Simple, Pragmatic Suggestions to Election Commission

Dear Sir,

We sincerely Thank you for providing us, reasonably good elections so far. While a lot has been achieved but still lot more is required towards Electoral Reforms. We realize that Free and Fair elections are foundation for any Democracy. We also realize that its we the voters who should come forward and play our part, but unfortunately we are sometimes occupied with our jobs, household chores, meetings or even watching the entertaining head over heels Bollywood movies. While all of our consumeristic heeds are important to push us ahead of China, we realize that by not sparing time to vote, we are insanely leaving our houses open, hoping that the Ram Rajya will prevail. While we have many other explanations about why we hope for Euphoria to prevail and prepare ourselves to be embraced by the daemons from heaven, we have few simple suggestions which can make our and your life bit more easy and comfortable. We are not challenging your or capabilities, but we believe that these suggestions can be easily incorporated -

1. Please try to plan to elections over weekends and/ or over lapping with some public holidays. I know that certain officials might not be inclined to work during such odd times, but I think that this step can significantly increase the voter turnout across all categories such as working professionals, students or housewives. We, the people wont mind spending half of the off day to vote, but the probability of voting decreases significantly, if its organized on one of the hectic weekend.

2. Please try to increase the number of voting booths, so that its easy for you to monitor voting in each booth and it takes less time, thus will not hamper many of us from voting, who cant afford to spend hours in que under sun, due to various reasons.

3. Please make some special arrangements for physically handicap, elderly people, pregnant women at the polling booths.

4. As you might be aware that in 20 major cities of our country more than 100 million people, reside, i.e more than 10% of the total population. A significant percentage (guesstimate> 50%) of people are not bonafide of that particular city, hence cant vote. Similarly in several Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities and towns (by population). Overall all these migrants (in metros, major cities and towns, including the NRIs) should total to more than 100 million India citizens, who cant vote. So please make simple and clear policies so as to include this group into election process.

5.  Instead of investing your time and resources in taming the Elephant, please try to tame the Liquor barons, the free food, drugs, cash distributors. You may disqualify candidates who found doing these un-democratic misdeeds and all his relatives from contesting in election for next 15 years. Please go on and ban that political party from contesting in the election of that specific constituency.

6. In addition to publishing all information on website, please create information kiosks in each village, town and city from where the citizens can gather information about the affidavits filed by each candidate, current and previous election manifesto of each political parties etc.

 7. Please the Government of India to allocate more funds to you, so that you can round the year propagate and educate the citizens about their rights and responsibilities.

8. Mobile Booths - Big trucks or vans can be converted into a Polling Booth which can travel to remote areas, Colleges, Hospitals, IT Parks etc where lot of potential voters reside but who are not able to visit Polling Booths due to insane traffic, heavy work schedule etc.

Implementing above suggestions wont cost too much of Exchequer's money, but will definitely improve the participation of we the people thus bolstering democracy in many subtle but powerful ways.

Of course the above list is not exhaustive, please add your suggestions in the comments and we can subsequently send an email/letter to Election Commission !

500 IITs, 50 IIMs and 550 AIIMS

That's all we need to fix the education system of India. Quiet simple isn't it ! Same old, 4-5 fixed formula is not all is you need to appease, woo voters, snatch and retain power in India, today. That's what our current and even previous Minister of Human Resource Development and the GOI believe in general.

Blame it to lack of creativity or to inability to prepare a comprehensive master plan to revamp the business of higher education in India. Is it so hard to manufacture different names for different Universities? I think the ministries and bureaucrats needs to take some lessons in creativity from the Saas Bahu brigade, who keeps on creating new characters, sub plots under super plots for decades or the celebrated Roshans who keeps on inventing news names for their movies despite having the severe 'K' restriction.

IIT Kanpur is all set to establish a center in Noida and in parallel IIT Roorke is planning to open a research center in Noida, while my Alma-mater IIT Bombay is contemplating to set up campus in New York! Now that's some out of the box thinking ! With elections round the corner and Congress seems to be loosing battle on most of the fronts, I wont be surprised if in the name of progress Congress announce opening of another 5000 IITs, 5050 AIIMS and 50 IIMs in next 5 years. Very soon, we can run into some interesting conversations-

Ram- Hi, I am from IIT Baroda, Mysore, Behind Cloth Market.

Shyam- Hey, even I am from IIT Baroda, Mysore, but on left side of Cloth Market !

