Anurag  Behar

The Azim Premji Foundation is working with the public schooling system in India, 1.5 million schools, to try and improve the quality of education. And the reason they feel the need of that is that while India has a large public system, the quality outcomes is far from desirable, it is actually where poor. So the foundation is focused on improving that kind of education and it works with the government. They are setting up an university which will conduct research and offer graduate programs in various specialization of education: curriculum development , education management, pedagogy of language. We have large field programs where we work with government schools in teacher training, workbook preparation, curriculum reforms, and examination changes.

Why did they choose this? You will see causes you want to contribute to: issues of livelihood, public health, infrastructure, etc, he says. Anything that you see is a worthy cause. The reality is that we cannot do everything; we got to choose something. And when we were making a choice we said “if you look at all these worthy causes, what kind of a cause, what kind of an area probably has the greatest multiplier effect. And we realized that education has the greatest multiplier effect. And it’s the same old story. If you give a fish to somebody you feed her for one day, but if you teach somebody to fish, then you have taken care of her for all her life. Therefore in our minds, if we can do a good job of education in this country, that will enable development in every prospective, whether it’ll be health, whether it’ll be livelihood, whether it’ll be governance.

It is become the received wisdom, it is become the only legitimate thinking of man, of that of an economic man. “I the economic man, hunting for my current needs”. “I the economic man, everywhere”. I think this kind of a prospective under rates the goodness of man. And I think that is a tremendous folly, tremendous folly. I think we've had that kind of a thought process for the past 150 years. We should not undermine the importance of it, we should not think that the economic man is not real, it is real, but what I am saying that the “Good Man” is equally real. Goodness is equally real and we should not under rate that. That goodness in itself, the expression of goodness in itself, is sufficient for all these different stakeholders to talk about to be able to talk together, to work collaboratively and to work towards something which is better for society not just for today but also for tomorrow and eternity. 

if there is a coherence then there will be sustained good effect and if there is no coherence, then there will be sustained good effect. If there is no coherence then there will only be replication. I think at the core of this there are two issues and they are inter-related: - The first issue, and it applies to all the stakeholders: civil society, government, corporate, etc. is that of an openness of mind about intentions, about trust. Too long have we looked at each other as adversaries. We think that the government is bad, the government does not do. Somebody in the government might think that the civil society people are here only to protest and the only thing they know is the activist form of doing things and they cannot contribute. This atmosphere of miss-trust is the first thing that has to be eliminated because that is the heart of the second issue, which is - That if you have mistrust you don’t have dialogue. If you have trust that which builds continuous dialogue, I think that is the simplest, and I would say it is the only mechanism, which makes sure that we are not doing the same thing over and over again with very limited success, but that we are doing things in a coordinated fashion, we are doing things which are complimentary and supplementary, rather than repeating the same things.