In the week that we finally passed a law making primary education compulsory, it would be churlish of me to write only bad things about the abysmal state of Indian education. So good things first. Kapil Sibal has already proved to be the best Minister for Human Resource Development that we have had in decades. He is educated, energetic, modern and appears to be aware of the magnitude of the task before him. More than can be said of his predecessor who did not understand even the basics of education. I remember a press conference in the ‘90s when Arjun Singh was HRD Minister in P.V. Narasimha Rao’s government and an American reporter asked him why India did not make primary education compulsory. His answer was, ‘It is compulsory.’ When the reporter asked up to which class it was compulsory, Arjun Singh was flummoxed. He had no idea what compulsory primary education was.

Some days after this press conference I was invited to an official lunch that Dr Manmohan Singh, then finance minister, was giving for some visiting dignitary. I managed a few moments alone with the minister and brought up the subject of making primary education compulsory. I pointed out that it was compulsory across South East Asia and literacy rates in those countries were now in the eighties and nineties. At Independence these countries were all as illiterate as India. Surely compulsory primary education was what made the difference? Before the minister could answer, an evil bureaucrat who lurked behind him said with absolute certainty and a smug sneer, ‘Don’t you know that India is a democracy? It cannot be compulsory here.’

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