Making India Shine.
Jul. 30th, 2004 02:53 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
swestrupThis was first published in the New York Times, but is now only available if you want to pay for an archived article, so I'm reproducing it here. It shows some of the good that leveraging technology can bring:
Making India Shine
NYT Op-Ed, May 20, 2004
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
India just had a stunning election, with incumbents across
the country thrown out, largely by rural voters. Clearly
rural Indians, who make up the country's majority, were
telling the cities and the government that they were not
happy with the direction of events. I think I can explain
what happened, but first I have to tell you about this wild
typing race I recently had with an 8-year-old Indian girl
at a village school.
The Shanti Bhavan school sits on a once-scorpion-infested
bluff about an hour's drive - and 10 centuries - from
Bangalore, India's Silicon Valley. The students are all
"untouchables," the lowest caste in India, who are not
supposed to even get near Indians of a higher caste for
fear they will pollute the air others breathe. The Shanti
Bhavan school, with 160 students, was started by Abraham
George, one of those brainy Indians who made it big in
high-tech America. He came back to India with a single
mission: to start a privately financed boarding school that
would take India's most deprived children and prove that if
you gave them access to the same technologies and education
that have enabled other Indians to thrive in globalization,
they could, too.
I visited Mr. George's school in February, and he took me
to a classroom where 8-year-old untouchables were learning
to use Microsoft Word and Excel. They were having their
computer speed-typing lesson, so I challenged the fastest
typist to a race. She left me in the dust - to the cheering
delight of her classmates.
"Dust" is an appropriate word, because a drought in this
area of southern India has left dust everywhere. "These
kids - their parents are ragpickers, coolies and quarry
laborers," said the school's principal, Lalita Law. "They
come from homes below the poverty line, and from the lowest
caste of untouchables, who are supposed be fulfilling their
destiny and left where they are - according to the
unwritten laws of Indian society. We get these children at
age 4. They don't know what it is to have a drink of clean
water [or use a toilet]. They bathe in filthy gutter water
- if they are lucky to have a gutter near where they live.
They don't even have proper scraps of clothing. We have to
start by socializing them. When we first get them, they run
out and urinate and defecate wherever they want. [At first]
we don't make them sleep on beds because it is a culture
shock. Our goal is to give them a world-class education so
they can aspire to careers and professions that would have
been totally beyond their reach, and have been so for
generations."
After our little typing race, I asked the 8-year-olds what
they wanted to be. Their answers were: "an astronaut," "a
doctor," "a pediatrician," "a poetess," "physics and
chemistry," "a scientist and an astronaut," "a surgeon," "a
detective," "an author." Looking at these kids, Mr. George
said, "They are the ones who have to do well for India to
succeed." (See his Web site, www.tgfworld.org.)
And that brings us to the lesson of India's election: the
broad globalization strategy that India opted for in the
early 1990's has succeeded in unlocking the country's
incredible brainpower and stimulating sustained growth,
which is the best antipoverty program. I think many Indians
understand that retreating from their globalizing strategy
now would be a disaster and result in India's neighborhood
rival, China, leaving India in the dust. But the key to
spreading the benefits of globalization across a big
society is not about more Internet. It is about getting
your fundamentals right: good governance, good education.
India's problem is not too much globalization, but too
little good governance. Local government in India - basic
democracy - is so unresponsive and so corrupted it can't
deliver services and education to rural Indians. As an
Indian political journalist, Krishna Prasad, told me: "The
average Indian voter is not saying, `No more reforms,' as
the left wants to believe, but, `More reforms, please' -
genuine reforms, reforms that do not just impact the cities
and towns, but ones which percolate down to the grass roots
as well."
India needs a political reform revolution to go with its
economic one. "With prosperity coming to a few, the great
majority are simply spectators to this drama," said Mr.
