Comment
Wanted: a barefoot minister
BY any reckoning, The Rural Employment Guarantee Bill is one of the most important pieces of socio-economic legislation in post-Independence India. If the purpose of the amended bill can be achieved in the next five years, we should be able to reduce poverty to less than 10% of the population in the next seven to eight years. This will be an unprecedented achievement in India’s history. However, for the reasons that I will mention below, this hope is unlikely to be realized – unless action is taken to administer the proposed scheme differently than similar schemes launched in the past with high promises but poor results.
It is fortunate that the bill, in an earlier draft, was introduced about nine months ago in the Lok Sabha. As such, there has been sufficient time for all aspects of the proposed bill to be examined by the Standing Committee, the media, economists, sociologists and other experts. Various viewpoints, both for enlarging the ambit of the bill or restricting it, as well as its utility and fiscal implications, have now been widely discussed. The government has also introduced some worthwhile amendments, including increasing the scope of the scheme to cover all households in rural areas. At this stage, I want to make only two ‘core’ or overarching points for further consideration by government.
The first core point is that since the purpose of the bill enjoys vast support in the country, cutting across party lines, and its financial and economic implications are enormous, mere legislation – however good the drafting – is not enough. There is an enormous administrative challenge involved in achieving the purposes of the bill. Unless we monitor its implementation closely, and remove the lacunae on the ground at the earliest, the bill will fail to achieve its laudable objectives – like so many other brilliantly drafted schemes in the past.
Several case studies have shown that the most important problem in governance and administration of projects or schemes launched with great hopes is the involvement of a large number of agencies and ministries in decision-making and implementation. It is a common experience that these multiple agencies do not work in unison to resolve any administrative issue. They often have conflicting objectives. One agency may like to incur expenditure, another may like to reduce it, while a third agency may like to increase the scope of the scheme, and a fourth agency may be interested in encouraging different type of work in different locations, and so on. Then there are agencies for grievance redressal, investigations into complaints about corruption, and staff postings – with touts and intermediaries in-between. These multiple agencies generally work at cross purposes, and a great deal of time is lost in dispute resolution even on minor points.
We have introduced several employment schemes before – NREP, RLEGP, JRY, SGRY – with all the alphabets that we can think of. However, as highlighted in the ‘Statement of Objects and Reasons’ in the present bill, all of these schemes which were started with a lot of fanfare, including the recent Sampoorna Gramin Rozgar Yojna (SGRY), have not achieved what was promised. This is the reason for the present new scheme. While the new amendments to increase the scope of the bill to cover all households and fixation of minimum wages across the country will reduce some of the bureaucratic rigmarole, there are still several other provisions which require book-keeping and discretionary decision-making at several levels by a number of agencies, including the provision to ensure that no more than 100 days of work in a year is provided in aggregate to several members of the same household in designated locations.
In the present bill, I find that a very large number of agencies are likely to be involved in implementation, grievance redressal, disbursement of funds, planning works, and appointing staff to run the scheme. These agencies will operate at five different levels vertically – centre, states, districts, blocks, and villages. Under the amended scheme, in addition to other authorities, three levels of panchayats at district, intermediate and village level will be involved in implementing the new scheme. There are employment guarantee councils at the centre and state level; employment guarantee funds at the centre and state level; programme coordinators and implementers at district, intermediate and village level, and grievance redressal mechanism at different levels. Further, all these agencies would be working under guidance of five or more ministries at the centre and/or state levels, such as those of finance, planning, rural development, personnel and panchayat.
