India, Dec. 19 -- If irony ever needed a permanent address, it would find one not in a grand boulevard or a government bungalow, but in an Indian school staff room. It would sit between a fraying attendance register and a biometric machine that fails to recognise the fingerprints that keep the system alive. In a country that worships knowledge and calls teachers nation-builders, the Indian schoolteacher has been quietly reinvented as the world's most expensive clerk.
Why burden a trained educator with the inconvenience of teaching when they can be "productively" deployed filling forms, feeding portals, chasing signatures, uploading data, supervising mid-day meals, managing elections and conducting surveys? As the old proverb reminds us, wh...