Shut down HRD ministry!

Shut down HRD ministry! by Sauvik Chakraverti

Shut down the union hrd (human resource destruction) ministry. The ministry is manned by propagandists of a failed experiment in state socialism. It has ensured there are no genuine knowledge workers in the entire education system, except bureaucrats. Its supervision of schools, colleges and universities should be revoked.

Dismantle all licensing requirements for education institutions. The education sector urgently needs to be set free. This will facilitate entry of competing private firms offering short courses that equip young people for vocations or professions, be it plumbing or baking into the education sector. The three R’s can also be easily taught, especially using computers.

Free the student community. In schools, colleges, universities and B-schools across the country students receive state-sponsored ‘education’. Such education churns out limited types of economic actors: bureaucrats, managers, accountants, lawyers, doctors, engineers. In the emerging free market economy, young people will find profitable niches as DJs, VJs, even tattoo artists. The burden of formal education — especially state-sponsored education — is inimical to creativity and intellectual freedom. 

Revoke higher education subsidies. Higher education is a privilege, not a right. Those who actually produce knowledge should be free to work, teach and sustain their respective schools of thought. Every such school should sustain itself on its own resources as it would be fatal to academic freedom to expect or receive subsidies from the state.

Moreover some Indian edupreneurs are venturing overseas. The Manipal Education & Medical Group has promoted state-of-the-art medical schools in Nepal and Malaysia, and the S.P. Jain Institute, a campus in Dubai. And most spectacularly, India-born Sunny Varkey who runs a dozen secondary schools in Dubai and the UAE, has acquired 13 independent schools in Britain and could well be the world’s premier edupreneur.

This urgent flurry of activity within the hitherto somnolent education sector has ensured that the vital importance of qualitative education has permeated down to the lowest income groups across the subcontinent — a development accentuated by the promotion of the country’s 517 urban benchmarked Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalaya residential schools in rural India (see EW cover story August). Simultaneously it has focussed public attention upon hitherto arcane subjects such as syllabus design and curriculum development and shifted national attention from ritual to real education. Suddenly paper degrees and qualifications are not as important as professional and life skills which school leavers and college graduates must acquire within their institutions of learning.

Therefore the newly emergent consensus that reform of India’s Macaulayan system of education based on rote learning and memorisation rather than development of problem-solving and conflict-resolution skills requires urgent attention. And even as several specialist committees constituted by the Union ministry of human resource development are currently engaged in the process, the public interest demands a wider ambit for the national debate on syllabus and curriculum reform. To this end, to meaningfully celebrate the 5th anniversary of EducationWorld, we deemed it incumbent upon ourselves to ask several educationists and industry leaders with proven commitment to improving the education system to write prescriptions for a renaissance of Indian education.

Inevitably, prescriptions for the reform of India’s patently languishing, if not terminally ill education system by dedicated educationists in diverse professions and vocations differ widely. However on some points there is a broad consensus. The reforms implicitly or explicitly endorsed by all the seven eminent respondents are:

Liberalise and deregulate the education system to encourage promotion of new schools, colleges, vocational and other institutions of higher education.

To a greater or lesser degree all the respondents are in favour of addressing the supply side of education to eliminate capacity shortages which are the root cause of the overwhelming majority of the hundreds, if not thousands, of rackets which plague post-independence India’s education system. The learned justices of the Supreme Court agree. In its historic 2002 judgement in the TMA Pai Foundation Case (8 SCC 481), a full bench of the court expanded the right of minorities to “establish and administer educational institutions of their choice” as mandated by Article 30 of the Constitution of India, to all citizens.

This development prescription is strongly endorsed by liberal economist and writer Sauvik Chakraverti. “The education sector urgently needs to be set free. This will facilitate entry of private firms offering short courses that equip young people for vocations and professions — be it plumbing, or baking — into the education sector. The three R’s can also be easily taught by them using computers,” says Chakraverti (see box p.39).

SAUVIK CHAKRAVERTI is an alumnus of the London School of Economics and former senior assistant editor of The Economic Times. Currently Chakraverti is the convenor of the Liberal Study Group, Mangalore.

