Society

The concept of 'creative society' refers to a phase of development of a society in which a large number of potential contradictions become articulate and active. This is most evident when oppressed social groups get politically mobilised and demand their rights. The upsurge of the peasants and tribals, the movements for regional autonomy and self-determination, the environmental movements, and the women's movements in the developing countries are signs of emergence of creative society in contemporary times. The forms of social movements and their intensity may vary from country to country and place to place within a country. But the very presence of movements for social transformation in various spheres of a society indicates the emergence of a creative society in a country.

New India's children have a right to receive at least eight years of education, the gnawing question is whether it will remain on paper or become a reality. One hardly needs a reminder that this right is different from the others enshrined in the Constitution, that the beneficiary a six year old child cannot demand it, nor can she or he fight a legal battle when the right is denied or violated. In all cases, it is the adult society which must act on behalf of the child. In another peculiarity, where a child's right to education is denied no compensation offered later can be adequate or relevant. This is so because childhood does not last. If a legal battle fought on behalf of a child is eventually won, it may be of little use to the boy or girl because the opportunity missed at school during childhood cannot serve the same purpose later in life. This may be painfully true for girls because our society permits them only a short childhood, if at all. The Right to Education (RTE) has become law at a point in India's history when the ghastly practice of female infanticide has resurfaced in the form of foeticide. This is "symptomatic of a deeper turmoil" in society which is compounding the traditional obstacles to the education of girls. Tenacious prejudice against the intellectual potential of girls runs across our cultural diversity and the system of education has not been able to address it.

Education, without a doubt, has an important functional, instrumental and utilitarian dimension. This is revealed when one asks questions such as 'what is the purpose of education ?'. The answers, too often, are 'to acquire qualifications for employment/upward mobility', 'wider/higher (in terms of income) opportunities', and 'to meet the needs for trained human power in diverse fields for national development'. But in its deepest sense education is not instrumentalist. That is to say, it is not to be justified, outside of itself because it leads to the acquisition of formal skills or of certain desired psychological – social attributes. It must be respected in itself. Education is thus not a commodity to be acquired or possessed and then used, but a process of inestimable importance to individuals and society, although it can and does have enormous use-value. Education then, is a process of expansion and conversion, not in the sense of converting or turning students into doctors or engineers, but the widening and turning out of the mind — the creation, sustenance and development of self-critical awareness and independence of thought. It is an inner process of moral – intellectual development.

Malnutrition most commonly occurs between the ages of six months and two years. This happens despite the child’s food requirements being less than that of an older child. Malnutrition is often attributed to poverty, but it has been found that even in households where adults eat adequate quantities of food, more than 50 per cent of children-under-five do not consume enough food. The child’s dependence on someone else to feed him/her is primarily responsible for the malnutrition. Very often the mother is working and the responsibility of feeding the young child is left to an older sibling. It is therefore crucial to increase awareness regarding the child’s food needs and how to satisfy them.

India accounts for nearly a fifth of the world’s child deaths. In terms of numbers, it is the highest in the world — nearly 16 lakhs every year. Of these, more than half die in the first month of life. Officials believe that the reason for this is the absence of steps to propagate basic health practices relating to breast feeding and immunisation. Also the large reproductive population of 2·6 crore remains bereft of care during the critical phases of pregnancy and post-delivery. Added to this is the prevalence of child marriages, anaemia among young women and lack of focus on adolescent sanitation, all of which impact child death rates.

Set against a rural backdrop, ‘Stench of kerosene’ is the story of a couple, Guleri and Manak, who have been happily married for several years but do not have a child. Manak’s mother is desperate to have a grandchild to carry on the family name. Hence, she gets Manak remarried in Guleri’s absence. Manak, who acts as a reluctant but passive spectator, is meanwhile, informed by a friend that Guleri, on hearing about her husband’s second marriage, poured kerosene on her clothes and set fire to them. Manak is heartbroken and begins to live as if he were a dead man. When his second wife delivers a son, Manak stares at the child for a long time and blurts out, “Take him away ! He stinks of kerosene.”

