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ARTICLE AD BOX
Summary
The gaping divide between the rich and poor in India is stark, especially in its cities like Bengaluru. This cannot be blamed solely on policy. What individuals see and choose not to see could make a significant difference to how millions of lives are lived.
Ten years ago, only two or three students from a class of 30 would pass the class 10 board exam at this government school. Today, only two or three from a class of 60 do not.
The class has grown because the school changed. As the class 10 board results were transformed, parents began moving their children here from other schools—mostly private ones. The teachers were thrilled by this resounding acknowledgement of their work and gladly added a second section of 30 students each in classes 9 and 10.
The woman with whom these changes began was born and brought up in that very village. Her father was a stone worker. For reasons she doesn’t remember, the father who laboured like everyone else—cutting stones every day—was unlike anyone else in the village. He valued education deeply and ensured that all his five children, including two daughters, went to school and college. This had never happened in that village.
After her undergraduate degree, she enrolled in a bachelor’s of education programme to qualify as a teacher. On graduation, she joined a private school at a good salary.
Years passed and she saw no improvement in the lives of her community. The village was trapped in a cruel equilibrium. The young received poor education, most dropping out or failing; girls were married off at 13 or 14, with boys joining stonework or some other back-breaking labour at the same age.
Poverty in the village wore other faces too—among them, early mortality, which left a number of orphans.
She couldn’t take it anymore. About 12 years ago, she resigned and joined the government school as a ‘guest teacher’ at a substantially lower salary. In her telling, she downplays her own role in what followed, saying that “everyone rallied around.”
But her pivotal role in the story is unmistakable, including the remarkable moment when her brother—who held and continues to hold another job—began teaching part-time at the school. He joined her and the other teachers because they saw only one path out of the poverty and disempowerment that village lived with: good education.
The sister and brother sat together and told us this story. With good cheer and without the slightest tinge of anger or regret. Their assessment: “Our work has only begun—till marriages before 18 are stopped, all youngsters have good jobs, and there are no orphans, we are not done.”
Ordinary-seeming lives often hold extraordinary stories. Many are not short of epic when you see their details. Here is one detail from the story of this school: the neighbourhood of that village generates tens of billions of dollars in revenue annually. How does it do that?
This village, once beyond the outskirts of Bengaluru, has been engulfed by the city over the past 30 years. The world’s big tech companies and other industrial giants have buzzing campuses around it. These campuses have been the vanguard of India’s surge in technology over these three decades—even as the village has struggled with stone-cutting, child marriage, early mortality and dire poverty.
Beyond token corporate social responsibility projects, India’s dynamic tech capital is a universe separated from the village of stonecutters and labourers with whom it shares water, air and soil.
This vast chasm is not an unfortunate exception. It is the norm in this city and in all our cities.
On the same day, in another part of the city, I walked along a 300-metre wall. From atop the rubble piled against it, the other side was visible in places. Four tennis courts, two basketball courts, an Olympic-size swimming pool, four padel courts, two mini football fields and more—everything gleaming in a private sports arena.
On this side of the wall: rubble and heaps of waste of every sort. The boundary of this wasteland was a giant open drain snaking as far as the eye could see—12- feet deep, 30-feet wide, full of slowly flowing viscous black muck. Along its banks, among the rubble and rubbish, stood rows of tin-sheet shanties—1,200 households.
Even in Bengaluru’s moderate weather, the insides of those shanties felt like 55° Celsius. Such unbearable heat is an apt metaphor for what their residents face in their daily struggle. Still, life in this locality of tin-roof shanties is humming and buzzing. If it were not to be, this megapolis would have had no domestic help, no delivery boys and no construction workers, among others.
People in these other universes can more than fend for themselves. Not just survive and overcome, but change and improve—as that woman has shown. They don’t need our pity. But it seems we need our own pity. How else do we live with our apathy—swimming and playing padel and celebrating tech dominance, while across the wall, a young, emaciated woman is denied basic medical treatment and a stonecutter is dying and a child is being married at 13.
These astonishing dichotomies that we are blind to cannot be blamed on policy and governance failure. The roots are in our hearts, from where that most basic of human qualities—empathy—seems to have vanished. And this collectively manifests in the de facto organizing norms of our society. The cure for this societal disease is in our grasp, across the wall and the street.
Just walk out and meet that teacher in a blazing tiny tin room. Not only will that encounter be a fount of empathy, but could make us better human beings.
The author is CEO of Azim Premji Foundation.
English (US) ·