In due course, we should seriously consider appointing a single agency at the central level in place of all other agencies to implement the proposed scheme. This agency should adopt a completely different model for management and administration of the scheme and ensure proper outcomes. This single agency which may be called, say, ‘All India Rural Employment Agency’ (AIREA), should function like any other successful public sector agency operating all over India to deliver an essential product through wholesale and retail channels (for example, the Indian Oil Corporation). It should have an extremely competent executive chairman with a successful record of implementing difficult projects efficiently (such as, the Kolkata or Delhi metro or national highways). He or she should be assisted by a high level board of directors with representation of central government and state governments (by rotation). All the budget allocations should be transferred by the Ministry of Finance to AIREA at the beginning of the year. Under this model, the panchayat at village level should become analogous to retail outlets for AIREA for identifying the beneficiaries and rural works to be undertaken. The district level agency should become analogous to wholesale outlets. Both the retail and wholesale outlets at village panchayat and district levels should be provided adequate additional compensation by AIREA to meet their costs in implementing the scheme.
To monitor the effectiveness of the implementation of the programme, the government should appoint a whole-time minister who should be individually responsible and accountable to cabinet and Parliament. The minister should be a ‘barefoot minister’ as it were – to use the old analogy of barefoot doctors – without red-lights and other ostentatious paraphernalia. To begin with, in cooperation with state governments, the minister should visit all states and districts where the programme is to be started in the next 12 months and present a report to the Parliament on how the scheme has been implemented on the ground and how many jobs have actually been created.
The above administrative model may sound unconventional. However, if IOC can successfully deliver kerosene or LPG in the remotest part of our country at prices fixed by government, there is no reason why a new agency like AIREA cannot deliver guaranteed employment if it is funded and managed properly. The great advantage of a single agency, rather than multiple authorities at different levels, is clarity and accountability in the decision-making process.
My second, and final, point is on the fiscal or the budget side. In public debate, estimates for implementation of the scheme vary from Rs 40-45,000 crore to more than Rs 100,000 crore. I understand that the Finance Minister has assured the country that, in the first year, the expenditure is manageable and will not exceed the provisions of this year’s budget. However, over the next five year period, it is clear that the FM would have to find more and more resources to fund this scheme without violating the FRBM provisions. How he finds the money is obviously for him to decide.
However, the point that needs to be emphasized is that the Finance Ministry must not cut other essential expenditure, which are even more important for poverty alleviation, for example, in the areas of education, health, irrigation, water and power in rural areas. This must be a binding constraint. Along with the report on implementation and funding proposals for the EGS, Parliament must get an annual assurance that necessary budget provisions for all vital areas of interest to the poor have been adequately provided.
Similarly, there should be no new taxes or cess. We already have far too many different kinds of taxes including some new ones, which have made our fiscal system one of the most complex in the world. If we need more resources for EGS, it is much better to do it directly and explicitly by raising the rates of existing taxes in a transparent manner.
Bimal Jalan
* Based on the author’s intervention in the Rajya Sabha during discussions on the REG Bill.
Images of a yatra
IT is a moment of sweet triumph for India’s silent millions. Employment will not be a favour, but a right for tens of millions of poor. While the passage of the Rural Employment Guarantee bill has hit the headlines, little is known about the intense public campaign that led to it. One such campaign was the Rozgar Adhikar Yatra. The yatra travelled through ten of India’s poorest states, and within these, the poorest districts and villages. Public meetings were held in all the villages. Through the medium of songs, plays, speeches, banners, posters, badges, primers and puppets, we spread awareness about our demand for an Employment Guarantee Act. For me, one of the youngest in the yatra, it was a chastening experience, and its images will stay for a long time. Images that I would like to share with fellow travellers in the EGA’s long march as well as its sceptics, and most of all with those who govern us, since I believe that it has some lessons for all of us.
People walked for miles under the blistering June sun to attend the meetings. There were times when I wondered why our words were so important to them. It was humbling to see people happily donating whatever sums they could for the yatra, possibly because they wanted to contribute to a cause they believed to be noble and one that affected their own lives.
