The choice of parents is the lottery of life.

Bihar is in the news again. Last year it was famous for electing Mr Nitish Kumar as Chief Minister, in alliance with 'Jungle Raj', by defeating the 'Hindu nationalist' BJP. This year Bihar is famous all over the world because the topper in arts in Class XII Board exams said that political science is all about cooking, poor girl, while the topper in science could not answer a simple chemistry question. No wonder Bihar voted for 'Jungle Raj'. Yet vigilance was much stricter this year. Pass percentage for Class X students dropped from 75 to 46% and over 800,000 students failed. Education in India is not about learning but about getting a paper which will somehow get them a government job so that they are guaranteed a salary for life. In UP, 2.3 million applied for 368 jobs of peons, 25,000 were graduates and 255 had PhD degrees. 75,000 beggars, or 21% in India have passed high school, some even have college degrees. 'Jungle Raj' may be good at winning elections but scares away businesses. Who would want to work in a state where kidnapping is the most lucrative profession? School students are ignorant because their teachers are also from the same system, having managed to obtain pieces of paper by escaping detection. In Agra, in UP, 12,800 students appeared for the Bachelor of Education examination and 20,000 passed. Having a piece of paper improves chances of finding grooms for girls and increases the amount of dowry a man may demand. With no jobs to go around, convicted murderers, serving long jail terms, have become much wanted in the marriage market in Bihar. Access to education is similar for all sections of society in primary schools but the proportion of the poor children falls steadily as you go higher up. However, a lot of these arguments are based on rights of the poor rather than on how to improve learning. Here, middle class children have a great advantage because their parents are educated and so they learn a lot at home. Just talking to children increases their vocabulary, their understanding of situations and comfort with numbers. Also, middle class parents are likely to know more than one language, especially English, without which higher education and getting good jobs becomes impossible. " If your child learns English it's as if he or she has inherited 100 acres of land," said a Dalit scholar. Efforts to increase knowledge by force is futile as the US learnt from its 'No Child Left Behind' Act. Regardless, the Congress passed the Right to Education Act to provide more equality in education. That increased the cost of school education for the middle class and resulted in worse outcomes for the poorer children. How do you give equal parenting to every child. That is the real difficulty.