There may be many in this House – I am sure Dr. Ambedkar is the foremost amongst them – who will remember that when the late Gopal Krishna Gokhale first brought forward the Bill for compulsory primary education, the then officials of the then Government of India gave all sorts of reasons why such a step was simply impracticable. One of the arguments was that an expenditure of three crores spread over ten years, that is rupees thirty lakhs a year, was too heavy a burden for the Government of India’s finances at that time to bear. But within four years of that, however, they were wasting not three crores but more than thirty crores over the war in which we had no concern and about which we were not consulted.
