Gold and Education - India’s Favourites?

The order is best left to the reader!

India’s fetish for gold and all that glitters is hard to ignore in a country that has over 20,000 tonnes of idle gold worth over Rs.52 lakh crore. 

With our very own Goddess of Learning, education in India is highly valued and also a highly prized commodity.

What have the two highly prized commodities Gold and Education to do with performance, engagement and influence of the Indian?   

Two recent events in India serves to highlight the conundrum confronting all those entrusted to ensure performance, engagement and influence. The launch of the two year Bachelor of Education Programme and the Gold Monetisation Scheme, in 2015.

The Bachelor of Education (B.Ed) Programme, in India, with the exception of Regional Institutes of Education, was a-year-long programme. In 2015, all B.Ed programmes in India, became two years programme. For a country that values education and teachers, the New B.Ed Programme, never merited mention in any of the National Dailies, wonder how many local rags did! Hardly a year into the Programme, anecdotal accounts refer to a catalogue of complaints and disappointments with the new B.Ed programme. The significant dip in admissions to the two year B.Ed programme begs attention! 

The launch of the Gold Monetisation Scheme (GMS) in India meant to make the yellow metal more valuable, merited mention, coverage, glitz and glamour from the Prime Minister. The GMS had little difficulty, meriting privileged space in every newspaper and local rag worth its name! 

Ironically, the purely voluntary Gold monetisation scheme, till November 18, 2015 garnered a paltry 400 grams of physical gold from a country that has over 20,000 tonnes of idle gold worth over Rs.52 lakh crore with household and institutions. 

Could the paltry 400 grams of gold, serve to be a good metaphor, to refer to the current ‘education’ doled out in the name of 'a collective, public investment' public education to the teeming complex and diverse mass of learners in India? Education, the Indian version - has to a large extent degenerated into a ‘ritualisation of the learning process’. The implications of ‘idle education’ like ‘idle gold’ is scary!

When two recent well-intentioned schemes, Education and Gold, themes deeply ingrained in the Indian ethos, go awfully wrong, questioning all those entrusted to ensure performance, engagement and influence is in order.

Appealing to humans' basic instincts - fear, self-interest and simplicity calls for continuous and comprehensive monitoring, evaluation and learning for all those entrusted with performance, engagement and influence.

Today, in the age of social media, when one can measure practically anything, if only one knows what one is looking for, one also know that collecting mountains of data won’t yield a grain of insight. Such a state of affairs causes one to stop, think and question.

It is ‘question time’ particularly by people with a proven record - those accomplished as thinkers, scholars, academics, dancers and painters - to exercise the essence of democracy, to question those entrusted with performance, engagement and influence about the system/s that helps them to ask the right questions, how do they measure the right data, and how do they then learn from the results?

Thomas Piketty’s call to India, ‘one particular thing that was never really done in India was growth-based investment in basic schemes, basic education, health...’ and when he adds that the Indian elite have not adjusted to the idea of such a collective, public investment, such a call is hard to ignore. An outlook, such as this, has served to aid and abet the ‘... hypocrisies and lots of misunderstanding in the way some of India’s elites is interpreting what capitalist development is all about ...’ Little wonder then, why, the hapless teeming Indian masses continue to grovel, ‘selfish, scared and stupid’.

As we stand at the threshold of the release of a New Education Policy, painfully aware that collecting mountains of data won’t yield a grain of insight one wonders wether ‘reason and reality’ and a ‘humane engagement methodology’ served to guide the wisdom of the all those entrusted to ensure performance, engagement and influence - Indian Shining!