Amnesty by another name

The Income Declaration Scheme has garnered only a minuscule amount of black money. The big fish have got away.

The Income Declaration Scheme (IDS) announced in the 2016-17 budget closed on September 30, after remaining open since June 1. The finance ministry has announced that 64,275 people have come forward to declare Rs 65,250 crore of black money. This is the largest amount declared as black money in the history of Indian taxation. Naturally, the government claims this to be a big achievement, more so since the response in the first three months was tepid.

The average amount of black income per declaration is about Rs one crore. This is indeed low when there is daily news about people being caught with hundreds of crores of rupees of black incomes. It is likely that either the big earners of black incomes have not come forward or declared a negligible part of their black money. It is reported that the income tax officers pressurised people under their charge to make declarations in the last three weeks. So, either they coerced the small fries, or the big fellows declared a miniscule amount. Also, many of the black income earners do not pay any tax. So they do not come under any income tax circle and, therefore, would not have been under any pressure.

The last disclosure scheme was announced in 1997 — the Voluntary Disclosure of Income Scheme. Under it Rs 33,000 crore was declared and tax of about Rs 10,000 crore was collected. The 2016 scheme is also a “voluntary” programme, even though it is not called that. The 1997 scheme was called an amnesty scheme because of the low tax that had to be paid. But this time, it is not referred to as an amnesty because a higher rate of tax is being charged. The government had also given an undertaking to the Supreme Court in 1997 that it would not initiate any more amnesty schemes. The reason being that an amnesty scheme is unfair to the honest tax payers while those evading taxation get a concession for declaring their past income.

But the IDS is also an amnesty scheme because the penalty charged under it is less than what was being charged for tax evasion before the scheme was launched. Before June 2016, if a person’s income was found to be black, the penalty was 100 per cent to 300 per cent of the tax evaded. Since the tax rate is 30 per cent, the penalty worked out to 30 per cent to 90 per cent of the income evaded; under the IDS, the penalty is 15 per cent of the income. In this sense, the IDS runs counter to the government’s commitment to the Supreme Court in 1997.The comparison of the 1997 and the 2016 schemes does not show the latter in a favourable light. This author estimates the current size of the black economy at 60 per cent of the GDP; at current prices, it would be Rs 90 lakh crore in 2016-17. Thus, what has been declared is roughly 0.7 per cent of the black income generated this year. The declarations under the 1997 scheme was roughly five per cent of the black income generated that year.From the black incomes generated every year, a part is consumed and the rest saved. Over time, the accumulated savings become much larger than the annual income. For the rich, the savings from incomes are high, so the black wealth accumulated is much larger than their annual black incomes. Data suggests that only a small part of these black savings are declared under the amnesty/declaration schemes. Thus, barely 0.2-0.3 per cent of the black wealth has been declared in the 2016 scheme. The number of declarations in 1997 was over four lakh; now, surprisingly, it is a sixth of this number. The number of businesses, professionals, corrupt officials and politicians has risen over time. So, the number of people with substantial black incomes and wealth should have been several times the number in 1997. Even if it is assumed that the top one per cent of the population generates substantial black incomes, the numbers should have been close to 13 million.

The government has announced that it would not reveal any of the data collected through the scheme to any agency; not even the CAG. This is strange since CAG is a statutory body with powers to audit the accounts of the government. It is the CAG that pointed to the various infirmities in the 1997 scheme. Giving data to the CAG does not violate any confidentiality.

It needs to be assessed whether those declaring their black incomes are doing so correctly. They could be misdeclaring their recently purchased gold as that bought 20 years ago at one tenth the cost and thereby turning 90 per cent of their black wealth into white. Only an assessment by an independent auditor will help unearth such manipulations.

