists and the working class, we are today having knowledge workers and service workers. Even in America, the Morgans, the Rockefellers and the Carnegies have been replaced by professional managers. Today, the well established pension funds increasingly control the supply and allocation of money in developed countries. These funds own in the United States half of the capital of the country's largest businesses.

The pension funds are run by a new breed of 'capitalists' -- the faceless and anonymous employees who run the pension funds, and investment analysts and portfolio managers. As Peter Drucker observed, we are living in a new era which is both non-socialist and post-capitalist.

Investing in education is to the 1990s what nationalisation was to the 1940s and privatisation was to the 1980s -- the universal panacea of the day. All thinkers are agreed that in our times human capital is the most precious form of capital there is. The skill and calibre of corporate manpower can never appear in any balance sheet; but it is widely acknowledged throughout the world that the greatest resource of a company is trained manpower. In a book published recently by the famous economist, Julian Simon, the human resource is rightly defined in the title of the book as The Ultimate Resource.

Among the nations of the world. India ranks very high in innate intelligence, but abysmally low in wisdom -- what the ancient rishis called buddhi. This is both the cause and the effect of our total indifference towards education. The criminalisation of politics and the deplorably low moral tone of our public life are the direct consequences of the failure to impart value-based education. When Indians are better educated, they will know how to behave better as workers and to discharge with greater responsibility their duties as citizens.

Liberty without accountability is the freedom of the fool. Our concept of freedom will remain an impoverished one, until it is rounded and deepened by liberal education.

Education is the rock on which India must build her political salvation. Our country will be built not with bricks but with brains; not with cement but with enlightenment. If we cannot afford education, we cannot afford to remain a civilised society.

Secondly, we must privatise the public sector units. Privatisation means that the majority of shares should be allowed to go into public hands, while the government may only retain a minority interest. In India, there is no political will to privatise any of the industries which are today in the public sector -- the utmost the government is willing to do is to offer a minority shareholding in public sector enterprises to private parties.

However, the present government has appointed in August 1996, a Disinvestment Commission with Mr G V Ramakrishna as the chairman. Though the programme has not yet started, the target has been set around Rs 50 billion. (This year's Budget mentions that the disinvestment programme will be selectively done through the Commission).

Take, for example, the subject of life insurance and general insurance. The then finance minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, did nothing for the deregulation of the insurance sector. In his Budget Speech of 1993, Dr Manmohan Singh had rightly referred to it as one of the urgent tasks of liberalisation. The Malhotra Committee was appointed and it made a very balanced, well-thought-out report as one would expect from a man of the calibre of Mr R N Malhotra.

After that report, Dr Manmohan Singh in his Budget Speech in 1994 again reiterated his proposal to deregulate the insurance sector and to create a competitive and financially strong insurance industry functioning under an independent authority. But in the Budgets of 1995 and 1996, nothing was done. Kingsley Amis was not wrong when he said, 'There is always a gap between an idea and its execution, but in India it is the widest.'

In this year's Budget (1997-98), the finance minister, Mr P Chidambaram, has made a modest opening of one segment of the insurance sector -- viz the health insurance business. Only a few Indian companies, which are Indian-controlled and with majority Indian ownership, will be permitted to enter the health insurance business.

Thirdly, India has vast infrastructural gaps. It has to add 100,000 megawatts of power capacity in the next ten years. It has to upgrade, both quantitatively and qualitatively, telecommunications network. The state-run telephone monopoly took 110 years to instal eight million telephones, but it has taken private cable operators just three years to instal 20 million satellite television hook-ups. About two-thirds of the country's 500, 000 villages still do not have a telephone.

Fourthly, we should change our labour laws instead of aiming at populism all the time. Five years ago, the government promised an exit policy, but no action whatever has been taken in that direction. India will find it impossible to compete with the rest of the world so long as our law forbids even a humane exit policy and prohibits closure of sick units without the government's permission.

Fifthly, if there is any one political factor which is bound to impede the forward march of India, It is the resurgence of the age-old curse of casteism. In no other country in the contemporary world is there anything comparable to our casteism except perhaps tribalism in Africa. Reservations for the backward classes in different Indian states have resulted in the substandard replacing the standard, and the reins of power passing from meritocracy to mediocrity.

Casteism and religion are the two powerful divisive forces in India. Some critics have gone to the length of saying that the Indian people is not a nation but a collection of communities. Winston Churchill said in 1931, 'India is a geographical term. It is no more a united nation than the equator.' Reservations on caste considerations in the Maharashtra state have climbed to 73 per cent.

Under a democratic set-up like ours, there is no short-term solution whatever to the problem we are facing. The only solution is a long-term one. We have to educate our people on the essential unity of all religions. Instead of letting them remain cultural illiterates.

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