ADDRESS BY SHRI K.R.  NARAYANAN, VICE‑PRESIDENT OF INDIA, AT THE CONVOCATION OF THE TATA INSTITUTE OF SOCIAL SCIENCES

BOMBAY, MAY 12, 1995

Mr.  B.G.  Deshmukh, Chairman of the Institute, Mr.  Jamshedji Bhabha, Former Chairman of the Institute, Dr.  Armeti Desai, former Director and presently UGC Chairperson, Prof.  Sarathi Acharya, Acting Director, Distinguished members of the Board of Governors, members of the faculty and dear students,   

It is a great privilege to address the Convocation of this Institute a second time, now after a lapse of 15 years.  I had the honour of addressing the convocation in May 1979.  Much earlier I had very intimate though not formal association with the Tata Institute of Social Sciences.  In fact, I could be considered as one of the first informal students of this Institute when it was situated at Nagapada.I was literally stranded in Bombay on my effort to go to London as a Tata scholar.  Those were the days of the Second World War.  There were few sailings to U.K.  I was totally stranded in Bombay for nearly a year.  The very kind and dynamic Secretary of the Tata Endowment for the Higher Education of Indians, Mrs.  Piroja Visugar, thought I should be helped.  I badly needed help.  She talked to Dr.  J.M.  Kumarappa, who was then the Director of the Institute and asked him to allow me to stay in the Hostel of the Institute at Nagapada.  Thus I stayed there for nearly one year in l944‑45. 

I also worked as a journalist, a reporter, in the "Times of India" at the same time.  I came to know personally the early batches of the students of the Institute Prof.  M.S.  Gore, Mrs.  Phyllis Gore, Mr.  P.D. Kulkarni, Prof.  Panakal, Mr.  B.  Chatterjee and others.  All of them became friends and I had the privilege of keeping up the contact and friendship with them ever since.  I must have had acquired a basic inclination towards social work because I happened to marry someone later, one who was also a social worker though not from Tata Institute, but from Delhi School of Social Work. In a sense, I have been a perpetual object of compassionate social work.  ever since.  My stay at Nagapada enabled me to pick up a smattering of the knowledge of social work and social sciences which stood me in good stead in the London School of Economics and later in life.   

On this occasion I want to congratulate Mr.  Deshmukh, who has been an old colleagUe of mine in the Government of India for his assumption of the Chairmanship of this prestigious Institute.  May I also congratulate Mr. Bhabha, who presided over the Convocation I addressed in l979, for the manner in which he has built up this institution.  Above all I want to congratulate all the students who obtained their degrees today, and those who have got coveted prizes.  It has been more than pleasing to me to see the predominance of girls among those who have taken their degrees today.  This is encouraging for the future of India.  It was Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru who said once that the future of India lay in the hands of the women of India.  But I must also congratulate the lone young man who accepted a prize today with good grace and courage.   

Well, I have been wondering what I should talk about today.  I thought I should do some loud thinking about social change in our country, not in a very academic way but in a common sense manner.   

India is reputed to be one country which had an unbroken civilisation and a society which has passed through centuries without being damaged fundamentally.  This continuity is remarkable.  It had its advantages and disadvantages.  When the British came to India they talked about the placid, pathetic contentment of the masses of the Indian people.  They introduced some reforms and new steps to industrialise the country.  I should like to read out to you something Lord Northbook, who in a panegyric of Pax Britanica, said in the House of Lords about the law and order that they have gifted to India.  It is a very interesting passage because it contains some social and sociological observations.  He said, "When you come to apply (that is law and order) to an empire, multitudinous in its traditions as well as in its inhabitants, almost infinite in the society of races which populate it and of creeds which have shaped their character you find that it involves administrative problems unsolved by Ceasar, unsolved by Charlemagne, unsolved by Akbar. 

It seems very simple to say that we shall keep the peace of the empire.  But if you have to keep the peace, we must have laws to settle quarrels which would otherwise disturb the empire and if we have to have such laws we must frame them to a system to administer it, and the police to carry the orders of the judges, and then we must have the troops to protect the judges, the police, the people and all concerned.  When you come to introduce this elaborate system of administration into a vast continent you find that the work in which you are engaging is nothing less than this, that you are modifying, not harshly, not suddenly, but slowly, gently and with sympathy but still modifying the whole collective life and the character of the population of the empire".  Well one must admit that the British did attempt and to some extent succeed in modifying the life and character of the Indian people.  But there are other aspects of British Rule.  Apart from the arrested industrial and economic development there was arrested social development also, Dr.B.R.  Ambedkar once described the British attempt to change Indian society like that of an old Chinese tailor who was given cloth to make a new suit together with an old suit as a model; he brought back the new suit faithfully copying the old one with all its stains, tears and patches.  This was what the British did to the Indian social structure.   

