Broken Ladder – Anirudh Krishna

Village kids coming to cities could learn the skills, for instance, of map-reading, taking the metro and learning to work with high-speed computers. They will come to know more about the pathways leading to fasttrack careers. At the other end, city kids coming to villages would acquire other skills, including how to navigate by the stars and how to tell apart flora and fauna, providing a boost to the nation’s efforts to conserve biodiversity. Most of all, they’d learn to appreciate the other families who live in India.

Experiences of meeting people from different regions of India will help generate a greater sense of community. Inductees to India’s elite civil services are sent on a month-long India tour. Young adults in schools and colleges should also be given an opportunity, if only once in their lifetime, if only for a week, and if only to visit a single place at the other end of the country. Another initiative worth considering, being implemented to good effect in some provinces in China, involves exchanges of teachers and students between rural and elite urban schools, with benefits of different kinds accruing to both types of students.63 Not least among these benefits is the greater understanding that city and village students acquire about each other.

Other institutions encouraging intermingling of different kinds will help serve a similar purpose. Interfaith councils with regular meetings, particularly in cities with a history of religious or caste-based strife, can help generate positive experiences, diluting biased attitudes and exposing bigoted beliefs to the light of facts and reason. As attitudes start to change, investments must be made in creating a network of information centres.

Anirudh Krishna is the Edgar T. Thompson Professor of Public Policy, and professor of political science at Duke University, USA (https://sites.duke.edu/krishna). Before taking up academic life, he spent fifteen years in the Indian Administrative Service. Krishna has made a home in a village in central India, to which he returns for a few months every year. 1kitap1.com/en PRAISE FOR THE BOOK ‘This is a remarkable book pointing our attention to the ground-level realities and vulnerabilities of the poor that are overlooked by the glowing macro-economic growth stories about India.

With vivid examples it highlights the micro situations (involving attitudes, beliefs, availability of information and credit, etc.) that make it so difficult to climb out of that poverty and vulnerability for otherwise highly motivated and talented people. The author’s human case studies are quite touching as the analysis is incisive. I recommend this book to any reader who is interested in an empathetic understanding of the constraints, institutional failures and opportunities facing vast numbers of people in India’—Pranab Bardhan ‘Krishna presents detailed case studies of people he lives around, and this closeness keeps him from making glib judgements’—Business Standard ‘Compel[s] you to look for answers with a different perspective…

. With PM Modi talking about eliminating poverty by 2032, doubling farmers’ incomes, bringing in social equality among all sections of the society, the book has come at the right time’—Business Today ‘This interesting book makes the point that bureaucrats are not heartless … they have managed to create a governmental system in which no one has any stake in achieving any outcome’—Tribune ‘A compassionate, engaged and informed portrayal of the broken ladder which forces millions of Indians to “cope without advancing”. Combining lessons from working within government, in university libraries and researching villages, his solutions—of investing in the countryside, in health and education, and decentralizing governance—are compelling and thoughtful’—Harsh Mander ‘A masterly work grounded in decades of methodical research combined with unusual personal commitment and experience.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

Book Information

• Unique ID: 64e22f495a0094ee
• File Extension: .pdf
• File Size: 3,891,678 bytes (3.711 MB)
• Title: –
• Author: Unknown
• Pages: 351
• Language: English (en)

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• Total Words: 113,303
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