Open defecation is disastrous when practised in very densely populated areas, where it is impossible to keep away human faeces from crops, wells, food and children’s hands. Groundwater is also contaminated by open defecation. Many ingested germs and worms spread diseases. They prevent the body from absorbing calories and nutrients. Nearly one-half of India’s children remain malnourished. Lakhs of them die from preventable conditions. Diarrhoea leaves Indians’ bodies smaller on average than those of people in some poorer countries where people eat fewer calories. Underweight mothers produce stunted babies prone to sickness who may fail to develop their full cognitive potential. The germs released into environment harm rich and poor alike, even those who use latrines.

Safe and sustainable sanitation in slums has immeasurable benefits to women and girls in terms of their health, safety, privacy and dignity. However, women do not feature in most of the schemes and policies on urban sanitation. The fact that even now the manual scavenging exists, only goes to show that not enough has been done to promote pour-flush toilets and discontinue the use of dry latrines. A more sustained and rigorous campaign needs to be launched towards the right to sanitation on a very large scale. This should primarily focus on the abolition of manual scavenging.

Why do people prefer open defecation and not want toilets or, if they have them, only use them sometimes? Recent research has shown two critical elements: ideas of purity and pollution, and not wanting pits or septic tanks to fill because they have to be emptied. These are the issues that nobody wants to talk about, but if we want to eradicate the practice of open defecation, they have to be confronted and dealt properly.

We have hard work ahead. There is no resting for any of us till we redeem our pledge in full, till we make all the people of India what destiny intends them to be. We are citizens of a great country, on the verge of bold advance, and we have to live up to that high standard. All of us, to whatever religion we may belong, are equally the children of India with equal rights, privileges and obligations. We cannot encourage communalism or narrow-mindedness, for no nation can be great whose people are narrow in thought or action.

Many pathogens that cause foodborne illnesses are unknown. Food contamination can occur at any stage from farm to plate. Since most cases of food poisoning go unreported, the true extent of global foodborne illnesses is unknown. Improvements in international monitoring have led to greater public awareness, yet the rapid globalization of food production increases consumers’ vulnerability by making food harder to regulate and trace. “We have the world on our plates”, says an official of WHO.

Though I have discarded much of past tradition and custom, and am anxious that India should rid herself of all shackles that bind and contain her and divide her people, and suppress vast numbers of them, and prevent the free development of the body and the spirit; though I seek all this, yet I do not wish to cut myself off from that past completely. I am proud of that great inheritance that has been and is, ours and I am conscious that I too, like all of us, am a link in that unbroken chain which goes back to the dawn of history in the immemorial past of India.

It is no longer enough for us to talk about providing for universal access to education. Making available schooling facilities is an essential prerequisite, but is insufficient to ensure that all children attend school and participate in the learning process. The school may be there, but children may not attend or they may drop out after a few months. Through school and social mapping, we must address the entire gamut of social, economic, cultural and indeed linguistic and pedagogic issues, factors that prevent children from weaker sections and disadvantaged groups, as also girls, from regularly attending and complementing elementary education. The focus must be on the poorest and most vulnerable since these groups are the most disempowered and at the greatest risk of violation or denial of their right to education.

The right to education goes beyond free and compulsory education to include quality education for all. Quality is an integral part of the right to education. If the education process lacks quality, children are being denied their right. The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act lays down that the curriculum should provide for learning through activities, exploration and discovery. This places an obligation on us to change our perception of children as passive receivers of knowledge, and to move beyond the convention of using textbooks as the basis of examinations. The teaching-learning process must become stress-free; and a massive programme for curricular reform should be initiated to provide for a child-friendly learning system, that is more relevant and empowering. Teacher accountability systems and processes must ensure that children are learning, and that their right to learn in a child-friendly environment is not violated. Testing and assessment systems must be reexamined and redesigned to ensure that these do not force children to struggle between school and tuition centres, and bypass childhood.