But the Indian nationalist movement which arose in the womb of British rule was at once a movement for the reformation of Indian society and a renaissance of Indian culture and Indian values.  The constructive programme launched by Mahatma Gandhi was a massive voluntary movement, the largest voluntary movement for social reform and national construction that has taken place in any country.  It changed the attitudes of the people in almost all walks of life and gave them confidence that by their own efforts they could change their lives even under foreign rule.  Thus the nation building process started.  The process is not yet completed.  In fact, it is one of the most complicated tasks to build a nation which was described as a single civilisation, but not a single nation.  In the late fifties, Jawaharlal Nehru reflected upon this and said and I am quoting, "The fact remains that we have yet to develop a unified nation.  We distrust each other and sometimes even dislike each other.  Under the stress of some calamity or external danger we may well unite.  When that immediate urge is removed we fall back into our respective shells and lose the sense of the whole.  Painfully, we try to get out of those shells and build the unity of India.  Step by step we advance and then something happens which lays bare our inner urges and feelings.  Whether it is caste or provincialism, we still live in a tribal age.  Religion was exploited to break us up and now language.  Meanwhile caste remains to separate us and to encourage narrow groupings".   

Many changes have taken place as a result of modernisation, industrialisation and the introduction of technology.  One has to ask whether these changes have helped or hindered in building up national unity and in building up a cohesive nation and society.  In fact, sociologists say that some of the new processes have, in fact, militated against creating unity in India.  For example, one sociologist hailing from the Jawaharlal Nehru University has observed that the new middle class 250 million strong have imbibed the values which are not always liberal, they have imbibed attitudes which are not sensitive to the condition of the majority of the people of this country and they have developed an aggressive materialism which disturbs the harmony of society, and therefore, he says that in one respect this modernisation process has not really helped in creating unity and nation building. 

But we must understand that the process of modernisation, of development, of social change, of nation‑building that we have been attempting has been much more difficult, complex and immense a task than what Caesar, or Charlemagne, or Akbar or the British themselves ever attempted to do.  We have to overcome the backwardness of a century and a half or more and we have to develop ourselves in the context of democracy which was not the case in regard to all the developed countries of the world.  They could disregard human rights, they could disregard democratic opinion, they could set aside all environmental problems and develop their countries and bring them into the modern world.  But we have to develop our country in the context of a vibrant democracy, paying heed not only to our ancient values but to the new values and standards of environment and the new concepts of human rights.  This is a most difficult and complex thing to achieve.   

As Jawaharlal Nehru once put it, India has been throughout haunted by a dream of unity.  But it was a floating dream without a substantial material base.  For the first time, after independence, through the process of planning which encompassed the whole of India, a planning process which was not totalitarian but democratic, we provided an economic content to our independence and national unity.  For the first time we built up a system of inter‑dependence between different parts of India.  In the grave threats and crises that we have faced since independence it is to a large extent due to the elements of economic unity and a minimum of economic inter‑dependence that we managed to bring about that has helped us to sustain ourselves as a nation.   

Nehru's approach and philosophy of social change and economic development was geared to this broad objective.  In the introduction to the First Five Year Plan written by Nehru himself, he noted:  "Economic equality and social justice are conditions indispensable for survival of democracy.  On the other hand hasty implementation of measures to bring about economic equality may affect production adversely".  So a balanced approach was necessary.  He later said that elimination of poverty cannot obviously be achieved merely by distributing existing wealth nor can a programme aiming only at raising production remove existing inequality.  The two have to be considered together.  It was based on this balanced approach we adopted what is called the mixed economy and it was in the womb of the mixed economy that our present dynamic private enterprise and our middle class were born.  This was not something that happened in just three years since 1991.  The middle class and the private enterprise were slowly nurtured during the period of planning and the mixed economy.  In fact, they were nourished by the infrastructure established during the period of planning.   

There was deeper thinking behind our plan for development and social change and for nation building.I am quoting Jawaharlal Nehru again.  In a famous article he wrote in 1958 and published in the "AICC Economic Review" under the title "The Basic Approach", he wrote:"In order to give an individual and the nation a sense of purpose, something to live for and if necessary to die for, we have to revive some philosophy of life and give, in a wider sense of the word, a spiritual background to our thinking." This is an old Indian attitude but applied to modern development.  Nehru introduced a spiritual dimension into development, and also held that a social reformation movement was needed in the country combining governmental role with people's efforts through a process of decentalisation.   