In the district of Mirzapur, a man called Tolak came to the first public meeting in Halia. He had a problem. Like many others in the village, he was very poor, and every summer migrated to the city in search of work. However, this year the government had sanctioned pond construction work in his village under the food for work programme. Tolak looked forward to working in his own village and not having to migrate to alien lands in search of employment. The district commissioner had on 28 February directed that the work start on 3 March. It was 25 June when we reached Halia and the work had still to begin. Tolak and many others like him had stayed back in the hope of work, and were now desperate. He showed me the letter he had written to the block officer and the district collector pleading for the work to begin. The letter carried signatures of several villagers like him who too were depending on the work. Though he went several times to their offices, the officials never bothered to meet him. He sat beside me and implored me to write down everything in my notebook. I did so obediently but failed to find any words to comfort him.
Within the yatra contingent, each yatri was assigned a particular task: filling up the water cooler at every stop, writing media reports, maintaining newspaper cuttings, handling the cash and so on. I was given the task of documentation. It was hard. The villagers saw a pen and paper and knew that their complaints were being noted. It kindled a flame of hope in them that we might just be able to help. It took a while to convince them that we were not government officials. The task was made easier by the assurance of local NGOs whom the people trusted. However, with the assurance came something else. They opened up their hearts to us. They had no one else. Most of them had tried their best to get justice by knocking on official doors but to no avail. They looked up to me with eyes that had some faint embers of hope burning in them. I could almost see that hope dying now. They looked at my notebook as a sacred entity in the hope that all that was recorded would be heard.
The people expected that their appeals would reach the court of heaven where the final judgement was given. The judgement, given that He is an unbiased judge, would undoubtedly be in their favour. All they needed was to be heard. And so they made me write. They would come up and sit next to me and tell me all. If at any time they saw that my pen was not moving, the pressure to write would begin. ‘Write every single word, for it will be of use when the hearing takes place.’ I felt miserable. The knowledge that I was a nobody and all that I wrote would probably be of little use, that the movement of my pen was unlikely to change anything for them and that probably nothing could, was distressing. I felt like a betrayer. They had formed an image of me as someone who would listen to their problems and solve them, if only they could get me to write them down in my notebook. I felt like a betrayer because I did nothing to change that image. I could not, fearing that if I did, they probably would not even talk to me. But I needed to make them talk because I was documenting and had to note all the problems.
Sometimes my conscience would prick me hard and I would resolve to tell them, ‘Look, get this clear in your head. I am no one. All the problems that you are making me write down will not be resolved just because I am writing them. They will probably never be resolved. If the rich landlord beats you up because you stood for elections against him, or if the contractor did not pay you after working for months at a food for work site, or if a powerful neighbour took over your land, there is nothing I can do. I don’t have any power to solve even the tiniest of your problems.’ And sometimes I did start on it, but the look in their eyes made me lose my words just as I had found them.
If listening to the litany of injustice and exploitation made one feel helpless, their silence was equally unnerving. Just before joining the yatra, I had completed a survey of the food for work programme in Palamau district of Jharkhand. In Manatu block, work had been sanctioned for 57 worksites. However, even a month later, work had begun only at 15 worksites. We were told the minimum daily wage in the state was Rs 73; however, at none of the worksites were the workers paid more than Rs 40 a day.
That was not unnerving, however. What was disquieting was the silence that met our questions. Why aren’t they speaking about their problems, I wondered. Are they afraid that they might be heard by the mate and that he might fire them? Maybe they are scared of saying the wrong things, which may cause the work to close down altogether. Maybe they are just happy doing some work rather than being in the state they would have been in had the work not started. Maybe they recalled the times when, because there was no work, they had to migrate to far off places, with or without their families. Those who had gone with their families would think of the horrible bus journey to their destination. They often had to sit on the roof or hang onto the sides of the bus, while inside their wives were harassed by the bus conductor, afraid to utter a word of protest as they might have been thrown out, stranded in the middle of nowhere. Maybe they remembered the innumerable workers who went out in search of work but never returned, no one even knowing whether they were dead or alive. Maybe thinking of all this made them feel happy that they had some work near their own village, even if they were paid just nine or ten rupees a day after toiling relentlessly under a burning sun. Maybe that’s why the only people who did complain were those without any work.
