Comments on: A Modest Proposal — Part 5

By: Rural Infrastucture & Services Commons (RISC) | Screensumer

Rural Infrastucture & Services Commons (RISC) | Screensumer — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 08:53:08 +0000

[...] Antanu Day writes : RISC, Deeshaa, and Rajesh Jain — The story so far on Deesha.org an entrepreneurial institution, which aims to transform the rural Indian economy and contribute to India’s economic development. He throws some light on Rural Infrastucture & Services Commons (RISC) which is an economic model & has the potential for achieving the multi-faceted goals of sustainable economic development through more efficient utilization of available resources. I had been thinking about the problem of India’s economic development for a long time. Even though my undergraduate work was in mechanical engineering, and my postgraduate work in computer sciences, I decided to study economics primarily because I wanted to understand how economic growth could be catalysed. Around 1998, I started converging to the idea that urbanization is both a cause and consequence of development. But rural India was huge. Massive rural to urban migration is not an option for India. So I started thinking of some way of “urbanizing” rural India in rural India itself. RISC was born. Related Links : [...]

By: Atanu Dey on India’s Development » A Review of Education Related Posts Here

Sat, 14 Jan 2006 10:48:06 +0000

[...] uck if what you really need done is make a cup of tea.Part four of the modest proposal and part five went into some implementation details. Following a presentation at a conf [...]

By: Atanu Dey on India’s Development - Deeshaa » Blog Archive » A Modest Proposal — Part 4

Thu, 30 Jun 2005 10:32:40 +0000

[...] nnot be the one certifying whether it has been successful in the training. {Continued in Part 5.} {Recently discovered Tim Worstall’s [...]

By: Ramesh

Ramesh — Unknown, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I just read your whole idea from the beginning, and have a few comments/concerns to make, to add to Alok/Vipul/Yum’s comments.

Firstly, agree totally about the need to make education the focus, and to make it NOW. Agree about all the hidden costs that we as a country are having to bear due to illiteracy and about literate productivity being higher than illiterate productivity, but involving multiplier effects of increasing money supply etc. only dilute the argument I feel. Anyways, now to what I wanted to say.

Implementation – how do you stop an already literate person from joining the program, giving the test and claiming 100$? If you cant, the cost immediately goes up by 600 mln x 100$ = another 60b$.

Then again, how do we stop a person who has already passed the test from giving it once again by ‘faking’ illiteracy?? Its not as if India has a uniquely identifiable characteristic for each of its citizens to use as a control mechanism(social security number?). We talked earlier about NDS colluding with ERAI, but what about the people themselves? In such a case, where there is no cost to the test giver, how do you ensure one person-once test?

Infrastructure – once everyone is educated, there is no market for the NDSs. So where does all the capital investment go? If the NDSs invest in schools / furniture / halls / ICT equipment etc., there is going to be no use/return after as you say optimistically, 3 years. So why invest in the first place? To keep costs down, in all likelihood, the NDSs wont invest – dont you think the quality of the education would suffer in that case?

I got a bit interested in the numbers you were throwing around, so did a bit of Googling and number crunching – 1951: 361 mln population with 18.3% literacy; 2001: 1027 mln with 65.4% literacy. Meaning an addition of about 605 mln literate people in 50 yrs by our govt, at 150b$ cost if your estimate is right. And you are proposing 60b$ for 300 mln people – that isnt too far off cost wise.

About your ‘contrived’ numerical example(in part 5), it is just that – contrived. I think anyone with a decent education will profess to the private benefits of education themselves being far higher than the cost of education, keep aside social benefits. What is required is not society bearing part of the costs, but getting this message across to to everyone. Then the rational analysis bit will take over.

Also, I’d like to know how you came up with the 3 year time frame? 3 ppl made literate every second? Hmmm….