http://www.livemint.com/2012/
An excuse called Rushdie
Politicians and clerics offer illusory benefits to Muslims, who want
education and jobs. Instead they get quotas, and not skills
Here, There, Everywhere | Salil Tripathi
Only one out of every six Muslim children entering an Indian school stays
till his matriculation. I use "his" deliberately; the figures are worse for
girls-only two out of five Muslim girls enter schools, and fewer than
one-tenth complete secondary education. These stark dropout rates explain
the malaise affecting Indian Muslims, and unless that's addressed, all other
solutions are ineffective.
Such low enrolment figures and high dropout rates mean that only one of 25
undergraduate students, and barely one out of 50 postgraduate students in
Indian universities, is a Muslim. India defines literacy rather generously,
and yet Muslim literacy rate is only 59.1%.
According to the Rajinder Sachar committee's report in 2006, Muslim
enrolment at the Indian Institutes of Management was 1.3%, and at the Indian
Institutes of Technology, out of 27,161 students, only 894, or some 3.3%,
were Muslim.
The consequence? Inevitably restricted professional opportunities.
Just about 5% of applicants for the civil service examinations are Muslim,
and of the elite bureaucracy, only 3% of Indian Administrative Services,
1.8% of the Indian Foreign Service, and 4% of the Indian Police Service, are
Muslim. The figures improve marginally in other government departments, but
only just. Muslims form 4.5% of employees in the railways, and an
astonishing 98.7% of them are employed at lower levels. In other
departments, such as education, health, and transport, representation varies
between 4% and 7% of the total number of employees.
Lacking education and skills, many Muslim men and women find it hard to get
jobs, and many end up being self-employed. While 44% of Muslim women are
economically active (in itself a low figure) only 25% work outside their
homes. Many men work in small businesses. Such jobs typically have minimal
protection-no unions, poor work conditions, limited probability of training
or advancement and low wages.
Even if they become entrepreneurs, credit may be hard to access without
paper qualifications. Figures bear that out: the loans that average Muslim
borrowers get are smaller than the loans others get.
Furthermore, between 2000 and 2006, of the Rs 266 billion that the Small
Industries Development Bank of India disbursed, Muslims received only Rs
1.24 billion. It could mean shortage of qualified borrowers, less ambitious
projects, lower awareness of credit availability among borrowers, or plain
old discrimination. The record of the National Bank for Agriculture and
Rural Development is similar, with Muslims receiving less than 4% of
disbursements.
Alarmingly, the Sachar committee also reported that some banks had
identified places with high concentration of Muslims as "negative
geographical areas" where banking services were not easily accessible, nor
were there enough roads, bus stops, postal, or medical services.
The self-evident mathematics should be sufficient to convince any government
or political party that magical quick fixes won't solve the problem.
Cosmetic solutions such as reserving jobs for Muslims won't and can't change
anything-given such dropout rates and low graduation levels, where will the
qualified candidates come from? Setting quotas for groups is easy: you keep
adding new groups for phantom jobs and keep sub-dividing the stale pie, and
then promise further sub- divisions at election time, and attempt to reap
rewards at elections.
This is how you end up making each group resent the other, as has happened
in countless cases since independence.
Or you invest in improving the quality of primary education, and remove
restrictions on non-governmental and private organizations to open schools,
so that all deprived children go to schools, and more important, stay there
till matriculation. Only then there will be large numbers of qualified
Muslim candidates to go to universities, who will later apply for elite
universities or jobs, creating a bureaucratic and professional class to
administer the country, to run India's companies, and to go to banks and
venture funds with amazing entrepreneurial ideas. Focusing on quotas, as the
Congress party has promised in Uttar Pradesh, only feeds the politics of
envy and resentment.
Given such a bleak picture, one would think that Maulana Abul Qasim Nomani,
the rector of the Darul Uloom Deoband, would know his chief
priority: to ask the government to implement the Sachar report, identify the
root causes and fix those, instead of tinkering at the margins. But Nomani
seems to have a more pressing concern: keeping Salman Rushdie out of the
Jaipur Literature Festival. With politicians offering questionable placebos
which have expired use-by dates, and clerics misdiagnosing the disease, is
it any wonder that the patient's condition remains grave?
In Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Iff tells Haroun how certain
things are P2C2E, (process-too-complicated-to-
simple: politicians and clerics gain by keeping the population uninformed.
They fight chimeric battles and offer illusory benefits to Muslims, who want
education and jobs. Instead they get quotas, and not skills, with the added
bonus: to protest Rushdie.
In case there are disturbances after prayers at the mosque tomorrow in
Jaipur or elsewhere, the responsibility will rest with the clerics, the
politicians, and the rioters, not the writers. Ah, magic realism.