There can be several reasons why the IDS has garnered much less than it should have. If “round tripping” can be done at five per cent to 10 per cent of the amount of the funds, why pay 45 per cent under the IDS? Further, if the government, promises not to resort to vigorous pursuit of businessmen — under “ease of doing business” — they may be under no pressure to come clean. A person who has hoarded black wealth can only be caught in a raid; such a person will not declare black wealth voluntarily unless there is a cost to not declaring. The “success” of the IDS scheme in the last three weeks also suggests that if the income tax department applies pressure, black money can be unearthed. The government seems to be trapped between unearthing black money and not applying pressure on businesses. Why this dilemma?

The writer is a retired professor of economics and author of ‘Indian Economy since Independence: Persisting Colonial Disruption’

Source: Indian Express, 8-10-2016

Before he became Mahatma

Coming to terms with Gandhi’s South African phase is a challenge for both his supporters and his critics

Gandhi scholars generally see his political work in South Africa (1893-1914) as but a prelude to the remarkable role he played in reshaping the politics of the Indian freedom struggle. In recent years, however, a flurry of writings on Gandhi, some authored by known South African scholars, has catapulted to the centre stage ofGandhiana his ‘racist’ attitude towards Africans and Coloured people, exclusion of this segment from the political struggles that he organised, his failure to form political alliances with all oppressed people, his sexual preferences, and his imperial patriotism. How do we begin to reconcile these insights with the widely held belief in India and abroad that Gandhi is a Mahatma?

A telling contradiction

We can follow different paths to address this contradiction in Gandhi’s thought. We can, for instance, shrug off the problem by quoting the poet Walt Whitman: “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself, I am vast, I contain multitudes.” Gandhi certainly contained multitudes, he held odd views on social relations, his defence of the caste system is unjustifiable, and he was eccentric to a fault. But he also had an extraordinary gift for understanding the political significance of the moment, and grasping it. He lived a life of contradictions, as we all do.

Neera Chandhoke

Alternatively, armed with numerous cups of tea as Munna Bhai did in the marvellous film Lage Raho Munna Bhai, we burrow into dusty volumes of his letters and writings, acknowledge he was wrong at that moment of his life, and cite him to establish self-correction in his later life. The project is tiresome but doable. Thereby we follow the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, who in the 1960s pointed out an ‘epistemological break’ in Marx’s thought, and distinguished between the ‘young’ and the ‘mature’ Marx. We can accordingly speak of a ‘young’ and a ‘mature’ Gandhi.

Or we can focus on the historical context of his remarks. The Cambridge historian Quentin Skinner suggests that before we judge words spoken in the past, we must know what they signified then. In the work The Prince (1513), the Florentine philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli advises the ruler of Florence, Lorenzo de' Medici, thus. A prince, he said, must know when not to be virtuous. For these words, Machiavelli has been slammed throughout history as the teacher of evil, and as immoral for separating, as he did, ethics and politics. Prof. Skinner asks us to consider what virtue meant in 16th century Florence. At that time virtue signified either a life devoted to reflection in the Platonic sense, or a life lived in accordance with the tenets of Christian morality. Lorenzo de' Medici, destined in Machiavelli’s view to unite a fragmented and conquered Italy, needed a different set of virtues. He had to possess pagan virtues of honour, valour, and courage. Virtue held different implications in the public sphere compared to the private sphere. Consider the time Gandhi lived in settler-dominated South Africa. Dominant linguistic conventions sanctioned the use of derogatory terms for non-whites. Indians, for instance, were called coolies. Gandhi erred because he did not question a practice that violated his own understanding of what human beings are due.

Does it really matter if Gandhi statues and photographs are removed, if M.G. roads are renamed, or if our present government tries to depoliticise a politically subversive leader by designating October 2 as Swachh Bharat? Gandhi, who wielded the broom with some dexterity, would not have minded. As Munna Bhai’s inner-self manifested as Gandhi’s apparition instructs him, do all this, just keep my teachings in your heart.

