Catch them young

Apropos of “Stay insured digitally” (FE, June 24), it would be in the fitness of things if we have lessons on insurance, financial products, etc, at the high school level. Catch them young. In villages and small towns, at Class X-level, insurance, mutual funds and financial products must be part of curriculum. Financial planning and its related subjects must be popularised at the grass-roots level and must become part of our education. The sooner children learn about these in schools, the better it is. A banker could volunteer at secondary/higher-secondary schools and take classes on weekdays. We have huge network of financial planners. Touching base at the senior school level is bound to be a high-paying long-term investments. Financial product literacy in villages or mofussil towns will hit the right note when parents take a call on financial product. A quiet tech boom has given rise to the emergence of hundreds of new apps and it is a matter of days before payments banks will be pressing all the right buttons on specially designed financial products on the e-wallets. In all panchayats, we could showcase “financial planning through mobile” through government broadcasts. Payments banks are scripting the financial inclusion saga with a lot of hard work—a DD Kisan broadcasting financial literacy shows through will be game-changer. against the deliberate onslaught of the BJP MP Subramanian Swamy. Simply put, Jaitley is just trying to put up a brave face before the media knowing fully well that he himself is the real target of his ‘loose cannon’ BJP colleague who usually remains mired in various controversies. Needless to say, the learned think-tank of the BJP had taken him into the party’s fold with an intention to keep its political rivals, mainly the Congress, on tenterhooks in view of his exemplary past of fighting the Congress. Mind you, he was also very recently accommodated as a BJP member of Rajya Sabha (a quid pro quo?) in the hope of targeting some lowhanging political fruit. It may be recalled that Swamy had earlier put many prominent Congress leaders, including the party president Sonia Gandhi and former finance minister P Chidambaram in the dock over the infamous National Herald case and the illegal wealth case, respectively. Earlier, he had gone after the Tamil Nadu CM J Jayalalitha in the ‘disproportionate assets’ case, currently being reviewed by the Supreme Court. It may be pertinent to point out that his latest victim is the Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal whose degree from IIT-Kharagpur is being questioned by Swamy. But, strangely, Swamy has trained his gun on his own party colleagues in the Union government and has been firing away on a day-to-day basis. If he is not immediately silenced, he may soon prove to be a huge political NPA for the BJP.