George. "The country is governed poorly, with corruption
and heavy bureaucracy at all levels. I am a great advocate
of technology and globalization, but we must find a way to
channel their benefits to the rural poor. What is happening
today will not succeed because we are relying on a corrupt
and socially unfair system."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/20/opinion/20FRIE.html
Making India Shine
NYT Op-Ed, May 20, 2004
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
India just had a stunning election, with incumbents across
the country thrown out, largely by rural voters. Clearly
rural Indians, who make up the country's majority, were
telling the cities and the government that they were not
happy with the direction of events. I think I can explain
what happened, but first I have to tell you about this wild
typing race I recently had with an 8-year-old Indian girl
at a village school.
The Shanti Bhavan school sits on a once-scorpion-infested
bluff about an hour's drive - and 10 centuries - from
Bangalore, India's Silicon Valley. The students are all
"untouchables," the lowest caste in India, who are not
supposed to even get near Indians of a higher caste for
fear they will pollute the air others breathe. The Shanti
Bhavan school, with 160 students, was started by Abraham
George, one of those brainy Indians who made it big in
high-tech America. He came back to India with a single
mission: to start a privately financed boarding school that
would take India's most deprived children and prove that if
you gave them access to the same technologies and education
that have enabled other Indians to thrive in globalization,
they could, too.
I visited Mr. George's school in February, and he took me
to a classroom where 8-year-old untouchables were learning
to use Microsoft Word and Excel. They were having their
computer speed-typing lesson, so I challenged the fastest
typist to a race. She left me in the dust - to the cheering
delight of her classmates.
"Dust" is an appropriate word, because a drought in this
area of southern India has left dust everywhere. "These
kids - their parents are ragpickers, coolies and quarry
laborers," said the school's principal, Lalita Law. "They
come from homes below the poverty line, and from the lowest
caste of untouchables, who are supposed be fulfilling their
destiny and left where they are - according to the
unwritten laws of Indian society. We get these children at
age 4. They don't know what it is to have a drink of clean
water [or use a toilet]. They bathe in filthy gutter water
- if they are lucky to have a gutter near where they live.
They don't even have proper scraps of clothing. We have to
start by socializing them. When we first get them, they run
out and urinate and defecate wherever they want. [At first]
we don't make them sleep on beds because it is a culture
shock. Our goal is to give them a world-class education so
they can aspire to careers and professions that would have
been totally beyond their reach, and have been so for
generations."
After our little typing race, I asked the 8-year-olds what
they wanted to be. Their answers were: "an astronaut," "a
doctor," "a pediatrician," "a poetess," "physics and
chemistry," "a scientist and an astronaut," "a surgeon," "a
detective," "an author." Looking at these kids, Mr. George
said, "They are the ones who have to do well for India to
succeed." (See his Web site, www.tgfworld.org.)
And that brings us to the lesson of India's election: the
broad globalization strategy that India opted for in the
early 1990's has succeeded in unlocking the country's
incredible brainpower and stimulating sustained growth,
which is the best antipoverty program. I think many Indians
understand that retreating from their globalizing strategy
now would be a disaster and result in India's neighborhood
rival, China, leaving India in the dust. But the key to
spreading the benefits of globalization across a big
society is not about more Internet. It is about getting
your fundamentals right: good governance, good education.
India's problem is not too much globalization, but too
little good governance. Local government in India - basic
democracy - is so unresponsive and so corrupted it can't
deliver services and education to rural Indians. As an
Indian political journalist, Krishna Prasad, told me: "The
average Indian voter is not saying, `No more reforms,' as
the left wants to believe, but, `More reforms, please' -
genuine reforms, reforms that do not just impact the cities
and towns, but ones which percolate down to the grass roots
as well."
India needs a political reform revolution to go with its
economic one. "With prosperity coming to a few, the great
majority are simply spectators to this drama," said Mr.
George. "The country is governed poorly, with corruption
and heavy bureaucracy at all levels. I am a great advocate
of technology and globalization, but we must find a way to
channel their benefits to the rural poor. What is happening
today will not succeed because we are relying on a corrupt
and socially unfair system."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/20/opinion/20FRIE.html