India’s educational system is modelled on the mass education system that developed in the 19th century in Europe and later spread around the world. The goal of the system is to condition children as ‘good’ citizens and productive workers. This suited the industrial age that needed the constant supply of a compliant workforce with a narrow set of capabilities. Our educational institutes resemble factories with bells, uniforms and batch-processing of learners, designed to get learners to conform. But, from an economic point of view, the environment today is very different. It is a complex, volatile and globally interconnected world.

The practice of dieting has become an epidemic; everyone is looking out for a way to attain that perfect body. We are all different with respect to our ethnicity, genetics, family history, gender, age, physical and mental and spiritual health status, lifestyles and preferences. Thereby we also differ in what foods we tolerate or are sensitive to. So we really cannot reduce so many complexities into one diet or diet book. This explains the failure of diets across the world in curbing obesity. Unless the reasons for weight gain are well understood and addressed and unless habits are changed permanently, no diet is likely to succeed.

Education plays a great transformatory role in life, particularly so in this rapidly changing and globalizing world. Universities are the custodians of the intellectual capital and promoters of culture and specialized knowledge. Culture is an activity of thought, and receptiveness to beauty and human feelings. A merely well informed man is only a bore on God's earth. What we should aim at is producing men who possess both culture and expert knowledge. Their expert knowledge will give them a firm ground to start from and their culture will lead them as deep as philosophy and as high as art. Together it will impart meaning to human existence.

Access to schooling for those coming of school age is close to universal, but access to quality exhibits a sharp gradient with socio-economic status. Quotas for the weaker sections in private schools is a provision introduced by the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009. The quotas have imposed a debate on issues of social integration and equity in education that private actors had escaped by and large. The idea of egalitarian education system with equality of opportunity as its primary goal appears to be outside the space that private school principals inhabit. Therefore, the imposition of the quotas has led to resistance, sometimes justified.

A majority of the TB infected in India are poor and lack sufficient nutrition, suitable housing and have little understanding of prevention. TB then devastates families, makes the poor poorer, particularly affects women and children, and leads to ostracisation and loss of employment. The truth is that even if TB does not kill them, hunger and poverty will. Another truth is that deep-seated stigma, lack of counselling, expensive treatment and lack of adequate support from providers and family, coupled with torturous side-effects demotivate patients to continue treatment — with disastrous health consequences.

Diarrhoeal deaths among Indian children are mostly due to food and water contamination. Use of contaminated groundwater and unsafe chemicals in agriculture, poor hygiene in storage and handling of food items to food cooked and distributed in unhygienic surroundings; there are myriad factors that need regulation and monitoring. People need to have awareness of adulteration and ways of complaining to the relevant authorities. Surveillance of food-borne diseases involves a number of government agencies and entails a good training of inspection staff. Considering the proportion of the urban population that depends on street food for its daily meals, investing in training and education of street vendors is of great significance.

India is at once among the fastest growing global economies and home to the largest number of malnourished children in the world. There are regions where malnutrition is not the exception but the norm. And across the country, malnutrition is the cause of death for roughly half the 1·3 million children who die before their fifth birthday each year. Even those children who survive suffer permanently from the damage that has already been done to their bodies and minds from not getting enough of the right foods and nutrients. Around 44 million children under 5 are stunted. That makes it harder for them to learn in school and subsequently earn a living as adults. Their lifetime earnings potential is almost a quarter less than that of their healthy peers.

A social and physical environment riddled with poverty, inequities, unhygienic and insanitary conditions generates the risk of infectious diseases. Hygiene has different levels: personal, domestic and community hygiene. There is no doubt that personal cleanliness brings down the rate of infectious diseases. But the entry of the market into this domain has created a false sense of security that gets conditioned and reinforced by the onslaught of advertisements. Experience in Western Europe shows that along with personal hygiene, general improvements in environmental conditions and components like clean water, sanitation and food security have brought down infant/child death/infection rates considerably. The obsession with hand hygiene also brings in the persisting influence of the market on personal health, overriding or marginalising the negative impact on ecology and the emergence of resistant germs.