At this time in Africa

But there was a time when African freedom movements drew upon Gandhi; today, nationalist Africans attack him. Therefore, none of the paths suggested above might help us to reconcile the contradiction in Gandhi’s ideas or mollify our African friends. Witness the extent of anger. In June 2016 a Gandhi statue was installed in the University of Ghana during the visit of President Pranab Mukherjee. Soon thereafter a number of academics, students, and artists demanded the removal of the statue. Last year an online campaign ‘#Ghandimustfall hashtag’ gained traction, even as his statue in Johannesburg was vandalised in April during a rally against ‘Gandhi the racist’.

This anger is understandable. There was a time when Indian leaders were committed to solidarity with other postcolonial countries. Today as Indian industrialists/entrepreneurs compete with China to appropriate land and resources in Sub-Saharan Africa, we see the rise of resentment against the new colonisers. Therefore, Gandhi, who inspired Nelson Mandela, Julius Nyerere, and Kwame Nkrumah, is now unacceptable to many Africans. The exploitation of vulnerable countries by India, an emerging power, has bred a rather bitter harvest.

We can ask why something said or done a hundred years ago still has the power to evoke offence. Arguably, a reinvented nationalism that has swept the world as ‘hatred of the other’ revisits the past to identify those who belong, and those who do not. In parts of Africa, Gandhi is clearly perceived as someone who came in from the outside, and began to mobilise an otherwise disparate community of Indians: indentured labour, Memon and Bohra merchants locally called Arabs, and other Indians against discriminatory laws. He was indifferent to the plight of African and coloured people.

But that was not his project. Gandhi entered South Africa as an inexperienced and brief-less lawyer to assist a case involving two prominent Memon traders. At that time of his life, a 24-year-old Gandhi believed that the British Empire would ensure the freedom of its subjects in an oppressive settler colony. He supported the British in the Boer war (1899-1902), and raised a unit of stretcher bearers to accompany troops to the front. He expected the British to reciprocate by protecting Indians. His hope was belied, and Gandhi the imperial patriot was transformed into Gandhi the leader who touched the hearts and minds of millions. He learnt the grammar of anti-colonial nationalism in exile, and amidst oppression, much as Irish immigrants became Fenians on American soil.

His idea of India was expansive and included all Indians wherever they may work; the fulcrum remained a territorial entity called India. In a farewell address he gave to a Gujarati audience on July 9, 1914, he said: “For me there can be no deliverance from this earthly life except in India. Anyone who seeks such deliverance must go to the sacred soil of India. For me, as for everyone else, the land of India is ‘the refuge of the afflicted.’” His project simply did not include Africans and coloured people, even though they were oppressed.

The task Nehru took up

Gandhi failed to grasp the importance of an alliance between oppressed groups. That task was taken on by his heir Jawaharlal Nehru. Nehru learnt the virtue of solidarity by participating in the ‘Congress of Oppressed Nationalities’ in Brussels in February 1927. The 1927 congress was the precursor of the Bandung Conference in 1955. In The Color Curtain, Richard Wright wrote of the 1955 Conference, which excluded the West, thus. “Only brown, black and yellow men who had long been made agonizingly self-conscious, under the rigors of colonial rule, of their race and their religion could have felt the need for such a meeting. There was something extra-political, extra-social, almost extra human about it, it smacked of tidal waves, of natural forces... And the call for the meeting had not been sounded in term of ideology. The agenda and the subject matter had been written for centuries in the blood and bones of the participants.”

Gandhi would have approved, because in his later life he came to believe that the ‘other’ is a part of ‘us’. By then African sensibilities had been wounded. Gandhi has to be faulted for this lack of understanding. Perhaps it is time for Gandhians to apologise to South Africans and atone for the ‘sins of their fathers’.

Neera Chandhoke is a former Professor of Political Science, Delhi University.

Keywords: Mahatma Gandhi, South Africa, Jawaharlal Nehru

Source: The Hindu, 8-10-2016

HIV Bill: Discrimination ends, time to promote awareness

Removing discrimination against those living with HIV/AIDS is an exceedingly slow and painful process. In many cases, the best hope the affected have is the law. So the amendments to a Bill cleared by the cabinet on HIV prevention and control that make discrimination in employment against those with HIV/AIDS punishable with two years in jail and a fine of Rs 1 lakh come as a positive step. The amendments also bar unfair treatment in educational institutions, healthcare, residing or renting property and standing for office.