Road to Liberty: Markets Alone Reward Diverse Knowledge Forms

Sauvik Chakraverti, Sep 4, 2004, 12.00am IST

Socialists insist education will help the poor. Actually, millions are poor not because of ignorance, but because of socialist law. Unlettered tribals in the jungles of central India, for example, know how to distil mahua but laws prevent them from selling it. Millions of poor coastal Indians know how to climb the palm tree, harvest the juice, and brew toddy. They are poor because laws prevent them from selling the fruits of their traditional knowledge. In Sri Lanka, toddy is touted as the national drink and sold in tetrapak. No toddy is sold on Brigade Road, Bangalore: Excise law.

Similarly, millions of unlettered Indians know how to sing, dance and play musical instruments. But they languish in poverty because the socialists have outlawed nightlife. The poverty-stricken north-east is full of potential rock stars. Arun Shourie showcased many great north-eastern bands in Delhi recently but where do they perform, given all the restrictions on opening bars and clubs, serving alcohol and so on? In Mumbai, entrepreneurs have invested in thousands of dance bars which fork out crores in taxes, but cops routinely raid bars and arrest these girls who are just trying to earn an honest living with skills they already possess. In Maharashtra, legends recount the Peshwa Baji Rao's deep love for the dancing girl Mastani. Today, poor Mastani would be in jail or in a municipal school! Tamasha is an ancient Maharashtrian form of ribald popular entertainment, but it has been legally crushed, and the papers report that tamasha artistes today survive as mistresses of corrupt local politicians. Mujra is banned in Lucknow.

In America, black slaves made it big in music. New Orleans produced Satchmo and hundreds of jazz and blues stars not because of education, but because of liberty: The liberty to earn an honest living.

The socialist emphasis on education also demonstrates complete ignorance of how knowledge operates in the market economy. Main Street, Pune, is a busy market. Walking around, you find hundreds of small bakeries that turn out a dazzling array of breads, buns, biscuits, rolls and so on. There are scores of small jewellers, tailors and

expert darners. Many tiny establishments make picture frames. There are Irani, Parsi, Chinese, tandoori and continental restaurants. Budhanis is famous for its potato chips. There is a popular home-made softy ice-cream joint. There is a vada-pau stall that always has crowds of customers. There are bhelpuri and chaat-wallahs. A group of acrobats perform for passers-by. The street is lined with hundreds of shops selling diverse products ranging from footwear to sarees, from electronic goods to kitchenware. This is what Friedrich Hayek called the division of knowledge: Every economic actor is operating with distinct know-how.

Important implications follow the Hayekian view of knowledge. First, that central economic planning can never work, because knowledge cannot be centralised: What cannot be known cannot be planned. The socialist central planner, Hayek said, suffers from fatal conceit: He does not see the wonder of knowledge, and thinks he knows it all. It is because of knowledge failure that there are shortages of everything that is planned, from roads to power. There are no shortages in the market economy.

Second, Hayek showed how knowledge and education are entirely different things. Hayek found much of the knowledge used in the market economy to be inarticulate and uncodifiable. The bakers, tailors, expert darners, and bhelpuri-wallahs of Main Street possess this kind of knowledge. This shows the limits of formal education as a means to economic achievement.

Formal education churns out certain types of economic actors only: Bureaucrats, managers, accountants, doctors, lawyers and so on. The vast majority of successful economic actors get their knowledge elsewhere. That is why VJs, DJs, sports-persons, fashion models, and hotel chefs earn more than professors of economics.

Liberty matters much more than all the education the socialists can impart. Liberty means free trade and open borders. Liberty means there are no restrictions placed on economic achievement and it is this freedom that empowers the poor to enter the market, not education. Liberty beats education in another important way, for education requires us to pay a new tax, while liberty is free, requiring only that repressive laws be repealed and meddlesome, corrupt bureaus be shut down. So why have almost all educated Indians agreed to the education cess?

Perhaps their education made them forget liberty. In 1215, when the Magna Carta was signed, Englishmen were all quite illiterate, but they instinctively valued liberty: Every freeborn Englishman is the king of his own castle. Thus, we see the birth of constitutional democracy and the birth of capitalism. The merchants of cities and towns

extracted from King John constitutional liberties to self-government and trade by land and sea. The richest livery companies in London then were those of the fishmongers, grocers and fruiterers because they sold what everyone consumed. The merchants of England's cities and towns comprised the commons. But in every Indian city today, people in these basic trades have their surpluses robbed by parasitic state personnel. How can we believe we are a true constitutional democracy when we don't have liberty?

