By Patricia Mukhim
It is gross misdemeanour on the part of the Education Minister to hold up the results of the admissions in Pine Mount School. In the first place why should the file have to go to the Minister? Is he without work that he has to scrutinise even the names of who has got in and who hasn’t in one Government public school? Isn’t this the work of the Principal of the School, assisted by some teachers? The Education Department in this State has been held up to public ridicule repeatedly. How can the Department regulate the conduct of education when all the time it is caught doing the wrong thing? First it was the white ink scam, then the recent interview where two applicants for teaching posts happen to be the daughters of a senior official of the Department who presided over the interview. And now we have the Education Minister himself deciding whose kids will be admitted and whose will not make the cut for the prestigious Pine Mount School. This is crass nepotism! Anywhere else the Education Minister would have had to vacate his portfolio. Alas! In Meghalaya, wrongdoers are never punished or even socially ostracised. They strut around with all the pomposity they can muster. It is because of such arrogant legislators that the likes of Arvind Kejriwal get public support. Kejriwal is seen as someone who can bring the pompous to their knees. Why is Meghalaya so devoid of such reformists?
The Education Department is wasting its time cleaning up the mess created by its higher-ups. Someone has rightly stated that the violence perpetrated by corruption is far worse than violence perpetrated by the gun. That the presiding deity of the Education Department is none other than a PhD holder (the epitome of educational attainment for many) makes it all the more galling. He of all people should have the savoir faire (quickness to know and do the right thing) to run the Education Department. But how wrong are we? There is a vast difference between being a true scholar and a sciolist. It’s hard to believe that a scholar would short-circuit every endeavour for promoting quality education in the State. That a file dealing with admission into Pine Mount School for this academic session should be dealt with by the Education Minister himself is despicable. Isn’t there a yardstick by which children are measured if they can cope up with the Pine Mount ICSE syllabus? Why not look at how privately run institutions conduct their admissions?
Development experts say that a few institutional factors such as fiscal discipline, openness to market competition, strong investment in education, political freedom and low levels of corruption makes some countries flourish while others wither.
Let’s take a look at Meghalaya. Corruption is rampant here which is why our educational standards are dipping instead of rising. Our schools, colleges and universities produce thousands of half-baked graduates who are not employable unless they get political oxygen. That is why our young people have such low self esteem and their dependence on politicians is overwhelming. Even after having written their examinations and faced the interview boards, they still expect politicians to be their arbiters. Parents have no sense of guilt about asking the Education Minister to push their children above the meritorious ones, to the point where the Education Minister has to use white ink to falsify the list of those who should have been appointed as primary school teachers. And why did the Education Minister do something that is so obnoxious? The reason, as I had stated in my last article, is because their children don’t study here. They are studying in the best public schools outside Meghalaya and abroad. Maybe we should print out a list of where all the children of these worthies are studying. It would give an idea of why they don’t care a damn about raising the quality of education in Meghalaya.
To express these views openly is to be called a malcontent or an eccentric. But as senior members of society it is our duty to constantly give those in government the migraine and those who commit scams, the jitters. We have to be ants in their pants. Unfortunately we don’t do enough of either. Someone has rightly remarked that democracy is by definition very tiresome. It involves constant engagement with saints, dreamers, rogues and normal people. The problem with our democracy is that it has bred more rogues at the higher echelons. The other predicament is that we are a society that cannot confront corruption because of our sectarian views. If the a scamster is from my church or my community, my clan or my locality, I will not disown the person but continue to patronise him/ her because he/she wields authority and most of us love to rub shoulders with these powerful beings.
All of our elected MLAs forget that the power they wield today is given to them by the people. That power should be used to protect the weak, not to further weaken them by taking away even what they have merited through hard work and diligence. Not every parent who wishes to admit their child in Pine Mount School has political or bureaucratic clout. What do they do but just turn away in humiliation when their child is denied a seat despite performing well in the interview/written tests!
In this ugly imbroglio one wonders what the bureaucrats in the Education department are thinking. Why don’t they have the gumption to tell the Education Minister that selecting the names of children to be admitted to Pine Mount School is not his brief? Why do they comply with his orders to bring the file to him? In the Police Department, corruption to a large extent has been eliminated by declaring all results immediately on completion of the physical tests. There is a time line within which the results of written tests are announced. Former DGP, Mr N Ramchandran had streamlined this process leaving politicians with no scope to manipulate results. Why is this not followed by the Meghalaya Public service Commission (MPSC) or while admitting students into the Government administered public schools? It would bring to a close all controversies regarding admissions and interviews.
Talking of the bureaucracy two cases involving senior bureaucrats in the Central Government came to light this week. One was the case of the Secretary Health, Keshav Desiraju, who was shunted out because health Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad wanted to bring Ketan Desai back to the medical Council of India. Desai, the former top official of the MCI had been arrested in a scam involving granting of recognition to medical institutions. Another reason behind the conflict between Desiraju and Azad is the former’s tough stand on a company selling stents in India. It appears that Azad was upset with the Health Secretary for not being ‘flexible’. On the same day the Secretary Urban Development, Sudhir Krishna said that Finance Minister P Chidambaram humiliated him by not allowing him to speak in Hindi and instead asking him to converse in English.
In Meghalaya, our bureaucrats are not known to be as venal as their political masters. What they lack is the spine to stand up to the Ministers/politicians and expose those who compel them to do what is wrong. But bureaucrats here are too selfishly motivated to protect their backsides and to avoid transfers. Hence they will not speak up even if doing so is necessary in their call of duty. When will the IAS fraternity here develop the backbone to complain against the meddlesome politicians? When will they stop saying, ‘Yes Sir’ to everything?