The draft’s endorsement of critical thinking would have gained credibility if it had promoted liberal values:
Relevance: Mains: G.S paper II: Education
A few months ago, a school principal told me about her conversation in the morning assembly with children of the middle (Grades VI-VIII) section. She had asked them for suggestions to turn the school into heaven. Some children suggested a garden, with trees, grass, and flowers blossoming all year round. Others pointed out that the school already had a nice garden. They suggested that heaven should have peace, so we should end all fights. The assembly ended with everyone taking a vow to stop all fighting in the school to make it like heaven. A short while later, two boys came scuffling into the principal’s office, quarrelling and seeking her intervention. On inquiry, one of them said, “Ma’am, didn’t you say you want our school to be like heaven?” Then he pointed at the other boy and asked, “What is he doing here, Ma’am? He fights with me all the time.”
This story came back to me when I started reading the section on higher education in the 480-page draft of the National Education Policy (NEP). I had completed my reading of the section on school education, so I was ready to be told how a future generation that spends its school years under the guidance of the proposed new policy will spend its college years. For improvement in learning at school, the draft NEP wants critical thinking and creativity to be treated as the cornerstones of intellectual development from early childhood onwards. As a term, critical thinking or inquiry has gained enormous popularity of late. It does not mean ‘critical’ in the common sense. How the term has evolved in recent educational theory implies the ability to place ideas and problems in a larger context in order to locate creative links and clues by using information and concepts drawn from different subjects. Imagine our youngsters proceeding to higher education after this kind of intellectual training at school: you can picture a transformed college classroom.
Pivotal to reform
In the draft NEP, the section for higher education opens with ‘liberal arts’ as the key to reform. This is another term that has been gaining currency in India over recent years, but its history is rather different from that of critical thinking. In India, owing to our colonial history, we are more used to the term ‘liberal’. In modern education, ‘liberal arts’ refers to undergraduate courses in America’s elite private universities. For years, I have been looking for a suitable term in my mother tongue, i.e. Hindi, to convey the many layers of meaning underlying the word ‘liberal’. The common translation is ‘udaar’ or large-hearted. (I am sure this is the term they will use when the draft NEP is made available in Hindi.) The idea of liberalism as large-heartedness or intellectual generosity ran into trouble when ‘neo-liberalism’ gained centre-stage in economic policy. The only way one might notice some generosity in it was by recognising the state’s willingness to loosen its grip. Neo-liberalism has now settled in, transcending ideological boundaries, but its impact on liberal arts education in America is far from clear. Many scholars have suggested that the turn towards neo-liberal policies has weakened critical thinking in liberal arts courses. This matter has suddenly become relevant for us in the wake of the draft NEP proposing both critical thinking and liberal arts, virtually in the same breath.
Applying critical thinking
Implementing the draft NEP in my own mind, I thought of using critical thinking to reflect on the prospects of liberal training. The late Professor Ravinder Kumar, an eminent historian of modern politics, was a self-avowed liberal. I once heard him explain why liberalism is the hardest social doctrine to practice. He said the capacity to tolerate your adversaries, with curiosity to understand them, calls for a mutual agreement. If there is no such consensus, i.e. liberal outlook is practised by one side only, it can be frustrating, and might even lead to a tragic failure of liberalism itself. When I hear about liberal arts courses being offered in private universities, I often wonder what future awaits them. How will they face a world in which the ‘narrow domestic walls’ are rising higher and higher? This metaphor was used by Tagore, a bold liberal, who wanted India to become a ‘heaven of freedom’. ‘Where knowledge is free’, the same poem said. The liberal arts undergraduate courses I am referring are to cost ₹8 lakh per year.
The draft NEP’s support for liberal arts comes with a plea for increased public funding. It also cites employability as a justification. Even more interestingly, the argument excavates historical grounding. It says: “Indian universities such as Takshshila and Nalanda… definitively emphasised the liberal arts and liberal education tradition…. The critical Indian concept of liberal arts has indeed become extremely important in the modern day employment landscape of the 21st century, and liberal arts education of this kind is already being extensively implemented today (e.g. in the United States in Ivy League schools) with great success. It is time India also brought back this great tradition back to its place of origin.” (pp. 223-224).
The resounding, elaborate commendation of liberal arts in the draft NEP brought me back to the principal’s story about turning her school into heaven. The boy who asked her about his classmate — “What is he doing here, Ma’am?” — was asking a fundamental question pertinent to the future of liberal values. The youngster’s query demonstrates that he has internalised the spirit of the age. Many children do that. Their questions carry valuable material to understand our times better and more objectively than we might be able to do as adults, submerged as we are in our ethos, feeling forced to cope with it. The boy’s query contained the hope that principal Ma’am, being the custodian of heaven, will exercise her authority to adjudicate in his fight. What were her choices? There were mainly two: to expel the alleged fighter or to ask the complainer to talk to his adversary. Only the latter would qualify as a liberal administrative measure.