We No Longer Need Economists

We No Longer Need Economists by Sauvik Chakraverti 

6 Feb 2004, 0000 hrs IST, The Times of India 

Our adversaries rail at us liberals for being ideological; they say we are full of empty theories. So here is a simple travelogue. For some months now, I have been living in Mangalore, an ancient city on the west coast. A 13th century Kannada poet has marvelled at the fact that as many as 38 different kinds of coinage circulated in the city’s markets then. It becomes obvious that the city owes its existence to overseas trade: At the centre of the old city is the Bunder, the port.  

It is another ancient trading city that came up by the sea, like Alexandria or Venice. They were all glorious centres of civilisation although there were no economists then. In modern Asia, Hong Kong and Singapore are thriving port cities and neither has produced a single economist of note. The other day I was taken to a beach just beyond the New Mangalore Port Trust. What struck was the wall. The entire port is surrounded by a 20 ft high wall. 

So, because of some theory, Mangalore has moved away from having a port open for the citizens to trade, and now possesses a walled port to which citizens are denied entry. The gates to the walled port are manned by armed guards paid for by the taxpayer. Also at the taxpayer’s expense are a whole lot of customs officials who do not permit trade without prohibitive exactions. All this must be justified by reams of economic theory, for there is an economics department is St Agnes College here, the oldest women’s college in south India. There is a Mangalore Economics Association. 

Driving along the wall, I passed some towering examples of industrialisation: Nehru’s theory. A sizable amount of prime beach-side land is occupied by a phenomenally ugly public sector iron ore exporting plant. 

There is a fertiliser factory which surely survives on production subsidies. So the dealbetween New Delhi and Mangalore is clear: We stop you trading and then we give you industrialisation. There is, at the taxpayer’s employ, an entire Indian Economic Service wedded to this theory. The wall is bad for sailors as well. I was with a ship’s engineer when he suddenly announced his departure, saying that if he did not return by 10 p.m., he would get into trouble with the personnel manning the wall. He said that even an ordinary sailor spends at least $20 a day while ashore but here the wall keeps them on board. 

Mangalore is a dream city for eating and drinking out, famous for its cuisine. The seafood is superb, and much, much cheaper than Goa. Mangalore also possesses many establishments where what is offered might be called cabaret. Surely anyone will realise that we do not need economists to know what is good for Mangalore. What sense does the wall make? The path to commercial success and the regaining of the city’s old glory should be obvious. The citizens of Mangalore should do to the wall precisely what Berliners have done to theirs. Then, as with the old Bunder, they should set up a big market there. After all, didn’t God promise Jerusalem greatness by making it a mart for all nations? The mayor of New Jerusalem should issue externment orders to all the customs officials and the armed guards. 

The prime land occupied by the ugly iron ore plant and the fertiliser factory ought to be seized and auctioned so that hotels, shopping malls and beach resorts take over the landscape. Within a decade, this will be India’s leading city, especially considering the fact that all the others, including Bangalore, are perishing. To unravel the sophisms in the theories justifying the wall, I recommend Frederic Bastiat, who did not have a formal education in economics, who never taught at university, and who was just a journalist and pamph-leteer. In one essay he put the point across thus: There is this steel magnate in France. He sees cheap steel imports coming in from Belgium and this threatens his profits. He now has two choices. One, he can hire a posse of men and arm them with guns, with instructions to shoot anyone who brings steel into France from Belgium. But such a course is highly inadvisable. 

So there is the other option: Go to Paris and pay some politician there to do it for you. He will deploy armed men at the borders at the taxpayer’s expense. And the two of them will share the profits, while the taxpayers who paid for the guards will now pay out even more for steel. After reading Bastiat I arrived at a conclusion: We don’t need the WTO; we need unilateral free trade. Get every government out of trade. And every trade economist too. 

The late professor B R Shenoy, a classical liberal who studied under Hayek himself, was the only economist to dissent officially with Nehru, and in writing. His daughter, Sudha Shenoy, an eminent liberal economist, in a recent interview, said that nearly every economics depart-ment in the world could be shut down without having an ill-effect on the world of ideas. 

Strong words indeed. She bemoaned the sad fact that economists do not study the real world of human action any more; they are all lost in theories and models and mathematics and statistics. I entirely agree. The wall proves it. 

