“When a man vows to advance his community,

God Himself will wrap His robes and lead the way.”

Tirukural.



Think! Why do millions around us still live in squalor and abject poverty struggling to bring up their young ones, not even knowing where their next meal comes from? Think again. Not only of the poor but also millions of us in the middle class who are still struggling. Think of nearly 70% Indian children who only have half the needed blood haemoglobin, thanks to the ubiquitous hook worms that creep in for want of toilets in the villages and in city slums! India has the largest number of malnourished children in the world, 57 million in all as against 41 million in Africa. Right inside the hi-tech city of Bangalore one in eleven children dies for want of low tech solutions like clean drinking water and sanitation. Just outside the financial capital of India, Mumbai, there is an Adivasi village, Jamsar, where every day children are dying of malnutrition! Think of this wide gulf between the two Indias-the hi-tech shining India and the low-tech poor India that falls outside the radar range of the rich and the famous.



Let us dream of an India where every Indian, rich or poor, is blessed with identical opportunities. It is an India where even the poorest of the poor has three square meals a day, a roof over his head instead of the star-lit sky and a healthy enthusiasm to work on a level playing ground. For these dreams to come true we need balanced, humane, and holistic development centred on our far flung villages. Let every village have an arterial road that connects it with the rest of India. Let there be clean drinking water and smoke free cooking facilities. Good food is another dire necessity for the villagers. We need co-operative micro-financing to save them from money lending sharks.



If technology alone could make mankind happy, some of the advanced Western countries must have been the happiest. The fact is, they are not. Every social ill from corruption, crime, economic one-upmanship, political trickery, to exploitation of the vulnerable is a kind of mental illness in need of permanent solution. The game starts with proper education. Education must primarily build character along with the three R s. Education should stress on the Indian culture of not doing anything that one doesn’t want the world to know. Education must teach the child that it is better to fail than to cheat. Let every citizen know that failure is not fatal and success is not final. Young minds should never be exposed to unhealthy competition with others. Such unhealthy competition breeds negative thoughts that are at the root of all social evils, including killer diseases that man is heir to. Competing with others is mediocrity but competing with oneself is excellence. Education must aim only at excellence.



We talk of our huge population as a curse. Let us look at it as our largest man power pool to be nurtured. When the day comes where the poor man feels assured that his new born child would survive, family planning begins at the grass roots level. What with our present peri-natal and infant mortality being precariously high, how can we expect our poor people to adopt family planning? Let us be realistic. They are also human and they also want their progeny to carry the torch forwards. Let us invest wisely in basic health needs to change this dismal picture. It is not wishful thinking as some parts of India even today have slightly better life expectancy than European countries!



We have no choice but to invest much more of our GDP in education to provide compulsory primary education for every citizen. Vocational and higher education could be optional. We need to strengthen our higher educational base to cater to more than 700-800 million youngsters in the next fifty years by reviving our ancient University culture that existed in Nalanda at a time when the rest of the world was still in the dark. Higher education should aim at acquiring wisdom and not just knowledge and information.



Westminster type of democracy seems to have failed here. Gandhiji did not attend the first Independence Day function in the Red Fort as his vision of Swaraj (self rule) had not been on the agenda. We should concentrate on holistic village development based on self reliant micro-financing. Political humanism with mature wisdom is the need of the hour. Let us prepare our future generations to realize their societal obligations to others before they become our leaders. Biologically every living cell wants to come close to another cell, if allowed. Why then are we killing one another in the name of religion, language, region, caste, creed or our misguided belief systems?



What is our vision for India of tomorrow? What sort of India do we want to build for our future generations? Where are we headed? If we have gone wrong what is the remedy? These nagging thoughts haunt me everyday. I have an Indian vision. Let us come together to build a strong India. When the world becomes tranquil the billions of rupees spent on defence and security could be better utilized to provide clean drinking water for the masses, three meals a day for everyone and the healthy basic sanitary amenities! This would build a physically and psychologically strong India to compete with the world to rise above the rest in the comity of nations.



The three enemies of mankind, poverty, ignorance and illness, could be easily won over. We could build an India where justice is not injustice and justice is not the convenience of the powerful either. Let us come together in this Herculean task of rebuilding India morally, physically and economically. India has all the potentials needed for mankind to develop fully. Healthy India is happy India. But remember, the task is stupendous and we have miles to go, miles to go before we sleep!



* Corrected transcript of a speech delivered in Chennai recently by Prof. B. M. Hegde, a thinker, writer, and a former Vice Chancellor of MAHE University, Manipal. He can be contacted at hegdebm@gmail.com