If a week is a long time in politics, two years is an eternity. The Modi Sarkar that promised Achche Din for 1.2 billion Indians is yet to come true on its promise. India remains a sleeping giant, a land of what-ifs, an area of darkness. To the many who say, “But two years is too little time for Modi to have turned India around!”, there can only be one response: two years is an eternity.

Doubtless many of Modi’s ministers have performed very well. Doubtless, too, that the last two years have flown by without a major mishap. The kind that, for example, has the force to push a nation off the cliff – like the crises that strike Latin American countries with metronomic regularity, Venezuela being the latest casualty.

India is hobbling, India is stumbling, India is surviving. But something has to make India thrive, not just survive; to make her shine, zoom past all her troubles and into a future that is shown to us every five years, a future that we can only see but never touch. That something is education.

India is in dire straits because education in this country is in dire straits. At the end of two years, one expected a serious assessment of the state of our education, but disappointingly, none of the dozens of newspapers that have churned out column-yards last week on Modi Sarkar’s Report card thought it worthy to evaluate Smriti Irani and the Ministry of Human Resource Development.

Education has always been afforded a low priority by our governments and this is especially true for our Central governments. A major reason for this is that education is a State subject. It comes under the Concurrent List in our Constitution, with the responsibility of the Centre limited to coordination and setting the standards for technical and higher education. This is a get-out clause for the Centre. Most of the budget for education goes into paying salaries of those working in either well-established institutions or newly-promised ones. With the Centre having recently increased the budget allocation to the States, the list of excuses for not achieving much in education has only got longer.

Be that as it may, Smriti Irani must be evaluated. She is constantly in the news, and constantly for the wrong reasons. To be sure, many have pretended to evaluate her work – in bombastic media interviews and syrupy garden walks – but in Ms Irani’s defense, the answers can only be as good as the questions. No one asks about the Ministry, everyone asks about the minister. This is a shame, especially because, in this author’s estimate, Ms Irani holds the most important Ministry in the Modi Sarkar. Her job is one of providing vision while at the same time holding true to her mission. It is time she was evaluated on both counts.

The Mission

The best way to evaluate Ms Irani’s performance is to score how well she has done on the promises that were made by her party in its 2014 election manifesto. The table below – the Mission Table – lists each and every promise that was made by the BJP in the field of Education, colour-coded for easy reference (Yellow for announcement; Green for action; Red for inaction).

It must be said that Ms Irani has made good progress, although a hard taskmaster would have expected better. Still, for those who have judged her by sound bytes or controversies, it may come as a surprise that she doesn’t fare too badly.

The Vision

To cut to the chase, Ms Irani has been a failure. One would have expected her to have had ample time at her disposal to formulate a core set of ideas that would define the state of our education well beyond the five years that are allowed her. While she is required to fulfill her party’s election promises, the portfolio she’s been given requires her to have vision, which in turn means to go over and above her ministry, party, and even Prime minister. What would education look like in India, in 2030? What are the policies, and the institutions needed? What are the institutions that would most certainly fail to get us to where we’d like to see ourselves in 2030? Two years ago, this author had written in detail on the abject state of our education, our schools, and in particular our universities. Little has changed; in fact, things have only gotten worse. A visionary minister would have realized at once what needed to be done. The table below – the Vision Table – is but a sad reflection of what Ms Irani has achieved or set out to achieve in this context.

Additionally, Ms Irani was also, as is the case with every politician, was bitten by the 100-day bug. The table below shows how she has fared.

How does one develop human resource? Can one do it with small increases in the budget, with thousands of teaching positions that lie vacant, with universities sanctioned on paper, with institutions that have long outlasted their value? Can one develop India without increasing manifold the money that is spent on Education? Can one develop India without the Minister for Education blackmailing, even threatening the Prime Minister and Finance Minister for more money? The answer is an unequivocal no. This isn’t rocket science, this is common sense.

Comparisons with United Progressive Alliance show there is nothing out of the ordinary that the National Democratic Alliance has achieved in the first two years of its term. Worse, the functioning of each of the six institutions under the aegis of MHRD — be it the ICHR, AICTE, UGC (appointment made by the UPA), COA, ICSSR or ICPR — reeks of political interference, incompetence, vilification, or plain ineptitude. To be sure, the MHRD has reviewed the functioning of some of the institutions mentioned above and the reviews have been scathing, like for example the review of AICTE. But reviews are like Commission reports – they are destined to gather dust atop the Godrej almirah in the corridor.

The state of School Education is dire. In 2015, a quarter of a million primary school teachers took the Maharashtra Annual Teacher Evaluation Test and only one per cent passed. There is currently a shortage of 9.5 lakh primary teachers. India spends roughly four per cent of her GDP on education. Expenditure on education under the British (in 1947) was Rs 57 crore. By 1965, under Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, it had jumped to Rs 600 crore, although as a percentage of GDP spent, it was still less than half of what Japan was spending on education. In 1966, India spent on education one-hundredth of what the United States of America did per head.

Fifty years have gone by and yet we are as far removed from good education as we are from cleaning the Ganga. Education is not a priority for us and this is evident from the budgetary allocations for this year. In 2015-16, MHRD budget has been slashed by 6.3 per cent from its 2014-15 allocation and the 2016-17 budget estimate (Rs 92,666 crore), though higher than last year, is still less than the 2014 figure. The Sarva Siksha Abhiyan allocation is down by 20.74 per cent, the Support to education, including teacher training, by 36.55 per cent. Of course, if one were to ask Ms Irani she would doubtless say that the budget has been distributed, or that it fluctuates year on year. But a visionary would know and appreciate that the education budget should never be slashed come what may, simply because the money that is allocated to MHRD it is never enough. Never ever never ever.

The verdict is clear. Things can no longer be allowed to carry on like this. One cannot just go on making more and more promises without realising the ones made already. The recently-announced Higher Education Financing Agency, to be set up with a seed fund of Rs 1,000 crore, is yet another promise. Everything cannot be in the pipeline forever, given that the pipeline has also corroded beyond recognition. Nitin Gadkari, Minister of Road Transport and Highways, has realized this. In a recent interview, he said – and I am paraphrasing — that the Finance Minister doesn’t give his ministry the money he needs so he’s going to make arrangements so that he gets the Rs 20 lakh crore that he needs for his plans. This is what is required, of every Ministry, of every Minister in the Modi Sarkar. Give Modi hell, get your job done. If you can’t, make way.

Ms Irani has been decent on Mission, poor on Vision. She needs to make way for someone who would be great on both.