At times, I am driven to think whether this is a boon or bane to our country.

BOON:

• Turn this into advantage.
• Hone the skills of manpower and make cheap, skilled workforce and dump the global markets with your products
• Half of the population is youth meaning India is in its youth - Full of energy and the fire to achieve something. Capitalize this and make India a world leader.
• Let all Indians be Educated, Well conversant in English - shrink the world to mini-India

BANE:

• Half the population is youth and the average Indian life is increasing. This means after 100 years we will be a country of old ones – We may not know, at this growth rate, we might as well have equal number of youth too!
• The learned or educated families today are having only one kid while the illiterates have multiple kids meaning the share of educated ones is shrinking while the illiterates are on the rise.
• Abuse of natural resources leading to damage of nature.
• On particular religion is expanding their base in huge numbers and unfortunately this community is not paying attention to education of their kith and kin.
• Though we are the nation of the youth, we are led by oldies (our HR dept is led by a man who cannot walk by himself)

It is not easy to build a strong educated country if the present system continued. Due to the lop-sided increment in population, the Government is forced to come out with concessions like reservations that push meritocracy to the back seat. The very system of reservation is wrong. If, in its implementation of 50 years, we claim that the backward are still in backward condition, either the system is wrong or the implementation pattern is wrong or those considered backward can never be uplifted.

If the system is wrong, why not discontinue it? Why not re-visit the system? I am not against reservation but against the present system. Imagine we are participating in Olympics. The entire world knew that India is poor in athletics. Just to encourage India participate in athletics, can the federation bring in a rule that Indians have to run only 50m instead of 100m sprint? It might sound weird but our present system of reservation is similar to this.

• Provide reservation facility to one person per family.
• Members of the same family should not avail this facility generation after generation.
• If one member of the family had availed it, then only the 3rd generation can avail this facility provided they had not really uplifted.
• Provide the reservation facility only once in his career (either in SSC or in HSC or in College or in employment or in promotion).
• Unlike the present system where reservation is given from birth to death, we should provide this only once.

Simply by providing opportunities, one cannot develop. It sounds as if we provided bats to people, we can make many Tendulkars.

The basic problem lies with the lack of primary education at rural areas. At the outset, the Govt should bring out some concrete plans in starting primary education centers all over India. This can be possible if we had enough teachers for this. Unfortunately, teaching profession has no takers. To have a strong foundation in education, the teacher to student ratio should be less than 40~35.

The government should encourage the profession of teaching. As on date, teaching is the last resort of the boring house-wives in India. The pay packet is not lucrative and hence this profession is not sought by a common man. Those who are in the profession are here either by desperation or they did not have another option.

will be continued.....