Page 174 - EW October 2024

Postscript

Certification corruption it was essentially drafted by the bureaucracy, which drew
up such a complex GST structure that it has massively
AST MONTH EDUCATIONWORLD FEATURED boosted official corruption for which India has a globally
a cover story on raging skilling, upskilling and infamous reputation.
Lreskilling fever sweeping the country. Despite the On September 11, at a public meeting with Union
Mahatma’s advice that children should learn with hands finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman, a respected
apart from head and heart, vocational education has been Coimbatore-based restauranter pleaded for a single tax on
a blind-spot of the country’s omniscient education policy food items by citing the example of a bread bun which is
formulators for over seven decades. And although youth exempt from GST but attracts 18 percent GST if cream is
in schools and colleges, and adults in executive suites added prior to service. For plain-speaking, the business-
yearn for and are prepared to pay for high quality VET, man was forced to apologise to the minister because the
administrative ineptitude and reckless certification rooted interaction was broadcast on social media. Yet the plain
in subcontinental corruption which has wormed its way truth is that worldover the GST or VAT (which is levied
deep into the bowels of the education system, may well only on goods, not services) is levied under a single, or
sabotage 21st century India’s belated discovery of critically at best two categories of goods, and not four as in India.
important VET. As a result, there is great confusion about the amount of
Following outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, GST chargeable for a huge number of goods and services,
the entry of Palestinian labour into Israel has reduced aggravating the burden of doing business. Moreover
dramatically, especially in the construction industry. by threatening harsh penalties for misclassification or
Therefore a few months ago, the Netanyahu government misinterpretation of complex provisions of the GST Act,
in Tel Aviv decided to recruit 10,000 trained construction tax officials are reported to be extorting huge sums from
labour from India. According to a report in the Indian businessmen, most of whom prefer to pay up rather than
Express (September 10), 5,000 workers were recruited resort to expensive snail-paced litigation.
through two “pathways” — Government-to-Government That’s why India is ranked the world’s 93rd (of 180)
(G2G) supervised by NSDC (National Skill Development most corrupt country in the Corruption Perception Index
Corporation) and Business-to-Business (B2B) through of the Berlin-based Transparency International.
private agencies supervised by the Union Ministry of
External Affairs.
Israel’s requirement was for labour trained for low- Not right enough
skilled, iron bending, plastering and ceramic tiling jobs.
To select suitably qualified workers (who would be paid R. AMBEDKAR, WIDELY ADMIRED AS THE
Rs.1.9 lakh per month), three rounds of “professional father of the Constitution, was right. “What is the
tests” were conducted in Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Dvillage but a sink of localism, a den of ignorance,
Telangana. narrow-mindedness and communalism,” he observed way
According to the Tel Aviv-based Elda Nitzen, chairman back in 1948.
of the Union Association of Foreign Employment Agen- But Dr. Ambedkar could have added another debilitat-
cies, most of the ‘tested’ workers had never worked in the ing feature of village India: deep-rooted corruption. The
construction industry, and many “did not even know how disastrous rule (1947-64) of patrician Harrow School and
to hold a hammer”. For monitors of India’s education sys- Cambridge University graduate Jawaharlal Nehru who
tem, the causes of this debacle are clear. Slapdash train- grafted Soviet-inspired socialism quickly reduced high-
ing, ‘incentivised’ assessment and reckless certification. potential post-independence India to a “ship-to-mouth”
Little wonder back home, newly built roads soon economy pathetically dependent upon grain exports from
exhibit crater size potholes, and bridges collapse with America. Subsequently, Indian politics especially in the
regular frequency. states, was swamped by ignorant, narrow minded, com-
munalist rural politicians who also imported the casual
routine corruption of village India into the Central and
Calculated complexity state governments.
Half a century on, several rural titans catapulted into
HEN THE BJP GOVERNMENT AT THE Centre chief ministerial positions, are struggling to hold on to
introduced a central GST (Goods and Services their shaky thrones because of corruption charges against
WTax) seven years ago to replace widely divergent them. India’s rural politicians riding on the backs of an
sales taxes levied by state governments, the initiative was ignorant rural majority have transformed Indian politics
widely welcomed. In the ancien regime, retail prices of into flourishing family businesses. Worse, they have infil-
goods varied countrywide, because state governments trated their kith and kin en masse into offices of gover-
imposed diverse sales tax on goods, often leading to smug- nance. As a result, no document moves from desk to desk
gling across state borders. Therefore, the idea of imposing without ‘speed money’. And the latest gambit of this tribe
a GST which would also levy a tax on services to augment is to extend affirmative action to OBCs (other backward
the tax pool to be shared between Centre and states, was castes), who rule rural India with an iron hand, beyond
universally welcomed in the interests of price equalisation. the 50 percent ceiling imposed by the Supreme Court, a
Octroi, a tax imposed by municipal governments on all blatant conspiracy that has the support of Rahul Gandhi,
goods entering towns and cities was also abolished. Al- Nehru’s champagne socialist great grandson, Leader of the
though the tax structure had the stamp of approval of the Opposition in Parliament.
GST Council comprising the finance ministers of all states, Dr. Ambedkar was right, but not right enough.

174 EDUCATIONWORLD OCTOBER 2024