Surrounded by unprecedented scams, scandals and daylight robbery of the public exchequer, raids on the public purse by light-fingered gentry within the Congress-led UPA-II government even as leftist intellectuals on the National Advisory Council chaired by Congress party chairperson Sonia Gandhi decree hand-outs of thousands of crores for potential vote banks, Union finance minister Pranab Mukherjee issued a clarion call on July 12 to 55 ministers and heads of government departments to cut foreign travel, seminars and conferences in 5-star hotels and refrain from purchasing new cars. According to the finance minister, this will help him attain the Union government’s targeted fiscal deficit of 4.6 percent of GDP in 2011-12 (cf. 4.7 percent last fiscal).
However, if the princely sense of entitlement with which government ministers and babus of the Delhi durbar spend public money is any indicator, Mukherjee’s plaintive cry is likely to prove a voice in the wilderness. It’s hardly likely to rein in big spenders of public money such as deputy chairman of the Planning Commission who, according to an India Today investigation, has travelled abroad on every ninth day of his second term in office running up a bill of Rs.85,400 per day while discharging mysterious duties overseas. Nor is the Union government likely to put the President/ prime minister’s customised Air-India Boeing 747-437, equipped with anti-missile systems and air-to-air refueling facility, or the three Boeing business jets with a range of 7,400 km fitted with encrypted satellite communication facilities and advanced navigation aids for the use of the country’s high-flying cabinet ministers, or the 12 AgustaWestland AW101 helicopters for ministerial use, on E-Bay for auction.
None of these essential expenses are likely to be pruned in response to the finance minister’s call for belt-tightening and austerity in the national fiscal interest. In the topsy-turvy socialist society fashioned by the country’s dominant dynasty and its servitors, austerity must begin at the bottom of the pyramid and filter upwards.
Close shave
The trials and tribulations of octogenarian transnational media baron Rupert Murdoch, which might result in his decline and fall, have stirred the embers of memory of your editor to recall a providential act of God — or more accurately a sudden takeover of the London-based Times Education Supplement (TES) by a private equity firm. But for it, your editor and this publication might have been squirming with embarrassment and/or suffering guilt by association. Thereby hangs a tale.
Circa 2001 when EducationWorld like the proverbial prophet without honour in his own country, was in dire straits and unable to raise any equity funding from the professed champions of education in India Inc, despite being the first champion of Indian industry as editor of the country’s first two business magazines which initiated a national campaign to unshackle Indian industry from the licence-permit-quota regime, your editor was obliged to seek funding abroad.
Naturally, one’s fancy lightly turned to TES which was the ads-replete leader of the education news publishing industry in Blighty. Surprisingly your editor was not without honour in the first metropolis and missives were exchanged with James McManus, then chief executive of TES and Times Higher Education Supplement (THES) publications in the Murdoch-managed News Corp stable, who conceded an appointment in London.
However, when your editor duly presented himself at the London offices of TES, McManus was obliged to break the news that the previous week TES and THES had been acquired by private equity firm Exponent, inflicting a painful blow to the high hopes of the then struggling EW.
In retrospect, the bad news was a close shave — perhaps as close to the one Murdoch had when the intruder into the meeting of a House of Commons committee grilling Murdoch hurled a plate of shaving foam at the media mogul provoking the ire of vigilant wife Wendy Deng.
Meanwhile although disgraced in Blighty, Murdoch is not without honour in this country. According to Aakar Patel writing in the weekly Mint Lounge (July 23), the feisty media tycoon is the greatest journalist of all time and space. So don’t write his obit yet.
End IR monopoly
With the monopoly of the erstwhile Indian Airlines (recently merged with Air-India to create a huge mess) — which ruled the Indian skies for five decades after independence and ripped off the then rising middle class with sky-high fares for almost half a century — being broken since 1991 and air travel becoming affordable, the public sector Indian Railways (IR), which claims to be the world’s largest railway organisation, has become the neglected stepchild of the establishment.
Under-investment in track renewal and maintenance coupled with massive overloading of goods trains (the secret of former railways minister Lalu Prasad Yadav, who was felicitated by simpleton professors and students of IIM-Ahmedabad for this dubious achievement) which weakened the rail track network, has resulted in IR suffering accidents and derailments almost every second day. And shockingly, despite claiming to be the world’s largest railway, the super managers of IR are innocent of any knowledge of chemically-treated waste disposal technology.
The plain truth is that like the deep-in-debt public sector Air-India, IR too has been captured by its overpaid and pampered employees who have converted it into a state within the state, complete with their own housing colonies, schools, hospitals, and supermarkets. Cursory enquiry will reveal that in any given first class carriage, at least half the passengers will be IR employees or pensioners travelling at concessional fares.
Clearly, Indian Railways, with its record of frequent wreckages has become a national embarrassment. It’s high time its monopoly is ended as was Indian Airlines’ two decades ago. The IR management should restrict itself to maintaining tracks and stations with private corporations and entrepreneurs given the opportunity to bid for routes and run trains paying a fee for tracks usage. That’s what happened in the air travel and telecom sectors, where customers now call the shots. But doing this would require courage and a leap of imagination which is beyond the nation’s rote educated intelligentsia.