Lovely But Increasingly Unequal
- Contemporary Manipur society -

Amar Yumnam *

We know the climate of Manipur is just wonderful. We are reminded of this beauty every year whenever evening approaches after a sultry day of summer or we come across the breeze of Manipur. We are also made to remember the greatness of our weather any time whenever we visit any other city in India or abroad.

I have a wonderful friend who has been completely enchanted by the beauty of our climate and the charm of our girls that he wishes to go for a second birth here and settle down in this place. He even thinks of transfer-fulfilling of his wishes through his son if the latter readies for marrying a Manipuri girl. I have all my wishes for this friend who grew up in Central India, but now settled in Western India.

I also have another firiend who has spent the better part of his life in France, particlularly Paris, but now back to India. He is right now with us as an academic visitor.

He was telling me the other day that Manipur has got a nice climate. Well I reaffirmed his comment and added that unfortunately this beauty in climate is not getting transformed into beauty of development somehow. Development unfortunately has failed terribly in the land, and all the changes whatever are haphazard.

All these have now led us to a situation where even students are organized along ethnic lines. Well, instead of increasing convergence in interest among the youths originating from different backgrounds and whatever, we now find increasing mobilization of students along ethnic lines and even indulgence in physical violence on the basis of their ethnic-based interests.

This is something we all have to take the blame. The academics have failed to reform the students, and the society have refused to evolve.

Despite This: Despite this awfully devastating environment, we find our youths working very hard to compete with each other and with the rest of the world. The performance of the State in the field of sports is already well noted. I would however dwell on another aspect today, which though preparing the youths for competition has an inbuilt character of raising the inequality in the society. I would talk of the tuitions and the widespread participation of students in this.

Given the prevailing educational scenario of the land, tuitions are now a necessity. The beauty as well as pity lies in the fact that all our school going boys and girls are actively participating in this process sacrificing all their sleep and compromising on their health.

They are all preparing themselves for the competition for life here as well as anywhere in the world. All our boys and girls today are by and large more aware of their life challenges than their predecessors. They are well versed with the scale of competition they have to ride through to be something in life.

So far so good. What I am really worried and disturbed is that by now we find quite a large number of families who cannot afford to send their children for the various needed tuitions, given the failure of the educational system of the land.

We find this in a situation where the once summer holiday or winter holiday tuitions organized by local clubs becoming a thing of the past. So naturally the children of the poor families have to satisfy themselves with whatever education they receive from the already failed schools. It is not that these children are less brainy and incapable of participation in the rat race for competition, but only that they are just deprived of the opportunities to prepare themselves for the battle of life.

The implication of this prevailing scenario is that our society has now an in-built feature for increasing inequality in the years to come. Inequality based on fair competition and relative achievements is acceptable and tolerated, but inequality founded only on unequal access to opportunities is a sure sowing of seed for instability.

We already have so much inequality in the system. But if we are to keep on adding greater unfounded inequalities among our children on grounds the children have no control over, then the society we are evolving for our children to survive and work on is a bloody one in the real sense of the term.

We should now apply our mind on evolving an institutional mechanism so that all children have equal access to more or less equal quality education so that we leave at least a manageable society for our children unlike the present chaotic one.