I don’t know the answer for their silence.
While surveying the NFFWP in Manatu, a man from Bedani Kala village requested us to visit his village briefly, which I did. Immediately all the villagers surrounded me and all I could see was a sea of starved faces and tattered houses. They belonged to one of the scheduled castes. They told me that they had tried to apply for a BPL card for the past three years but to no avail. However, the richest person in the block, who was also an elected representative and had a house in the city, was a BPL card holder!
The right to life and liberty is guaranteed as a fundamental right in the Constitution. However, being able to live, and live with liberty, requires prerequisites without which life and liberty are as meaningless as coke without its fizz. That is why Amartya Sen and Jean Dreze speak of the ‘capability approach’ or a ‘freedom perspective’ to point out that in order to live, and live in liberty, people require basic amenities like work, food, education and information. What the movements in the country relating to the right to work, to information, to food and to education are doing is to stress this point. They remind the state of the essential prerequisites to a life of liberty, and the need to enforce these as distinct rights.
The yatra remained on the road for 52 days. The villages were varied and the problems different everywhere. However, the common thread was of exploitation and the hardship people face when they get no work. I cannot think of any single legislation that might help reduce the problems of rural India more than the EGA. The yatra is over and the bill has been passed. However, there is a long road ahead. The pledge to the people is to be redeemed. We have to ensure that they are empowered by the right to information and the benefits of the EGA do not remain restricted to official records.
Anjor Bhaskar
Adivasis and forest management
INDIA’S forests, the foundation of the nation’s ecological security, are being lost to a plethora of commercial enterprises at an alarming rate. The latest statistics released by the Forest Survey of India shows that the country has lost over 26,000 sq km of its dense forest during the period 2001-2003. With over 3000 species of flowering plants and about 200 species of animals of the country having been already categorized as being threatened, this massive loss of forest is sure to have added to the decimation of biodiversity.
This is happening at a time when the whole world, sans USA, is counting down to the year 2010 by when substantial reductions in the loss of global biodiversity should be achieved through the implementation of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), to which India is a party. India’s massive failure in the sustainable management of its forests largely lies in the exclusionary and regimental nature of the forest management regime shaped by the colonial legacy and informed by a casteist worldview that regards with contempt those at the bottom of the social pyramid.
At the root of the deepening forest crisis is the displacement of the adivasis as the traditional caretakers of India’s forests. The adivasis, the original custodians of our forests, who had defended the forests from the savage assaults by the British colonialists and struggled against a multitude of commercial exploitations in the post-colonial political order, have been systematically disenfranchised and alienated from forest management by the conservation regime, including the wildlife and forest laws. The proposed Scheduled Tribes (Recognition of Forest Rights) Bill is, therefore, not only a means to undo the historical injustice done to the adivasis but also provides the much-needed opportunity to win back the world’s largest population of indigenous people as the caretakers of our forests.
It is no surprise that some elements have come out against the proposed law, which in some ways marks a paradigm shift. The doctrine that generates opposition to building partnership with adivasis in the management of forests holds the autochthons and the rest of the marginalised as the Other and cannot come to terms with even an infinitesimal elevation in the status of the subaltern. Conservation is only an alibi for this doctrine, for the world has already discarded the exclusionary dogma of conservation that characterized the approach that we had imported from the West.
The CBD, which is legally binding, is based on the triple objectives of conservation, sustainable use and equitable benefit sharing and provides for the participation of the indigenous people in the management of biodiversity. One of the three ongoing working groups established by the Convention process is to address the issues associated with the use and protection of the traditional knowledge of the indigenous people. However, India has made a mockery of the CBD by creating a national law – the Biological Diversity Act – which limits itself to addressing issues related to regulating access to biodiversity, blissfully feigning ignorance of the existence of the indigenous people (in a manner reminiscent of defeating the spirit of the innovative Man and Biosphere Programme by simply redesignating some existing protected areas without reforming the management system).