The person affected also need not reveal his status unless required by the court. Confidentiality by employers will help the affected person’s chances at the workplace as it is here that he can be discriminated against the most in a manner which affects his livelihood. Remember Tom Hanks’ case in the iconic movie Philadelphia. At least Hanks was able to battle his case in court and win but here the affected are rarely able to do so for fear of further exposure or lack of support and money.

Another enabling provision is that the states are expected to provide anti-retroviral therapy and infection management, facilitate access to welfare schemes and formulate HIV education programmes that are gender-sensitive, age-appropriate and non-stigmatising. This is good news but for many of the 2.1 million people living with HIV/AIDS, it would make much more sense if the systems to deliver all this were in place.

For medical care to be delivered in time, the public health system needs to function properly. This is not the case here. However, at least anyone denied this will now find the law on his side. The extent and depth of the stigma crosses all socio-economic strata. Education does not necessarily mean that attitudes towards the affected will improve. One of the most famous cases of discrimination against children took place in highly educated Kerala, which ranks the highest in awareness about the disease. In 2003, two HIV positive children Bency and Benson came into the news when their grandfather fought to have them admitted to a school. The children had been kicked out of three schools after their status was revealed. It took the intervention of the chief minister and a protracted battle to get them readmitted. The school had pleaded helplessness as other parents objected. There are many cases where the environment turns hostile when a person’s status is revealed. Not everyone will be able to counter this.

It is important that state governments work to create awareness of these changes in the law. It is only when you know your rights that you can benefit from the law. That should be the next endeavour along with putting in place the mechanisms that will make these amendments really work for those with HIV/AIDS.

Source: Hindustan Times, 8-10-2016

Learn as You Celebrate

SITAKANT MAHAPATRA





In my school days, Saraswati Puja was a major festival. At school, we students decorated the idol of Saraswati with flowers; the priest performed puja and we made flower offerings, chanting a hymn in chorus, “Thou who has the whiteness of kunda flowers, the moon and snow, who is seated on a white lotus, draped in white and wielding a veena in thine hands; thou whom Brahma, Achyuta, Shankara and other gods worship in divine prayers; O Saraswati, Bhagwati, we pay obeisance to you.“At the time, I knew nothing of Markandeya Purana's Devi Mahatmyam, Skanda Purana or Madhusudan Stotra wherein the white goddess is described with all her attributes and powers. The Purana elaborates on the manner in which she is to be venerated. The Devi Mahatmyam speaks of her as Mahasaraswati, and describes her beauty in great detail, “She is effulgent like the moon shining at the fringe of a cloud.“
When in deference to entreaties of the gods she is required to kill formidable demons, Shumbha and Nishumbha, she transforms herself into a ferocious goddess with her eight lotus-like hands holding bells, trident, plough, conch, mace, discus, bow and arrow. In the Markandeya Purana, she appears at the final phase of the vanquishing of the brood of demons who troubled the gods.
She is Vagdevi, the goddess of the word that is the foundation of the universe, which creates us, gives us our identity and imparts meaning to our existence.

Studenting Era: One stop service to help students in making better career choices

Digital Learning introduces the first of its kind, a student online services portal,“Studenting Era” (studentingera.com) that will help the students in making better career choices. In an exclusive interaction with Raja Dasgupta, Founder & Chief Executive Officer, Studenting Era Pvt. Ltd told Elets News Network (ENN) that the genesis of creating “Studenting Era” was to provide students with a one stop service portal.
Inspiration & AspirationWe started envisaging a dream to parent the students towards success. This led to a thought where we decided to build a gateway for students so that they have access to diverged opportunities and possibilities. Hence we started dreaming to meet every need of a student from education to career planning, from entrepreneurship orientation to employability, from healthcare to daily utilities, from aspirational hobbies to entertainment. This gave the antecedence to “Studenting Era”.   

