FB Discussions - IITs and IIScs and Democracy.

High time IIT and IISc and IIM and etc. were made to answer to and seek budget allocation permissions from every village in india.
Otherwise, they need to close. This is a democracy.

Comments

Narayana Sarma oh no!

Aparna Krishnan endulku pa ??? you have probably lost (or disposed) your gilt edged degrees as of long ago ! Kannan I think actually burnt his up, or meant to. And regarding discussions of displacements, he said his own IIT had displaced all the villages therein earlier.

Vijayvithal Jahagirdar Swaraj does not mean me getting involved and holding power over every issue of the world. It means me getting involved and having power over my local issues.
I, living in a city should not wield power over a villager, similarly a villager should not wield power over the decisions of a city dweller which does not affect the villages.

Aparna Krishnan Who pays for your IITs ?! Raise money locally in your cities and finance your fancy institutes !!

Aparna Krishnan Please look deep into the movement of money and goods and profits and finances.

Vijayvithal Jahagirdar If we really start looking at who pays, using modern methods of economics and accounting then we will have to listen to only those who pay tax that would be the middle and upper class, corporates industries etc.

Instead of going down that path, I would stick to my original position of, who is (potentially) affected. 

Aparna Krishnan Each farmer, each begger pays taxes. Please see the taxes paid as a % of their asset base also !

Rahul Banerjee If villagers began asserting themselves instead of craving for the consumerism of city life tha latter would collapse like nine pins!!

Aparna Krishnan True. And twenty years back, I demanded the highest standards from the village people . I took them to task for moving to shampoos, for craving cement rooms when they had their no-cost beautiful thatched homes. I gave my pravachans, and they listened, holding their peace, and generally ignoring my wisdom also !

Years brought some perspectives. They are only a small part of the larger world, and to demand far greater morality or vision from them is unrealistic. They also succumb to all that the advertizing whiz kids, paid in lakhs and crores for this skillful deed, direct at them. And thy also move to toothpastes, and shampoos and cell phones ... And when we ourselves to lesser or greater extent are trapped in these trappings, what can we say.

Yes, I wish the village would stand their ground, and refuse to part with their produce, and also refuse to be a market for these useless products the modern engineer and marketing executives churn out. But I only see that day recede. What should we do ? Sridhar, and all our efforts to bring simple livlihoods to their doorsteps actually takes that dream further away ...

Aparna Krishnan Rahul, taking on consumerism, the pinnacle of materialism, needs the highest of resistance to it, which is rooted in ethics, morality, spirituality. So to counter capitalism, the avatara purusha of materialism, we need less of revolutions maybe and a deeper spirituality in which all actions are rooted. I know this will be blasphemous is some anti-capitalist circles - but the essence of satyagraha is only this.

Rahul Banerjee Tv has to go as neither the materialism of the marxists nor the spiritualism of gandhians have been able to keep the masses aloof from the lures of the idiot box.

Aparna Krishnan It will not go. Because it has everybody who uses it to exploit wanting it. And also everyone who is exploited by it, also wanting it. So we stand totally alone abusing it, and the winds carry the abuses away.

I wish I could see the way out of this trap, but imagination falters.

Aparna Krishnan Same about schooling, and many other things.

Aparna Krishnan " I am not in a mood to say much. All I can say is, that all these huge laboratories and electrical apparatus you see here are due to the labour, unwilling and forced, of millions. For Tata’s thirty lakhs did not come from outside, nor does the Mysore  contribution come from anywhere else but this begar-1 world. If we are to meet the villages and to explain to them, how we are utilizing their money on buildings and plants which will never benefit them, but might perhaps benefit their posterity, they will not understand it. They will turn a cold shoulder. But we never take them into our confidence, we take it as a matter of right, and forget, that the rule of ‘no taxation without representation’, applies to them too." http://paalaguttapalle.blogspot.in/.../gandhi-in-iisc.html

Ashok Urs I ask this question every time I pass through IISc Bangalore, what have they done to deserve, this budget allocation.

Aparna Krishnan i was once there. I treated it as my entitlement. Today i am ashamed of that attitude of my youth - but that is the essential moral vaccum of the classes that inhabit these rarefied spaces, and to top that they claim to be the Cream. Been there, done that.

Rama Subramanian Why single out these institutions? I would say all knowledge institutions need to abide by that which is a local need and perhaps the research needs to be prioritised based on the long term needs of the community from which people come to study in that institution. Much of our education and research if it is only meant to serve countries, companies and economies elsewhere, they should be funded by such people and the institution and its sovereignty hypothecated to them. Why should I accept someone as an educator who is basically doing dalali with human "capital" and "resource"

Aparna Krishnan I target these, because the alumni here feel they are the cats' whiskers !!

Aparna Krishnan As to your suggestion that we hypothecate those institutes to those countries - why would I give them a cent of my land ?? Those institutes that dont serve the people of this land - clean them up and make them government hospitals. 

Paromita Goswami How can villages give permission for budget allocation to institutions of higher education? ... I am confused!

Aparna Krishnan Only then can we claim we are in a democracy. It is not rocket science - if the will is there the details can be worked out.

Paromita Goswami Villages are deeply divided today. Just today some adivasis came to me and said that the gram sabha is not ready to pass a resolution regarding their claims over forestland, because the gram sabha is dominated by non-adivasis. When villagers are not ready to give permission to adivasis to make houses on forestland, what type of permission will they give for budget allocations to IITs and IIMs?

Aparna Krishnan There are many many practical issues. The answers will have to be seeked locally. And yet - power has to go to the people. On that I have no doubt. That is what is right. And the Elite and the Educated, however well meaning are far too alienated. And there is precious little we have done in these years we have held the reins. High time to hand it over. To the people who are local and rooted. There is sanity and sense and sensibility there. More than in Lutyens Delhi !

Aparna Krishnan Till that day we can go to villages and set up schools thereby invalidating their own vast knowleges. We can go and set up sewing machines and 'create livlihoods', while with a vaster, far stronger sweep we destroy livlihoods - skilled thatching, skilled weaving, skilled farming all crushed under the juggernaut of modernity. Our hands are tied in many ways and we do these relief measure interventions. But I demand of NGOs, social workers, and people who have moved to work in villages, and myself, to see these as such, as defeated measures, and not adulate each other on the, Caveat - I also 'teach children', and I also try to sell cloth bags for the women for 'livlihood. And I only rue deeply the sweeping end of the vast knowleges and the truly sustainable livlihoods, which are what can sustain villages. And the earth itself.