The Agenda 21 adopted by the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in all its four component programmes addressing terrestrial living resource management underlines the role of the indigenous people and in addition includes a specific thematic programme for strengthening the role of indigenous people in the sustainable management of such resources. Further, the Johannesburg Summit, held ten years after the UNCED, in its Plan of Implementation, calls for enabling the indigenous people to contribute to the implementation of the objectives of CBD and explicitly recognises their role in conserving and using biodiversity in a sustainable way.
It has been the World Parks Congress, its 1962 session in particular, that was largely instrumental in pushing the doctrine of violent and exclusionary form of protected areas in the developing world, modelled along the US Yellowstone National Park, in the establishment of which over three hundred native Americans were killed and several thousands displaced. In a turnaround, the 2003 edition of the Congress underlined the importance of participatory and collaborative forms of protected area management, and specifically called for the restitution of the traditional lands taken away from the indigenous communities, which is what the draft bill is seeking to achieve. There has been a marked increase in the number of protected areas across the world in recent years exceeding over one lakh sites, covering more than ten per cent of the earth’s terrestrial area. It is pertinent to note that a large number of the recently created protected areas are indeed sustainable resource use reserves.
Addressing the 1972 UN Conference on Human Environment that for the first time put environment on the global political agenda, Indira Gandhi told the West that poverty was the worst form of pollution – a statement subsequently made famous by our conservation bureaucrats in successive multilateral forums. However, a few months after her return from the Stockholm Conference, she was to deepen the poverty and destitution of a huge mass of Indians, ironically in the name of conservation, through the Wildlife Protection Act that challenged the very existence of adivasis whose life is organically linked to the wildlife, as if the havoc played by the illegitimate Indian Forest Act, 1927 that formalized the colonial appropriation of India’s forests wasn’t enough. The tragic disappearance of the tiger from Sariska, in spite of having spent a crore of rupees per individual tiger within the reserve over the past 25 years, as revealed by the Tiger Task Force, is instructive of the failure of the present conservation project.
There is no reason for India to prolong the twin crises of accelerating biodiversity degradation and endangering the adivasi population even after more than half a century of formal independence. The enactment of the adivasi forest rights bill should be seen as the first essential step in reforming the country’s forest management regime in order to seek the partnership of the most original conservationists to protect and sustainably use the country’s most critical ecological endowment.
S. Faizi
Market, media, and mediocrity
IT is indeed troubling how readily the middle-class intelligentsia is buying into the ideology of ‘market mechanism’, the mainspring of which flows from allegedly universal human motive for private profit and gain. More astonishingly, market-worshipping arguments are being applauded as if they represent a panacea for the economic backwardness of a large chunk of humanity; as if the ‘market’ is the only time-tested route to improvements in human comfort and bliss.
It is often forgotten that debates over the efficacy of ‘market mechanism’ in growth, productivity and social welfare/equity originated quite early to eventually occupy almost the centre-stage of economic discourse by the mid-19th century. In this analytically rich discourse, the verdict – even in this heyday of laissez-faire – was hardly unqualified praise for an unfettered market. This literature is fast fading away from the ‘mainstream’ academic memory. The media’s cursory analysis on this generally assumes diluted, distorted, and at times virtually vulgarised, versions. Thanks to technical advances, the market-lords have grabbed a sizeable chunk of media for using it as a powerful tool not only towards amassing private profit, but also for protecting and projecting the premise on which profit thrives best, namely market-ideology. At the esoteric intellectual plane too, they have ensured a steady support from a relatively self-seeking section of academia.
