A shrunken world of schools will impact India’s future leadership

The exposure afforded even by elite schooling in India must widen to inspire optimism on outcomes

Indians who are not sure whether to be proud of fellow citizens crowding the world’s billionaire charts tend to see their ranks swell each time talk of inequality accompanies such rich lists. Like this year. The latest Hurun list of global billionaires has 94 new faces from India, with 10 drop-offs, taking the country’s total to 271. In comparison, China added only 55 people whose estimated wealth went above $1 billion over the past year, though it has as many as 814 people on the list, 14 more than the US, which saw 132 additions. This comes on the heels of a World Inequality Lab paper by Thomas Piketty and three coauthors titled ‘Income and Wealth Inequality in India, 1922-2023: The Rise of the Billionaire Raj.’ Its very title is loaded with a hint of plutocracy and hence political relevance. Its core finding of worst-on-record disparity between India’s top 1% and the rest did make many of us either sit up or shrug, but the data proxies that went into the study are so wobbly that its claim to empirical truth is woefully weak. Even so, the plausibility of Piketty’s arguments are hard to dismiss, especially the big one that catapulted his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century to fame. So long as annual returns on capital exceed the growth of everyone’s income (as tracked by GDP expansion), he noted, the pie of wealth would expand faster, leaving no hope for earners to catch up in such a lopsided economy. This would send the affluent into ever-more glittery orbits of affluence, unless we deploy a wealth tax to restore balance. Among leftists, this levy has acquired the aura of an idea whose time has come. It hasn’t, though.

A tax on wealth may tempt anyone who cares about equality as a social value, but such a proposal would be hard-pressed to survive its first contact with economic reality. As it happens, there exists a wide gap between what’s ideal and what is doable, a chasm strewn with the debris of Marxist tools. Taxes, for example, are best levied on flows of money, not stockpiles of riches. A tax can easily and equitably be applied to income, while the same cannot be said of wealth, which doesn’t show up on financial radars evenly enough for a fair slice to be taken away. Not all vaults are visible, and, like hidden bars of gold, a crypto stash online is just one of the more obvious ways to dodge detection. How various assets are valued could also create inequity in the liability math, since reliable mark-to-market figures are not readily available for real estate and other holdings. Asset illiquidity would pose its own hurdles. It would be unjust if a home-owner is slapped with a tax bill that can only be paid by a distress sale of the property that generated it in the first place. Of course, wealth estimates are mostly drawn from the stock-market value of shares owned by big shareholders. The very visibility of share-price data would make equity chunks the focal target of any wealth tax, but this would penalize a productive device for public participation in pursuits of profit. Not only would it deter businesses from going public, it would risk a flight of wealth to friendlier tax regimes abroad. And should an open intermediary’s capacity to mobilize funds weaken, overall capital allocation across the economy would turn more opaque and less efficient, with adverse consequences for all.

In an ideal world, a fiscal equalizer would not endanger the optimal use of money—a formula for prosperity with no parallel so far. But the real world, alas, is full of perverse outcomes. So why risk leaving everyone worse off? is CEO of Azim Premji Foundation.

From the windows of our classroom, we could see trains passing. The railway line was more than a kilometre away, but down on a slope, with nothing to obstruct our view. Spotting the (it was the fastest on the route) was the high point, and its distinctive red colour a giveaway. We could also make out the

Express. Even in 1978, that was one of the busiest train routes, connecting the north with the south. There were too many passenger and goods trains to be identified, but we would try to count the number of wagons and coaches.

Our imaginations would fly with the trains. To Madras, as it was known then, to Delhi, Agra, Hyderabad and Bombay. And places like Wardha, Itarsi, Warangal, and many more. In 1978, those places were accessible to most of us only in our imaginations. The window of our classroom inadvertently became a kaleidoscope of the world.

There was no other building within a kilometre’s radius. Most of that open expanse was huge igneous rock with nooks and crannies, as also small and big crater-like formations that became tiny ponds after the monsoon rains. We called them (boulders), and

(jumping across those boulders) was a game of utmost courage and athletic prowess.

There were clear champions. In my memory, Rahul, Juby, Ish Kumar,

Deepak and a few others left us in awe, as they fearlessly leapt across what seemed like impossible gulfs between two boulders, risking falling 6-10 feet on to the hard rock below. I can recollect closing my eyes in fear as one of them would sprint to jump. Rarely did they fall and rarer was a serious injury. After the monsoons, catching fish or tadpoles was the favourite pastime. As we grew older, we used the excuse of collecting these creatures for our biology lab.

Even in the blazing sun of April, we would often walk back home; over those smouldering boulders up the Arera hill and then down. Other kids would go their own way. Some to sprawling bungalows, and some to congested quarters. Differences that we were unconscious of in school.

You can’t see passing trains from those windows anymore. The boulders have vanished and buildings are all you see. There are no tadpoles after the monsoon. Since I drive around there once every few months, I know it won’t be easy to walk back home from there.

So, what if a child’s imagination cannot get pulled along with a

from the window? Is that good or bad? Is that even a relevant question?

When I was in that school, it was just called Kendriya Vidyalaya Bhopal. Today, it is called Kendriya Vidyalaya Number 1, Bhopal, because now there are five Kendriya Vidyalayas in the city. It’s good that there are so many more of them. Today, much like back then, these schools are sort of the ‘elite’ public schools, as they are well resourced. All our public schools should be like them, but till we get there, the more of these schools we have, the better it is.

We moved to Delhi in 1977. I joined Kendriya Vidyalaya, R.K. Puram Sector Eight, which stands today much the way it was. In its vicinity, a few private schools have sprung up. Each of these seems to serve a certain category of the population. So, kids come from different kinds of homes and go to different schools designed for those homes.

The Kendriya Vidyalayas I studied in were definitely some of the better resourced schools, even in big cities. Even today, these schools are better resourced than most in the country, and there are many more private schools even better resourced than them.

But while the number of such elite schools and their resources have expanded, too many of these schools have shrunk. The physical world of the schools, which integrated them with nature and the city, has shrunk. Windows don’t open to the diverse world anymore, students can’t collect tadpoles, nor do they walk home. The social world of these schools has shrunk even more, with more students coming from more similar backgrounds. Even the Kendriya Vidyalayas have shrunk in both ways. The kids of officers of elite government services rarely go to Kendriya Vidyalayas, they go to even-moreelite private schools.

What effects do such a shrinking have on us as a people? Definitive answers would be foolhardy. But we can conjecture the slow burn shaping the populace going to such schools, leading to a shrinking of fraternity and capacity for empathy, and thus to the exclusion of different people and even nature. Not ‘intellectually,’ but in their innermost beings, bereft of the experience of real people in the real world. So, perhaps even the shrinking of a sense of our shared destiny as humanity.

Most of the 260 million children of our country do not go to these elite schools. The schools that they go to need urgent improvement and transformation on most fronts. Rightly so, our policies and actions are focused on that.

However, this kind of shrinking of our elite schools is bound to affect our country. Given the way that societal dynamics operate, a disproportionate number of our leaders in all walks of life will continue to come from these schools. Whither our country if the minds and hearts of our leaders have shrunk?