India is a unique nation. Save Asia, India is populated by more people than any of the continents. In terms of area too, with 3,287,469 square kilometres of land, India occupies 2.4 percent of the total land area of the world. Both these figures make India an enormous country. What magnifies the uniqueness is that the country with the 2.4 percent of the land on the planet supports 16.7 percent of the world population.
This uniqueness poses a gigantic challenge by itself and the challenge in turn makes India more unique. The challenge is further magnified by the acute diversity. India has great number of people who live the most advanced life style at par with any stratum of the global community and at the same time, India is inhabited by a great number of primitive peoples, who live in absolutely natural state. We have also sizeable numbers of people, who are among the richest in the world, and we have the biggest numbers in terms of the absolutely poor too. Even in the very capital city of the gigantic country, starvation deaths have been reported. I am not talking here about ethnic diversities – of looks, habits, culture, religious affiliations, languages etcetera which leave any foreign visitor bewildered in India.
Yet the challenge is not that we are too many or too diverse. Our civilization has made us to survive and thrive on this very land for millennia. And this is the same civilization which makes us a great functioning democracy, a rare feat even otherwise. It must be underscored that the nation-state as it emerged in the West was a mono-ethnic entity and nobody could have even imagined earlier that India would survive as a democracy amidst such deprivations and diversities. Thanks to our civilization heritages, we are a very proud democracy of the world.
Again a point deserves to be underscored. Each of we Indians is equally worthy and valuable as any other person in the world.
What is our challenge then? Our challenge is opening space for a billion aspirations to play. And this is not something unachievable. Since 1991, with little bits of periodic unshackling the Indians have made global strides. The point to ponder over is how to ensure that all aspiring souls get decent outcomes of their endeavours?
This is basically a managerial problem. Any good company knows this and therefore hire suitable minds at the steepest cost to run their business efficiently. Any country, and if the country is India with its population and complexity, would certainly require incomparably greater expertise to make the coexistence of so many people smooth and their collective self to rise to its deserved place. But for governance, we don’t hire super experts and the greater fact is that they don’t exist. People elect and the elected ones command a bureaucracy to run the affairs and expertise is the least of their concerns. What can then be done?
We need great infusion of knowledge in the society – both general and specialized. And we cannot import some critically required knowledges from outside as they are not manufactured anywhere, as nowhere else such numbers in such complexity are managed.
These days there are talks of propelling some of the Indian universities to global top ranks. This is certainly a great move. But what we really need is that we must have great universities in general in order to meet our knowledge needs. They must have to rise above from their functional role of imparting some rudimentary skills or more practically from their ritualistic role of conferring degrees.
Niraj Kumar Jha
कोई टिप्पणी नहीं:
एक टिप्पणी भेजें