Private Opinionist’s Comments on What Public Opinionists Said

 Private Opinonist’s Comments on What Public Opinionists Said

If you hadn’t guessed already, I am the private opinionist. In this post, I am not going to name the public opinionists; yet, I will confirm that the statements were taken from the editorial and the opinion pages of the daily newspaper The Hindu. I may agree or disagree with some of the statements I am highlighting through this post.

The newspaper pieces that caught my interests were on education, in particular about NEP 2020, and on, this one you have to think twice to get a grip on, reforming the financial sector reforms, the newspaper heading reading, India’s financial sector reforms need a shake-up; simply put, reform the reforms.

I will take up the education thing first. NEP 2020 aims to foster innovation, enhance employability of students, and strengthen industry-academia collaboration. Are these the three verticals (?In corporate lingo?). I have been hearing the above three aims since at least 2016. NEP 2020 is, then, merely the new dust jacket on the old tome. If the reform initiatives are themselves old, how can the reforms be forward looking?

There is the second list of three (number three seems to have a parasite’s hold on the brains that do the planning): ensuring originality and indigenously-rooted imagination in research, constant competitiveness in the global educational sphere, and preparing students on a multiple career path.

The following are my translations of the highfalutin items that comprise the list. You look for originality not in the current state of knowledge but in the long forgotten past; this also dovetails with basing one’s research on our indigenous imagination. Do not look hither and thither, be focused and keep your blinkers on, wearing it backward.

The second pathway is to compare competitiveness continuously−not continually, meaning with relevant gaps−with the global educational sphere. Now, that is like fitting a square peg in a round hole. My carpenter may be able to do it!

How in the world would someone device a metric to compare indigenous imagination with global thinking? Isn’t indigenous local, whichever way one imagines it?

The last in the list gives the game away. Education shall be career oriented−prepare for “multiple career paths”. Career defines and measures the value of education one gets. What did our recent ancestors know? They were know−nothings. We needed to go back to our globally celebrated past, though it may be beyond its use-by date.

Is there anything called “innovative research skill”? Could it mean something like fine tuning the proportions of chemicals in a formulation, never figure out why such tiniest of changes and/or addition of an extra compound are expected to produce paradigm shifts in the physical behaviour of the resulting compound. I know, as this methodology has anchored a dozen Ph.D theses submitted in the School of Civil Engineering in a Deemed-to-be University! The researcher is never in the know of why she observed what she observed. There is not even ahypotheses in this regard. All that the research does is to say, “This is what is observed.” Big deal, like a glass cup fell off the table and we saw it break. This can be at best ghost-like research output. This is what, apparently the writer desired.

The reforming the reforms in the finance sector is, in this writer’s reading, slightly better. Incremental reforms, as the government is claimed to have been indulging in, have met their match in systemic inefficiencies, and are going nowhere. We need a sledge hammer. Deeper structural corrections are needed in the corporate bond market, which has been in nascent stages over a number of centuries. Why the sudden emergency response? My immediate response: would either Ambani or Adani look away as the so-called corrections are carried out? I doubt it. Protracted litigation is a drag on the finance sector, it is said. I doubt that, as it is the judiciary that is pulled by its nose rope by the corporates; again Ambani and Adani? There is enough blame to go around.

There is one phrase that really ruffles my feathers: market integrity. From the days of Adam Smith, markets have never been models of integrity. It took more than two thirds of this piece before I encountered the word that I was waiting for from paragraph one: ecosystem. This unnecessary word (oh, it has become a necessary word in a newspaper column no matter the topic, like educational ecosystem, social ecosystem, governance ecosystem and the original, environmental ecosystem) grates on my nerves. There is a hugely good rhetorical question that receives my approbation. It reads: Does the Finance Ministry or RBI even know the scale of this [Shadow Banking] lending? This is an “Ouch!” moment for anyone in government.

The last item. India “...need[s] a coherent, forward-looking strategy ...” This is dangerous. India should be prudent in looking forward, neither miles nor inches ahead. This needs real-time assessment and periodic fleet footedness, the very thing democracy correctly does not allow.

So, here you have the financial illiterate submitting a thesis on national finance. 

As Alan Parsons Project said, “Games people play, you take it or leave it”.

Raghuram Ekambaram