The Indifference That Kills

YAWN!

India has lapsed into indifference.

The word ‘lapse’ has this sense of a falling from grace, from acceptable norms. One of the illustrative phrases for the word in the online dictionary was “a lapse into savagery”. Far too often, we have fallen into the depths of hatred and brutality - during the Partition that marked our birth as an independent nation, the anti-Sikh riots in 1984, or the 1989 expulsions of Kashmiri Pundits. Sometimes, one placename is enough to trigger images of brutality, like Nellie, or Godhra, Bhiwandi, Manipur… At other times, it is a verb, like lynching, which threatens to spread as rapidly as brutishly as a meme.

But far more than savagery or hatred, our bigger national failing is that of indifference.

In my inbox this morning - behind a paywall unfortunately - was a Morning Context article about India’s refusal to take part in the PISA* test again. Every three years, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, OECD, conducts a Program for International School Assessment of fifteen year-olds. India participated only once, in 2009. When the results were released in 2011, Indian students came second from the bottom, just above Kazakhstan, 72nd out of 73 nations. We hastily excused ourselves from subsequent PISA cycles.

In 2019, the current government asserted that we would participate again, in the 2021 round. The assessment was pushed to 2022, because of the global pandemic. India withdrew from the test, citing the gaps in schooling because of COVID, underlining the reality that our school system had been less than able to deal with the challenges created by lockdowns. But we will participate in 2025, the government asserted. The breaking news today is that this will not happen.

What is not breaking news is that our educational outcomes are shabby. Our own ASER* (Annual School Education Report) has been surveying schools across our nation for a quarter of a century, and consistently reported, for example, that less than half of our 5th standard kids can read a 2nd standard text - in the language of their learning.

Year after year of abysmal schooling, twenty-five years of consistent reporting, and our national response has been one of indifference. We put our kids into the best schools each of us can afford, pay our taxes to put the others through the sarkari mills, and put the matter of national education out of our minds.

If you read these posts somewhat regularly, you know that air pollution concerns me deeply. As it does our newspapers, especially the northern ones, around November of each year, when crop burning, Diwali, and thermal inversion pack hazardous levels of pollutants into our air. “But now we have clean air”, is something I hear almost every day during the glorious weather of March in Delhi, when flowers line Shantipath, like serried ranks of sentinels guarding the approach to Rashtrapati Bhavan. At 119 today, the Air Quality Index, AQI, is lit by a benign orange, much less forbidding than the brooding maroon that rules in the depths of November. But the 119 micrograms of the finest polluting particles, PM 2.5, that inhabit every cubic meter of Delhi air is twenty four times as toxic as the WHO standard.

In our indifference, we have mentally normalised air that should be declared a public hazard. Unlike our brains, our lungs will never normalise this air; they will not magically develop the ability to deal with it. The toxins will accumulate, line our lungs, reduce their ability to transport oxygen to the rest of the body. The tipping point will be different for each individual, but our span of healthy years is being reduced by years, perhaps as much as a decade. As much as the toxic air, it is our indifference that is killing us.

It is the same indifference that is allowing Manipur to burn since 2023, not calling the government to account for violence that has killed hundreds, displaced tens of thousands, and allowed the looting of government armouries.

Highway fatalities* in India are among the highest in the world. Our roads are badly designed, our traffic rules breached a million times a day. But driving licences are handed out like movie tickets, and the shows of highway chaos are never cancelled.

Shitty water at the Mahakumbh? Move over so I can get my dip, too.

Stampede at New Delhi Railway Station? I need to catch the next train.

That, for now, is how we roll. In a perpetual state of indifference to the fact that things can get better.

Acceptance may be a useful coping mechanism. But it should not blind us to the fact that we can improve our lot if we organise ourselves as a people. To work with government, and outside it. And when necessary, against it, not as an act of protest, but as a collective act of will to improve our weal.

• PISA:

  https://www.oecd.org/en/about/programmes/pisa/pisa-publications.html

• ASER:

  https://asercentre.org/

  and Indian schooling:

  https://mohitsatyanand.substack.com/p/-26-taxes-the-opm-of-the-masses-what?utm_source=publication-search

• Highway Accidents: