Varun Gandhi speech

Good Evening, Ladies and Gentlemen,

There has to be something magical about travelling halfway across the world to find at the end of the journey, a piece of home. Thank you for making me so welcome. Being here with you is a reminder that no matter how far we may come, both in terms of distance and achievement, we remain essentially Indian – people who eat with our hands and speak from our hearts. Some things don’t change.

But there are others that can and do. Years ago many of you dared to give up the security of home and family to venture to a new land in search of a dream. Today I would like to see India become that dream, holding out a promise so powerful, it will lure back all of her children – including, hopefully, yours.

I refer not to the inflated rhetoric we’re are bombarded with – world’s next superpower, the Indian century, the future is India and other such false visions of grandeur. Sure, we may be growing at breakneck speed but let’s never forget that many Indians still don’t get enough to eat. In fact we have nearly 40% of the world’s malnourished children. With one sixth of humanity, India accounts for 36% of the world’s poor which means more than the whole of Africa living on less than ONE dollar a day.

In a country abundant in human and natural resources imagine 77% of its total population being classified as poor and vulnerable. I submit that India is not a poor country but a poorly managed country. But by adopting outdated policies, we are wasting productive lives, and weakening democracy to the point where it only functions through patronage of various kinds.

From the time I was little I remember people streaming in with problems regarding gas and telephone connections, housing, school admissions, job opportunities. When I asked why my mother always extended herself to help, she explained that since we had failed to create a system where basics were a matter of right and routine, she believed it was incumbent upon anyone who could help to do so.

25 years later, constitutional guarantees still remain out of reach of the vast majority. That’s not fair. And that’s not democracy. Every Indian must be assured dignity, justice and the opportunity to earn and care for their families and leave something better for their children. What we need is a model of development harnessed to the future not shackled to the past.

Today, 60% or 630 million Indians, that’s double the entire US population are under the age of 30. This is the world’s greatest workforce. And our greatest resource. How we utilize it will determine the future of India and the world.

What I would like to share with you today is an unabashedly idealistic vision of a new, efficient and reinvigorated India.

Most of the young people in this audience know India primarily through their parents’ fond memories. I’ve thought long and hard over what to say to you today. Please forgive me as I replace the rose tint with the reality of modern India. And understand that it is not because I love India less but because I love India so much that I believe it necessary to examine and scrutinize and fault find so that we may swiftly course correct to become the world beaters that I know we are capable of being.

From our tax tangle to our legal labyrinths, It’s not hard to find things that need fixing in India. For most however, poverty remains the fundamental issue. And it’s true that 40 years after the Garibi Hatao poll promise and billions of dollars poured into poverty alleviation programmes, we are still overwhelmingly poor.

I see poverty and wealth as part of the same spiral. You either go up or down. At the extreme ends the conditions are aggravated. The super rich just get richer. In 2008 a tiny 0.01% of the population owned 35% of the country’s wealth, with the top four having the combined net worth of 16% of the total GDP. At the bottom, the poor get poorer.

Sukh Ram is a farmer with 6 children. He mortgaged his land to get his daughter married. Now with the monsoon and his crops failing, he cannot repay the moneylender. He faces the prospect of becoming a landless labourer or committing suicide. Similar stories of destitution and desperation occur all the time all across the land. Even so and even though surrounded by its cruel and constant reminders, I do not regard poverty as either inevitable, or incurable. I do not even see it as the root cause of our condition.

Poverty is only a symptom – perhaps the most obvious, the most serious and certainly the most soul destroying but still only a symptom of a deeper underlying malaise. There are others too like the lack of big ideas needed to cope with a country of 1.4 billion that is still producing 6-8 children per rural family. Like the crippling ill health that grips our people, like the frustrating unemployment that saps the spirit of our young, like the frequency of the failures of our monsoon and crops. We can talk about India being the next super power, we can produce a fashionable number of billionaires, we can manage IT technology, but we have not been able to do anything about our bone grinding, crushing poverty caused and perpetuated by inept management and a tragic failure of leadership.

It will need more than a single speech, it will need vigorous debate, but what I shall touch on today are the crucial components of health and education to demonstrate that another India is possible.

Officially there are only about 70 lakh children outside the school system. But of the 13 crore children in elementary school, we have a drop-out rate of over 50%. Worst of all, the govt education that we provide is entirely meaningless. The syllabus is over 30 years old, the books are written by bureaucrats or their relatives, the information is skewed and inessential.