The best universities like Harvard and MIT, despite having the luxury of having some truly excellent teachers on their payroll, are increasingly embracing the “flipped classroom” format, where students listen to video lectures at home, and spend class time applying their knowledge, solving problems, discussing examples, etc. Professors guide that discussion and fill in wherever necessary, explaining those bits that seem to be eluding the students and throwing in advanced ideas that happen to be topical. These universities have made their video lectures available free for anyone in the world. They are also encouraging colleges and universities all over the world to integrate these online courses into their own pedagogy, picking the pieces that are appropriate for their needs and building a package around them.

In our schools; we teach our children all that is there to know about physics, maths and history and what-have-you. But do we teach them about the bitter caste divide that plagues the country, about the spectre of famine that stalks large parts of our land, about gender sensitivity, about the possibility of atheism as a choice, etc.? Equally important, do we teach them to ask questions, or do we teach them only to passively receive our wisdom? From the cocooned world of school, suddenly, the adolescent finds himself/herself in the unfettered world of university. Here he/she is swept up in a turmoil of ideas, influences and ideologies. For someone who has been discouraged from asking questions and forming an opinion, this transition can be painful.

In an economic organization, allowing mankind to benefit by the productivity of machines should lead to a very good life of leisure, and much leisure is apt to be tedious except to those who have intelligent activities and interests. If a leisured population is to be happy, it must be an educated population, and must be educated with a view to enjoyment as well as to the direct usefulness of technical knowledge.

More than half of Indian women and almost a quarter of Indian men of working age suffer from anaemia. According to studies, they are anywhere from 5 – 15% less productive than they could be, as a result thereof. India also has the largest tuberculosis burden in the world, costing 170 million workdays to the country annually. But what is just as important as lost productivity now is lost potential in the future. It is becoming increasingly clear that on many measures of cognitive ability, malnourished Indian children perform two or three times worse than their adequately nourished peers. For an economy that will be more dependent on highly skilled workers, this poses a significant challenge. And it is one that really should be addressed given India’s demographic outlook.

Many people are not eating the right food. For some, it is simply a decision to stick with food they enjoy but which is not too healthy. This is leading to an increase in non-communicable diseases. This in turn leads to major burden on our health-care systems that have the potential to derail the economic progress which is essential for the poor to improve their lives. For others, it is about limited access to nutritious food or a lack of affordability, leading to monotonous diets that do not provide the daily nutrients for them to develop fully. Part of the reason nutrition is under threat worldwide is that our food systems are not properly responding to nutritional needs. Somewhere along that long road from farm to fork, there are serious detours taking place.

Food consumption patterns have changed substantially in India over the past few decades. This has resulted in the disappearance of many nutritious foods such as millets. While food grain production has increased over five times since independence, it has not sufficiently addressed the issue of malnutrition. For long, the agriculture sector focussed on increasing food production particularly staples, which led to lower production and consumption of indigenous traditional crops/grains, fruits and other vegetables, impacting food and nutrition security in the process. Further, intensive, monoculture agriculture practices can perpetuate the food and nutrition security problem by degrading the quality of land, water and food derived through them.

Benefits of good quality school education accrue only when students complete and leave school after having acquired the gateway skills. Like one learns to walk before running, similarly one picks up advanced skills only after picking the basic foundational skills. The advent of the knowledge economy poses new challenges, and one of the severe consequences of having an uneducated workforce will be our inability to keep pace with the global economy. Without a strong learning foundation at the primary level, there can be no improvement in higher education or skill development.

