Electoral mercy
Despite the denial of media pundits, educationists and myopic captains of Indian industry, EducationWorld now in its fifth uninterrupted year of publication, has quite obviously infused the fear of God into the hearts and minds of wheeler-dealer bureaucrats and politicians masquerading as educationists at the Centre and in the states. That’s why it’s very rare for any members of these anti-social tribes to grant interviews to scribes from this publication.
A case in point is J.S. Rajput, director of the nodal Delhi-based NCERT (National Council for Education Research & Training), a subsidiary of the Union ministry of human resource development during the turbulent reign of the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance government (1999-2004). Though EW consistently badgered Rajput for access to NCERT for a cover feature on the organisation, throughout his five-year term scarred with suspected scams and controversies, the gates of this institution which devises a model syllabus for CBSE and government schools countrywide and is also the largest publisher of school textbooks, were firmly shut against this publication.
Now it’s understandable why. A one-man committee constituted to probe 201 allegations of nepotism, arbitrary governance, fraud and worse against Rajput chaired by S. Satyam, a retired IAS officer, has found substance in 101 of them. According to the committee’s report, six months after Rajput permitted ICICI Bank to install an ATM on the NCERT campus, his son was employed by the bank; his wife Sarla was hired as a professor in NCERT; his daughter mysteriously acquired employment in the University Grants Commission. Moreover Rajput who was charged with "unleashing a reign of terror" and of being an "academic terrorist" by the committee, made 13 "irregular appointments" during his tenure including the appointment of an unidentified sympathetic journalist’s wife as consultant assistant editor of an NCERT publication with an annual remuneration of Rs. 3.5 lakh. Likewise one Vineet Joshi was appointed assistant editor because he was the nephew of Union HRD minister Dr. Murli Manohar Joshi. However the Satyam Committee’s 1,000-page report is mysteriously silent about the substantive charges of saffronisation of NCERT textbooks and the discovery that several of them had plagiarised entire chapters written by American academics.
Mercifully and quite unexpectedly the BJP was trounced in the May 2004 general election forcing the NDA to relinquish office. One shudders to contemplate the fate of Indian education if it had been returned to power at the Centre.
Rip-off Britannia!
It’s rude awakening. Two decades ago when your correspondent last set foot in Blighty it was still one of the more affordable nations of Europe. A decade before that when your correspondent (editor of this publication) was a law student in London, it was indisputably Europe’s most affordable country which maintained a healthy distance from the continent. Not so this time around. By common consensus Great Britain is great for its soaring prices where a month’s wages of poor little brown colonials can disappear into the secure tills of scary, hard-faced restaurateurs before one can say Jack R.
Indeed it’s a conundrum how with the manufacturing base of this wind-swept island nation which pioneered the industrial revolution almost completely wiped out, and its services stratospherically priced, Blair’s Britain is enjoying its manifest economic boom. For unawed visitors from the former jewel of imperial Britain, the answer is obvious. It’s the much-maligned immigrants from the subcontinent and the Caribbean doing all the dirty service sector jobs — 31 percent of all medical practitioners in Britain are from the subcontinent and almost 80 percent of omnibus drivers of London Transport are former colonials — who are making it great going for Great Britain, though there is no evidence of gratitude in the coded anti-immigrant what’s-mine-is-mine and what’s-yours-is-mine rhetoric of this island nation’s denizens.
Another bit of useful advice to the growing number of Indians being successfully wooed and won by the British Tourist Board to spend their hard-earned rupees in Blighty, is to budget carefully for visiting the historic monuments of Britain. While British tourists to India seldom fail to complain about the small ‘discriminatory’ entrance fees levied upon foreign tourists visiting the Taj Mahal and other historic sites in India, the entry prices to Blighty’s own historic sites and monuments are killing. For instance the entrance ticket for the Tower of London is £14 (Rs.1,190) per head and to Madame Tussaud’s waxworks museum £18 (Rs.1,530) per capita. That most visitors from the subcontinent are caught unawares by these big ticket entry prices is a telling commentary of this country’s freeloading, junketing tribe of travel writers. Meanwhile rip-off Britannia!
Soft state socialism
On the garden city’s traffic-choked streets where road fatalities and accidents are rising furiously, they are the most feared. Drivers of the nationalised, state government-owned Karnataka State Road Transport Corporation (KSRTC) which ferries an estimated 2.2 million commuters daily through Bangalore’s crammed streets are a law unto themselves. Breaking every rule in the rule book — speeding, driving dangerously, switching lanes, blowing banned air-horns and skipping bus stops — with impunity, KSRTC’s 7,146 drivers kill at least one citizen and injure several more daily as they bear down their ten tonne-plus packed omnibuses upon lesser vehicles and the scattering public. Under an unwritten social contract, the city’s pathetically ineffective traffic police turns a blind eye to the open, continuous and unchecked traffic violations of KSRTC drivers.
At last there’s an explanation for the rash behaviour and astonishing bad manners of these public service providers. According to data derived from KSRTC’s own Workplace and Alcohol Prevention Programme and Activities (WAPPA) which runs a medical clinic, Chethana Kendra, at any given time 12 percent of KSRTC drivers are under the influence of alcohol while at the wheel. Since the establishment of Chethana Kendra in 1999, 2,308 KSRTC employees including 850 bus drivers have been treated for alcohol and/or drug abuse.
Yet prosecution of KSRTC drivers who are public servants (and as such have a higher duty of care), for drunken driving is rare with the state government’s emphasis being on treatment and rehabilitation rather than prosecution and prompt dismissal. Under Indian style soft state socialism, the interests of government employees who "have families to support" take precedence over the millions of citizens at risk as the state-owned corporation’s drivers run amok in the streets. That’s one explanation why India has the highest incidence of vehicular accident fatalities per 10,000 automotive vehicles (54) in the world (US:2.4), with Bangalore, the self-styled knowledge city of the country, high up in the Indian ranking. Meanwhile civis emptor!