Over last few days, while trying to set up a small office in Sirsi, we found few scary developments which I would like to share with this community.
Decay of educational institutions:
Lot of us who could find good corporate jobs in Bangalore, owe it to the English medium schools we studied in our native small towns.
Two of such schools in Uttarakannada are it brink of closure owing to cashflow issues. Both these schools are 100+ years old and we’re prominent institutions in their respective Taluka.
When probed with school management, the primary cause for adverse cash flow has been strange. It is not emerging competition or decay in staff quality.
It is primarily caused due to changing socio economic background of the parents in that Taluk. Earlier most of students enrolled where children of government servants, bank staff, small and mid business owners.
The current parents ( age 35-45) do not have stable source of income and hence do not pay on time or opt for government schools. The schools think that brain-drain of creme to cities and lack of local economy would eventually lead to closure of schools.
Lack of multi-speciality hospital
There have been many deaths owing to lack of immediate critical medical support required. The folks have to either travel to Udupi or Hubli for any critical situation, which has led to many losing their lives on their way. While the locals believe it is onus of government to provide a multi-speciality hospital, my thought is it is again rooted in local economy. If there was significant number of people who had opted/access to health insurance, it would had attracted few private hospital chains to invest in a branch for our district. The unattractive ness of starting a Apollo/Manipal primarily roots from lack of predictable revenue sources of locale.
Do let me know your thoughts and what we can do to make small towns more livable.
It’s telling on the human state, and also on the natural world and ecosystem that we inevitably turn on for short term gains/relief and look at as merely a resource pool.This in turn will make it even worse. Rekindling the economies - with local production and consumption - everywhere, is a major fix for addressing both the deficit/loss in human development indices as well as ecological destruction. The revival has to be ecologically sound though, or else we will merely set it up for a larger loss, eventually.