The debate that the Education Ministry generates is never about the quality of education and whether it equips the poorest child in the poorest village with the requisite knowledge to cope in the outside world. The debate is simply about how many exams we should have in one year, how many schools should be built, whether and what student quotas or reservations should be introduced and whether the midday meal should consist of fresh or packaged food and whether it is getting past the principal’s family or not. The quality of teachers and teaching material is seen as irrelevant. So our children will graduate from school with full stomachs but empty minds.

Skill –based education is looked down upon as ‘vocational’ training and almost entirely ignored. Compare our workforce with its 2% skill training to that of Korea with 96% and Japan with 80%. Our agricultural universities have no reference to local agro-climatic situations eg in the current drought situation, we find we have no drought resistant seeds. Instead of experimenting, innovating and developing practical applications, they concentrate on outdated and cumbersome theory. There are no skill updation institutes for farmers, no formalized training institutes to teach them modern agricultural practices or how to value add to produce or even simple marketing techniques. The Krishi Vigyan Kendras which were set up 60 years ago, shut shop 30 years ago leaving a thirty year gap in agricultural knowledge. The result is that though we had plenty of warning about the impending monsoon failure, no anticipatory action were taken because we have no trained people either in our agricultural fields or in policy making.

Govt run industrial training institutes for low skilled industrial labour do not reflect market needs. We have no schools to provide formal training for vast armies of plumbers, masons, cooks, contractors, carpenters, forest developers, guards, etc. We simply expect these skills to be passed down within families or communities. There is not a single subject in any school that teaches entrepreneurship. Imagine how useful such study might have been in this time of recession. The lack of it probably explains why there is so little cottage industry in our villages in spite of so much
opportunity.

We have no courses that would teach a poor villager how to apply for a loan, handle a bank account, or even avail of any of the schemes supposedly for his benefit. There is not a single school or college that has useful environmental textbooks – long after the Supreme Court ordered environmental education to be compulsory. In fact no government school has the information as no books have yet been written. So we do not learn that there is no rain to be expected as its stabilization point has gone.

We are neither preparing for nor doing anything to avert the imminent meltdown of the Ganges glacier which will deprive 400 million people of drinking and irrigation water. We are not developing the expertise to replace polluting industries that foul up our air and water or even remove their remains that like large gravestones continue to litter our countryside even after they go bust. Environmental protection continues to be misunderstood as a roadblock in the face of “development“ rather than the necessary foundation for all planning. No one is preparing the youth for a world on the brink. We are turning out millions of young people who may technically be ‘educated’ but are functionally incapable.

The same lack of training spills over into politics. We have a generation of politicians and bureaucrats who managed the old India and continue to offer the same stale and standard non-solutions. For Drought – construct canals and tube wells; For food scarcity– use more fertilizer and pesticides . For an aggressive China – be conciliatory. For Pakistani terrorism in Kashmir – petition the UN or US for more toothless resolutions. Our so –called new politicos are simply the children of old politicos continuing with business as usual.

What we have to understand is that no piecemeal change is going to be able to deal with the threats facing our development, the inequalities in our society and the environmental disaster we are already in the middle of. We need to address the fundamentals.

Health is a priority goal in its own right, as well as a central input into economic development and poverty reduction. Health and socio-economic development are so closely intertwined that it is impossible to achieve one without the other. While economic development in India has been gaining momentum over the last decade, our health system still ranks a lowly 118 among 191 WHO member countries on overall performance. We have clearly not recognized that health cannot be measured by swanky medical hotels for the rich but how we provide for the poor.

But sometimes sensible simple solutions will do. In villages, a lot of people who claim blindness turn out to be just in need of spectacles. Primary health centres have no specialists so villagers have no access to eye tests and glasses. One NGO, Development Alternatives has started training teams of village youth, equipping them with eye testing kits and selling them glasses which they sell further for between Rs 50-100. Imagine this being the price between light and darkness.

In the sixties, the All India Institute of Medical Sciences , Delhi was set up as , a centre of excellence and the motherboard of all medical research in India . Has any research come out of it in the last so many years. No, because the Centre’s 400 doctors have to cope with over 25,000 patients a day. What is the government’s answer? : make 5 more of the same except that in the last ten years it has not started on even one.

The 25,000 patients that daily besiege AIIMS come from all over India – I know because I send at least 100 people a week from my own constituency because rural areas have no functional health facilities. Again the debate centres around bricks and mortar – we build these many primary health centres but we neither equip them adequately nor are we able to staff them so we end up establishing empty rooms across the countryside. There is no provision for medical emergencies, and thousands of Indians die of perfectly curable medical conditions. The single hospital in my constituency has its medicines sold outside and its doctors practice only after hours. I can’t say I blame them. The sheer number of people who pour in all day since they lack even the money to pay for an aspirin, can destroy the spirit of even the most dedicated doctor.

