A Feast of Vultures: The Hidden Business of Democracy in India

by Josy Joseph

Every individual in that web has a stake in the perpetuation of the system, and each one of them contributes to denying poor access to instruments of democracy. The courts in the world’s largest democracy are crowded and expensive, the police corrupt and cruel, the powerful television and English-language media far too urban, and the political class busy plotting to grab power.

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Every individual in that web has a stake in the perpetuation of the system, and each one of them contributes to denying poor access to instruments of democracy. The courts in the world’s largest democracy are crowded and expensive, the police corrupt and cruel, the powerful television and English-language media far too urban, and the political class busy plotting to grab power.

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India has become a very rich country of too many poor people.

The majority of those living in India’s 6,38,000 villages find themselves besieged. In most of these villages, agitated citizens are preparing complaints, petitions and court cases to address their corrupt and inefficient governments, and sometimes mounting violent responses in frustration and anger.

In liberalized, market-economy India, the people’s elected representatives forget Mahatma Gandhi’s warning that if the villages perish, India will too.

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‘If you fight persistently, you can get something you deserve with a lot of difficulty. If you have money, you can get it without a fight.’

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The rich here are only so in the context of the village. In the larger national context, not one family here would qualify as even middle-class.

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According to recent estimates, some 66 per cent of rural residents do not have access to critical medicines, while 31 per cent Indians have to travel more than 30 kilometres to avail themselves of any health care. Just 28 per cent of Indians in urban areas corner 66 per cent of India’s available hospital beds. Mind you, India is still largely a rural country, with around 70 per cent of its population living in rural areas.

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‘Schoolteachers are the government’s tool for everything; from conducting census to elections, we have to be out there,’ he lamented. He also had to look after several administrative duties, including midday meal cooking, repair works, distribution of government-allotted books and so on.

The bullwork of democracy

‘Schoolteachers are the government’s tool for everything; from conducting census to elections, we have to be out there,’ he lamented. He also had to look after several administrative duties, including midday meal cooking, repair works, distribution of government-allotted books and so on.

Teachers build democracy

‘When I find time I also teach,’ he said.

Burden of admi istrative work

the school building had been comprehensively repaired two decades ago. ‘It was badly damaged in the rains and there was no place for our children to study. We all came together and repaired the building,’ he said. When I visited, the floors were all gone, the walls were cracked, the yellow paint long peeled off, the roof leaky, and the whole structure covered in dust.

our schools where 80% of Indian kids study

That year, the free textbooks meant for the students did not arrive in April 2014 when the academic year started. They came only by October–November. ‘Half the academic session is almost lost. We managed by using old textbooks of senior students,’ one of the school’s eleven teachers told me. Children in this school are actually lucky, the teachers said, because many schools in the neighbouring villages have just one or two teachers. ‘In Paharpur, there is a primary school (from classes one to five) operated by just one lady teacher,’ one of them said.

No books and rare teachers

A recent survey by the National Institute of Education Planning and Administration (NIEPA) found that over one lakh of India’s elementary schools had only one classroom. In Bihar, over 1,200 schools had no building at all. Across India, 90 per cent of these no-room or single-room schools were in rural areas. Some 27 per cent of Bihar schools were single-teacher institutions, with an average of hundred students each.

Schools without buildings

The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009, has made it every Indian child’s right to access full-time elementary education of satisfactory and equitable quality until the age of fourteen. Estimates vary, but India has a shortage of almost half a million teachers and over eight million primary school-age children still do not attend school.

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In New Delhi, all discussions are now about transforming India into a manufacturing hub, building smart cities and strengthening the country’s IT power status. A new government is talking about regaining India’s past glory and its rightful place in the global order. But here in Hridaychak, those words mean nothing.

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in 2015 that even though 85 per cent of rural women are engaged in agriculture, only 13 per cent of them own land.

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Democracy in India is only a ‘top dressing on an Indian soil, which is essentially undemocratic’.

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