NaMo is a lonely person at the top with a grand design for change up his sleeve. He has been throwing up ideas on various occasions speaking at different functions. His colleagues as well as his opponents find safety in sticking to old approach. They find the pace adopted by NaMO for his driving through uncomforting because they find it difficult to fathom the message hidden in actions and words of NaMo, but he clearly has a design in mind to improve the education system without depending on or dismantling the present structure. It cannot be improved as faculties in non private schools are laden with men and women with intent of only easy earning of their monthly salaries. The redesigned buildings with all necessary facilities would not improve the system that is the carry over British legacy. Even though the planned economic development was adopted as main objective of governance, no attempt was made to introduce the changes needed to meet the main objective like imparting skills that would enable them to find employment.

On more than one occasion in the past fifteen years the Prime Minister spoke with emphasis of educated young as national asset as they can find employment in any country that need skilled hands to keep their machines in operations as most have turned old while India is still young. He also stressed on need to impart skills to the educated to make them productive in different sectors. Yet another idea that emerged from him at his meeting with the top brass of industrial world. He proposed a possibility of converting the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee scheme into scheme for imparting skills to rural youth instead of using them to dig and fill mud holes only.

At the conference of scientists and technocrats connected with the Space Research, he sought an easier solution of the Satellite communication channels usage for long distance education. A good teacher can attend to needs of several thousand students through visual medium and thus deliver quality education. He would perhaps also use the satellite channels to speed up the skill training programme.

He had mentioned in his reply to the debate on the Presidential address to parliament last year the need for turning the educated into skilled hands as they have a potential as exportable commodity. Most development nations suffer from dearth of skilled young hands, with their populations of workers growing above the working age, to keep their wheels running. Yet nothing was moved in that direction in the last fifteen months. Fears were lurking large around of pressing demands for introduction of old culture subjects in education as attempted in the Vajpayee government. NaMo has no intention of yielding to such demands that would put the clock backwards.

The rising demand for reservations to classes that are economically or socially not backward castes has brought to the fore the issue of efficacy of the discriminatory political intervention to provide room for the Dalit and the Other Backward Classes in the higher technical education. Instead of making them competent to withstand competition at higher levels by providing them quality education at lower levels, their future is stamped by the government intervention with label of intellectual inferiority. As municipal and state governments are normally attended by classes other than the upper middle classes, no attention was so far paid to improve quality of education though India adopted education for as the millennium goal set up by the United Nations in 1994.

On the literacy day even the President Pranav Mukherji spoke of achievements of India in improving literacy rate in last two decades. Private surveys indicate that 96 per cent children in the age group of 5 years to 13 years are attending schools. The heartening development denotes a major change in concept of even poor relating to education. They see possibility of empowerment of their child through education. They yearn to ensure their child also does not have to pass through similar miseries and indignities that they suffered. Even uneducated old Dalit woman, earning Rs. 200 a day by pressing clothes from a by-lane of Lucknow, craves to send her grandson to a English Medium school. Devesh Kapur of the Pennsylvania University’s Centre for India studies noted in his article story of the dalit old woman saving Rs. fifty per day for the purpose.

To lend his support to the growing awareness of importance of education, the Prime Minister Narendra Modi appeared before school children, seven and half lakh of them, to have interaction with them. No prime minister had ever exposed himself to meeting with young learners and answered their questions. His opponents jeered at his attempt as farcical drama without any purpose. The jeering exposed their lack of comprehension that India is fast changing. Even for poor roti is not as important as education of their children. It reflects the transformation of the values and aspirations. They no more force their child to join the child labour force and earn few rupees a day for the family. Instead, they lead him to the school gates. If they can be assured that their child would get free but quality education, it can be converted into a new political mantra that would put waters of all rivers of India aflame as the remove poverty slogan had.

NaMo is striving to force the pace of transformation but it is much hard task because the political and administrative structures have been habituated to the traditional solutions. The side whispers and cynical smiles of faces of few young technocrats when the Prime Minister was addressing them spoke volumes of need for a drastic overhaul of their mentality.