While we will continue to strengthen these service verticals, our market research & development team are constantly exploring emerging trends and service areas, so that we can offer today’s trend-oriented students with the emerging opportunities & services much before they become fashionable.   

We are very confident to create this ecosystem where studenting becomes a part of our process and  help us to adapt to a pedagogy where learning, reading, researching, exploring and digitizing harmonizes to our daily life.

The mission of “Studenting Era” is to create an environment, which will enable students to get access to information, services and opportunities that will enable them to enhance their career goals and objectives. The website is developed in a way to regularly evolve with the most diverged services which are relevant and aspirational for students, thus parenting them to success.

To avail various career related services such as Career Counselling and Profiling, Global Collaborative Learning, Entrepreneurship Development and Mentorship etc, students need to register @ www.studentingera.com, which will help them with a host of opportunities and possibilities through an annual membership.

A) After registration, students will instantly get gratified with Seventeen free certified trainings, One retail voucher and One medical consultation.

• Online Global Certificate course on Confidence Series, Meeting Etiquette, Interview Skills, Stress Management, Corporate Etiquette, Non Verbal Communication, Art of Speaking
• Online course on CAT, SBI PO, Employability Quotient Test
• Online Certificate course on Ethical Hacking, Programming on C+, Phython, Big Data
• Refresher Program on Quantitative Aptitude, C Programming, SQL Programming
• One free Online Doctor Consultation
• Value Retail Voucher from Togofogo.com

B) Registered students will also be entitled for an annual membership to Studenting Era and be able to avail of the following services:

Career Counselling and Profiling Services – Under these services, students will be able to search mentors, who could understand their strengths, analyze the market trends and create a roadmap to enhance his/her career in this age of diverged opportunities. Studenting Era creates this platform to extend the opportunities for career guidance and profile creation through some progressive organizations and consultants, thus ensuring students’ success.

Global Collaborative Learning – Collaboration is the way to go forward and is the only way to grow. Every student has been exercising this aspect in their learning, while preparing for examinations, working on the laboratory or doing projects. “Studenting Era” has already adapted  this successful methodology by bringing in Learning opportunities on IT, Soft Skills and domain skills through the leading Universities and Institutions across the globe. Another very important feature of this vertical is ‘Sharing’, seniors of same course and pass-out or toppers will be encouraged to share their class notes with the entire student fraternity and help them gain in their journey of studentship, thus remaining a “hero” as always.

Entrepreneurship Development Program – As we move forward towards a progressive economy, there is a need for vigorous innovation and out-of- the-box thinking. The world requires transformational business along with influx of first generation entrepreneurs. Under this program of the website, students will be encouraged to aspire to be leaders of businesses. This program will take the students through a three phases of learning cycle. The students will be exposed to state-of- the-art online training, followed by online mentorship through eminent thought leaders and finally get introduced to the incubation process.

Project and Employability Program – This is a very crucial part of studentship. Under this program, the website aims to provide a new age online project evaluation guidance. Under this, a platform will also be created for students enterprises to collaborate for employment and internship.

Student Lifestyle Value Additions – Studenting is a part of everyone’s life and Studenting Era will try to provide all kinds of support and services which are essential for students. This section is initiated with the services such as online doctor support, tele-medicine and student loans.

Digital Student Portals: Unique feature for you to consider it.Access Anywhere AnytimeOnline Human – to – Human CollaborationDigital Archives of Academic Material and Student DataOnline Communities of counsellors, educators, learners and students

Digital Student Portals and Digital Learning is different – better – and is far more beneficial than what we as students are used to.

Source: Digital Learning, 17-09-2016

Ourview A boost to fundamental rights

Courts are finally protecting individual liberty in prohibition and beef ban cases

The politics of alcohol consumption and cow slaughter have, of late, run roughshod over issues of constitutional law and philosophy. The Patna high court’s recent judgement on prohibition in Bihar—especially when read together with the Bombay high court’s earlier beef ban verdict—is a necessary redressal of the balance. These judgements are a nuanced look at how the relationship between the republic and the citizen is being renegotiated within the constitutional framework. The fundamental question at the heart of both cases is this: Do Indian citizens have the right to drink and eat what they want?

