And, there is not much else going on. Bharat Nirman remains an abstract idea, as does the wondrous plan to renew India’s cities. They go from bad to worse although we hear much about the Jawaharlal Nehru Urban Renewal Mission. Poverty remains unalleviated despite grandiose pronouncements and huge expenditure. As someone who believes that people can usually alleviate their own poverty when given the the opportunity, it is my view that this government’s most conspicuous failures are in the areas of healthcare and education.

Abysmal public healthcare is something the poorest of our citizens have learned to live with which is why more than eighty per cent of our population uses private doctors, quacks and alternative medicine when in need. Not much can happen to rectify this shameful situation in the next eighteen months but remarkable change can happen very quickly in the area of education.

This is why what Rahul Gandhi reportedly said at a recent parliamentary committee meeting is most interesting and very important. This newspaper reported that he said he was in favour of private investment in education and was shouted down by Brinda Karat who went to the same school as I did.

This was not just a private school but in its time, and probably still, one of the most elitist girls schools in India. Ah, but that is what is so endearing about the Left, if you can see their funny side, they make an honest distinction between the party and the proletariat. For Stalin, Mao and their favourites — residential accommodation in the Kremlin and the Forbidden City. For the masses — hovels on the bad side of town.

So, our champagne communists shout poor Rahul down when he makes a most important suggestion. Well, it’s time for the prime minister to take his Marxist allies on and tell them to shut up and concentrate their energy on improving the dreadful state of education and healthcare in communist Bengal.

India could be transformed in the next eighteen months simply by allowing private investment in education. A million schools and colleges will bloom and a million will be too little for a country that has the largest young population in the world. Nearly half of India is under the age of 25. If decent schools and colleges remain unavailable then we are colonising our own people by keeping them illiterate so they can never be anything more than cheap labour for the developed countries of the world. If we solve our education problems, we make the 21st century our very own, as the prime minister in more romantic moments has predicted.

Neither Manmohan Singh’s government nor our state governments have the financial resources to build educational institutions of excellence. Private investment is the solution and if it has been controlled so far it is because our political class likes to hang on to its powers of patronage and because they like to portray private colleges and schools as something that only benefits the rich.

The truth is rich Indians can afford to send their children to schools and colleges anywhere in the world and because of the dearth in our own country even middle-class Indians scrape together what they can to send their children to foreign universities. The only people who suffer are the poorest of the poor.

There are too few schools and colleges in India because the infamous license-quota-permit raj is still thriving. It can be abolished as it was for industry but no prime minister has shown the political will to do this. If Manmohan Singh pushes for change, chief ministers will line up to copy his example. And, his government will be remembered for more than doing its best to cling to silly old ideas like quotas and permits at a time when the Indian economy is booming. They put restrictions, we are told, because they want growth to be “inclusive”, more available to our needier citizens. What can be more inclusive than allowing a million schools and colleges to bloom? If Rahul Gandhi succeeds in pushing his idea through, he deserves to be prime minister and I say that, I with my known aversion to baba log in politics.