Last week, while the Prime Minister and Sonia Gandhi were choosing ministers for the new government, I read a paragraph in The Economist that summed up in a few short sentences the enormity of India’s problems. It said, “About 27 million Indians will be born this year. Unless things improve, almost 2m of them will die before the next general election. Of the children who survive, more than 40 per cent will be physically stunted by malnutrition. Most will enroll in a school, but they cannot count on their teachers showing up. After five years of classes, less than 60 per cent will be able to read a short story and more than 60 per cent will be stumped by simple arithmetic.”

India’s children are India’s future and this future looks very depressing. There is nothing more important than making sure that by the next election something is done to drastically rectify our shameful failures in education, healthcare and nutrition. Our problem is that the Government of India does not concern itself with primary education, nutrition or primary healthcare because these are state subjects. But, surely a nation of half-starved illiterate children is a monumental national problem? Is it not time for some serious rethinking at the highest levels of government? The solutions are simpler than we think.

Last month I visited a Satya Bharati school run by the Bharati Group. It was in a small village in Haryana and as different to any village school I have ever seen. There were proper classrooms with brightly painted walls and in them were teachers actually teaching. There were separate toilets for girls and boys and clean water to drink. At lunch time arrived a delicious midday meal cooked by a woman from the village. The Bharati Foundation runs more than 250 such schools in North India. It all began as a private-public partnership with the Government of Rajasthan. The former chief minister, Vasundhara Raje, asked the group to take over 49 of her schools and run them as best they could and from this came the idea to build such schools in villages that needed them. The children who come to these schools are from the poorest rural families and so tuition is free. Bharati pays its teachers half of what government teachers are paid. They recruit mostly unemployed graduates who are then trained to teach through special teacher training programmes.

... contd.