RTI immunity
The pernicious fallout of post-independence India’s failed experiment to create "a socialist pattern of society" is that public servants have become public masters, answerable only to themselves. However notwithstanding the unrelenting efforts of the Indian Left, half a century later wisdom has dawned upon most lay citizens that socialism means government of bureaucrats, by bureaucrats, for bureaucrats. One of the beneficial outcomes of this belated awareness is the much-acclaimed Right to Information Act 2006 and the appointment of a chief information commissioner in Delhi and in most state capitals. Since the passage of the Act by Parliament and an abortive rearguard action by the bureaucracy to keep their ‘file notings’ from public scrutiny, the RTI Act has exposed many of the murky decision-making processes which have permitted the overwhelming majority of bureaucrats to retire in great comfort and quasi-literate politicians to amass huge fortunes.
However one ministry of the Karnataka state government which has remained immune to the injunctions of the RTI Act is education. Today it’s more difficult for philanthropists, NGOs, and lay citizens in Karnataka to promote a new school than it is to establish a missile plant. To substantiate this proposition, under the provisions of the RTI Act, EducationWorld has repeatedly solicited information relating to the procedure and process for promoting a new greenfield, private primary-cum-secondary school. A rain of letters (May 23, July 24, and October 10) to the education ministry has not elicited a single response. Complaints to the commissioner of information are routinely forwarded to T. M. Vijay Bhaskar, secretary of primary education and Madan Gopal, director of public instruction, neither of whom have furnished the solicited information despite many promises to do so. Meanwhile the queues for admission at the gates of the city’s private schools become longer year by year.
Quite obviously despite the enactment of the RTI Act, in the warrens of the low-priority education departments of state governments, it’s business as usual.
Hares & hounds
Although in India the media commands a modicum of social respect, in the US — the world’s most vigorous democracy — the media is a public watchdog which most people love to hate. This is not only because of the bottom-of-the-barrel journalism of tabloid papers aka the gutter press, but even more so because of the extraordinary ubiquity and intrusiveness of that country’s television news channels. Unfortunately post-liberalisation India’s mushrooming television channels are following suit and are incrementally bringing this country’s hitherto respected media into hatred, ridicule and contempt. But while proliferating television news channels undoubtedly serve the public interest by highlighting the callousness and neglect of government officials, there is growing disquiet over their penchant for utilising the medium to stoke the fires of controversy and precipitate ill-considered, knee-jerk government reaction.
A case in point was the bar girls controversy of last year in which tens of thousands of professional dancers employed in beer bars in Maharashtra and Karnataka lost their livelihoods. While reporting a proposed government ban on bar dancers, they couldn’t resist the temptation to show video clips of women dancing in sleazy bars. As a consequence when simple-minded rustic politicians in the two states imposed the ban, there was little public sympathy for the bar girls deprived of their perfectly legitimate livelihoods. Similarly while headlining a car accident in Mumbai on November 12 in which an expensive car filled with rich young kids mounted a pavement and killed six pavement dwellers, the editors of NDTV news couldn’t resist the temptation to juxtapose shots of the grieving victims with disapproving video clips of upper class youth dancing nights away in swish discotheques. The patent intent behind such faux sympathy for the poor and dispossessed is to reassure the public of the liberal pro-poor credentials of the NDTV management, i.e cadillac communist Prannoy Roy.
Yet ironically NDTV — like most others news channels — runs a daily late night programme covering the five-star party scene in excruciating detail. A typical case of running with the hare and hunting with the hounds. Little wonder the media is moving steadily upwards in the national hate list.
Steep wages
A war of words has broken out in New Delhi between the Planning Commission and the Union HRD ministry over the issue of permitting private unaided institutions of higher education to determine their own tuition fees. In its approach paper to the Eleventh Plan (2007-2012), the hitherto dormant commission has woken up to the logic of the Supreme Court’s judgement in the TMA Pai Foundation (2002) and P.A. Inamdar (2005) cases that privately promoted colleges and deemed universities which don’t receive government handouts should be free to design their own admission processes and determine tuition fees payable provided they are transparent and reasonable. Perhaps the members of this somewhat redundant commission which reportedly has 28,000 employees on its muster roll, should have woken up earlier. Because while they slumbered, Union HRD minister Arjun Singh, an unrepentant socialist of the old school and self-styled champion of the backward classes and minorities, drafted and piloted the 93rd Amendment which expressly overrules the Supreme Court’s judgement in the two cases cited above. Under the provisions of the 93rd Amendment, state governments have the power to pass legislation in all matters — including admissions and fees — pertaining to private, unaided institutions of education, schools included.
According to sources in the HRD ministry, Singh is absolutely convinced that only by championing the minorities can the Congress win the next general election scheduled two years hence. Meanwhile leaders of the opposition BJP are reportedly chortling with glee because the ruling Congress party is increasingly being branded as a party of minorities, and the massive Hindu vote is once again consolidating behind the BJP and its allies.
Two years hence the ailing septuagenarian Arjun Singh will have disappeared into the footnotes of history, leaving the country to the not-so-tender mercies of the BJP and the sangh parivar. Such are the steep wages of populism.