India Rising: Tales from a Changing Nation (30 page)

Ashish is one of five Teach for India participants in the school. Relations between them and the mainstream staff are, it would appear, a touch tense. With a base stipend of fifteen thousand rupees per month, the programme affiliates earn more money. The salary marks a large drop from their corporate wage. Even so, it’s still five times more than a newly qualified teacher might earn. Some resentment is only natural.

More than the money, the young professionals are seen as a threat to the status quo. The majority of teachers have only a minimum level of education themselves. In Ashish’s home state, statistics from a few years back showed that unqualified ‘contract’ staff filled more than half (fifty-three per cent) of teaching posts. The reason the pupils’ English is so bad, Ashish contends, is because the teachers’ own command of the language is so poor. He cites a note that the principal sent to parents about sending
snacks for break time. Instead of ‘snacks’, however, she’d written ‘snakes’.

The same is often true for mathematics. Government inspectors recently undertook a spot-check of teachers across the state of Maharashtra. They were tested on their seven times table. A sizeable minority failed. The results sparked outrage among parents’ groups. Less predictably, the teachers’ unions were equally incensed, claiming that the tests had been unfair. Their members had not been forewarned.

As part of the Teach for India programme, volunteers are required to undertake extra-curricular initiatives. Ashish has set up a series of training workshops in curriculum development. Using project-planning skills learned at Infosys, the idea is to instruct teachers in putting together a creative twelve-month syllabus plan. The course has attracted one hundred and twenty participants from fifty-five schools. Only now it wasn’t running any more. The municipal official responsible changed posts. His replacement thought the initiative ‘inappropriate’ because Ashish was unqualified. He pulled the plug. Another case of Old India obstructing the New.

As Ashish had warned, the principal proves frosty. She grants me the shortest of audiences, most of which is occupied with questions about my identity and reasons for being there. ‘Who are you?’ ‘What are you doing?’ It’s like being back in the class again, only distinctly more hostile. Ashish is given a dressing down for not obtaining proper permission for my visit. (‘If I’d asked,’ he says afterwards, ‘she’d just have said “no”.’) As for the Teach for India recruits, she eventually concedes that they are ‘doing okay’ although they have much to learn. She re-emphasises that the young volunteers are ‘not qualified teachers’ and, by inference, substandard. Her points made, I am duly excused.

Ashish and I have lunch at a mid-range hotel in the centre of town. The menu is orientated towards an international palate. Slowed-down, elevator versions of popular Hindi soundtracks drift across the almost empty restaurant. The air-conditioners are set several degrees too low. The lighting is, by a similar measure,
too bright. The waiter, meanwhile, is ever-present and then nowhere to be seen. Everything feels slightly out of sync, yet oddly familiar, as if the hotel owners had visited an Indian restaurant in small-town England and tried to import the export back home.

I ask Ashish how he heard about the Teach for India position. He’d seen an advertisement in the newspaper, he says. Had he thought about being a teacher in the past? He almost chokes. ‘No, never.’ Teaching, he’d been brought up to believe, was a profession you did when ‘you were unsuccessful in every other career’. If you failed your exams or couldn’t find employment elsewhere, then you became a teacher. It was a job of last resort. ‘We used to think of it as a noble profession and all,’ he admits. ‘But from a career point of view, it wasn’t even on the list.’

Teachers have not always been so poorly viewed in India. By tradition, education is a Brahmin profession. Students of his parents’ generation studied under highly educated teachers, Ashish points out. Back then, the school principal would occupy a similar rank in society to, say, the commissioner of police. ‘The day that teaching as a profession gets that kind of respect, it’ll be the day that India really starts changing.’ The drop in standards is partly the result of expanding educational opportunities. Fifty years ago, when Ashish’s parents were studying, there were far fewer schools. The teaching pool was therefore smaller and more selective. That worked well for those who got an education. Many, however, went without.

Ashish feels that the main reason for the fall in teaching standards lies elsewhere. India’s guiding ethos, he believes, is no longer what it was. He sees the shift among his peers. India is a very commercialised nation right now, he tells me. ‘Our daily routine just concentrates on the profits and losses that we are making.’ With everyone keen to get on and make what they can, traditional concerns for the country’s wider social welfare are diminishing. ‘Out of a thousand,’ Ashish says, referring to those with a college education, ‘hardly one turns up and says they are ready to sacrifice something.’

