Rural India–Does it really need Education ?

Well.. being jobless now a days is helping me to spend more time here I guess. Lol.

Anyway, let me tell you about what went through my mind today.

I go to this place, a bus stop on the outskirts of my town to smoke. I go there once or twice a day. So, it is a stop for all the private buses that come from and go to nearby villages. Most of the villagers, whose main occupation is irrigation and petty businesses frequent that place for transportation. I see a lot of people and observe some of them almost every day.

Most of them are illiterates I guess. and they look so too. . They are busy everyday, travelling, transporting their goods from one place to other. Some of them visit their kin and kith, some of them come to the town for business, some of them come for daily labor chores and yeah.. u get to see a lot different lifestyles there.

All of them are busy.. awaiting buses and as soon as they reach, these people fight to board. Looks pretty similar to software lifestyle in Bangalore right ? yeah. it is. These people are uneducated, from farming families, or those who stand on their own feet doing various types of businesses and are successful in their life.

One thing I noted common among all these people is that many of them are not answerable to anyone – except themselves. Doesn’t have any deadlines, project plans, bosses to answer, team leads to worry about, Nothing really. and we, try to educate them, get them into schools, and as a result many of them leave their professions back home and get to these metros in search of real jobs where they are forced to work under someone, take an enormous amount of pressure and be answerable to someone always in their life and then brag about what they lost. Isn’t it what we are doing .. ?? Talk a lot about bosses’ harassment, project pressures, deadline tensions, etc..,

I doubt if there is really a necessity to educate them and bring them to our place, so that the void they left is filled by no one and we wonder why irrigation and agriculture are declining in our country everyday. Is it necessary for them to come to these cities and work under someone in the name of development and modern culture ? Is it necessary for those people who are independent to become slaves of some multi-national companies ?

Yet, we try to educate them and convert them into white collar slaves. Is this the kind of education they need ? Is this the kind of education that our real India needs (Villages are the true face of India – M.K. Gandhi). Well .. some one has to clear me.