The Great Indian Harvest

- Azim Premji

Yojana || Apr 2, 2007

Introduction

By the late 1940s, centuries of imperialism had ravaged the Indian soil leaving it dry and impoverished. Immediately after independence, eschewing easy substitutes, we decided to fertilise our land with three ideals that make me proud to this day.

The first was plurality - believing that our different faiths, philosophies and practices are the very things that bind us and give us our identity. The second was democracy - stating that we are a nation where no citizen is greater than the other. The third was non-alignment - which is essentially the wisdom of walking the middle path, blurring the line that divides the left from the right.

It is important to remember that these choices were the loftiest ideals of nationhood the world had ever witnessed. It challenged a globe torn by war, ambition and prejudice to rewrite the very concept of wealth - by proclaiming that a country is defined not by its economic or military might, but by its collective vision for humanity.

Since then, we have relentlessly tilled the land with dialogue and fortitude; and the rejuvenated Indian soil is now rich and ready for cultivation.

How does one cultivate a nation? How do we ensure that the last six decades of toil will harvest a new and enduring society worthy of our founding ideals? All good farmers begin by getting to know the land - testing soil, studying climate and local resources, assessing demand - before deciding what to produce. This will not work for us; instead, we need to begin by first choosing the crop and then figuring out how to work the land.

Choosing crop

Traditional developmental models suggest that the Indian crop should have two characteristics: Economic Strength and Human Development. Economic Strength is about the size, potential growth, resilience and influence of a nation’s economy. Human Development is a measure of every citizen’s access to food, shelter, transport, education, justice, etc. Contemporary opinion is that we are on the road to becoming one of the world’s strongest economies even while languishing on issues of human development.

But is such a crop sufficient to satisfy our constitutional aspirations and founding ideals such as plurality and equality? In addition, must India not play an exemplary role in mitigating imminent global challenges such as the reduced amity between nations and faiths, and the detrimental impact of human activity on ecology?

With these in mind, let me suggest that nation building must include three key processes. One: Participation - which is the opportunity every citizen has to participate in and influence social, economic and political processes of the nation. Two: Sustainability - our ability to preserve ecology, and to reduce our influence on biospherical processes. Three: Empathic Dialogue - as the primary process to find common ground between individuals, groups, societies and nations.

We now come to the tricky question. We seem to have an inkling of the kind of nation we want. From history and from experience, we also have an understanding for its constituents. But whose responsibility is it to make this happen?

Knowing the farmer

As long as our goals remain within the domain of national economics or the citizen’s access to basic rights, the community of nation-builders could be limited to those who influence policy and action. I first heard this in a public meeting where a speaker felt that if we were to count the people who matter - his term for political leaders, bureaucrats, judges, industrialists, union leaders, etc. - it would add up to a couple of thousand people. “Imagine,” he said, “that the fate of our entire country is in the hands of two thousand people!” So should it just be these two thousand people who control the fate of our nation? Should we relegate our responsibility the moment we exercise our choice in deciding who these people are going to be?

The moment we seek pervasive processes such as participation, sustainable action and dialogue, any idea of hegemony will only be counter-productive. I suggest to you that such an extensive and complex task can only be achieved when every Indian citizen takes ownership to building the nation. In the process of creating such a nation, the citizen is not just a passive observer or just a contributor, but shares the ownership and is an active participant in the process. He is both the writer and the writ.

To understand the kind of citizenship that India needs, we need to look no further than the Constitution of India. Rather than presenting a static and narrowly defined set of qualities, it suggests a notion of an ideal citizen in the broadest terms. Let me present to you select excerpts on the fundamental duties of a citizen:

- to promote harmony and the spirit of common brotherhood amongst all people...;
- to protect and improve the natural environment... , and to have compassion for living creatures;
- to develop scientific temper, humanism and the spirit of inquiry and reform;
- to strive towards excellence in all spheres of individual and collective activity so that the nation constantly rises to higher levels of endeavour and achievement.

When we juxtapose these duties with ideals such as justice, liberty, equality and fraternity; or with the fundamental rights such as the right to equality, right to freedom, right against exploitation; we realise that each of these - ideals, rights, duties - are not merely stating the relationship between India and its citizens. Rather, it proclaims that the idea of India is no different from the idea of a citizen. It says that when a certain kind of citizenship becomes all pervasive, it will lead to a society with such ideals, rights and duties. Effectively, it breaks down one of the greatest illusions of modern nations, that the nation and the citizen are distinct entities.

