Delhi: Malevolent stars

A MALEVOLENT constellation of stars seems to be presiding over Shastri Bhavan, Delhi which houses the Union human resource development (HRD, aka education) ministry. To the misfortune of India™s 550 million children and youth, all HRD ministers of the past decade have at best been successful failures. After the disastrous reign of the BJP™s Dr. Murli Manohar Joshi in Shastri Bhavan (1999-2004), the first five-year term of the UPA government (2004-09) was wasted by the late, unlamented Arjun Singh, who utilised his tenure in Shastri Bhavan to force the 73rd amendment of the Constitution which carved out an additional 22.5 percent reserved quota (i.e in addition to the 15 percent reserved for scheduled castes and 7.5 percent for scheduled tribes) in Central government-funded institutions of higher education, including the IITs and IIMs, for OBCs (other backward castes). This amendment and accompanying legislation was pushed through without any expansion of institutional capacity resulting in worsened teacher-student ratios and over-crowded classrooms. Unsurprisingly, he wasn™t reappointed HRD minister in 2009 when the Congress-led UPA was returned to office in Delhi. Arjun Singh™s successor as Union HRD minister was too-clever-by-half  Supreme Court counsel Kapil Sibal who antagonised Parliament and his own party colleagues by presenting  several ill-drafted Bills including the Foreign Educational Institutions and National Commission for Higher Education & Research bills which were rejected by the ministry™s parliamentary standing committee. The only legislation Sibal managed to pilot through Parliament ” the Right to Education Act, 2009 which became law in 2010 ” is a welter of confusion and has proved to be beyond the implementation capabilities of most state governments. Sibal was moved out of Shastri Bhavan in 2013 and succeeded by Dr. M.M. Pallam Raju who spent most of his time immersed in Andhra politics convulsed by the promised division of the state into Telangana and Seemandhra. In short, despite incremental public awareness of the vital importance of quality education as the essential precondition of human and national development, the past decade ” but for determined private sector initiatives in education ” has been a decade of stasis, if not decline in public education. Consequently the controversy surrounding the appointment of popular BJP spokesperson and former Rajya Sabha MP, Smriti Irani as Union HRD minister following the sweep of the General Election 2014 by the BJP, has ominous portents. Surprisingly women™s rights activist Madhu Kishwar, a staunch BJP supporter, has made a big issue of Irani not having completed her commerce degree programme which in her (Kishwar™s) opinion makes Irani unqualified to lead the HRD ministry. This charge is dismissed by most pundits who point out that independent India™s first Union education minister, the highly respected Dr. Maulana Azad, didn™t have a college degree either. Worse, spokespersons of the routed Congress party have highlighted contradictory affidavits filed before the Election Commission in 2004 in which Irani averred that she was an arts, and later commerce, graduate of Delhi University, when she is neither. On her first day in office on May 27,…