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/477732.cms

Pathology of Civilization Walled-In Ideas We No Longer Need Economists

Pathology of Civilization Walled-In Ideas We No Longer Need Economists By Sauvik Chakraverti 6 Feb 2004

Pathology of Civilization
Walled-In Ideas
We No Longer Need Economists
By Sauvik Chakraverti
6 Feb 2004

Our adversaries rail at us liberals for being ideological; they say we are full of empty theories. So here is a simple travelogue. For some months now, I have been living in Mangalore, an ancient city on the west coast. A 13th century Kannada poet has marvelled at the fact that as many as 38 different kinds of coinage circulated in the city’s markets then. It becomes obvious that the city owes its existence to overseas trade: At the centre of the old city is the Bunder, the port.

It is another ancient trading city that came up by the sea, like Alexandria or Venice. They were all glorious centres of civilization although there were no economists then. In modern Asia, Hong Kong and Singapore are thriving port cities and neither has produced a single economist of note. The other day I was taken to a beach just beyond the New Mangalore Port Trust. What struck was the wall. The entire port is surrounded by a 20 ft high wall.

So, because of some theory, Mangalore has moved away from having a port open for the citizens to trade, and now possesses a walled port to which citizens were denied entry. The gates to the walled port are manned by armed guards paid for by the taxpayer. Also at the taxpayer’s expense are a whole lot of customs officials who do not permit trade without prohibitive exactions. All this must be justified by reams of economic theory, for there is an economics department is St. Agnes College here, the oldest women’s college in south India. There is a Mangalore Economics Association.

Driving along the wall, I passed some towering examples of industrialisation: Nehru’s theory. A sizable amount of prime beach-side land is occupied by a phenomenally ugly public sector Iron ore exporting plant.
There is a fertiliser factory which surely survives production subsidies. So the deal between New Delhi and Mangalore is clear: We stop you trading and then we give you industrialisation. There is, at the taxpayer’s employ, an entire Indian Economic Service wedded in this theory. The wall is a bad for sailors as well. I was with a ship’s engineer when he suddenly announced his departure, saying that if he did not return by 10 p.m., he would get into trouble with the personnel manning the wall. He said that even an ordinary sailor spends at least $20 a day while ashore but here the wall keeps them on board.

Mangalore is a dream city for eating and drinking out, famous for its cuisine. The seafood is superb, and much, much cheaper than Goa. Mangalore also possesses many establishments where what is offered might be called cabaret. Surely anyone will realise that we do not need economists to know what is good for Mangalore. What sense does the wall make? The path to commercial success and the regaining of the city’s old glory should be obvious. The citizens of Mangalore should do to the wall precisely what Berliners have done to theirs. then, as with the old Bunder, they should set up a big market there. After all, didn’t God promise Jerusalem greatness by making it a mart for all nations? The mayor of New Jerusalem should issue externment orders to all the customs officials and the armed guards.

The prime land occupied by the ugly iron ore plant and the fertiliser factory ought to be seized and auctioned so that hotels, shopping malls and beach resorts take over the landscape. Within a decade, this will be India’s leading city, especially considering the fact that all the others, including Bangalore, are perishing. To unravel the sophisms in the theories justifying the wall, I recommend Frederic Bastiat, who did not have a formal education in economics, who never taught at university, and who was just a journalist and pamphleteer. In one essay he put the point across thus: there is this steel magnate in France. He sees cheap steel imports coming in from Belgium and this threatens his profits. He now has two choices. One, he can hire a posse of men and arm them with guns, with instructions to shoot anyone who brings steel into France from Belgium. But such a course is highly inadvisable.

So there is the other option: Go to Paris and pay some politician there to do it for you. He will deploy armed men at the borders at the taxpayer’s expense. And the two of them will share the profits, while the taxpayers who paid for the guards will now pay out even more for steel. After reading Bastiat I arrived at a conclusion: We don’t need the WTO; we need unilateral free trade. Get every government out of trade. And every trade economist too.

The late professor B.R. Shenoy, a classical liberal who studied under Hayek himself, was the only economist to dissent officially with Nehru, and in writing. His daughter, Sudha Shenoy, an eminent liberal economist, in a recent interview, said that nearly every economics department in the world could be shut down without having an ill-effect on the world of ideas.