Among the various means of pushing market-centred agenda, one of the more damaging – from humanity’s standpoint – is the ‘slow-poisoning’ of peoples’ minds to the point of making them impervious to human history. Schematically, people are being made – through various informal and (some formal) means – to believe in the futility of peeping into the past, especially into the long period between extinction of dinosaurs and emergence of ‘Washington consensus’. (Even the study of dinosaurs-age could better be entrusted with Hollywood directors!). No less dangerous are recent attempts – prompted by felt threat of extinction of the profession, combined with a strong allegiance to Darwinianism – at reshaping, realigning and reinterpreting historiography so as to make it appear accommodative of current (historically) opportune advances of market-agenda. For instance, if colonialism could be shown – by selective and clever interpretation of past records – to have offered boon of dynamism almost equally for colonisers and the colonised, this (renewed?) historiography (and associated historians) could fetch, for supplying intellectual backing to current globalisation agendas, a new lease of long life.
Even as presently pervasive ‘liberalisation’ connotes primarily the freeing of market from normative state regulations, what about the rich historical discourse, which emerged with the rise of capitalism, on this issue and others such as freedom, liberty and social justice. A calculated neglect or convenient twisting of this insightful historical scholarship seems – consequentially – analogous to religious fanatics’ harping on crude and ritualistic versions of a religion vis-à-vis its tolerant and humanistic core. A tendency for ignoring rich historical discourse on judicious delineation of the state’s purview on criteria of social welfare is gaining strength in the wake of a post-cold war euphoria over media-hyped victory of market-ideology. But it may turn highly imprudent to overlook that it was the market which itself had to make expanding room for state. It would be too hasty and costly to tear off all ties with the debates, discussions, dialogues, and dilemmas of preceding epochs just for the sake of obsessive surrender to the market mechanism.
The trouble is of course multifaceted. First, market-champions often enjoy a near hegemony over an over-arching mass media, which, in turn, is literally creating havoc by inculcating a market-oriented fixation in peoples’ perceptions. This snowballs into ever-deepening grip of market-centred ideology, as these people are and/or would be holding key positions in administration, politics, and decision-making. Such an orientation geared to injecting market-ideology as a sacrosanct ideational system is amply evident in media news and commercial captions. For instance, a billboard of a giant private electrical company posted on the inner walls of public buses uses a printed portrait of Lenin with a caption: No empire lasts for ever, especially one where you have to wait eight hours for repairmen to come. While such private abuse of Lenin in the public domain may clearly appear indecent, this caption, more importantly, trespasses (not inadvertently), through its subtle propagation of market mechanism, into a realm, which has historically engaged social thinkers, intellectuals, and statesmen of highest order.
Being exposed to – but not absorbed by – market media, a perceptive mind cannot help feeling as if a parallel, albeit ‘invisible’, educational system is in operation, creating an ‘alternative education’ hardly harmonious with age-old formal classroom education. Advertisements in newspapers, magazines, radio and television teach us incessantly – often in shape of innocent information –what is best among life’s philosophies, values, lifestyles, marital relationships, transport systems, political system, clothes, profession and career, ways of spending holidays and what not. How does this square with stacks of scholarly books by hitherto-regarded great thinkers and philosophers?
Let me illustrate how academic quality is already getting diluted by overarching influence of market-media nexus. The sketch of a seemingly innocent common man, whose bewildered look at day-to-day revelations of politicians’ mischief and mockery is routinely appended in the cartoon of a prominent English daily for the last several decades, has been idolized in the form of his big sculpture erected at the main entrance of a private educational ‘enterprise’ of international repute. Apart from its daily campaign against the ‘state’, this exemplifies the inroads of sanctity that market-media has silently carved out for itself within an ‘academic’ universe. This marks nothing less than a paradigm shift, namely, a sway of media cartoonist’s iconic ‘common man’ over Bacon, Radhakrishnan, Max Mueller, Gandhi, Toynbee, Newton, Einstein – the long-standing icons of great imagination, scholarship, justice, and reason – whose statues have historically adorned premises of universities, colleges and similar places of learning. Likewise, pre-existing values and perceptions on the female body, modelling, sexuality, fashion, are getting profoundly reshaped through a capture of mass media by business. The issue is not trivial. The tactical use of mass media by business houses is shattering for historically evolved social perceptions on such innate matters as gender and labour, and is imposing shallow market-and- commodity-centred interpretations by leveraging our insulation from the more objective and unbiased debates hosted by relatively small section of less publicised, isolated, but committed media circles.
