The previous post on Bharti Foundation’s foray into providing quality education through the shells the government school system has passed on to them obviously begs the question: why isn’t the government doing its own job?

The teachers who were transferred to other districts so that Bharti could supply its own and actually start teaching are paid, and paid very well. Who pays them? We do.

So why aren’t they working? More to the point, why aren’t we holding them accountable? There is no company in the world which would retain employees who come in when they feel like it, conduct rival businesses on company time and consistently and defiantly fail to do their jobs.

So it shouldn’t be surprising that Bharti’s system works differently. The foundation while, strictly speaking, an NGO, is the social enterprise wing of a highly successful company. Its schools, while not being run for profit, are still going to be run efficiently, with results the bottom line. Companies don’t become as rich as Airtel by ignoring reality and tolerating  slackness, unproductivity and absenteeism.

They also don’t do things without a reason. While I believe that the Mittals may genuinely want to improve education in India for its own sake, I think it’s more likely that they realize the long-term business value of such an investment. Azim Premji was clear when he started a Foundation in his own name: faced with a shrinking pool of qualified and creative job applicants at Wipro, he decided to put his money into educating the next generation of employees. It was that or preside over the gradual demise of his own empire.

So we need to be clear that corporations are moving into education as part of a long-term agenda.

The government, on the other hand, belongs to us. In fact, it IS us. We elect our own representatives, make our own laws, collect our own money from ourselves and create the system which, like so many other systems we have signed off on, is happily and blithely not educating our children.

Can we make it work? Can we hold it accountable? It’s our money. They’re our kids. Seems like the least we can do for them!