Justice Navaniti Prasad Singh, in penning the main argument in the Bihar prohibition judgement, answers in the affirmative. He writes: “Similarly, with expanding interpretation of the right to privacy, as contained in Article 21 of the Constitution, a citizen has a right to choose how he lives, so long as he is not a nuisance to the society. State cannot dictate what he will eat and what he will drink.” This is a landmark observation since never before have the courts viewed prohibition through the lens of personal liberty. Previous judgements on the issue, almost always upholding prohibition, have viewed it through the right to livelihood lens and found that the limitations on the production and sale of alcohol were reasonable restrictions imposed by the state. This time, however, the personal liberty aspect was specifically raised by the petitioners who included not just alcohol traders but also individuals asserting their right to drink reasonable quantities of alcohol in the confines of their home.

A similar line of thinking is seen in the Bombay high court’s beef ban verdict. In striking down section 5 (d) of the Maharashtra Animal Preservation (Amendment) Act which criminalized the possession of the flesh of cattle slaughtered outside Maharashtra (such slaughter is banned within the state), the court opines: “As far as the choice of eating food of the citizens is concerned, the citizens are required to be let alone especially when the food of their choice if not injurious to health…. The state cannot make an intrusion into his home and prevent a citizen from possessing and eating food of his choice…. This intrusion...is prohibited by the right to privacy which is part of personal liberty guaranteed by Article 21.”

These are hugely progressive steps in the evolving discourse on personal liberty but they aren’t without their challenges. The directive principles of state policy (DPSP) urge the state to prohibit the consumption of intoxicating substances that are injurious to health (though this is not a call for a blanket ban because drinking in moderate sums is, arguably, not injurious to health—a point that is made in the Bihar verdict)—and the slaughter of cows and calves and other milch and draught cattle. What happens when the state seeks to realize these goals but also steps on the citizens’ fundamental rights? This issue has been debated at length by the courts, and the ground rule now is that while the two need to be viewed harmoniously, in case of conflict, fundamental rights cannot be sacrificed in the pursuit of DPSP.

Notably, in the prohibition verdict, even though the two-judge bench agreed that the alcohol ban did not stand up to legal scrutiny on other grounds, there was disagreement on this specific issue of fundamental rights versus DPSP. The chief justice of the Patna high court argued that the framers of our Constitution did not see alcohol consumption as a fundamental right because then they wouldn’t have listed prohibition as a DPSP. This is a convoluted line of reasoning which, as Justice Singh rightly points out, erodes fundamental rights to secure a DPSP—thereby militating against the principles set out famously in the Minerva Mills case.

Similarly, in the beef ban verdict, while the court struck down section 5 (d) for violating the fundamental right to privacy, it upheld the other sub-sections, 5 (a) to 5 (c), even though they too could have been brought under the same umbrella. For example, enforcing section 5 (c) which criminalizes the possession of flesh of cattle illegally slaughtered in Maharashtra requires the same intrusion of privacy that the court objects to for Section 5 (d).

That said, it is important to keep in mind that in deciding the beef ban case, the Bombay high court had to take into consideration several Supreme Court judgements that had previously upheld complete beef bans. These judgements had rejected arguments based on freedom of religion and freedom of trade because cattle preservation was considered to be in the public interest in an agrarian economy. But evidence points to a ban on cattle slaughter being the wrong way to protect that public interest.

It is also worth wondering if the courts’ zealous attitude towards cow slaughter will change as India becomes an industrialized economy. The issue of laws evolving to reflect changing social mores is touched upon in the prohibition verdict where Justice Singh writes, “We have to view this concept (of personal liberty) in changing times, where international barriers are vanishing.” He goes on to talk about Indian citizens who enjoy their drink being reluctant to move to a dry state, thereby restricting their right to move and settle anywhere in the country. This might be pushing the argument too far but nonetheless offers a progressive push to both law and society.