Salil Tripathi is a writer based in London. Your comments are welcome at
salil@livemint.com
An excuse called Rushdie
Politicians and clerics offer illusory benefits to Muslims, who want
education and jobs. Instead they get quotas, and not skills
Here, There, Everywhere | Salil Tripathi
Only one out of every six Muslim children entering an Indian school stays
till his matriculation. I use "his" deliberately; the figures are worse for
girls-only two out of five Muslim girls enter schools, and fewer than
one-tenth complete secondary education. These stark dropout rates explain
the malaise affecting Indian Muslims, and unless that's addressed, all other
solutions are ineffective.
Such low enrolment figures and high dropout rates mean that only one of 25
undergraduate students, and barely one out of 50 postgraduate students in
Indian universities, is a Muslim. India defines literacy rather generously,
and yet Muslim literacy rate is only 59.1%.
According to the Rajinder Sachar committee's report in 2006, Muslim
enrolment at the Indian Institutes of Management was 1.3%, and at the Indian
Institutes of Technology, out of 27,161 students, only 894, or some 3.3%,
were Muslim.
The consequence? Inevitably restricted professional opportunities.
Just about 5% of applicants for the civil service examinations are Muslim,
and of the elite bureaucracy, only 3% of Indian Administrative Services,
1.8% of the Indian Foreign Service, and 4% of the Indian Police Service, are
Muslim. The figures improve marginally in other government departments, but
only just. Muslims form 4.5% of employees in the railways, and an
astonishing 98.7% of them are employed at lower levels. In other
departments, such as education, health, and transport, representation varies
between 4% and 7% of the total number of employees.
Lacking education and skills, many Muslim men and women find it hard to get
jobs, and many end up being self-employed. While 44% of Muslim women are
economically active (in itself a low figure) only 25% work outside their
homes. Many men work in small businesses. Such jobs typically have minimal
protection-no unions, poor work conditions, limited probability of training
or advancement and low wages.
Even if they become entrepreneurs, credit may be hard to access without
paper qualifications. Figures bear that out: the loans that average Muslim
borrowers get are smaller than the loans others get.
Furthermore, between 2000 and 2006, of the Rs 266 billion that the Small
Industries Development Bank of India disbursed, Muslims received only Rs
1.24 billion. It could mean shortage of qualified borrowers, less ambitious
projects, lower awareness of credit availability among borrowers, or plain
old discrimination. The record of the National Bank for Agriculture and
Rural Development is similar, with Muslims receiving less than 4% of
disbursements.
Alarmingly, the Sachar committee also reported that some banks had
identified places with high concentration of Muslims as "negative
geographical areas" where banking services were not easily accessible, nor
were there enough roads, bus stops, postal, or medical services.
The self-evident mathematics should be sufficient to convince any government
or political party that magical quick fixes won't solve the problem.
Cosmetic solutions such as reserving jobs for Muslims won't and can't change
anything-given such dropout rates and low graduation levels, where will the
qualified candidates come from? Setting quotas for groups is easy: you keep
adding new groups for phantom jobs and keep sub-dividing the stale pie, and
then promise further sub- divisions at election time, and attempt to reap
rewards at elections.
This is how you end up making each group resent the other, as has happened
in countless cases since independence.
Or you invest in improving the quality of primary education, and remove
restrictions on non-governmental and private organizations to open schools,
so that all deprived children go to schools, and more important, stay there
till matriculation. Only then there will be large numbers of qualified
Muslim candidates to go to universities, who will later apply for elite
universities or jobs, creating a bureaucratic and professional class to
administer the country, to run India's companies, and to go to banks and
venture funds with amazing entrepreneurial ideas. Focusing on quotas, as the
Congress party has promised in Uttar Pradesh, only feeds the politics of
envy and resentment.
Given such a bleak picture, one would think that Maulana Abul Qasim Nomani,
the rector of the Darul Uloom Deoband, would know his chief
priority: to ask the government to implement the Sachar report, identify the
root causes and fix those, instead of tinkering at the margins. But Nomani
seems to have a more pressing concern: keeping Salman Rushdie out of the
Jaipur Literature Festival. With politicians offering questionable placebos
which have expired use-by dates, and clerics misdiagnosing the disease, is
it any wonder that the patient's condition remains grave?
In Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Iff tells Haroun how certain
things are P2C2E, (process-too-complicated-to-
simple: politicians and clerics gain by keeping the population uninformed.
They fight chimeric battles and offer illusory benefits to Muslims, who want
education and jobs. Instead they get quotas, and not skills, with the added
bonus: to protest Rushdie.
In case there are disturbances after prayers at the mosque tomorrow in
Jaipur or elsewhere, the responsibility will rest with the clerics, the
politicians, and the rioters, not the writers. Ah, magic realism.
Salil Tripathi is a writer based in London. Your comments are welcome at
salil@livemint.com
List of Universities in India, Top Universities in India, Best Famous Universities in India if you want more visit below
ReplyDeleteList of Universities in India