‘New Disease among Children’: Dhankhar's Lame(nt) Excuses
Amaan Asim | 31 October 2024 | The Wire
Last week, Vice President Jagdeep Dhankhar lamented a “new disease among children – that of going abroad”. Dhankhar believed this constituted a massive brain drain and “forex drain” for India, apart from the loss of a “bright future” students would have enjoyed had they chosen to stay behind in India itself.
This is not the first criticism of foreign education by the BJP-led Union government. In 2017, Prime Minister Narendra Modi infamously claimed that “hard work is more powerful than Harvard”. The jibe was targeted at Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen for his criticism of demonetisation. However, the sentimentality of decrying experts and foreign universities was clear….