Education for the highest bidder

A report in the Statesman, Kolkata on 12 June 2011 carries these nuggets.

Kerala health minister Adoor Prakash purchased a post-graduate seat at Pariyaarm Cooperative Medical College in Kannur for his daughter for Rs 80 lakh because it is “the responsibility of any father to ensure a better future for his children.” The minster runs a chain of liquor bars which I guess somehow qualifies him to be the health minister of a state that has overtaken Punjab as the biggest consumer of alcohol.

                                                        

Unfortunately, Prakash had to give up the seat because of criticism even from his party, the Congress, which as we all know, believes in austerity and value-based politics!

The comedy of ironies doesn’t end there. The seat was sold to him by the CPI M-controlled college, headed by party leader AV Jayarajan.

Education minister Abdu Rubb is under pressure from his party, Muslim League, to return the MBBS seat which he got for his son at the Jubilee Mission Medical College, Trissur. The Christian management of the college charges Rs 50 lakh to Rs 1 crore for an MBBS seat, but cynics allege that the seat has been gifted to the minister for supporting its stand that it can sell even government seats. (I presume this refers to the seats allotted to students who find themselves in the merit list prepared by the government.)  But to his credit, the education minister hasn’t yet succumbed to the pressure.

The DYFI, the youth wing of the CPI M, marched to the medical college demanding that the minister’s son not be admitted. The commendable protest by the DYFI against the sale of medical seats lost a bit of sheen when it was revealed that its state treasurer, VV Ramesh, too had bought a seat from the Pariyaram Medical College for his daughter under the NRI category, which costs Rs 50 lakh.

Ramesh, poor fellow, had to forego the seat at the instance of CPI M leadership. He said he had been driven by a father’s instinct when he had sought the seat rather than the discipline of a comrade. “The moment I realised my flaw, I corrected it by giving up the seat. For a communist, the party is above everything,” said he. It is sad that the people of Bengal and Kerala, who have seen the comrades closely, do not notice these simple virtues amongst them. BTW, the said Ramesh is also the director of the college.

In Kerala congressmen, communists, the Muslim political elite, padres, you name them, have their hands in the education pie. It is worth noting that these political parties / pressure groups have ruled the state alternately since the 1950s.

The situation is no different elsewhere. In Karnataka, possibly all the private engineering colleges are owned by congressmen and politicos other than from the BJP, who are Johnnies come lately in the state. The BJP chief minister therefore has developed a soft corner for the aspiring engineers of the state. He instructed the private engineering colleges to charge Rs 30,000 for meritorious students, that is, those who qualified through the common entrance test (CET). The colleges demanded they be allowed to charge between Rs 50 and 80 thousand. Ultimately, the chief minister arm-twisted the private colleges to accept the following fee structure:   

45% of engineering seats [will go] to students who have cleared the CET for Rs 35,000 and the remaining 55% seats under Comed-K and management quota for Rs 1.25 lakh. In addition, a supernumerary quota of 5% mandated by the All India Council of Technical Education will provide free seats [to] economically backward students.  (Deccan Herald, Bangalore, 3 June 2011)

In West Bengal, most of the private engineering colleges were set up by the CPI M leaders and their cronies during the second half of their 34-year regime. (Engineering colleges and cold storages were the only businesses that flourished in rural Bengal, both cornered by comrades.) In 2010, the reds read the writing on the wall. They knew they would be thrown out in the assembly elections in 2011. So they did something neat. They increased the annual tuition fees of private engineering colleges from Rs 56,000 to Rs 70,000. No protests, no wrangling, and no arbitrator to decide what the fees should reasonably be! Today, a student studying at a private engineering college in Bengal may reasonably ask why they should pay twice as much as their counterparts in Karnataka. 

Lots of good things have happened in our country since independence. And lots of bad things. The worst perhaps is commodification of education.

When we were young, a bright young boy or girl considered higher education their right, as college education, including at the IITs, cost next to nothing. One only had to be smart enough. The situation has changed. Higher education is now something that the rich can buy for their children so that they qualify for a job.

If you can afford it, you can buy a comfortable future for your offspring, just as you can buy a house or a car. Is anything wrong with that?

Well, till the other day, young Indians, who had neither houses nor cars, had the option to work hard and arm themselves with technical education to make a decent living. That option has been taken away, for all practical purposes, the official sop of 5% supernumerary quota notwithstanding.

Nobel laureate economist Amartya Sen has said a time might come when one part of India will resemble California and the other part will be like sub-Saharan Africa. If that ever happens, privatisation of education, rather, making business out of education will contribute much to the process.

Niyamgiri in West Bengal?

The dispute between dismally poor Adivasis of the Niyamgiri hills in Orissa and the powerful multinational Vedanta Resources is a hugely asymmetric conflict, particularly in view of the central and state governments’ eagerness to bend over backwards to help industrialists. Scrapping of the Vedanta aluminium mine has been a rare victory for the marginalised poor. Another David has tamed for now, though certainly not killed, a Goliath.

The reasons given by the Ministry of Environment and Forests in support of their decision to scrap the project has put an official stamp of approval on the concerns of the people who oppose such projects, namely, destruction of forest dwellers and irretrievable damage to ecology. The ministry and its head, Mr. Jairam Ramesh, and a section of the Congress party including Mr. Rahul Gandhi deserve to be congratulated for this.

