Lost the plot?
The secret behind the widespread persistence of licence-permit-control raj within the Indian economy, notwithstanding a mountain of rhetoric about liberalisation and deregulation of the Indian economy since 1991, is the ability of the Delhi durbar to seduce and co-opt reformers into the spoils-rich system.The latest victim of the Delhi establishment seems to be reformer par excellence Satyen (‘Sam’) Pitroda who engineered India’s astonishing telecom revolution of the past decade and reportedly also the Congress party’s unexpected triumph in the general election 2004. In 2005 Pitroda was appointed chairman of a newly-constituted, high-powered National Knowledge Commission (NKC) with the brief to suggest a radical makeover of the country’s moribund education system  primary, secondary and tertiary. During the past year, despite some initial teething troubles, the commission has made several overdue and common-sense recommendations to deregulate and free collegiate and university education from the dead hand of politicians.
But recently alarm bells have started ringing within liberal circles and establishments  EducationWorld included following an astonishingly hare-brained suggestion made by Pitroda "for enabling and regulating mechanisms for private schools". In a letter dated February 3 addressed to prime minister Manmohan Singh and also marked to socialist-style control freak Union HRD minister Arjun Singh, Pitroda inter alia recommends "the monitoring of private schools in terms of ensuring a transparent admissions process, regulation of fee structures as well as meeting set standards for quality of teaching and infrastructure"  a regulatory process eerily similar to that which governs admission and fees in the country’s bedevilled institutions of professional (medical, engineering and business management) education.
Within Indian academia and NKC, speculation is rife as to how this regressive recommendation which would bring the country’s best-performing institutions of education  its high performance private schools  under government control, was inserted in NKC’s carefully drafted 15-point February 3 letter to the PM. Meanwhile there are growing fears that Pitroda has lost the plot and has succumbed to the Circe-like charms of the establishment.
Forced philanthropy
The foundation stone laying ceremony of a multi-crore class I-XII school in Daulatpur, a small village in Uttar Pradesh’s dirt poor Barabanki district (52 km from Lucknow), on January 28 by Bollywood superstar Amitabh Bachchan en famille, was a big ticket event which attracted a huge crowd including former chief ministers Chandrababu Naidu and Mulayam Singh Yadav. At full capacity scheduled to be attained in 2009, the Srimati Aishwarya Bachchan Mahavidyalaya (named after his daughter-in-law, a superstar in her own right) will provide class I-XII free-of-charge education to 200 girl children from Barabanki and neighbouring districts.But Bachchan’s commitment to the cause of educating the district’s girl children would have drawn greater appreciation if the cloud of a land scam spanning Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra hadn’t hovered above it.
To purchase a salubrious farm property spread over 24 scenic acres in Maval on the Mumbai-Pune highway, under Maharashtra’s archaic property laws, Bachchan was obliged to prove he had farming antecedents. No problem. The friendly Mulayam Singh Yadav government which was in power in Uttar Pradesh at the time (2006) fudged land records in Barabanki district to show that the Bachchans had owned farm land there for centuries. Unfortunately this routine conspiracy was blown when district officials discovered that the 70,000 sq. ft plot transferred to Bachchan by the obliging Mulayam Singh government, was village panchayat land reserved for the Dalit and landless communities.
Following media exposure of this cosy conspiracy, the Maharashtra government withdrew the permission it had given to Bachchan to purchase the sylvan Maval acres. Moreover with the newly elected Mayawati government in Uttar Pradesh threatening to sue him for title fraud, Bachchan not only returned the government land to the local panchayat, but also promised to build a girls’ higher secondary on the land.
Thus superstar Bachchan had philanthropy forced upon him and the residents of Daulatpur who had vociferously alleged land fraud earlier, are not only mollified but loud in their praise for the superstar.
Thus some have greatness thrust upon them!
Warped priorities
Sometimes the public interest demands that political correctness is thrown to the winds. Therefore although this lonely publication has been in the forefront of pleading for a better deal for the nation’s 700 million rural majority, there’s growing exasperation with the warped priorities and almost total indifference to hygiene in particular, of farmers’ leaders who have risen to high public office. A case in point is the much-hosannaed Union railways minister Lalu Prasad Yadav who presented his budget to Parliament on February 26. Although Yadav proposes to spend Rs.37,500 crore on infrastructure development initiatives such as multi-level car parking facilities, electronic display boards and garib raths (airconditioned trains) for the poor, the best he could do for the most obvious problem of Indian Railways  the antiquated toilet systems of 14,000 originating trains per day  is to provide Rs.4,000 crore to gradually install environment-friendly green toilets. This despite a Rs.25,000 crore cash surplus. Which means Indian Railways will continue to pollute the environment and spread dirt and disease countrywide until 2012.
But such strange priorities are common to all rustic leaders. In the hi-tech city of Bangalore which during the past few years has been overrun by farmers’ leaders, there’s not a single toilet in the 6 sq. km Cubbon Park  the city’s pride and joy. But let’s not lay the entire blame on neo-literate rustics who have taken over this once gracious town. The middle class isn’t complaining either. Several letters written to the Times of India and other dailies in the garden city from the EW office drawing public attention to this glaring lacuna have not been found worthy of publication.
So why blame the unapologetically rustic Lalu? At least he doesn’t have faux intellectual Lead India pretensions.