Nor do our priorities seem right. Every day 1100 Indians die of malaria yet our health efforts are preoccupied by international scares like SARs and avian flue and swine flu that peter off into nothing while our endemic diseases get more dangerous and deadly.

One of the most important challenges in health reform is to design workable systems for rural idea. Given the discrepancy in earnings between private and public medical practitioners, how do we deliver competent healthcare in villages? Primary health centres in West Bengal, Orissa and Bihar cope with less than 20% of the allocated staff. One way might be to strengthen local systems of medicine like ayurveda and homeopathy. Gujarat has tackled the problem through improved connectivity creating an ambulance service that responds within half an hour to take villagers to medical help. What I would like to see is a programme of health education targeted at women designed to prevent diseases like malaria, TB and diabetes , that are needlessly killing us.

We need Indians from all over the world to pitch in with help and ideas. Foremost would be to design a rural insurance system. In the absence of good district hospitals – and the inability of most patients to pay– we need something to fill the gap. We cannot ignore the sheer terror and helplessness that any parent feels when a child is badly sick. We cannot compel those without insurance, to say to a wife or a child or an aging parent, there is something that could make you better, but I just can’t afford it.

I have heard of a charitable trust in Karnataka run by Dr Devi Shetty which has introduced the concept of health micro-insurance which gives a poor person the ability to get even a modern heart operation costing Rs 60,000. Here is something that can and must be replicated across the country. Health is the key to wealth. Only a healthy nation can be a prosperous and progressive one. Having the security of reliable healthcare allows a society to civilize, specialize and produce Michelangelos and Einsteins. That we see so few new ideas in India is not because we are incapable of them, it is because we simply do not have the time to generate them.

With everyone caught up in the everyday struggle of simply staying alive, where is the time to innovate? If we can provide the security of accessible and affordable healthcare, we can find ways to do things differently and better.

What we must have is a clear understanding that consumption and more consumption is not the way forward. Every month 30,000 people migrate to Delhi alone which already has a shortage of 23 million homes. 60% of the city lives in substandard housing with one room for a whole family without even a separate cooking space. If we want India to remain in her villages, those villages will have to be turned into oases of hope from the deserts of despair that persons long to leave. Already there is evidence of the miracles that can come out of our villages.

An IIM Professor, Dr Anil Gupta, has instituted a search for innovations by villagers and every year awards and markets the best ones. One of these is a cycle –operated washing machine invented by a 14 year old girl who was frustrated by the fact that family chores never left her any time to study. Now she can read her books while pedalling this machine that washes the clothes. Brilliant! From Bihar has come a cycle whose pedals turn into paddles so that it can be used even during floods.

Having a predominantly young population can create conducive conditions but is not by itself sufficient for change. Nor does being young necessarily equip anyone with fresh solutions to old problems. That only comes through education and health reform. I know that IACF shares these concerns and I urge that any meaningful contribution to India should be in these two areas.

You live outside our country. You can see its problems and achievements from a different perspective. You may feel perplexed by our convoluted politics and increasing corruption. But you also understand that corruption increases when resources and ideas diminish. That’s why we need a system that allows both resources and ideas to be freely and commonly shared. This is what I term altruism.

I am a young person in politics, the youngest person in Parliament today and my dreams are of sharing. I dream of an inclusive world that allows the poorest and most overlooked to participate in progress. That, I believe, is true democracy.

India has always had the ability to surprise. We triumphed over oppression not with guns but with roses, inventing non-violence as a practical political tool. Today when the Western consumption driven model has failed, it is once again time for India to show global leadership.

I would like to propose that Altruism be adopted as this century’s central guiding economic policy. We know that unchecked pollution anywhere in the world, affects it everywhere. What is needed therefore is technological and idea transfers that are free to countries that cannot afford to pay for them. The sink or swim together moment is upon us.

I ask of you too to share this spirit of altruism and to help spread it as the new ism of our age. It will translate into smaller government and more private enterprise – both in education , healthcare and infrastructure development. It will transform into social activism and charity leading us to venture where govt can’t or won’t go.

It will shift the emphasis from simply making money and calculating meaningless statistics to an awareness of what India needs to survive and transform into a truly great nation. Years ago when America faced a national crisis, FDR’s New Deal also called for a spirit of sharing. In India the govt’s flagship scheme NREGA is based on the same principle. In theory its guarantee of a minimum amount of employment to rural India is excellent but look at what is happening on ground. One, the usual middlemen are pocketing a huge percentage of the labourer’s daily pay and two, no administration has bothered to find out how to use this compulsory labour so all you have is crores of people digging holes in the ground and then later filling up those same holes to justify the wage they are getting. All it needs is for someone, anyone, to identify things that do need to be accomplished whether it is cleaning or building or planting trees instead of so foolishly wasting time, effort and money.