Source: Mintepaper, 6-10-2016

Indian languages face threat of fossilisation, need revitalisation

India has now been a free country for 70-odd years. Over these decades, we have made progress in many spheres of activity but there is one area where things seem to be sharply deteriorating — the state of Indian languages. I am not merely referring to the 220-odd minor languages and dialects than we have lost since the 1960s but the condition of major languages with tens of millions of speakers. This is hardly the first time someone has raised this issue, but the usual thinking is that Indian languages are being hurt by mutual suspicion combined with the apathy of an English-speaking elite. However, there may now be an even bigger threat — fossilisation.

Harivansh Rai Bachchan is one of the most important figures in Hindi literature but his great grand-children are almost certainly more comfortable in English than in Hindi. This is neither a unique situation nor can it be blamed solely on lingering colonial attitudes in elite schools. Across the country, this is being experienced by rooted families who are proud of their linguistic heritage.

The professional usefulness of English too is not a credible explanation. Indians have long been comfortable with a link language that was different from what they used in daily life. Over the centuries, Sanskrit, Persian and English were used for government, commerce, legal documents, high culture and so on. Far from displacing local languages, they enriched them with new words, ideas and themes. This is why the greatest writers and poets in most Indian languages were themselves multilingual and happily borrowed from the link languages.

In my view, the current crisis in Indian languages comes from a set of interlinked factors that are holding them back from evolving with the times. The first problem is that school textbooks are hopelessly outdated. I have personally verified this for Bengali and Hindi, but also asked parents of children learning other languages.

In lower grades, textbooks will have a smattering of folktales, stories from the Panchatantra and the epics, the lives of folk-heroes and so on. These are acceptable as they are timeless; analogous to nursery rhymes and fairy tales in English. However, the rest of the material seems stuck somewhere between the 1930s and 1970s. A survey of the technology reflected in the stories is quite telling. Forget mobile phones and laptops, you will rarely find television sets and aircraft. It is still a world of steam engines and animal husbandry.

Matters do not improve in higher grades — a great deal of preaching about “good habits” and the need to help the poor. These may be worthy goals but why do Indian language classes need to be specifically burdened with them? There is simply no sense of fun in the material. This is no way to promote a language in a country where the young, including the poor, are so aspirational. Munshi Premchand’s Idgah may be a great story but, at the risk of offending his fans, it may no longer resonate with most school children.

The second major problem with Indian languages is that the output of innovative new literature has slowed drastically. Allowing for the odd exception, publishing is increasingly limited to literary novels aimed at winning government awards rather than engaging readers. Once there was a flourishing culture of writing science fiction, detective novels and travelogues in languages like Bengali but these have slowed to a trickle.

Less than a decade ago, pretentious literary writing was strangling Indian English publishing till the arrival of Chetan Bhagat, Amish Tripathi and Devdutt Patnaik. Whatever one thinks of their writing styles, there is no denying that they opened up the field. A similar revolution in popular writing needs to happen in other languages. The steadily improving editorial quality of Indian language newspapers shows that there is demand for good writing.

The third related problem is a dearth of translations into Indian languages. A Tamil or Marathi writer will be pleased that his/her novel has been translated into a foreign language. While this may be good for the personal reputation of the writer, it does little for Tamil or Marathi. A language is a medium for transmitting ideas and its repertoire grows as it absorbs material from elsewhere. The success of English lies in the fact that we can read Homer and Kapuscinski without having to learn ancient Greek or Polish. Therefore, inward translation is more important than outward translation. For several languages, translation is an area where government support may be critical to creating a minimum ecosystem of material.

Popular culture depicted in cinema and television are today the most important factors that have kept Indian languages alive. However, these will not be enough in the long run if they do not keep evolving by generating and absorbing new material that fires the imagination of successive generations.

Source: Hindustan Times, 6-10-2016