Lucknow comeuppance
In the end, it was something of an anticlimax. Last year Samajwadi Party (SP) supported candidates had swept the Lucknow University Students Union polls with the blessings of chief minister Mulayam Singh Yadav and son Akhilesh Yadav, MP, in particular publicly stating that student intimidation and violation means boys will be boys. But in the recently concluded varsity election, SP candidates were swept aside in favour of independents and those with relatively clean reputations. SP candidates frantically petitioned the vice chancellor, district magistrate and superintendent of police to stop the oath-taking ceremony, charging that the poll process was tainted with fraud. The main protestor Ram Singh Rana, the SP supported candidate for presidency of the union chose to forget that he had conducted his election campaign surrounded by a posse of gun-toting policemen and that his supporters had resorted to air firing guns on every occasion.
Despite threats of violence from Rana’s supporters, to their credit, the university authorities decided to stand their ground. And the beneficial fallout of the smooth oath-taking ceremony of October 21 was that invited VIPs like former CBI director Joginder Singh, commended the university authorities for maintaining order on the campus. Unsurprisingly chief minister Mulayam Singh Yadav unlike last year, was conspicuously absent from the proceedings.
Two-edged sword cut
The power of carpet-bombing advertising and co-option of the mainstream press where marketers rather than editors call the shots, serves a purpose only upto a point. If not backed by product performance, it can blow up in the advertiser’s face. Ironically this elementary marketing lesson has been learnt the hard way by Dr. Malay Chaudhuri and son Arindam, promoter-directors of the intensively advertised Indian Institute of Planning and Management, a Delhi-based B-school professing to be one of the top 10 in India — academically superior, globally networked, ahead of its time, dares to dream and generally the hottest B-school short of Harvard, if that.
The loud advertising of Chaudhuri pere et fils both of whom claim to be full-fledged professors and business management gurus who can not only solve corporate conundrums but national problems in a jiffy, was recently investigated by one Gaurav Sabnis, hitherto an IBM (India) manager and Rashmi Bansal, editor of a Mumbai-based monthly published under the zany name and style of JAM (Just another Magazine). An inveterate blogger, Sabnis let it be known on his blog that most — if not all — of the Chaudhuris’ claims were fabrications rooted in their imagination rather than in fact. Bansal reproduced the information on Sabnis’ blog, inviting the wrath of the well-connected Chaudhuris upon them. IBM sacked Sabnis while Bansal was issued a legal notice threatening a Rs.125 crore libel suit.
Subsequently the matter was investigated by the Delhi-based weekly Businessworld (where the editor of this publication is a Soviet-style non-person) which inter alia discovered that the IIPM degree programme is unrecognised by AICTE and UGC; that young Chaudhuri is indeed a gold medallist B-school graduate, except that his gold medal was awarded by IIPM; that most of the companies advertised as IIPM’s campus recruiters had never visited the institute’s campus and neither have most of the advertised "world class faculty" ever taught at IIPM.
Instead of slapping a libel suit against Businessworld, the Chaudhuris responded with a curious advertisement in their favourite Times of India (October 26) detailing an "official response to one particular magazine’s factually incorrect reporting". In the ad which never names Businessworld, IIPM insisted that it delivers what it advertises.
The Chaudhuris’ seemingly unlimited resources for advertising in frontline dailies, especially the pricey TOI has aroused considerable speculation about the source of their wealth. The consensus of opinion is that the modus operandi of the IIPM management is to advertise tall claims heavily to influence new-rich families in smaller towns and cities to sign up for its expensive (Rs.5.26-8.25 lakh) programmes. Those who sign up are taught mainly by IIPM graduates and recruitment into IIPM and Planman apart, alumni are left to fend for themselves in the jobs market.
A neat strategy which worked well until inconvenient individuals decided to look beyond the ads at the advertiser. Moral of the story: advertising is a two-edged sword. You’d expect management gurus to know that.
Endangered social contract
It’s a national malaise which is assuming epidemic proportions. A common feature of the massive rain deluges which inundated most of India’s major cities including Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Kolkata, Bangalore and Chennai during the two months past, was the unapologetic abdication of their posts by state government and municipal corporation employees paid from the public exchequer to safeguard the public interest. Mass absenteeism in government and municipal offices when assorted calamities struck India’s cities serially, has suddenly made citizens acutely conscious of mutual obligations, aka the social contract, between taxpayers and government. Given that an estimated Rs.964,000 crore — a sum greater than the entire tax revenue receipts of the Union government is spent annually as government establishment expenditure (hence the Union government’ s rising ‘revenue deficit’), and politicians and bureaucrats showing no inclination to curb conspicuous consumption, a growing number of citizens’ groups and NGOs are beginning to question the sanctity of the implicit contract between citizen and the state.
In particular cynicism about the utility of paying taxes for the maintenance of civil servants who seldom provide the services they are paid to deliver, is likely to lead to greater tax evasion and falling tax receipts in a society in which a mere 87,000 people declare annual incomes of over Rs.10 lakh. According to the National Council of Economic Research, the number of households with incomes over Rs.10 lakh per year is 1.7 million. The country’s tax collection force estimated (by Jairam Ramesh, MP) at a massive 55,000 is unable — or unwilling — to bring this huge number of high income tax evaders to book. Quite obviously they are perpetually absent from their designated posts, sleeping on the job, or worse.