One of the reasons why the law and order situation across the country is going from bad to worse is that the country’s profligate state governments, which drain away the myriad taxes citizens pay through corrupt practices and institutional inefficiency, can’t afford to hire enough policemen to safeguard a nation of 1.2 billion.
According to the United Nations Survey of Crime Trends (1998-2000), India has a mere 95 policemen per 100,000 population compared with 284 in the US, 204 in the UK and 171 in Sri Lanka. To make matters worse, the quality of training the 1.3 million policemen employed countrywide — top-level IPS (Indian Police Service) included — receive, is rock bottom. Little wonder that murderers, rapists, child molesters and crooks and thugs of every hue and stripe flourish with impunity in the world’s most populous democracy.
Following the heinous abduction and rape of a BPO employee in Delhi in late November, your correspondent took time off to write a letter for publication to the editors of the Hindustan Times and Times of India in Delhi, offering a tried and tested solution to expeditiously bring sexual predators to book. The letter written in the public interest, enquired why the time-tested solution of deploying armed and shadowed policewomen as decoys to trap sexual predators is not employed by the Delhi state police. Curiously, India’s top IPS officers are innocent of any knowledge of this well-known entrapment technique. In an hour long programme on NDTV television on December 5, during which the Delhi police commissioner and garrulous former top cop Kiran Bedi discussed strategies to ensure the safety of women in the national capital with a panel of women’s rights activists, neither of them showed any awareness of this well-tested police work and sex crimes detection technique.
Nor can you assume that newspaper editors are any brighter. None of them deemed your correspondent’s letter worthy of publication.
Modern morality tale
The evil that men do lives after them, intoned the wise bard of Avon, RIP. Perhaps in his age and time. In the new millennium things are different. The evil that men do increasingly surfaces during their lifetime, and smiling villains are often exposed and tried in the media and quickly sentenced to disgrace, if not to prison. A case in point is Tarun Das, for almost three decades the Delhi-based secretary-general of the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), with whom your editor became well acquainted while working with Business India and Businessworld.
But quite obviously after rubbing shoulders with the neta-babu nexus which reigns and rules in the national capital, Das transmogrified into a typical kiss-up-kick-down courtier of the Delhi durbar. In the new millennium when your correspondent met with him and requested some support and encouragement for EducationWorld from CII — a not unreasonable request given that India Inc is the prime beneficiary of the education system — in a strange irrational reaction, Das not only withheld all support but also took EW off the CII media mailing list.
But nemesis has caught up with this worthy following the income tax department authorisedly tapping the telephone of prima donna power-broker Niira Radia last year, transcripts of which have been recently leaked to the media. In some of the taped conversations, Das has exposed himself as an arch manipulator and fixer with delusions of grandeur. In one conversation with Radia, he takes the credit for induction of Union minister for surface transport Kamal Nath into the Union cabinet, even as he describes Nath as a habitual bribes taker. Already persona non grata within the Delhi establishment, Das abjectly ate humble pie during a talk show with Karan Thapar on television on December 19. During the 30-minute interview, Das was cornered into publicly admitting that he had behaved “irresponsibly, indiscreetly and stupidly” and that he had “wept tears” in private for his indiscretion.
There’s a lesson in this morality tale from which the high and mighty can derive knowledge and wisdom.
Contribution query
The memory of an arguably great leader of Indian industry is being tarnished at the Dhirubhai Ambani International School, Mumbai (DAIS). Although this K-12 day school (estb.2003) is affiliated with the top examination boards (CISCE, Cambridge IGSCE, IBO), boasts excellent infrastructure, the country’s most well-remunerated faculty and hosts over 1,000 children of the noveaux riche residing in the nation’s commercial capital, there’s cause to speculate about the values and manners that DAIS faculty pass on to the school’s students. For instance, neither Nita Ambani, the promoter-director, nor any of its principals ever answer letters or telephone calls, or stoop to granting press interviews, especially to EW, notwithstanding its 11-year vintage and good reputation countrywide.
Despite the unwarranted hatred, ridicule and contempt that DAIS expresses towards this publication, in acknow-ledgement of the good intentions and not inconsiderable investment of the promoters, for the past four years this magazine has included this reputed school in its annual EducationWorld-C fore India’s Most Respected Schools Survey in the category of international schools. And to its credit, DAIS has routinely been ranked among the country’s Top 10 international schools, and ranked No. 6 this year, being highly rated on the parameters of academic reputation, individual attention to students and infrastructure (EW September, 2010). As expected, DAIS was unrepresented at the EW India’s Most Respected Schools Awards Nite staged on November 13 in Delhi to felicitate the country’s most highly-ranked schools.
Yet the true colours of this institution were fully displayed when subsequently our Mumbai-based marketing director Bhavin Shah visited DAIS to deliver the trophy and citation for being ranked among the Top 10 international schools. On the occasion, DAIS secondary school principal — an import of suspect antecedents named Dermot Keegan — together with primary school principal Zarene Munshi berated our awards-bearing representative, rudely disputing the legal right of EW to include DAIS in the survey without their permission, apart from generally rubbishing this publication. One wonders: what genus of school-leaver will the faculty of this institution contribute to a society already notorious for insolence of office and the proud man’s contumely?