Radheshyam - Good to meet you guys. I am also from IIT Baroda, Mysore, above Cloth Market !!

All the newly set and old IITs are struggling to fill in 1000 odd vacant faculty positions. The swanky buildings of private Daring to think beyond Lovely universities and institutes have launched a full throttle advertising campaigns to woo the students. But who cares what's inside the box ! The packing should be attractive.

I am not at all questioning the need to open more institutes of advance learning and research in each and every district of India. I am not trying to question the great service IIT, IIM, AIIMS and several such universities have rendered over the years. My point is why cant we create competing brands? Why are we hell bent on converting all Oranges to Apples? Why cant we create an ecosystem in which Baroda Institute of Technology competes with IIT Baroda? Each university can offer something new, something different be it options of courses or pedagogy. Why cant government prepare a comprehensive master plan, before conducting a inauguration ceremony photo session for ever news hungry news papers?  Do we only need more Engineers, Doctors and Managers? What about adding new universities in the field of Literature, Fine Arts, History and Political Sciences?

Despite being admired by several Business and Political honchos of the west, none of the best of cream universities of India, appear in the list of top 50 universities of the world in any category and barely couple of them could make it to top 100! We can either choose to bask in the glory of these words of appreciation we have been receiving OR we can attempt to rethink, re-look at what we have achieved so far, whats wrong with the current situation and what all is yet to be achieved ! India is ranked way down when it comes to Per Capita spending on Primary Education and Higher Education. Which implies, we haven't done anything extra-ordinary by investing in reasonable infrastructure at IITs and IIMs, which is definitely best at domestic levels, but when compared at International level, reminds me of the famous Robert Frost's poem-

He Gives his harness bells a shake,

To ask if there is some mistake.

The only other sound's the sweep,

Of easy wind and downy flake.

The Woods are lovely, dark and deep,

But I have promises to keep.

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

A Brief History of Education Systems in India.

Gone are the days when considering education as business was unethical/incorrect. In the ancient to medieval Indian society, education was a prerogative of the highies and almighties of the society! Education was customized inline with the Varna Vyavastha of then Indian society. The rise and demise of the Bhakti Movement did infused a new line of thinking in the highly aristocratic Indian society. The Bhakti Movement though was short lived and often condemned by the gatekeepers of education of those times. But I think it was very significant movement for several reasons. One the teachings were in the form or short poems and bhajans in the local language. In the language spoken by masses in their day to day lives. The movement was for sure not about formal or scientific education, but perhaps it is/was the world's first (and may be the only) movement which emphasized on Common Sense and Rational thinking. Both these attributes made the Bhakti Movement an eternal movement which still has relevance in the 21st century Modern India.

Between now and the era of Bhakti Movement was the period of rise and fall of the British empire. Under the British regime schools and colleges imparting formal and scientific education were created but with the primary intent of catering to the administrative requirements of British empire. Whatever the intent might have been, in my opinion these schools and colleges made the formal, technical and scientific education available to the masses.The penetration was very low due to several reasons - lack of intent, lack of resources, the common mass was involved either in the independence movement and cared less about getting higher education.

Post independence Pandit Nehru accurately gauged the need of hour and the stress was rightly placed on three critical fronts - Primary education to create a broader base of people who can read and write; Higher education - institutes for higher education, technical education and management education were formed (such as the IITs, IIMs); Practical Education - several institutions imparting job oriented education (such as ITIs) were created in parallel to make the masses employable. For the next 30 years the results of these three pronged approach were complacently satisfactory. Slowly however since the overall education system was still not very dynamic and so lost the relevance and efficacy. On the one hand we faced the problem of brain drain of the highly skilled labors, engineers and doctors while on the other the practical and job oriented education system failed to cater the need of new industries.A deeper analysis revealed that at primary level we were still following the curriculum and text books which were designed in the pre-independence era.

One thing is very clear from the above analysis that the time frame for which a particular system and a curriculum and overall education ecosystem remained relevant shortened. We followed a Varna Vyavastha for thousands of years, followed by a couple of years of religious-socio-education centric Bhakti movement which lasted for couple of hundreds of years, then under the British empire we perhaps developed for the the first formal, more wide reaching and scientific education system and then a Nehruvian education system, which is what we are still following to a very large extent. Guided by some political motives and desire to get media footage the curriculum has been mildly revised in past 30 years at primary level and with the rapid emergence of private colleges backed by the political support and desire to make quick money overnight more than 500 colleges have mushroomed out of nowhere in the past 10 years.