I wonder if he’s not being overly harsh. India is not without
its charitable pursuits. I’d seen as much in Vijayawada. The notion of sacrifice is an interesting one, though. The idea of giving something up for a greater good is deeply rooted in the Hindu scriptures and Gandhian tradition. Is India’s nascent materialism eating away at such thinking?

I ask Ashish if taking up his voluntary teaching job has been a sacrifice. I presume it has. When he left Infosys, he was earning just shy of forty thousand rupees per month. It was ‘fast money’, he’d told me earlier. With no responsibilities, no worries, he could buy – within reason – whatever he liked. His father had had to wait until he was forty before he could afford his first car. Ashish could persuade the bank to extend him sufficient credit with his first salary cheque.

The question appears to make the young programmer uncomfortable. He even winces ever so slightly. Sacrifice, I surmise, is a subject to be discussed in the generic sense. As with acts of charity, using the first person has the unseemly effect of turning a private virtue into a public boast.

I try another route. You must miss the extra cash? Ashish is visibly happier discussing the matter in monetary terms. ‘Who wouldn’t?’ he responds with a long-suffering smile. He’s learning to live on less again. He actually quite enjoys the forced downsizing, he says. ‘It’s like being a student.’ If he feels any sense of sacrifice, then it’s related to his career path. He enjoyed his job. Signing off software products that would then be released to consumers around the world gave him a buzz.

I thought back to the Infosys training campus that I’d visited in Mysore and the glittering careers that the company promised. Becoming a volunteer teacher – if only temporarily – cast doubt over such a future. When he told his friends that he was leaving, they thought he was mad. Why was he abandoning ‘corporate’ to work for an NGO, they’d ask? ‘It’s a highly unusual decision for someone with a background like mine,’ he admits. I ask what he means. Financially speaking, he clarifies. ‘I mean, my family, we’re not that strong, so it’s a risk.’ But it was a risk with several important mitigating factors, he’d resolved. He’s twenty-seven, so
still young. Plus, he could always go back to Infosys or sell his IT experience elsewhere. ‘So, no, it’s not been a big sacrifice in that respect.’

Eventually, the waiter reappears. He is carrying our food. We’re both hungry and tuck in ravenously. Several minutes pass in silence.

The break in conversation provides Ashish with a moment to reflect. He wants to clarify something. No one forced him to leave his job. It was a step he chose to take himself. In fact, he was already doing some voluntary teaching while he was at Infosys. Every Saturday and Sunday, he ran a small English and maths class in Pune’s Aundh slum. It was originally his girlfriend’s idea. ‘You’re always talking about the country’s problems and society, and all,’ she’d told him. ‘Why don’t you do something about it?’ So he did.

The result was a charity called Prarambh (meaning ‘beginning’). He hired an apartment and taught the lessons from there. By the end, around forty children were coming along regularly. Teach for India, he felt, represented a perfect opportunity to ‘scale up’ what he was already doing. ‘It gave me a scope to utilise my potential completely and create something good out of it.’

Couched though it may be in corporate-speak, it is hard not to admire the sentiment. Especially given how Ashish delivers it, free from self-satisfaction or sanctimony. From what I can tell, the young programmer simply feels drawn to the classroom. Teaching gives him a personal, tangible sense of the value of education – an activity in which, in terms of its societal repercussions, he clearly believes.

I’d seen a similar blend of personal fulfilment and ideological belief in Daniel and Ritesh, two other volunteers on the Teach for India programme. We’d met a few days previously, on the outdoor terrace of Cafe Coffee Day in the city’s trendy Koregoan Park district. Immediately around the corner lay the shell of the German Bakery, a popular eatery with tourists and the scene of a recent bomb blast. The attack, which left nine dead, was thought to be the work of the dissident Indian Mujahidin. Like the Naxals, the
Islamic terrorist group is unhappy with the direction that India seems to be taking. The Bakery’s charred interior had reminded me of the extent to which the country’s future still hangs in the balance.