In this Institute of Social Sciences, I should like to emphasize the aspect of interlocking a social reform movement with governmental development policies and programmes.  These developmental programmes are immense in size, whether they are minimum needs programme, anti poverty programme, employment generating programme or uplifting undeveloped and backward areas, these programmes amount to a vast range of activities.  Any social worker or any voluntary organisation which ignores the existence of this massive programme of development for social and economic change by the Government would be working in a vacuum, and therefore, today, the need is for social workers, for voluntary organisations to find ways of working in cooperation with these programmes on which vast funds are being spent.  They can ensure more than any other group in our society that these programmes are implemented successfully and their benefits, infact, reach the targeted sections of the people.  They can create awareness among the people, they can organise the people to demand that they should be getting the actual benefits and that they are not siphoned off to other purposes and other sections of people.  Thus the NGOs have this special function to perform and the Government has the duty of associating with the programmes so that the interlocking that Nehru had talked about could come about.   

Today in the world the emergence of NGOs is a very important phenomenon.  They have been agents of change.  I should call them midwives of social change.  At the international level it has been calculated that there are twenty thousand such gloabal social‑change organisations.  I am not sure, what the exact figures are with regard to India, but at least 50 thousand NGOs or so work in different fields in different parts of the country.  Their role is crucial in ensuring that developmental programmes are implemented properly and that the intended social change, in fact, takes place.  I have mentioned what they can do in respect of the various governmental programmes.  But there are other fields also in which they can operate, whether it is in the field of literacy or health and sanitation in the urban areas as well as in the villages.  There are social ills, social evils of immense proportions even today in our country.  Whether it is child marriage or dowry, atrocities on women, or on other weaker sections, child abuse, dreadful new diseases, or use of drugs, in all these areas the NGOs have a vital role to play.  In fact their role is more crucial, to my mind, than that of the Government.   

Whether all this will change our society which has been immobile for ages is a question to ponder about.  We have a system that is democratic, but often it operates as some sort of democratic feudalism.  Modernisation has, paradoxically, led to the revival of many evils in our society, particularly the phenomenon of religious fundamentalism.  It is ironic that with the advance of science and technology and the spread of rationality there is such an upsurge of religious fundamentalism all the world over.  In India this is accompanied by the revival of outmoded customs, superstitions, and practices which were condemned and kept under check during the period of our independence movement.The proliferation of such customs, practices, and rituals together with the recrudescence of caste is ironic, when on a larger plane, the forces of reason, science and technology have been advancing in our country. 

How do you explain it?  How can we fight it?  If the new knowledge and new technology is harnessed to the support of old social evils and attitudes what would happen to the country?  Perhaps we need some sort of a cultural revolution, a peaceful non‑violent cultural revolution.  I have sometimes thought that what we have in India is a co‑existence society, not a single society but various societies co‑existing together with marginal relations among them.  In the intimate things of life whether it is marriage, eating, celebration of festivals, the relationship is largely within certain groups and not open to the whole society.  That is why I believe that ours is a co‑existence society where there is interaction between groups at the margins.  Of course as a result of modernisation and education, the margins at which different groups interact have progressively expanded.  But basically the exclusiveness of groups remains still a social fact of life.  I have once described Indian society as a broken mirror.  You can see in the little broken pieces the whole of India in miniature, but nevertheless it is a broken mirror and a broken image.  What we need is that the different pieces be put together so that the social image of India is not fragmented but can be seen steadily and as a whole. 

This is the age of social transformation.  All over the world changes of a fundamental nature are taking place.  Peter Drucker has pointed out that three important changes are taking place in society.  One is the virtual extinction of the farmer.  The second is the extinction of the living in servants, the third is the decline of the blue collar worker, the main agent of the Marxist revolution.  In India these changes are not very remarkable yet, but one can sense that the trend is in that direction.  A new knowledge society and corps of knowledge workers are emerging.  They do not earn their living by the sweat of their brow.  They do their work sitting in their chairs hardly doing any sort of manual work.  But the knowledge workers constitute a minority in society.  What do you do with the majority who might well be unemployed or partially employed?  The problem of unemployment is already looming large in developed and developing countries.  A sector distinct from the traditional private sector and public sector is emerging.  Peter Drucker calls it the social sector comprising education, health, environment etc. 

It has been said that in the United States every other adult spends a few hours working in this so called social sector.  This is a role cut out for voluntary organisations and the NGOS.  Those who go out into the world from this institute after taking their degrees might go into Government or industry, but wherever they be formally employed they would have a role to play in the social sector.  They are trained to do that, and therefore, even while working in governmental or industrial organisations, they can serve the larger public through voluntary action.  They can be a bridge between the privileged minority, be it traditional vested interests or the new knowledge class, and the majority of the people.  They can be the agents of change mediating between the old and the new society.  May I wish you every success in this important role.  I thank you for the opportunity given to me to address you. Thank you.

Thank you.