The mechanisms of market-media’s penetration are often subtle. The spread of female-fashion and expensive clothes, which is often defended by media for its allegedly catalytic role in expanding female freedom, empowerment and creativity is linked to the interests of garment and cosmetic manufacturers. Given the mounting evidence of dowry-deaths, domestic violence, and women’s subjugation in much of Asia, this oft-glorified role of fashion fad turns to be a hoax, as its chief motive is expansion of market and profit, not real reform of intrinsic gender imbalances. Thus, much of the media-hype with a careful neglect of its adverse implications for gender relations, female status and family must contribute to growing social aberrations.
Few can deny that the media often disseminates useful practical information about most spheres of life, but there is danger if it takes some ‘ideological’ side for material/market ‘gains’. The so-called ‘liberalisation’ has possibly escalated the propensity of mainstream media to care less about professional values and ethics (other than profit and incentives). Although there exists a more rational and committed section within media, its overall influence remains dwarfed. While India’s relatively free media has undoubtedly been instrumental behind its lasting democracy, this should not blind us to the existence of forces that could make it increasingly fettered to the agendas of market-lords.
Let me illustrate how the corporate zeal for market can metamorphose public perceptions on such important issues as public-private composition. A leading two-wheeler manufacturer’s tele-advertisement shows common people rushing to own and ride two-wheelers, leaving public buses virtually empty (eventually ‘extinct’), with an erstwhile ‘bus terminus’ converted into (public?) parking space for thousands of bikes. In a quick sequel, the one time proud conductor managing a passenger-full lively public bus, has now become a sedentary watchman of hundreds of lifeless two-wheelers parked in countless rows. In its eagerness to capture the market, this advertisement not only turns a blind eye to human history, but instead instigates a public devotion to rugged individualism with one’s own private transport as against the cooperation and collectivism of public transport.
In contrast, the demand for larger public expenditure for strengthening the public transport system is gaining ground in western countries, exemplifying a duality in the media’s role in social development. While the relatively mature and articulate civil society in advanced societies works as a countervailing force to the mindless march of market, our countries remain vulnerable to the contamination of media-borne mediocrity. The propensity to use comments of entertainment ‘personalities’ on such national events as the budget or Independence Day in some popular dailies testifies to a commitment towards engulfing our society with a philosophy of ‘delusion’. Isn’t this an invitation to view serious public issues lightly? Such shallowness results largely from the increasing ability of private business to pervade nearly all spheres of civil society. This calls for a concerted public debate and reasoning for evolving policies and programmes for thwarting media-mediated celebration of mediocrity.
While a wide network of mass media facilitates speedy dissemination of information this, by the same token could muddle and dilute academic spirit, rigour and purpose. For example, a university student of social science/humanities – having been innundated by media-borne information since childhood – may typically lack the necessary curiosity, thirst, and receptivity for new ideas/theories to be presented in classrooms. In a market-oriented interpretation of education, which generally entails investment, the sheer joy of learning and delving deep into knowledge per se usually make little sense.
Even an ordinary mind can comprehend the centrality of the profit-motive in most media-advertisements, yet people seem so readily shaped by them. Under current global trends, the choice before the political leadership (especially in developing countries) seems to be either a ‘mindless’ surrender to the ‘market’ or focusing on universal human values and objective reasoning as elucidated over the long intellectual history of humankind. It is crucial not to confuse private incentives and profit with basic human values, since the former are essentially human ‘instincts’, which like others need to be shaped and tamed by imperatives of collective conscience, reasoning, and being.
Arup Maharatna
