Deeply in the red and unable to pay the july salary of its bloated 31,000 workforce — which translates into 588 employees per owned airplane cf. the world average of 150 employees per plane — Air India, the national carrier, is symptomatic of all that’s wrong with India’s resource-guzzling public sector enterprises. Reportedly losing Rs.15 crore per day and all set to announce a massive loss of Rs.5,000 crore for fiscal 2008-09, the management of the airline has sent out an urgent SOS to the cash-strapped Union government (which owns it) for a Rs.14,000 crore bailout package. And the imminent highest ever loss announcement in the 61-year history of this airline promoted by the business house of Tata in 1948 and nationalised in the public interest in 1953, comes hard on the heels of a Rs.2,000 crore loss chalked up in fiscal 2007-08. In the bizarre world of India’s PSE behemoths, there’s a deep seated belief that come what may, the country’s penurious majority is obliged to maintain Air India’s under-worked, overpaid employees in the style to which they have become accustomed.
But this time round there’s a possibility that calls for denationalisation and privatisation of Air India may be heeded. Quite obviously fed up with even the first class service of India’s third class national airline, last year the country’s me-first top political leadership established their own VVIP airline comprising five custom-built super-luxury jets equipped with special defence mechanisms and all mod cons, purchased at prices ranging from Rs.700-1,000 crore each and serviced by over 150 personnel. In the circumstances, they don’t need Air India anymore, and this public sector behemoth may well be put on the auction block. What about the larger question of whether a country with arguably the world’s poorest population can afford to maintain its leaders in such grand style? Question out of order, for reasons of state!
Don’t bet on it
The report of the Yash Pal committee, established over a year ago following a stand-off between the Union HRD ministry headed by the antediluvian socialist Arjun Singh and technocrat Satyen (‘Sam’) Pitroda chairman of the National Knowledge Commission, is likely to prove bad news for hitherto powerful career educrats and academics in supervisory organisations such as the University Grants Commission (UGC), All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) and Medical Council of India (MCI).
Siding with Pitroda, who had recommended moth-balling and supercession of all higher education supervisory organisations by an Independent Regulatory Authority for Higher Education, the Yash Pal Committee is believed to have recommended the establishment of an independent National Higher Education Council and corresponding state councils to supervise the country’s institutions of higher education.
While the Yash Pal Committee’s report is likely to prove bad news for all educrats manning these organisations, it’s likely to prove particularly ominous for the Delhi-based Ketan Desai, the uber powerful director of MCI for the past 21 years. An astute politician and master manipulator who has built up a huge following among down-market medical practitioners countrywide, Desai has been calling the shots in MCI for over two decades and has proved dislodgeable from the council. Somewhat belatedly, his low-profile cover within MCI was blown recently when a television news channel (Times Now), while running a sting operation against two Chennai-based private medical colleges demanding huge capitation fees (see editorial p.8), stumbled across his name as a trustee of both colleges.
Now the report of the Yash Pal Committee recommending the supercession of MCI, among other higher education regulatory organisations, is likely to prove the end of a record-breaking innings for Desai. But it would be inadvisable to bet on it.
Education Ambani style
Although foreign think tanks such as the Rockefeller and Ford foundations, Morgan Stanley and McKinsey World Institute, among others believe that India is likely to transform into an economic superpower by the mid 21st century, the acute myopia, sheer stupidity and unbridled greed of captains of Indian industry (who, according to the prophets of these and other think tanks will lead this miraculous transformation), make fulfillment of this prophecy seem doubtful.
Consider for instance their attitude towards education. Although industry is the largest user of educated people, sine qua non, unlike America and UK’s pioneer industrial tycoons who established great universities and research institutions, Indian industry leaders pay little more than lip service to the cause of improving and upgrading the education system.
A case in point is Mukesh Ambani, chairman and managing director of Reliance Industries Ltd, the country’s largest private sector company. Instead of gifting a great public library or university to the cities of Mumbai and Ahmedabad, which have enabled the Ambani clan to build the greatest business empire in Indian history, this Stanford-educated son of his father Dhirubhai — alas, poor Dhirubhai, I knew him well — is most well-known for showering lavish gifts upon his own family and over-the-top conspicuous consumption which must make Maoist leaders in the Red Corridor states (who control over 150 of India’s 600 administrative districts) rub their hands with glee.
Among this industry leader’s bounty to his own family members: a 40-storey home under construction on Mumbai’s posh Carmichael Road; a Boeing 747 airplane for his wife, and most recently a Yale education for his twin sons, which includes an entourage of servants to wait hand and foot on them in that great institution of advanced learning.
Yet this exemplary scion of Indian industry hasn’t totally ignored education. A decade ago he gifted his much-appreciated spouse Nita a K-12 school in Mumbai — a fiercely expensive and exclusive institution run under the name and style of the Dhirubhai Ambani International School. So exclusive is this school that not once in the past decade has any writer (editor included) of this publication — despite its qualification of being India’s sole education news magazine — been admitted into its fortress-like premises. Quite obviously the foreign think tanks who predict a bright future for the Indian economy haven’t factored in the unique capability of captains of Indian industry to shoot themselves in the foot.