Strong words indeed. She bemoaned the sad fact that economists do not study the real world of human action anymore; they are all lost in theories and models and mathematics and statistics. I entirely agree. The wall proves it.

http://freeofstate.org/new/?p=6819

Brand New Delhi: Let Political India Move Out of the Capital

Brand New Delhi: Let Political India Move Out of the Capital

26 Mar 2004, 0000 hrs IST, Sauvik Chakraverti 

Gerhardt von Hoffman was in charge of the privatisation of the properties of the East German government in East Berlin. We spent a fortnight together in Goa during which he said a very interesting thing, namely, that since there is no profit and loss in government calculations, the state is a very inefficient user of real estate. 

In his Utopia, he said, the state would be constitutionally required to rent properties. That alone would yield an efficient real estate market. After meeting Gerhardt, a new vision unfolded in my mind, a realisation that we could also privatise state property. 

This vision seizes me every time I am in Delhi, for in Delhi almost half the city belongs to the state. If we decide to privatise state property, and use Delhi as an example for the purpose, what benefits can this yield for the average Dilliwalla? And what lessons can be derived for the rest of India? The first great benefit that this approach will bring is that, by taking such a path, Delhi will finally be possessed of a Central Business District. Every great city has one, but Delhi doesn't. The Mughals built Chandni Chowk; the Brits built Connaught Place; but both these markets are not CBD material today. 

How can the privatisation of state property yield Delhi a CBD capable of handling globalisation? Rajpath can be privatised. Every sarkari bhawan there can take 10 shopping malls and have enough room for parking besides. The street name can be retained so that we all know that the raj now is of the market and not the Central planner. This splendid, broad avenue can be the central shopping and nightlife district and breathe fresh life into Delhi's commercial spirit. How can this be brought about? We must think ahead. Globalisation means cities competing for commerce. Cities are the hubs of world business. 

If Delhi has to be such a city, it will require a CBD. But globalisation also means the end of the dominant state. In commercial societies, capital cities are small. Washington DC, Bonn, Canberra, Berne, Ottawa... there are so many examples. If Rajpath is to be privatised, this means we must also shift the Capital out of Delhi to some smaller town. Such a move will also mean that the diplomatic community will have to shift out of Delhi too, and the prime spaces occupied now by foreign embassies can be used by the market. Then, Shantipath can be the central office district, with high-rises belonging to every great multinational, and this name, too, can be retained showing that we Indians seek peace through trade. 

Shifting the Capital out of Delhi will also yield huge amounts of space currently occupied by sarkari babus . All the Bapa Nagars and Kaka Nagars and R K Purams can be privatised and sold to the market — that is, to the citizenry. The bungalows of Lutyens' Delhi could be left for the commercial as opposed to the political elite. The question arises as to what should be done with the money that this privatisation will yield. 

I propose that it be used to shore up the city's transport infrastructure. Let 20 250-km-long eight-laned expressways emerge as 'spokes' from Brand New Delhi and connect all the surrounding towns so that a vast amount of space is opened up for residence and commerce. For example: One spoke to Dehra Dun with 10 satellite towns on the way; another to Alwar; one to Jaipur, one to Agra, one to Chandigarh, and so on. In this way, hundreds of satellite towns can come up (and not just NOIDA and Gurgaon). There is enough land for all; what is required to get the land into service are roads. They say 'every great city sits like a giant spider on its transportational network'. 

Let Brand New Delhi be such a city. New Delhi certainly isn't. It sits like a blob of jelly on the map, bloating up every year. And let rail links parallel the roads. We can have 20 lines of the Delhi Metro extending parallel to the expressways. In great cities, the underground railway goes overground outside city limits and connects up the outlying towns. Today, the Delhi Metro does not plan to link even Gurgaon. 

The airport is not on the route plan of the metro. What about the grand Viceregal Palace on Raisina Hill that we now call Rashtrapati Bhavan? I believe the entire area would be very well suited to make the world's greatest casino. I would welcome the idea of selling it to some casino firm for, in Brand New Delhi, the electoral sweepstakes should not be the only form of gambling allowed, as is the case in New Delhi. If half the profits from the casino are given to the city coffers, then Brand New Delhi may also be tax-free. They say political change is 'loquocentric': It happens if we talk about it. In which case, we must all talk about these ideas: First, the privatisation of state property; and second, the idea of a new capital town by getting the state out of Delhi. 