Perhaps this is what the draft NEP also wants in its push for the liberal arts, as a futuristic substitute for the monochromatic ‘BA’ our system is used to and stuck in. Since the draft NEP is committed to critical thinking, surely its writers had cast a glance at the larger ethos and noticed the demise of several bastions of liberal education. Had they evinced even moderate concern, their endorsement of the liberal arts would have gained credibility. Unless liberal arts graduates are to be produced exclusively for export, their training would have to include the smartness to not let anyone know what exactly you believe in. One suspects that their American counterparts already receive such training.
Let me get back to the heaven alluded to in the principal’s story. Trees and peace apart, a school turned into heaven will surely have to resolve the problem of fear, so endemic to our education system. The boy who wanted the principal to adjudicate was not afraid of indicating to her his own preferred solution. It was implied in the question: ‘What is he doing here?’ This stance also carries the hope of impunity from being charged of intolerance. As a grown-up he might say: ‘If we want to preserve our neatly fenced heaven, why can’t we expel from it the people we don’t appreciate?’ We might add: isn’t this already being argued in many liberal countries, so why should we hesitate? My principal friend, however, followed her instinctive good sense and sent the two boys away, asking them to talk it over and play without a quarrel together.
(Source: The Hindu)
- New revelations in the IL&FS fiasco call for a comprehensive review of the credit rating architecture.
Relevance: G.S paper III: Indian Economy
Ever since the collapse of IL&FS, credit rating agencies in India have been under the scanner for having failed to flag the financial stress at the firm and its subsidiaries. Reports paint an even more worrying picture. The rot runs deeper. Investigations into the IL&FS fiasco have revealed that its group companies were able to retain high credit ratings, even as they were facing a liquidity crunch, allegedly in return for favours to rating agencies. This practice was apparently going on for years. These reports come after the heads of two rating agencies were sent on leave by their respective company boards in response to questions raised over the assigned ratings. In response to concerns, last month, SEBI had mandated “enhanced disclosures” from credit rating agencies in order to boost transparency and accountability. Clearly, more needs to be done.
At the heart of the matter is the “issuer pay” business model. Under this model, the firm that is being rated pays for the ratings, which are then used by investors to evaluate the level of risk that a firm/instrument poses. This creates a conflict of interest. As rating agencies, which are profit-making enterprises, depend on fees paid by issuers, they are more susceptible to being influenced by them. But as ratings serve as a guide for investors, providing signals about the ability of the issuer to repay the debt, this raises legitimate questions over who is safeguarding the interests of investors. A case in point: Recently, a rating agency downgraded a firm’s rating by nine notches, from AA+ to D, in a single stroke, leaving investors in disarray. There has been some discussion on how to deal with this issue in India. In fact, in February, the parliamentary standing committee on finance had suggested the government explore shifting to an investor or regulator paid model. While switching to a new architecture is likely to be resisted by rating agencies, as it would hurt their profitability, there is a genuine case for re-examining the incentive structure of rating agencies. Mere tinkering will not yield the desired outcomes.
Globally, credit rating agencies came under the scanner in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008, with accusations of flawed methodology and rating shopping being made. Subsequently, they were penalised to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars to settle cases over their ratings of risky mortgage securities. But, imposing hefty fines is only a part of the solution. The regulator needs to undertake a comprehensive review of the ratings architecture in India. The first step could be to enforce mandatory rotation of rating agencies. This could address the issue of familiarity exerting influence. The option of compulsory rating of a firm/instrument by more than one rating agency could also be explored.
(Source: The Indian Express)
- There is big money at the top of the pyramid:
Relevance: mains: G.S paper III: Indian Economy
One multibillionaire in second place, or third, on a list of the few whose dollar net-worth runs into 12 digits, should make little difference to the rest of the world. Yet, such lists can be barometers of business performance, in particular, and social behaviour in general. France’s Bernard Arnault, CEO of luxury products group LVMH—derived from Louis Vuitton-Moët Hennessy—has displaced Microsoft’s Bill Gates on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index as the world’s second-richest man, just a month after he entered the rarefied $100 billion club. LVMH shares have made record gains this week on the back of a 16% revenue growth in the first quarter of 2019 over the same period last year, pushing Arnault’s personal wealth to nearly $108 billion. Gates is worth $107 billion on the chart. When one thinks of the world’s richest, one usually thinks of technology successes. That the creator of a luxury empire could get richer than the founder of a software major speaks of value generation of a far fuzzier kind—enabled by a world increasingly devoted to wealth and its symbols. Luxury is a market where anything that signals membership of a global elite commands an eye-popping premium.
