Business of Education

A friend of mine wanted admission in MDS (Master of Dental Sciences), in Bangalore, India and had to write the entrance exam COMED-K. She had to get at least 50% in the exam to get a seat and rank in the top 50 to get a government seat. The fee for a government seat is around Rs. 2 lakhs per annum (translates to around $4652). The fees for a management seat is an unbelievable 20 lakhs for the entire course plus the yearly fees (works out to be around $50000)!

Now, please help me understand, which middle class Indian family can afford this kind of money? Suddenly, education has become the prerogative of the rich Indian and the Non-Resident Indian (NRI)! India, needs educated people especially doctors, with our health services being among the worst in the world! Apart from which, a lot of these doctors pay this indecent amount of money and go abroad and our health services continues to be backward!

What can the government do? The government can increase spending on Education to make it accessible to the ordinary Indian and ensure that students that join premier and world renown Indian institutes such as the Indian Institute of Technologys (IITs), Indian Institute of Managements (IIMs), All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) and other such premier institutes funded by the government of India, they stay and give something back to the country first – at least for a period of 5 years to ensure that the country gets what it has invested in them! I know that this sounds very jingoistic, but this is surely one of the ways to guarantee that the country gets back!

Why can’t we Indians follow rules while driving?

There are 5 main reasons for this, as I see it:

• Sheer size of our population
• Size of our country
• Cultural and language differences
• Education
• Impatience
  

How do the above influence our driving skills (or the lack of it)?

Size of our population

We are around a billion people and counting. Although 80% of our population
lives in the rural areas, economic factors are beginning to drive more and more people to the cities in search of a better life. This is increasing the population in cities where existing infrastructure, more often than not, is creaking under the burden of additional population. To put this in perspective, apparently Bangalore attracts around 3000 migrants everyday and adds 5000 vehicles everyday! The more the population, the more vehicles on small roads and therefore more chaos!

Size of our country

India has an area of 3,287,590 square KM or 1,229,737 square Miles, with a billion people. To get some perspective around this number, the US has an area of 9,631,420 square KM or 5,984,685 square miles with 300 million people, which is around 3 times the area of India with a third of our population! So obviously the density of people per square mile or KM is very high in India.

Pause, to think of the consequences!

Cultural and Language Differences

India has 23 scheduled languages and various dialects as recognized by our constitution! So assuming that a truck driver from North India has to drive to the South or vice versa, the chances of the driver speaking in any language apart from the native language he speaks is infinitesimally small! Most of the signage in India is in the local language of the state the driver is in or in English! Chances that a driver would have got a license by paying out bribes are pretty high! Pray, tell me how will anyone understand the signage?

Education

India has a literacy rate of 65.38%, so again think of the truck driver – chances that he being educated is small, chances that he knows a language different from his native tongue, tends towards zero.

Impatience

Anyone who has lived in this great country of ours or anyone who has visited here will attest to the fact that everyone is always in a hurry! In the morning, yes there could be an office emergency, call or a meeting – in fact I was talking to a friend of mine and he has a very interesting theory around this – He opines that the urge to “get there” (read as being successful) and “get there” first is so overwhelming, simply because there at least a million other people who also want to “get there”. This I can accept and live with!

How in the world can you explain the peak hour chaos in the evening? More often than not, most people are getting home after a hard days work – why can't people chill out, listen to music or do anything to relax – Nope, everyone is yet a hurry!

So it is going to be implausible that the population of the country suddenly tapers off, the size of the country suddenly expanding, the cultural and language differences disappearing, the education levels suddenly skyrocketing and certainly impossible for the impatience to dissipate and replaced by patience. Ergo, we as country will continue to remain as we are!

American Media: Trivializing News and too internally focussed?

Is the American media trivializing news and are they too internally focused?

ON late Sunday night, India time, there was a major terrorist attack on an Indian train (connecting India and Pakistan) killing 66 people and injuring many others. One of American biggest and highly popular news website carried the news item as a byline in its “Latest News” section while the main story was dealing with how 4 people and a pet were rescued after they got stuck in a snow storm!

If the same attack happened on American soil or was targeted at American interests anywhere in the world, God forbid – we have too much bloodshed already, even if the casualties were far smaller, it would have made headlines!

Most American news channels, newspapers and websites are so internally focused that it seems that the news is getting trivialized!

The biggest news, recently in American media – Britney Spears has shaved her head! Give it a break folks – Leave her alone – It might do her a world of good!
All news organizations seem to be focused on making profits and news such as this, while useless and not giving any useful information sells!

This also seems to be a malaise affecting the American education system! The system is also so internally focused that most students at school do not even study various about countries, their cultures. Most Indians study the gamut of world civilizations, Indus Valley, Egyptian, Chinese etc. to the American civil war, American and the French Revolutions, the rise and fall of communism, World Wars etc.

Shouldn’t the media have the responsibility to teach people about various countries and cultures? The media mainly focuses on the city where it is in, the state, the US and countries where US has huge interests (especially Middle East, Israel) or where the Americans have or had their hands in a conflict (Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Vietnam).

IN the era of the internet blurring the borders across each country to make the world a global village, ignorance is certainly not bliss!