If enough people talk about these ideas, then only will we be able to say that their time has come. As a lesson for the future, let us now be very careful about how much property we allow the state to accumulate. Here's to a lean state and a lean government unobtrusively performing its chosen tasks well. Let the state be in a small government town and let every city blossom. As the poet put it: "Into such a haven of freedom, my Lord, let my country awake!" 

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/msid-582269,flstry-1.cms

We No Longer Need Economists

We No Longer Need Economists by Sauvik Chakraverti 

6 Feb 2004, 0000 hrs IST, The Times of India 

Our adversaries rail at us liberals for being ideological; they say we are full of empty theories. So here is a simple travelogue. For some months now, I have been living in Mangalore, an ancient city on the west coast. A 13th century Kannada poet has marvelled at the fact that as many as 38 different kinds of coinage circulated in the city’s markets then. It becomes obvious that the city owes its existence to overseas trade: At the centre of the old city is the Bunder, the port.  

It is another ancient trading city that came up by the sea, like Alexandria or Venice. They were all glorious centres of civilisation although there were no economists then. In modern Asia, Hong Kong and Singapore are thriving port cities and neither has produced a single economist of note. The other day I was taken to a beach just beyond the New Mangalore Port Trust. What struck was the wall. The entire port is surrounded by a 20 ft high wall. 

So, because of some theory, Mangalore has moved away from having a port open for the citizens to trade, and now possesses a walled port to which citizens are denied entry. The gates to the walled port are manned by armed guards paid for by the taxpayer. Also at the taxpayer’s expense are a whole lot of customs officials who do not permit trade without prohibitive exactions. All this must be justified by reams of economic theory, for there is an economics department is St Agnes College here, the oldest women’s college in south India. There is a Mangalore Economics Association. 

Driving along the wall, I passed some towering examples of industrialisation: Nehru’s theory. A sizable amount of prime beach-side land is occupied by a phenomenally ugly public sector iron ore exporting plant. 

There is a fertiliser factory which surely survives on production subsidies. So the dealbetween New Delhi and Mangalore is clear: We stop you trading and then we give you industrialisation. There is, at the taxpayer’s employ, an entire Indian Economic Service wedded to this theory. The wall is bad for sailors as well. I was with a ship’s engineer when he suddenly announced his departure, saying that if he did not return by 10 p.m., he would get into trouble with the personnel manning the wall. He said that even an ordinary sailor spends at least $20 a day while ashore but here the wall keeps them on board. 

Mangalore is a dream city for eating and drinking out, famous for its cuisine. The seafood is superb, and much, much cheaper than Goa. Mangalore also possesses many establishments where what is offered might be called cabaret. Surely anyone will realise that we do not need economists to know what is good for Mangalore. What sense does the wall make? The path to commercial success and the regaining of the city’s old glory should be obvious. The citizens of Mangalore should do to the wall precisely what Berliners have done to theirs. Then, as with the old Bunder, they should set up a big market there. After all, didn’t God promise Jerusalem greatness by making it a mart for all nations? The mayor of New Jerusalem should issue externment orders to all the customs officials and the armed guards. 

The prime land occupied by the ugly iron ore plant and the fertiliser factory ought to be seized and auctioned so that hotels, shopping malls and beach resorts take over the landscape. Within a decade, this will be India’s leading city, especially considering the fact that all the others, including Bangalore, are perishing. To unravel the sophisms in the theories justifying the wall, I recommend Frederic Bastiat, who did not have a formal education in economics, who never taught at university, and who was just a journalist and pamph-leteer. In one essay he put the point across thus: There is this steel magnate in France. He sees cheap steel imports coming in from Belgium and this threatens his profits. He now has two choices. One, he can hire a posse of men and arm them with guns, with instructions to shoot anyone who brings steel into France from Belgium. But such a course is highly inadvisable. 

So there is the other option: Go to Paris and pay some politician there to do it for you. He will deploy armed men at the borders at the taxpayer’s expense. And the two of them will share the profits, while the taxpayers who paid for the guards will now pay out even more for steel. After reading Bastiat I arrived at a conclusion: We don’t need the WTO; we need unilateral free trade. Get every government out of trade. And every trade economist too. 

The late professor B R Shenoy, a classical liberal who studied under Hayek himself, was the only economist to dissent officially with Nehru, and in writing. His daughter, Sudha Shenoy, an eminent liberal economist, in a recent interview, said that nearly every economics depart-ment in the world could be shut down without having an ill-effect on the world of ideas. 