The number of millionaires worldwide has been rising as entrepreneurs create consumer-centric technology businesses, marking a shift from the industrial era. This year, the number of people with $1 million, or more, in net assets is expected to exceed 20 million for the first time, according to a Global Data Wealth Insight report. While the fortunes of these folks are based on entrepreneurial acumen, hard work and a favourable business environment, easy taxation regimes have played a significant role. In Arnault’s France, for instance, the taxation structure is regressive, as economist Thomas Piketty and others have shown, with the top groups paying lower effective tax rates than those below them. Of the world’s three richest men, who happen to be the only ones with 12-figure fortunes—Amazon founder Jeff Bezos ($124 billion), Arnault and Gates—only one has signed the Giving Pledge, and reports have pointed out that Gates would still be in second place if he hadn’t pledged $35 billion to his philanthropic foundation. Arnault’s LVMH group publicly pledged €200 million for the reconstruction of Notre Dame, but has stumped up only €10 million so far, and that too, after getting some flak for being stingy. In India too, the number of millionaires and billionaires has been growing rapidly—up 11% in 2018, by some estimates—fuelled by a stock market boom and rising consumption, but income inequality is worse than ever before. Unfortunately, philanthropy is not picking up. Since 2014, philanthropic contributions of over ₹10 crore by ultra-high net worth individuals, excluding Wipro’s Azim Premji, have declined 4%, notes Bain and Company’s India Philanthropy Report 2019.
Some of that may be because upward mobility is a phenomenon that reaches all the way to the top. No matter how rich you are, someone is always richer. Since being well-off is relative, there is no end to the aspiration curve. This sentiment exerts a powerful influence at the upper echelons of the socioeconomic pyramid, especially among those who are near the top, but not at the peak. For them, there is always something fancier to buy—and flaunt. Arnault, it seems, knows that only too well.
(Source: Livemint)
- Fears of a vocal section should not override the rights of NRC claimants to due process
Relevance: mains: G.S paper II: Government Policy:
With the Supreme Court-led process of updating the National Register of Citizens in Assam nearing its deadline of July 31, the complexities involved in the gargantuan exercise have dawned upon the executive. Both the Central and State governments have sought an extension. But it remains to be seen whether the Court, which has insisted on sticking to the timelines, would relent when it hears the matter on July 23. The first draft NRC published on the intervening night of December 31 and January 1, 2018 had the names of 19 million people out of the total 32.9 million who had applied for inclusion as citizens. The second draft NRC, published on July 30 last, upped it to 28.9 million but left out four million found ineligible. Around 3.6 million of them subsequently filed citizenship claims. An “additional exclusion list” was issued last month containing 1,02,463 names included earlier in the draft list. In anticipation of millions being ultimately left out, the Assam government is moving to set up 200 Foreigners’ Tribunals to handle cases of people to be excluded from the final NRC, as part of a larger plan to establish 1,000 such tribunals. The State government is also preparing to construct 10 more detention centres; six are now running out of district jails.
A humanitarian crisis awaits Assam whether the final NRC is published on July 31 or after. In the run-up to the final publication, case after case has emerged of persons wrongfully left out of the list. The process has left no group out of its sweep, be it Marwaris or Biharis from elsewhere in the country, people tracing their antecedents to other Northeastern states, people of Nepali origin, and caste Hindu Assamese. The prime targets of this exercise, however, are Hindu Bengalis and Bengali-origin Muslims of Assam — more than 80% of the 4.1 million people named in the two lists belong to these two groups. Yet, the rationale of the Centre and State in seeking a deadline extension, as found in their submissions in the Supreme Court, betrays an exclusionary bias. The joint plea sought time to conduct a 20% sample reverification process in districts bordering Bangladesh and 10% in the rest of the State to quell a “growing perception” that lakhs of illegal immigrants may have slipped into the list. This, despite the State NRC Coordinator’s reports to the apex court suggesting that up to 27% of names have been reverified during the process of disposal of claims. It hasn’t helped that the Central government keeps holding out the prospect of unleashing a nationwide NRC to detect and deport illegal aliens, when it has no index to base such an exercise on — the 1951 register was exclusive to Assam. The accent should be on inclusion, not exclusion. The wheels of justice cannot pander to the suspicions of a vocal majority without giving the excluded access to due process.
(Source: The Hindu)