Wishful thinking
In the dog-eat-dog world of the news media there’s a pathological fear of acknowledging a rival newspaper or television channel’s very existence. Therefore it’s quite usual for newspapers to refer to each other obliquely as "a city daily" etc without providing any further or better particulars. Indian editors seem to harbour the irrational fear that the very mention of the name of a rival will spark a mass migration from their publication to the other. Safer to practise complete denial.
This often leads to ridiculous, anti-social consequences. For instance, this year on February 25-26, the Delhi-based bestselling weekly India Today organised a mammoth two-day India Tomorrow Conclave featuring a galaxy of star speakers including senator Hillary Clinton, steel tycoon Laksmi Mittal, authors V.S. Naipaul and William Dalrymple, prime ministers Manmohan Singh and Shaukat Aziz and President Hamid Karzai among others. But for readers of national dailies and rival periodicals, the conclave may never have happened at all. Because newsreports of what the notables said or discussed over the two days were conspicuously absent in the media. For that one had to wait for the next and succeeding issues of India Today which reported its own conclave ex post facto in inadequate detail.
Unfortunately such feeble petty mindedness is de rigueur in Indian media. There is a naïve belief that if the competition is not acknowledged, it will wither away. We should know, because there’s a complete media blackout of EducationWorld. But that doesn’t mean we’ll fade away. That’s wishful thinking.
Outlays and outcomes
One of the most significant passages in the union budget 2005-06 address of finance minister P. Chidambaram even as he was liberally allocating taxpayers’ money to sundry sectors of the economy, was one in which for the first time ever a government official admitted that "outlays don’t mean outcomes". To mend the ragged swag bag of the finance ministry which leaks a steady stream of rupees, Chidambaram has promised a tete-a-tete with Planning Commission chief Montek Singh Ahluwalia to "put in place a mechanism to measure the development outcomes of all major programmes" — an overdue consummation devoutly to be wished.
Just how urgently an accountability system is required is demonstrated by the reckless and arbitrary manner in which chief ministers and sundry government officials fritter away taxpayers’ contributions to the exchequer.
In an extravagant gesture reminiscent of the nawabs who once ruled Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh chief minister Mulayam Singh Yadav has signed a huge allocation of Rs.69 crore to the obscure Choudhury Charan Singh Degree College (CCDC) which coincidentally of course, is managed by his brother Shivpal Singh. This targeted largesse in a state in which most institutions of higher education including the 85-year-old Lucknow University are experiencing an acute funds crunch, has aroused the wrath of even Dr. Ajit Singh, son and heir of the late peasant leader Charan Singh and leader of the Rashtriya Lok Dal Party which is a constituent of the Mulayam Yadav-led coalition which (mis)rules benighted Uttar Pradesh. In a public speech Ajit Singh was obliged to highlight that while the Sardar Patel Agricultural University has received a mere Rs.38 crore during the past five years by way of grants, CCDC (which is also located in Mulayam’s constituency of Etawah) has been bestowed Rs.69 crore in one shot.
While designing their outcomes-measurement mechanism, the Chidambaram-Ahluwalia duo would do the country a great favour if they tighten the system to ensure that the new nawabs of Indian democracy don’t disburse public funds as their own.
Pie in the sky
India’s first education satellite — Edusat — launched into the heavens with great fanfare last September by ISRO (Indian Space Research Organisation) at a sky-high cost of Rs.1,000 crore, is floating aimlessly in outer space. That is because there’s been inadequate preparation on terra firma to activate this extra terrestrial university.
None of the satellite’s 74 channels are operational nor has ISRO been able to install the 17 additional hubs required to uplink the satellite. Given that Edusat’s lifespan is a mere seven years, scientists prognosticate that remote area use of the satellite will be cut to five years, as funds for equipment and content generation will be sanctioned this fiscal and flow to states only six months later.
Caught in this crossfire are the academic institutes which entertained great expectations of Edusat and rural India’s neglected downmarket education institutions. According to UGC (University Grants Commission) sources, the opportunity cost of the failure to operationalise Edusat is equivalent to the price of constructing 10,000 new schools.
Carry on launching!
Rich prize scramble
With a sprawling 900-acre campus, a budget of over Rs.200 crore per year and a gross enrollment of 400,000 students in 400 affiliated colleges, Bangalore University (estd. 1964) which bills itself as Asia’s largest varsity is a rich prize offering a plethora of cuts, commissions and graft opportunities to the ungodly. Hence the undignified scramble for backdoor entry into the Bangalore University Syndicate — the highest decision-making authority of the varsity.
Syndicate members have wide discretionary powers of approving new study programmes, increasing annual student intake in affiliated colleges, awarding construction and building maintenance contracts, purchasing library books and recruiting faculty under the Karnataka State University Act, 2000.
Thus an almighty row has erupted over the nomination by the Congress-led state government of several gents with unimpressive credentials to the syndicate. This despite ss. 28 and 30 of the Karnataka State Universities Act clearly stipulating that only individuals who are "eminent educationists" with an "undergraduate degree", are eligible for nomination. Much to the chagrin of bona fide educationists, the front runners in the nomination race to the all-powerful syndicate are five individuals not even remotely connected with education; they are party functionaries and/ or supporters of the ruling coalition government.
With academics in the state as well as T.N. Chaturvedi, the governor of Karnataka who is also the ex officio chancellor of BU, up in arms against the list of nominees sent to the governor for approval, the state government’s nominations are under review. But the minority of isolated academics surviving in Asia’s largest university fear that the review statement is a mere time-buying ploy. The chances are that the nominations of these front men of powerful state-level politicians will be pushed through once the dust settles.
Quite obviously education is too important a subject to be left to business-innocent educationists.