But the question that comes to the mind is: does this one swallow make a spring? Does this mean some day in the future, our policy makers will believe development means water, food and shelter for all, instead of more highways, glitzier malls and bigger airports in a country where half the children go to bed hungry? Does this mean industries that pollute and slow-poison people will be scrapped in other parts of the country too? Let’s discuss another case.

In West Midnapore, Burdwan, and Bankura districts of West Bengal, many sponge iron factories that have sprung up during the Left rule have been causing massive damage to the environment.

My senior friend and a retired teacher of economics of Calcutta University, Subhendu Dasgupta has given some startling information in an article published in a Bangla newspaper today: production of 100 tonnes of sponge iron requires 1.6 lakh tonnes of water, (an equivalent amount is consumed by 80 thousand humans per day). 100 tonnes of sponge iron also produces 180 to 200 tonnes of carbon-di-oxide, 26 to 30 tonnes of waste, and 100 tonnes of dust. The fields and grazing tracts around the sponge iron plants have turned black and water in tanks has been contaminated. Agricultural productivity has reduced: from 36 to 45 sackfuls of paddy per acre to 21 to 24 sackfuls. There is also black stain on the rice and the rice mill owners refuse to buy such paddy; Mangoes fall off before ripening, saal leaves are turning black, and even fish have developed black stains, and cannot be sold. Domestic animals too are harmed; cows give birth to stillborn calves. [Ekdin, 3 September, 2010, article by Shubhendu Dasgupta on edit page]

I checked with another friend, a chemical engineer by training, who currently works on industrial pollution. My friend confirms this is actually happening and one can see buildings and roads covered with black soot in wide areas around Durgapur and Asansol where there are about forty sponge iron factories.

The government of West Bengal has reacted to the crisis by arresting the people who have been protesting against this wanton destruction of Nature and her children. Members of Jhargram Block Environmental Pollution Resistance Committee, Hemanta Mahato and Upangshu Mahato were arrested and charged with waging war against the state. Naba Datta, of Citizens’ Forum, who has been studying the effects of industrial pollution by sponge iron factories, too was arrested. Twenty cases, including waging war against the state, have been slapped against him. [Ibid.] Perhaps even the worst criminal in the state would not have received such attention and honour from the government.

Will anything be done to protect the poor villagers affected by sponge iron plants in West Bengal and elsewhere?

An inane (a)political debate

Last night, I watched a curious debate on the forthcoming West Bengal municipal elections thanks to the TV channel Star Ananda. A junior minister and an actor represented the Left in the programme. (One could say two actors; aren't ministers actors too?) The Trinamool Congress (TMC) was represented by theatre director Bratya Basu and artist Shubha Prasanna, and the Congress, by two middle-rung leaders, Nirbed Roy and Arunhabha Ghosh. The odd man out was Saifuddin Chowdhury, the former CPIM MP who has been in the wilderness for long.

In the long discussion frequently interrupted by longer commercial breaks, nothing was mentioned about what the parties would do if voted to run the municipalities. There was not even a word of praise or criticism of the present municipal boards.

Time wise, the debate was dominated by Shubha Prasanna who spoke in long, complex sentences and often flew off at a tangent. His relative naïveté and inexperience in political wrangling was exploited by the Congress duo who attacked the respected elderly painter with a vengeance. They had obviously come prepared with a strategy and stooped low to unsettle him. Some samples: “apni to paanch koti takar maal kamiechen” (“You’ve made five crore on the sly”); “he paints crows and behaves like one”.  Shubha Prasanna swallowed the bait hook, line and sinker, lost his composure, and retaliated with equally wild allegations and personal attacks.

The Left representatives were better speakers, but their debating skills didn’t hide their woeful lack of substance. All they could say was that their rule should be perpetuated so that the anarchy of the 1970s didn’t return, as if the present anarchy is better than the anarchy of the past. The level of the political discourse was unimaginably abysmal.

The only person who talked sense and substance was Saifuddin Choudhury, although he hardly got any opportunity to speak. It was perhaps symbolic of Bengal today. Decency and reason be damned, street fighters rule the roost.

Despite their incoherence and lack of homework, the TMC duo at least spoke on behalf of the average citizen of Bengal crushed under a diabolical rule. They reflected the political reality of the time. The congressmen were often seen giggling and talking between themselves and made a mockery of the debate, quite literally. For more than an hour while I suffered them, they didn’t criticise the Left misrule once; it seemed their only objective is to prevent TMC coming to power.

In the assembly elections of 2006, the Left Front secured less than 50% of the popular votes in West Bengal, but won 235 seats as against the combined tally of 30 by all the opposition parties. In the parliamentary elections of 2009, the left was trounced by the united opposition. The left can win in the state only if the opposition is a divided house. It was expected that the Congress and the TMC would continue with the winning combination for the municipal elections too. But that was not to be.

Until hearing the debate I was not sure who broke the Congress-TMC alliance for the coming elections. I thank the two congressmen for removing all doubts in the matter.

Kolkata, 13 May 2010