Delighted though I am that the Supreme Court kicked the government in the butt over educational quotas last week, may I remind you that the issue is not quotas but education? The issue is the abysmal failure of the Indian state on the educational front, not merit or the absence of it.

In the 27 per cent debate started by that old cynic, Arjun Singh, too often have we forgotten this. Too often have we forgotten that what handicaps underprivileged children in India is not their caste but the inability of the state to provide them with decent primary and secondary education, without which they have no chance of getting into IITs, IIMs or institutions of higher learning of any kind.

To emphasise this let me describe for you a school I recently visited in an Uttar Pradesh village less than 50 km from Delhi. It consisted of a collection of rooms built around a barren field. Neither aesthetic nor academic considerations had been kept in mind in its construction, so the general impression was not of a place of learning but of a village godown.

The classrooms had dirt floors, so clouds of dust were a permanent fixture and crude wooden planks served as desks and chairs. How can we begin to discuss so grand an idea as learning in such a place? How can children who are taught in such a school hope to compete with those who have played with computers in the kindergartens of Delhi and Mumbai? And, what has any of this to do with caste?

... contd.