Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Illustration by ChatGPT I have/had many students whose parents are teachers in schools run or aided by the government. These teachers don’t send their own children to their own schools where education is free. They send their children to private schools like the one where I’ve been working. They pay huge fees to teach their children in schools where teachers are paid half of or less than their salaries. This is one of the many ironies about the Kerala society. An article in yesterday’s The Hindu [ A deeper meaning of declining school enrolment ] takes an insightful look at some of the glaring social issues in Kerala’s educational system. One such issue is the rapidly declining student enrolment in government and aided schools in the state. The private schools in the state, on the other hand, are getting more students. People don’t want to send their children to the schools run by the government systems. The chief reason is that the medium of instruction is Malayalam. The second ...

The prices of food and other essential things keep rising.  Newspapers and TV channels celebrate it in catchy headlines.   But the number of private vehicles on the roads keeps increasing indicating that people have money to buy them and fill their tanks with fuel.  The number of people spending time in expensive shopping malls and multiplexes have not decreased.  So who is affected by the inflation and price rise? Economist and Nobel laureate, Joseph Stiglitz, delivered a speech recently to the AFL-CIO convention and said: “ 95% of the gains from 2009 to 2012 went to the upper 1% (in the USA).  The rest — the 99% — never really recovered. “We have become the advanced country with the highest level of inequality, with the greatest divide between the rich and the poor . ” The situation is not confined to the world’s most “advanced country.”  It is replicated in every country which follows the same economic policies, including India...