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.

... contd.