Strong words indeed. She bemoaned the sad fact that economists do not study the real world of human action any more; they are all lost in theories and models and mathematics and statistics. I entirely agree. The wall proves it. 

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/477732.cms

Shut down HRD ministry!

Shut down HRD ministry! By Sauvik Chakraverti

SAUVIK CHAKRAVERTI is an alumnus of the London School of Economics and former senior assistant editor of The Economic Times. Currently Chakraverti is the convenor of the Liberal Study Group, Mangalore.

Shut down the union hrd (human resource destruction) ministry. The ministry is manned by propagandists of a failed experiment in state socialism. It has ensured there are no genuine knowledge workers in the entire education system, except bureaucrats. Its supervision of schools, colleges and universities should be revoked.

Dismantle all licensing requirements for education institutions. The education sector urgently needs to be set free. This will facilitate entry of competing private firms offering short courses that equip young people for vocations or professions, be it plumbing or baking into the education sector. The three R’s can also be easily taught, especially using computers.

Free the student community. In schools, colleges, universities and B-schools across the country students receive state-sponsored ‘education’. Such education churns out limited types of economic actors: bureaucrats, managers, accountants, lawyers, doctors, engineers. In the emerging free market economy, young people will find profitable niches as DJs, VJs, even tattoo artists. The burden of formal education — especially state-sponsored education — is inimical to creativity and intellectual freedom. 

Revoke higher education subsidies. Higher education is a privilege, not a right. Those who actually produce knowledge should be free to work, teach and sustain their respective schools of thought. Every such school should sustain itself on its own resources as it would be fatal to academic freedom to expect or receive subsidies from the state.

Moreover some Indian edupreneurs are venturing overseas. The Manipal Education & Medical Group has promoted state-of-the-art medical schools in Nepal and Malaysia, and the S.P. Jain Institute, a campus in Dubai. And most spectacularly, India-born Sunny Varkey who runs a dozen secondary schools in Dubai and the UAE, has acquired 13 independent schools in Britain and could well be the world’s premier edupreneur.

 

This urgent flurry of activity within the hitherto somnolent education sector has ensured that the vital importance of qualitative education has permeated down to the lowest income groups across the subcontinent — a development accentuated by the promotion of the country’s 517 urban benchmarked Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalaya residential schools in rural India (see EW cover story August). Simultaneously it has focussed public attention upon hitherto arcane subjects such as syllabus design and curriculum development and shifted national attention from ritual to real education. Suddenly paper degrees and qualifications are not as important as professional and life skills which school leavers and college graduates must acquire within their institutions of learning.

Therefore the newly emergent consensus that reform of India’s Macaulayan system of education based on rote learning and memorisation rather than development of problem-solving and conflict-resolution skills requires urgent attention. And even as several specialist committees constituted by the Union ministry of human resource development are currently engaged in the process, the public interest demands a wider ambit for the national debate on syllabus and curriculum reform. To this end, to meaningfully celebrate the 5th anniversary of EducationWorld, we deemed it incumbent upon ourselves to ask several educationists and industry leaders with proven commitment to improving the education system to write prescriptions for a renaissance of Indian education.

Inevitably, prescriptions for the reform of India’s patently languishing, if not terminally ill education system by dedicated educationists in diverse professions and vocations differ widely. However on some points there is a broad consensus. The reforms implicitly or explicitly endorsed by all the seven eminent respondents are:

Liberalise and deregulate the education system to encourage promotion of new schools, colleges, vocational and other institutions of higher education.

To a greater or lesser degree all the respondents are in favour of addressing the supply side of education to eliminate capacity shortages which are the root cause of the overwhelming majority of the hundreds, if not thousands, of rackets which plague post-independence India’s education system. The learned justices of the Supreme Court agree. In its historic 2002 judgement in the TMA Pai Foundation Case (8 SCC 481), a full bench of the court expanded the right of minorities to "establish and administer educational institutions of their choice" as mandated by Article 30 of the Constitution of India, to all citizens.

This development prescription is strongly endorsed by liberal economist and writer Sauvik Chakraverti. "The education sector urgently needs to be set free. This will facilitate entry of private firms offering short courses that equip young people for vocations and professions — be it plumbing, or baking — into the education sector. The three R’s can also be easily taught by them using computers," says Chakraverti (see box p.39).

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