Today, if we consider cities such as New York, London and Paris as some of the most iconic cities in the world, it is because plans carrying a heavy systems approach were imposed on their precincts. The backbone of the systems theory is the process of translating social, spatial and cultural desirables into mathematical models using computing, statistics, optimization and an algorithmic way of formulating and solving problems. The early universities of the West which began to train professionals in planning, spawned some of the most ingenious planners, who were experts in these domains. This was because these very subjects were absorbed into the planning curriculum that had its roots in the social sciences, geography and architecture. Planning in India, and its education differ from the West.

By the time children reach class 8, the bulk of them tend to be in the age range of 13 years to 15 years. But in our country, about a quarter of all children in class 8 struggle with reading simple texts and more than half are still unable to do basic arithmetic operations like division. Every year about 25 million young boys and girls from elementary school move into the life that lies for them beyond compulsory schooling. They cannot enter the workforce at least in the organized sector till they are 18. For many families, these children are the first from their families ever to get this far in school. Parents and children expect that such ‘graduates’ from school will go on to high school and college. Hardly anyone wants to go back to agriculture. On the other hand, abilities in terms of academic competencies are far lower than they should be even based on curricular expectations of class 8.

Conventional classrooms, by emphasizing fixed duration over learning effectiveness, resign themselves to variable outcomes. The tyranny of the classroom is that every learner is subjected to the same set of lectures in the same way for the same duration. In the end, a few learners shine, some survive, and the rest are left behind. After the fixed duration, the classroom model moves on, with not a thought spared for those left behind. This is how we end up with 10 percent employability in our graduates after a decade and half of formal education. Repeating the same ineffectual script in the realm of skill education will not produce different results.

When a child reaches adolescence, there is apt to be a conflict between the parents and the child, since the latter considers himself to be by now quite capable of managing his own affairs, while the former are filled with parental solicitude, which is often a disguise for love of power. Parents consider, usually, that the various moral problems which arise in adolescence are peculiarly their province. The options they express, however, are so dogmatic that the young seldom confide in them, and usually go their own way in secret.

In our country, handlooms are equated with a culture that ensures a continuity of tradition. This idea has become part of the public policy-framing and provides a legitimate basis for the State to support the sector. But the notion of tradition as a single, linear entity is being strongly contested today. The narratives dominant in defining culture/tradition in a particular way are seen to have emerged as the identities and histories of large sections. The discounted and, at times, forcibly stifled identities are fighting for their rightful place in history. Against this backdrop, when we promote handloom as a traditional industry, it is not surprising that large sections of our population choose to ignore it.

In our country, regrettably, teaching and learning for the examination have been our forte but the new demands of society and the future of work require critical and independent thinking, learning through doing, asking questions from multiple disciplinary perspectives on the same issue, using evidence for building arguments, and reflecting and articulation. Higher education should not “either be a mere servant of the government policy or a passive respondent to public mood.” Higher learning is all about how to think rather than what to think. Teaching has to be re-invented.

‘Kalagram’, the cultural village set up at the Maha Kumbh Mela, unfolded as a mosaic of India’s diverse regions, each represented by seven meticulously crafted ‘Sanskriti Angans’—stepping through the grand portal was like entering another world. These thematic zones, inspired by iconic temples like the Dakshineshwar Kali Temple and the Brahma Mandir, were treasure troves of regional artistry. Bengal’s Pattachitra paintings, Assam’s bamboo crafts, Tamil Nadu’s Thanjavur paintings, and Madhya Pradesh’s tribal sculpture—all were showcased in these living galleries where 230 master artisans breathed life into them using age-old techniques, their hands shaping India’s ancient history into creations to behold.

Sport is not just about winning medals or getting jobs through a sports quota. Today’s generation is struggling with issues like depression and anxiety. Parents often say that their children are inactive and rarely leave the house. Sport can help tackle these problems. From sport you can learn time management, fitness, teamwork, coordination, and so much more. We need to develop a culture in which sport is seen as a way of life—a path to building a healthier, happier society.