Crass marketing genius
A peculiar characteristic of the specie homo sapiens Indicus — perhaps born out of the sub-continental genius for rote learning — is the herd mentality. No sooner is an enterprise successful in one niche or another, a dozen copycats scramble to clamber aboard the rolling bandwagon. Yet despite widespread awareness that imitation is tantamount to flattery, the urge to mimic success and worship precedence is too strong even in the newspaper/magazine publishing business. This is the only possible explanation behind the introduction of a tag-along, supplementary lifestyle mag blatantly titled Envy being offered free of charge to readers of the Delhi-based weekly Outlook. It’s patently obvious that the inspiration for the conversion of Outlook editor Vinod Mehta to the cause of conspicuous consum-ption (which is the sum and substance of the crudely titled Envy), is the runaway success of a similar appendage titled Spice tagged onto rival weekly India Today published by the Delhi-based high priest of effete epicureanism, Aroon Purie.
But instead of experiencing envy, even well-wishers of these two national weeklies are likely to suffer despair. How seriously can one take their anguished outpourings about misgovernance, injustice and exposés of the thousand unnatural shocks that citizens are heir to, when in their companion appendages these news weeklies sing panegyrics to super-luxury motor cars, thousand dollar hotel rooms, exotic foods and beverages and cigars priced at Rs.1,350 each? Yet in the shining new India shaped by the grabbing establishment of the Delhi durbar, such crass initiatives qualify as marketing genius.
Children need to know
The much over-hyped Indian economy currently experiencing boom conditions because of foreign capital inflow and the efforts of a small minority of private sector entrepreneurs, is beginning to flounder in turbulent white waters and is heading toward the edge of a huge waterfall because of infrastructure deficiencies, particularly a massive nationwide power shortage. Right now in the reportedly much-envied Indian silicon valley city of Bangalore, industry and business enterprises in the central business district are experiencing four-six power outages of almost an hour’s duration on a daily basis. According to a highly placed source in the Karnataka state government, the sad history of a now forgotten US-based company named Cogentrix which won a contract to establish a 1,000 Mw power plant in the state in the late 1990s offers an insightful explanation why not even one new power plant has become operational in Karnataka during the past decade.
Typically, as soon as bids are invited for a capital intensive project such as a power generation plant, government bureaucrats led by venal politicians split into two warring camps each backing separate frontrunners to bag the contract. For upfront bribes, they undertake to land the contract for their clients and also raise technical and other objections against the other bidders. In some cases even after the contract is awarded as it was in Cogentrix’s case, groups representing losing bidders don’t let up and continue to raise all types of doubts about the awardee’s technical and other capabilities which are highlighted in the media with the help of complicit and/or trusting journalists.
In Cogentrix’s case even after the contract to set up a 1,000 Mw power plant in Mangalore was awarded, the sniping and ambushing continued for so long that the American company evidently unused to the machinations of the state’s politicians and babus, wrote off its investments in ‘speed money’ and project conceptualisation costs and retreated back home. And that’s an illustrative rather than exhaustive story. Most of India’s notorious project implementation failures are rooted in this type of competitive corruption.
And that’s why India’s reportedly most envied city is experiencing prolonged and unprecedented power outages. Teachers: Children need to know!
Lifeboat principle
One of the reasons why contemporary India has perhaps the worst education systems of any major nation worldwide, is that since Maulana Azad in the 1950s, the country has not been blessed with a Union education minister (designation changed to Union human resources development minister in 1985) of any vision or consequence. In particular the population of long-suffering India, aka Bharat, has been especially unfortunate in being lumbered by two neanderthal old-world politicians steeped in the authoritarian culture of licence-permit-quota raj in quick succession at a time in global history when education and human development have moved to the top of the national agenda of countries round the world. At the turn of the century the incumbent in Shastri Bhavan, Delhi (which houses the Union HRD ministry) was the BJP’s hindutva champion Dr. Murli Manohar Joshi who took it upon himself to inter alia, tighten ministerial control over the six Central government sponsored IIMs (Indian Institutes of Management) and seven IITs (Indian Institutes of Technolgy). Luckily the BJP-led NDA government was unexpectedly voted out of office in the general election of 2004 and for all his pains Joshi lost his Lok Sabha seat.
Unfortunately for the country, Joshi’s successor in Shastri Bhavan is the septuagenerian self-styled socialist Arjun Singh, steeped deep in the licence-permit-quota ideology of the 1950s. Singh too has targeted the IIMs and IITs for special attention. Late last year he piloted a constitutional amendment through Parliament under which an additional 27 percent of available capacity in these institutions of high repute is reserved for OBCs (other backward caste/classes). The legal validity of this reservation diktat is currently pending adjudication in the apex court. Now having chanced upon the discovery that the older IIMs (Ahmedabad, Bangalore and Calcutta) have independently raised modest endowment corpuses which gives them some financial autonomy, the HRD ministry is reportedly giving the final touches to an Institutes of Management Act which would forbid IIMs from building independent corpuses.
With the Congress-led UPA government’s lifeboat taking in water in choppy seas at the midway point of its five year term in office, it’s perhaps time that Singh who is to a great extent responsible for the government’s slipping ratings in opinion polls, is jettisoned to save the Congress.