Since most govt schemes are similarly mired in corruption and sloth, what we need is more private involvement in nation building. The more our individual initiatives, the stronger we become as a people. The stronger we are as a people the less we need to rely on lazy, inefficient and ill educated administrations.

Let me give you a small example of medical altruism from Punjab. 30 years ago, Punjab had a disproportionately high mortality rate of women during childbirth. One person who studied problem discovered the cause to be the unhygienic instruments being used to cut the umbilical cord. Instead of waiting around for the Govt to do something he simply positioned people outside all maternity clinics selling sterilized razor blades for Re 1. Mortality rates fell immediately.

Here is an example of economic and environmental altruism again from Punjab. In Fazilka, a group of young IIT graduates have started an eco-cab service by organising cycle rickshaws into stands from where they can be summoned by telephone, benefitting the community, the puller and the environment. It is instances like these by which we should measure progress. In fact the best way to tell the health of an economy is not by its billionaires but by whether someone with a good idea can take a risk and start a new business, Last month’s newspapers announced that leading IT and telecom companies were setting up a programme to sponsor the coaching of young people in villages to enable them to get into technical colleges and become the engineers and computer analysts of tomorrow. If social organizations were to see themselves as companies and similarly set CSR targets and responsibilities, perhaps you could take up the training and creation of an employable, skilled youth force. From this force could emerge both responsible plumbers and policy makers.

What will do it is only a strong dose of self- respect and national pride. We need to understand that it is not just our house or office that belongs to us but our colony, our city and our entire country, when we internalise this sense of ownership that’s when things will change. After WWII the Japanese judiciously repaired not their shattered buildings but their national pride. Everything else followed to turn them into the economic giant that they remain.

Another useful example from Japan is its method of protest – unlike in India where we burn buses and destroy public property little realising that it is our own property and our own interests we are injuring, Japanese protesters simply work harder at their jobs as a way to shame the authorities into accepting their demand. And believe me , it works.

I was brought up to believe that you are more than your job, you are what you know and what you do beyond your work. Conversations at family mealtimes invariably centre around ways to contribute or give back to society. 35 years ago, my father’s 5 point programme included ‘Each one Teach one.’ Today I am delighted to see that concept being propounded by the country’s leading newspaper.

Another pet family project has been environmental protection which I personally believe to be of paramount concern for the youth who are going to increasingly face the consequences of climate change. As an agricultural country, we are particularly vulnerable. Yet it is India that is blocking Climate Change negotiations demanding that we (with over one billion people) must first be allowed to achieve the levels of consumerism of the West before we can be asked to reform. The question to be asked is what’s the use of a fancy house or hotel when you don’t have a planet left to put it?

I worry about the future of India. The rich grow increasingly selfish thinking in terms of the ‘republic of one’ with private security, generators, tubewells and cars. They have no expectations from the State and no sense of community. The poor on the other hand, have nothing to lose but their chains. There is growing unrest and violence. If every Indian is not a stakeholder in progress, we face a bloody future.

Young India is hungry, hungry for solutions. We want to know why the few who mismanage the system should continue to blight the future of a billion people. We want answers not excuses. And we want them now.

We cannot wait for reform for one more year, one more election, one more generation. Why should we wait for riots over food, water and power, for Naxal violence to engulf India, for total environmental collapse? We’re not here to fear the future. We’re here to change it.

We the young people of this country—those who will guide its destiny in the future—have a special interest in maintaining the national honor We cannot stand on the outside and complain about the system, we have to work from within to change it. At present of a graduating class, the brightest go to IITs, IIMs and medical schools to become professionals, the next brightest go to business schools to become entrepreneurs, the third level enters government services and finally it is the remainder that get into politics. So how does this translate into real life. The bottom of the class makes the rules. The slightly brighter ones implements them over those more intelligent and the brightest end up being governed by those far less able than themselves. It is time to turn that equation the right side up. And to do so, its important to develop and create a positive attitude towards politics so that more educated and honorable young people are encouraged to join the process and make a difference.

I have been brought up on examples of how people selflessly served the nation, they would have two pots of ink on their desk one for official letters, one for personal ones. As a young Indian today, I have faith that we shall not prove false to the memories of our forefathers. They did their work and won us the freedom we now enjoy. We in turn must be sure to leave this heritage enhanced and
enlarged to our children and our children’s children.

I have brought to you my message of hope and change. I know it will find resonance. You may not live in India, but it is your country as much as mine. Let us join our collective strengths to build the India of our dreams. Together we cannot fail. Jai Hind.