Alas, poor Union human resource development minister Kapil Sibal. After assuming charge with great enthusiasm, and being first off the blocks to announce a revolutionary 100 day agenda for the ministry, Sibal is reportedly beginning to appreciate that it was much easier for him to earn Rs.5 lakh per day as a front-rank Supreme Court counsel, than to run his new ministry turned upside down and inside out by his predecessors — the mercurial Dr. Murli Manohar Joshi of the BJP and machiavellian Congress stalwart Arjun Singh.
Shortly after grabbing media headlines and photo-ops following the June 25 presentation to the nation of his 100 day agenda to revive Indian education, Sibal was left high and dry by his cabinet colleague Union finance minister Pranab Mukherjee, who has made miserly provision for education in Budget 2009-10. Coterminously, the new minister has reportedly been inundated with requests from ministers, bureaucrats, MLAs, party workers and sundry petitioners countrywide for recommendation slips for favoured children to be admitted into the 981 Kendriya Vidyalayas, promoted by the Central government and administered by the Delhi-based Navodaya Samiti, a subsidiary of the HRD ministry. Under the live and kicking licence-permit-quota regime in education, ex officio as Union HRD minister, Sibal has — or thought he had — a quota of 1,200 seats in KVs countrywide to disburse to petitioners. But according to sources in the HRD ministry, in his last order before demitting office his predecessor, caste reservations champion Arjun Singh disbursed over 1,000 seats in the KVs for the academic year 2009-10.
Moreover the ministry’s wily babus seem to have converted Sibal — hitherto a committed liberal — into a business as usual control freak. According to insider reports, Sibal’s top priority of devising ways and means to raise the abysmal standards of education in state government colleges and universities, has been replaced by a crackdown on private medical and engineering colleges and a plan to impose a cap on fees chargeable by private unaided schools. Proof that tail can wag dog.
Mundane calculations
With unfailing regularity, the sacrosanct holy cow of every annual Union budget is the defence outlay. Come rain or shine, recession or inflation, the allocation for defence of this spiritually blessed, professedly peace-loving democracy rises steadily and inexorably. Therefore nobody was surprised when the Union budget presented to Parliament and the nation on July 6 by the Congress-led UPA-2 government’s old-new finance minister Pranab Mukherjee, jacked up the defence outlay by 34 percent to Rs.141,000 crore for the year 2009-10. Unsurprisingly, the issue of whether a country in which 700 million citizens survive on a daily income of Rs.20 ($0.40) should spend so much on arms and armaments, was not debated at all when Parliament passed Budget 2009-10.
Yet one wonders whether fierce patriotic sentiment or more mundane calculations inspire rising defence outlays. Five years ago, EducationWorld editorially questioned the propriety of the purchase by the Indian Navy of a second-hand aircraft carrier, the Admiral Gorshkov from Russia for a price of $875 million (Rs.3,500 crore), to be refitted and delivered in 2012. Since then the price of this vintage aircraft carrier has risen to $1.82 billion (Rs.9,100 crore), with the date for completion of refitting its anti-missile systems extended to “between 2013-2017”. According to a scathing recent report of the Comptroller and Auditor General of India, the Admiral Gorshkov has “half the life span” and is “60 percent more expensive” than a brand new, factory-fresh aircraft carrier.
Meanwhile in imperial New Delhi it’s an open secret that every armaments and supplies contract continues to involve shadowy middlemen (now known as consultants), who routinely pay huge kickbacks and commissions to politicians and bureaucrats. That explains ever-expanding defence budgets, never mind which party or coalition reigns and rules in New Delhi. And also why budget outlays for the education and health of India’s children are so mean and miserly.
Biz mags heartburn
The arrival on Indian shores of the leading American business (fortnightly) magazine Forbes, promoted by the legendary publishing tycoon Malcolm Forbes (1919-1990), has let a cat loose among the pigeons of the 30-year-old business magazines industry, which began with the launch of Business India in 1978. This pioneer Mumbai-based fortnightly published by barrister turned ambitious media tycoon Ashok Advani, was soon followed by Businessworld, launched in Mumbai in 1981 by the Kolkata-based Ananda Bazar Patrika group, and close on its heels came the Delhi-based Business Today in the mid-1980s. Arguably, it was these pioneer business publications which catalysed the dramatic liberalisation and deregulation of Indian industry which began in July 1991.
But unfortunately the huge success of Business India and Businessworld went to their publishers’ heads. Advani embarked upon a reckless expansion spree siring several failed ventures, including a television channel, running up huge debts, prompting him to manipulate the books of an education trust, for which transgression he had to do time. Businessworld, too, shot itself in the foot through a hasty decision to morph into a weekly, forcing it to sacrifice analytical depth for breaking news. But with the ubiquity of business television channels, business dailies and weekend newspapers, this trade off has proved to be self-defeating. Therefore the Delhi-based Business Today, deftly steered by magazine mogul Aroon Purie (publisher-chairman of the India Today group of publications), offers perhaps the only serious competition to Forbes India, launched in May by Delhi-based Raghav Bahl, promoter-chairman of the Network 18 group which also owns CNBC, the country’s No.1 business television channel, making for a formidable combination.
This reversal of fortunes in business magazines publishing is being tracked with some nostalgia-cum-regret by your editor, who lived laborious days to place Business India and Businessworld on the rails and kept them chugging for several years, with little by way of appreciation to show for it. Thus severely wounded by hasty wrong turns taken by their foolish masters, these enterprises built with blood, sweat, and tears are set to disappear into the footnotes of history.