Top table manoeuvring
With the influence of the comrade commissars of the Left parties who have the power of life and death over the Congress-led UPA government at the Centre riding high in Shastri Bhavan, Delhi (which houses the Union ministry of human resource development headed by woolly socialist Arjun Singh), there’s no letting up on blood-shedding in the country’s apex organisations supervising higher education. The latest to be shown the door is Dr. R. Natarajan, former director of the Delhi-based All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE). A competent administrator academic who proved himself in IIT-Madras before taking charge of AICTE in 2001 and initiating a clean up of the council’s smelly augean stables, Natarajan against all expectation was denied a second term last month. Reportedly because he refused to bestow AICTE recognition upon several patently substandard engineering colleges and B-schools promoted by politicians within the ruling coalition.
The next top-level target on the hit list of the CPM politbureau is Dr. Rajasekharan Pillai, the highly rated vice chairman of UGC (University Grants Commission) who won his spurs as chairman of the Bangalore-based National Accreditation and Assessment Council. The commissars of the politbureau regard Pillai, a proven academic professional, as a greater threat than incumbent chairman Arun Nigavekar whose RSS sympathies are no secret.
But Nigavekar, former vice chancellor of Pune University, has the protection of heavyweight Nationalist Congress Party chairman and Union agriculture minister Sharad Pawar which puts him beyond the reach of Arjun Singh. In the circumstances Pillai is the fall guy tarred with the handy, all-purpose brush of being soft on sangh parivar ideology. This way some room can be created at the top in UGC for a Left wing intellectual. After all even second place at the top table is better than no place at all.
Lucknow faculty fiddles
To its numerous dubious distinctions, Lucknow University has added another. In the pursuit of all round academic excellence, three Chancellor’s medals are awarded for academic and extra-curricular performance on recommendation from heads of departments. A gold medal is awarded to the student who excels in academics and extra-curricular activities; a silver medal for excellence in academics per se, and another silver to the best female student. The medals, scheduled to be awarded during the varsity’s convocation ceremony held on November 24, became fodder for the local media when two contenders — Aishwarya Singh and Pooja Pandey — coincidentally daughters of learned professors of the varsity — traded claims and counter-claims of favouritism in selecting the gold medallist.
Initially Pooja Pandey, a postgraduate student of political science was declared winner of the gold medal. But the decision was reversed in favour of Aishwarya. Then her father, Prof. Anil Kumar Pandey of the department of chemistry made a representation before governor T.V. Rajeshwar Rao, ex-officio chancellor of the university claiming that the academic achievements of his daughter had been suppressed while those of Aishwarya exaggerated by an officer who is doing his D. Lit under Aishwarya’s father, R.N. Singh, head of the university’s political science department. Meanwhile, another faculty daughter Anshula Pandey, of a professor in the statistics department jumped into the fray claiming that she had actually performed better than both contenders but was not considered because her head of the department did not recommend her.
In response, the baffled governor ordered a three-member committee to examine the claims and counter claims. The committee played safe by demanding more time to decide the winner. Consequently the chancellor cancelled the awards for this year. Standby for further faculty fiddles next year.
Long way to Shanghai
Horror stories of schools without teachers, blackboards, buildings and drinking water don’t emanate solely from the neglected outback of rural India. Right in the heart of the national capital which is reportedly being shaped into India’s answer to dazzling, born again Shanghai, the Government Boys Secondary School in Ashok Nagar, east Delhi, has been making do without a building for 20 years. A motley collection of tin sheds and a couple of toilets, the school is a learning centre for 1,600 students. According to Delhi state government officials the school lacks a main building because the land is disputed property over which a court battle has been raging for almost two decades.
Meanwhile for thieves and anti-socials in neighbouring slums, the school’s unguarded premises are a free-fire zone. Laboratory equipment, uniforms, microphones, loudspeakers, tea trays and crockery have vanished on several occasions and the principal’s office has experienced break-ins. Unsurprisingly, during the bone-chilling Delhi winters, attendance in the school plummets to less than 40 percent in the mornings, when it runs only for girl students. The result? Girls’ pass percentage in board exams has never risen beyond an abysmal 30 percent.
Realistically, it’s a long way to Shanghai.
Besmirching brand Birla
No matter how hard the winds of liberalisation and globalisation blow, one defining characteristic of the great Indian middle class — brow-beating and short-changing the seemingly vulnerable and disadvantaged — will take a long time to erase. A telling example of this deep-rooted national characteristic is provided by the amazing reluctance of a B-school promoted by one of the first families of Indian industry to discharge its contractual obligation to pay a modest bill of this very publication, i.e EducationWorld.
Early this year the Delhi-based Birla Institute of Management Technology (Bimtech) contracted with EW to feature a 16-page advertising supplement reciting the achievements of the institute which bills itself as the national capital’s second most respected B-school, at an agreed price of Rs.2 lakh. After furnishing the material for editing and layout, Dr. H. Chaturvedi, director of Bimtech capriciously reduced the number of pages in the supplement to four, for which a pro rata reduced price of Rs.50,000 was agreed upon. The reduced four-page advertising supplement of Bimtech was duly featured in the March 2004 issue of EW.
However despite the embarrassingly modest advertising tariff of the nationally distributed EducationWorld, Chaturvedi, employing a curious logic further reduced the amount due to Rs. 12,371. According to him Bimtech’s Prof. Rahul Singh who supplied the material for the 16-page supplement "was not informed about the coverage space and it was made 4 pages without information and without any confidence developed on the issue" (sic).
The matter is now pending litigation, but it’s a mystery how Chaturvedi who is self-evidently oblivious of the law of contract and business ethics, has made it to the top of the tree of a B-school from whose confines he is besmirching one of the most respected names in Indian industry.