Nation building is a complex and often indeterminable process that requires many different actors playing out dynamic roles. Yet at its core, the process of cultivating a nation is the process of developing citizens and citizenship.

Developing citizenship

It is time to sift through the different perspectives offered so far to construct a cohesive idea of a citizen. To infer, the ideal citizen is one who is courageous and reformist in spirit, is creative and critical in thought, and is empathic and humanistic in action.

Given how towering the Indian ideals of nationhood and citizenship are, it is inevitable that we fall short. Hence, contemporary society in itself does not offer opportunity for development of such citizens. In such a situation, the only recourse open to us is to carefully fabricate such a society in our schools. This is why schools are socially sacred, for this is the space within which a nation lives out its future. If so, this means that the school environment and processes need to reflect our nation’s ideals. And I feel that there is no better way to assess a nation than from the state of its schools; this is what we shall do.

Cause for alarm

Given that we wish to be a democratic and equitable society, it is safe to presume that all our children, no matter what their socio-economic background or innate competence, should have equal access to quality schools. Instead, the very stratification we see in society is also seen in our schools. This is obvious all around us. Within a 2 km. radius of my workplace, there are children who go to a school, which is a tin shed without a teacher, because they are from migrant labourer families who work in construction sites. There is a municipal school which makes up for its inadequate teachers and classrooms with an abundance of corporal punishment. There is an English medium convent which differentiates itself with its “reliable school-bus service”. There is an alternative school for “exceptionally gifted children”. And then there is an international school with its gymnasium and horse riding classes for the “leaders of tomorrow”.

Despite such shocking inequity, all these schools have one thing in common - their conception of a child and of teaching-learning. They view the child as putty, and hence the teacher’s relationship with the student is same as the potter to clay. This translates into mechanical drilling of words, numbers, formulae and definitions into the child’s mind - and memorisation and ability to spew out pre-packaged answers represents the highest form of learning. This entire process is then given credibility by board exams that test rote and recall in a high stakes competition pitting one child against the other.

If this is the reality of Indian education, we need to be alarmed and we need to act.

A good school

To understand what action is required, let us envision the kind of schools our country needs.

The obvious first step is to extend our social ideals into the classroom. What do plurality, equality, participation, dialogue and sustainability mean in the context of a school? Plurality implies that teachers and students, who are the school’s citizens, must represent as diverse a range of people as is present in society - with all its simplistic tags of poor, rich, Hindu, Muslim, tall, short, disabled, sad, happy, quick, young, old, witty, etc.

And within this rich spectrum, we apply the condition of equality. No matter who you are, within the walls of this school no one is greater or lesser than the other. The student is not subservient to the teacher. The bright math student is no better than the poor artist.

Overlay this with the primary process of interaction - empathic dialogue - and a new pedagogy emerges. Where the teacher and the student together immerse themselves in inquiring about and discover themselves and the world around them. And if the school is also able to demonstrate how to live in harmony with its environment and ecology, we have before us a school worthy of being our role model.

If we open our eyes, we will see that the school I have described is not merely a figment of my imagination. It is in fact a theoretical reconstruction of exemplary schools that inhabit our world and offer us inspiration. Some of them - such as Tagore’s Santiniketan and Gandhiji’s basic schools - are legendary. And in turn, they have inspired other schools that serve as society’s contemporary torchbearers: Digantar in Rajasthan, Centre for Learning in Bangalore, Rishi Valley in Andhra Pradesh, Kanavu in Kerala, and many more that continue to take birth all around us.

The Great Indian Harvest

While there are exceptions, the reality is that most of us have done little to influence the Indian school system. The situation will only improve when each one of us - as teachers, parents and community members - make it our task to demand and act for change. We need to know that by being passive observers or allowing circumstances around us to control and determine our actions, we are not just allowing things to remain the way they are but also contributing to the issue.

We are responsible for our environment, and if you and I do not take it upon our shoulders to make a difference, how will the future be any different? If we see a educational revolution today, I am hopeful that we will see a different India - an India worthy of the soaring ideals we were born with - in our lifetimes. Now is the moment for each one of us to stand up and be counted. And soon it will be time for the great Indian harvest.

Azim Premji