Thirty-four years of uninterrupted communist rule (1977-2011) over the fertile wetlands of West Bengal which in the 19th and early 20th century led the Indian cultural and education renaissance, has so devastated the state, that this once thriving region, the hub of the East India Company, has been reduced to an industrial wasteland. The only business enterprises which have survived communist rule are the tobacco, hotels and consumer products giant ITC and the Ananda Bazar Patrika (ABP) media group.
Consequently, all visiting writers looking for the silver lining write up the leonine personality of Aveek Sarkar, proprietor and chief editor of ABP which publishes the city’s #1 Bengali and English language dailies (ABP and The Telegraph), a clutch of vernacular magazines and owns several Indian language television news channels.
The latest visiting scribe to pay homage to Sarkar is Uttam Sengupta in Outlook (June 15), who eulogises this “magnificently rich” publisher’s not-so-secret passion for Davidoff cigars, Lahore-made bespoke tailoring (in preference to Savile Row), and disdain for fallen standards of the best Parisian restaurants. To these affectations, he could have added Sarkar’s membership of the world’s best clubs, and experiential knowledge of the world’s most expensive hotels.
Your editor is/was well-acquainted with Sarkar and the ABP Group for whom I launched Businessworld, which was back-breakingly developed into the country’s premier — and highly profitable — business magazine. Therefore I was surprised that when I put in my papers after seven years to become (an unsuccessful) writer, I wasn’t offered a severance package (aka golden handshake) for having established a Rs.100-crore brand for him. Two years ago when BW was sold (at a substantially lower price) to the Delhi-based Anurag Batra, I wrote to Sarkar suggesting a post facto handshake of a mere 2 percent of his windfall. No reply. Later I flew to Kolkata and presented a detailed proposal, inviting him to make a modest investment in a promising new project. All to no avail.
Evidently in his newly emergent persona Sarkar combines effete epicureanism of the occidental noveaux riche with ingrate, hard-ball oriental capitalism. A disappointing metamorphosis.
Privatise asap
An Achilles heel of the Indian economy and a major drag which has hobbled the promising economic revival plans of the BJP-led NDA government from taking wing, is the public sector banking system. Saddled with huge NPAs (non-performing assets) estimated at 10 percent of advances against the prudent banking norm of 1-2 percent, the country’s 26 public sector banks (PSBs), defined by red-tapism, unionism, systemic corruption and political interference, are reform-proof and need to be privatised asap.
Following widespread protests in the seventies, prime minister Indira Gandhi was obliged to introduce the concept of priority sector lending under which 40 percent of the credit advanced annually by all PSBs had to be mandatorily given to rural borrowers and medium and small scale enterprises (MSEs). Despite annual reports routinely stating — and often boasting — the attainment of priority sector lending targets, the promised miracle never occurred as testified by the rising number of farm suicides in recent years.
According to informed sources, a well-oiled racket continuing unchecked for decades has sabotaged the priority sector lending programme and in effect, strengthened the stranglehold of usurious money-lenders over the hapless rural citizenry.
“The formal lending system to farmers actually never took off. It existed on graft, where rural bank officers would lend to well-connected moneylenders, say, at 12 percent interest, and block all low-cost loans to farmers with a pile of garbage paperwork. The moneylender reigns supreme, even today, lending at 100-plus interest rates to farmers. Harvests can be devastated, but the loan has to be repaid. Over time, it becomes impossible,” comments Abheek Barman writing in the Economic Times (June 5), in a telling commentary on the corruption and moral turpitude within the country’s public sector banking system.
Teacher-grab war
Early years education is transforming into a major “occupation” (the Supreme Court prefers this description) of the country’s community of edupreneurs because of growing awareness of the critical importance of professionally administered early childhood care and education (ECCE). Besides, the pre-primary education sector is unregulated, and thus far has escaped the predatory attention of venal education bureaucrats and inspectors. Hence its attraction.
Because kindergartens are mushrooming in every street and corner across the country, the demand for professionally trained early childhood teachers is rising exponentially. This spells danger for the country’s top-ranked pre-primaries whose managements have invested heavily in globally-inspired child-friendly classrooms and environments, and teacher training.
In the once-gracious city of Pune, poaching of pre-primary teachers has not only become overt, but borders on desperation.
Ketan Gala, the promoter-director of Pune’s four Leapbridge preschools — of whom Leapbridge International, Kalyani Nagar is ranked #1 in Pune in the EducationWorld India Preschool Rankings 2014 — is reportedly contemplating legal proceedings against the management of Orange Ivy preschools for trespass and impersonation. According to Leapbridge sources, Orange Ivy employees routinely enter their premises under the guise of parents seeking admission for their children, and while chatting up teachers, blatantly offer them inducements to jump ship and join Orange Ivy. According to these sources, the Leapbridge management has gathered a considerable body of evidence including names and photographs of Orange Ivy employees up to the directors’ level engaged in these “criminal activities”.
Quite obviously, the race to influence and win trained teachers in the fast-track pre-primary education sector is accelerating. However teachers aren’t complaining.