Post-independence India’s Nehruvian socialist legacy has ensured there’s no stopping the slide of academia into mediocrity. Not only has public expenditure (Centre plus states) remained stuck in the 3-3.5 percent per annum groove for over 60 years as against 6 percent recommended by the high-powered Kothari Commission in 1966, the country’s higher judiciary has facilitated back-door nationalisation of privately-promoted education (Unnikrishnan Case 1993), by legitimising reams of rules and regulations stymieing all private initiatives in education.

The latest higher judiciary pronouncement that shoots the already hobbling Indian education system in the foot, is a September order of Justice Rajiv Sahai Endlaw of the Delhi high court, dismissing a suit filed by Cambridge University Press, James Taylor & Co and Oxford University Press against Rameshwari Photocopying Services sited on the Delhi University campus. The latter replicated reams of material from textbooks published by the plaintiffs and has created “course packs” mapped with college and university study programmes, sold to students at a profit. The court held this doesn’t amount to infringement of copyright. The 94-page ruling observed that photocopying and creation of course packs for the use of students is permitted under provisions of the Copyright Act, 1957.

Commonsense would indicate this issue has wider implications than interpretation of the Copyright Act. It’s a plain act of theft of intellectual property and violates the right of citizens (book distributors, retailers etc) to carry on a business, trade and profession (Article 19 (1) (g). If the Copyright Act permits such theft, the Act itself is violative of several constitutional provisions. This populist verdict is dangerous for Indian education because it will dissuade foreign publishers from exporting textbooks to India where indigenously written textbooks tend to be of pathetic quality. Therefore, the already poor learning attainments of school and college students will go from bad to worse. The learned judge should have known better.

Neta-babu freeloaders 

There’s a seemingly incorrigible blind spot in the greedy Indian middle class which stepped into the shoes of British colonial rulers who lived life king size in the immiserised subcontinent for almost two centuries, during which the rate of annual GDP growth averaged 1 percent. Despite the deep poverty of the masses, particularly in rural India, they see no reason to cut down the perquisites of office, especially foreign travel at public expense.

The example was perhaps set by independent India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, who during an era when foreign exchange purchase by the public for leisure and travel was limited to $5, nevertheless sojourned in the UK and elsewhere every summer on official business, undeniably mixed with rest and recreation. Since then, this perk of office has become an entitlement not only of Central government leaders and bureaucrats but of their counterparts in India’s 29 states and seven Union territories as well. Unsurprisingly, neither the Central nor state governments publish data disclosing the annual cost of neta-babu junkets. This expenditure is buried in ministry expenses under various heads.

The latest worthy commendably outed by Arnab Goswami, the iconoclastic anchor of the Times Now television channel, is Manish Sisodia, deputy chief and education minister of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) government in Delhi, which swept to power in the state election of 2015 on a high-voltage anti-corruption plank. According to Goswami, over the past 18 months top brass (with sizeable entourages) of the AAP government, which jointly and querulously rules (with the Central government) the state/city, have undertaken eight foreign jaunts at public expense with the self-righteous Sisodia leading with three excursions, at a time when the national capital was — and still is — reeling under a near dengue and chikungunya epidemic.

During the past year, Sisodia with attendant officials has travelled to Sao Paulo, London and Helsinki on state business — an impressive record. But not as impressive as of Dr. Montek Singh Ahluwalia, deputy director of the Planning Commission (India) under the Congress-led UPA-I government, who travelled abroad every nine days on official business.     

Pedestrian avatar

It looks like the beginning of the end for the Delhi-based business daily Mint, which made an impressive debut in the already crowded business publications space nine years ago in tabloid format. Promoted by Hindustan Times chairperson-tycoon Shobhana Bhartia in 2007 with a major splash, and initially living up to its promise of delivering in-depth analyses of corporate men and matters, the daily has since waned, and on September 12 re-introduced itself as a pedestrian run-of-the-mill broadsheet. And it’s not even pink. 

The rationale advanced for the switch of format by R. Sukumar, executive editor of Mint, is that the “world has changed” with the dawn of the digital age and “the new Mint is simply a contemporary newspaper for the coming digital era”. According to him, the tabloid was designed to provide in-depth analyses of business news and events (“more of less”), whereas the new digerati are browsers who want more news and less analyses (“more of more”). Not entirely convincing, because surely the digital age is all about miniaturisation and the new Mint is an arms-stretcher.

A more convincing rationale is offered by Sajith Pai, executive assistant of Samir Jain, the reclusive chairman of Bennett Coleman & Co. Ltd whose flagship dailies — Times of India and Economic Times — are head-to-head with HT and Mint, especially in Delhi. According to Pai, “speculating” independently in his blog, the real reason for upsizing Mint is that now HT can bundle and easily pass on its ads to the ads-stressed Mint at high prices and thus boost the latter’s financials as a precursor to the sale of this floundering business daily.

Certainly makes more sense than the digital era rationale.