Opinion A tutorial for Rahul baba

The subject of this week’s column is Rahul Gandhi because I have been overwhelmed by the articles and TV programmes in recent days that have hailed Rahul Gandhi as India’s saviour. He was compared to Barack Obama as India’s ‘yes we can’ man,praised for breaking the ‘bonds of dynasty’ to bring democratic practices to the Congress Party and eulogised as the harbinger of an Indian ‘renaissance’. Such tributes cannot be ignored so I set about doing some research. I spent hours trawling the web and delving into archives for old speeches. At the end of this exercise I concluded that Rahul had indeed said some things of importance to the Congress party but almost nothing of importance to India.

As someone who believes that poverty is our biggest,ugliest problem and that the tools to defeat it lie in a massive restructuring of public education and healthcare,I searched for Rahul’s thoughts on these subjects. I came up with nothing. Not even when he made his speeches to University students did he say anything that indicated that he had understood the enormity of the problem leave alone be in a position to offer us new ideas. This is disquieting in a man who wants to change India by using young people as his main resource. It is worth pointing out that although more than half our population is under the age of 25,these young people are useful only if they are educated. The average government school in India is so bad that if a child can learn to write more than his name it is something of a miracle. Learning to read and count is too much to hope for.

If state schools and colleges have gone from very bad to very much worse,the situation with healthcare is even more terrifying. According to the Government of India’s own estimates,more than 80 per cent of Indians are forced to use private healthcare because government hospitals and health centres are so bad. In rural India,sickness is the main cause of debt. In poorer families the situation is so appalling that sick girl children are often allowed to die because medical costs are too high. Anyone who hopes to become Prime Minister must think of solutions to these problems.

From Rahulji we have heard a lot of loose talk about ‘empowerment’ without any explanation of what the word means to him. Occasionally he explains that the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS)is his idea of empowering the poor and this is most worrying. The NREGS is a form of dole for the unemployed and unemployable and dole cannot ever bring empowerment.

For the poor to be empowered they need roads,electricity,clean water,schools,hospitals,public transport and real jobs. Not dole. Our future Leader needs to tell us how he plans to make these things available to the poorest of the poor. We cannot let another decade go by just hoping that high economic growth rates will have the desired trickle down effect. There are things that can only come with good governance and there is no sign yet that the future Leader of India has understood this. But,he is young and energetic and he has on his side the one Indian politician who has understood the importance of improved methods of governance. Our Prime Minister. A few tutorials could make a huge difference to our Renaissance man.