As with Ashish, both the young men came across as extremely articulate and evidently well educated. Daniel, a middle-class Catholic from Bengaluru, used to work at the huge IT advisory firm Tata Consultancy Services, designing software solutions for the digital TV station Tata Sky. Ritesh, on the other hand, is on leave from his job designing power plants with a Dutch engineering company. Both studied engineering.

Each had had their own reasons for trading in their careers to teach. In Daniel’s case, the decision was prompted by a desire to escape the rat race. Seeing the advertisement in the newspaper, it had got him thinking: did he really want to be designing software solutions for digital TV when he was forty? He didn’t.

Ritesh’s motives were more idealistic. Like Ashish, he enjoyed his job. Brought up in a tribal region of the mountainous eastern state of Jharkhand, it had cost him a lot to ‘get this’. He’d pointed round at the mall where we’d been sitting as though the brand-name stores represented a physical emblem of his change in station. His parents, both primary-school teachers, had scrimped and saved for him to have private English lessons. He was one of the few from his home town to score a lucrative corporate job. It was precisely these struggles and his sense of good fortune that made him, as he’d put it, ‘realise my responsibility to society’. Again, the words are spoken without self-regard.

As I listen to Ashish in the restaurant, what comes back to me from that earlier conversation with his fellow affilitates is the strategic vision with which they view education. For Daniel’s part, he wanted to see a more unified ‘citizen culture’. Such a prospect, the young Catholic believed, remained impossible as long as caste and religion pushed Indians into separate camps. Only education could broaden minds. Like Ashish, he was a firm believer in the ‘exposure’ method of teaching.

Ritesh’s hopes had been even more ambitious. India, he’d felt,
had the opportunity to grow into a superpower. The country must believe that, he’d said, as if losing faith would cause the dream to slip away. Yet India had a long way to go. He spoke passionately about his home town, which lacked a rail network or proper road system. ‘People are under the illusion that things are good, but look at rural India. If anything, it is falling further behind.’

It was a claim I’d heard up and down the country. Ritesh’s benchmark, like that of many others, was China. Huge investment in public education had much to do with the meteoric rise of India’s eastern neighbour, he felt. Meanwhile, policy-makers in Delhi are busy drawing up twenty-year plans for the country’s development. If education standards aren’t tackled, Ritesh believed, then such plans would come to naught. India, he’d concluded like a good engineer, needs solutions. ‘If we don’t come up with them, who will?’

Daniel had decided to carry on in teaching. Ritesh would probably head back to his power-plant job, for now at least. I ask Ashish about his future plans.

‘I’m not sure if I’ll go back,’ he admits secretively, as though fearful his employers might somehow get wind of his possible defection.

The revelation surprises me. Taking time out from work is one thing. Leaving for good is quite another. Daniel’s family had the financial wherewithal to support him if necessary. Ashish’s didn’t.

His future, for the moment, is fluid. He’s asked Teach for India if he can continue with his placement. He could work part-time for them to help make ends meet, he hoped. It looks unlikely that the charity will agree. His father, meanwhile, is putting pressure on him to come home. If his son is to carry on with teaching, he’d like to see him properly qualified. He’d then be in a position to take up a job in the local school. Ashish can’t decide. It sounds as if his corporate days are numbered, though. If not education, then he’s thinking of a switch to the voluntary sector.

The waiter returns and we ask for the bill. As we wait, the socially minded programmer tells me about another idea he’s toying with.

‘It’s called AwakIND,’ he says, his expression brightening. ‘It’s the world’s first socio-political forum.’ He lays out the concept, which revolves around the creation of an online platform for all ‘stakeholders of society’ – everyone from common citizens and civil-society representatives to local leaders and government agencies. The idea is to enable everyday Indians to engage with their leaders.

‘Take me,’ he says, pointing to himself as an illustrative example. ‘I might never get the opportunity to speak to my local Member of Parliament. This platform will allow me to do that.’ He hopes such interaction will enable everyday Indians to voice their concerns and obtain resolutions to them. He’s already rolled out the idea on Facebook, he says. He and a programmer friend have put together a Beta site as well. They have almost six thousand preliminary users so far. He passes on the web address so I can look it up when the website goes public. ‘www-dot-awakIND-dot-com,’ he spells out. ‘Awaken India, you see?’