Mahatma Gandhi's Prescription Can Revive Indian Education

Gandhi implicitly understood that to attain his social reform objectives and abate Hindu-Muslim antagonism aroused by the Partition of the subcontinent on religious lines, education of the population was a necessary precondition. Therefore he expended long years in ideating and developing his prescription of basic education.

- Dilip Thakore

In grand-scale national celebrations orchestrated by the BJP-NDA government at the Centre which was re-elected to office in General Election 2019 of last summer, the nation is set to commemorate the sesquicentennial (150th) birth anniversary of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948) for a whole year, starting October 2. Certainly, the proposed year-long nationwide celebrations to remember Mahatma (‘great soul’) Gandhi who masterminded and led India’s unprecedented freedom struggle from the cruel and exploitative rule of imperial Great Britain, are warranted.

Although with the passage of time public memory of British rule over India has dimmed, it’s useful to remember that the people of the independent Republic of India owe Mahatma Gandhi a huge debt. Right until the mid-19th century, the Indian subcontinent (as also imperial China) was the world’s richest region contributing an estimated 20 percent of global GDP. By the time the last British troops retreated in 1947 — almost two centuries after the Battle of Plassey (1757) in Bengal which marked the beginning of British Raj in India — the subcontinent had been reduced to the world’s poorest and most miserable region of the modern world.