The next orbit

Bengaluru ranking first in the 2020 Ease-of-Living index of Indian cities as published by the Central Housing and Urban Ministry seemed surprising to residents who travel in cars at 8 km per hour especially (most people can walk that fast). This reaction is not misplaced; we ranked 12th in Quality of Life and 31st in Municipal Performance but these weaknesses were overwhelmed by ranking first in Economic Ability.

I make the case that being a job magnet and great place to live are hardly contradictory objectives and our 18th rank in Citizen Perception can be raised via interventions in education, mobility and sanitation.

New thinking about cities comes in Harvard’s Raj Chetty ‘Opportunity Atlas’ of America’s neighbourhoods as ‘high opportunity’ (ambient effect of high economic development and a dynamic ideas network on youngsters growing up around innovation being extra likely to become inventors themselves) or ‘opportunity bargains’ (places with lower economic opportunity and lower rents that punch above their weight because of good schools and neighbourhoods that increase future social capital and long-term economic outcomes).

Borrowing his framework, Bengaluru is ‘high opportunity’ because of its ability to nurture young entrepreneurs and innovators while Jodhpur, Indore and Nagpur are ‘opportunity bargains’. In 2020, despite a 27% Covid shrinkage, Bengaluru absorbed 11.5 million square feet of commercial leases (Hyderabad absorbed 5.5 million and NCR 4.5 million).

Bengaluru’s economic vibrancy rides significantly on immigrant expertise but this doesn’t automatically translate to great jobs and learning opportunities for generations raised here; early indicators of a backlash to this are visible in proposals for reservation in private sector jobs in other states — Haryana, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra.

Bengaluru can avoid this destiny by intervening in three ‘opportunity bargain’ areas of improving education (easy), mobility (hard) and water/sanitation (very hard). Improving these three will create significant leverage for the other four parameters — Health, Housing and Shelter, Safety and Security, and Recreation.

Mobility needs public transport and pedestrian access. We need to speed up the metro work, learning from Delhi where many times more tracks were completed in much less time. We must study the Ahmedabad BRTS to slow our nearly 2,000 vehicle registrations every day. Covid has also brought more bicyclists and pedestrians to our streets. Completing proposed bike paths could accelerate environment and health-friendly commute systems. The largest difficulties lie in sanitation but an exponentially growing city cannot drown in its own sewage, water tankers cannot be the norm, and sewage cannot be disposed of in living or dead lakes.

The lowest hanging fruit is education; we have a roadmap in the National Education Policy (NEP-2020). For an economic heavyweight with rapid growth, Bengaluru’s school education needs to be much stronger and our ratio of only 20% of kids in government schools needs to change (this is shameful compared to 50% India national average, 96% in Japan, 92% in England and 85% in the US).

The NEP-2020, 34 years after the last policy, presents a paradigm shift with a pedagogically sound 5+3+3+4 framework that benchmarks globally and recognises the changing world of knowledge and work. Important aspects include transforming teacher training for “skills-based multi-disciplinary learning” and creating shared assessment platforms across 60 boards that shift from knowing to learning.

Education policy

The NEP-2020 suggests three high leverage pathways for Karnataka to accelerate change. First, free up schools showing excellence — which Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed as ‘balancing mistrust of non-government initiatives... moving from a sense of entitlement for autonomy to autonomy based on excellence’.

Bengaluru is unique in the number of schools that are truly independent and essentially run with the vision of creating great education. This strength is not happenstance, but vision meeting aspirations of a potentially global tech hub and must be leveraged. Set norms of governance that allow high-quality schools to function autonomously, liberate them from unfair and unpredictable regulatory distortion, to focus on great pedagogy. These lighthouses of excellence would not just be models for the city but the country.

Second, NEP-2020 advises public-private partnership for strengthening schools; allow the lighthouse schools and weaker private, aided or government schools to partner, not just superficially but in governance, teacher performance management and pedagogy.

Third, institutionalise a strong reading programme in all schools with skills, assessments and shared resources since reading is a skill that changes every other learning outcome. Our Shiksha Neeti reiterates — learn to read and then read to learn — basis global research on foundational literacy in the early years (Nursery to Grade 2). We don’t have formal reading programmes in India — maybe because of our language diversity but more likely because of our assessment thought worlds — but Bengaluru has many people and institutions with expertise in reading that can share their frameworks, digital resources and events to all schools.

Raj Chetty’s Opportunity Atlas reminds us that equality of opportunity is more important than equality of outcomes and education is an endeavour of profound optimism. We cannot guarantee where everyone finishes the race, but we can make the start point more equal and fair. Michael Sandel’s new book The Tyranny of Merit reminds us that an individual’s status is often determined by their membership in a family, a caste or a class that bestows or denies rights, privileges, prestige, power and status.

Abraham Lincoln once filled up an election form describing his education as “defective”; yet his teachers, reading, and lifelong learning made him powerful, innovative and skilled. Former President APJ Abdul Kalam, a great educator leader, mirrored the Katho Upanishad when he said, “Learning gives creativity, creativity leads to thinking, thinking provides knowledge, and knowledge makes you great”. To paraphrase old wisdom, we can’t prepare the future for our children but we can prepare our city and children for the future. Any takers?

(The writer is Founder and Head of Neev Academy)