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| June 12, 2000 | ||
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| Phoney
Capitalism Welcome to Ram Vilas Paswan rajya. Welcome to bankruptcy.
Given the man's unblemished history of populism, at some stage virus Paswan had to strike. As railway minister in the United Front regime (1996-97), he broke every conceivable record in distributing free passses, giving full-time jobs to 50,000 casual workers and doggedly refusing to raise ridiculous passenger fares. He even created a tortuous zonal headquarters system for an already beleaguered Indian Railways only to benefit his parliamentary constituency -- nondescript Hajipur, an economic black hole even by the standards of Bihar. Paswan's logic for his very own "telecom scandal" -- never has the expression seemed more appropriate -- is that dot employees will be on call. His measure is a direct contradiction of the efficient, cost-effective "rightsizing" of the Indian state the prime minister is committed to. From Ram rajya to Ram Vilas Paswan rajya is quite a descent. Marie Antoinette couldn't have put it better. PG Accommodation For
an otherwise moribund government, Uttar Pradesh is certainly blessed with
an audacious higher education minister. He The situation is scarcely different in even the national capital. The hostels of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), for instance, constitute the cheapest middle-class housing colony in Delhi. Postgraduate students get taxpayer-sponsored accommodation. Never mind if they hold full-fledged jobs in the city outside or share their rooms with spouses and children. Some years ago, an intrepid vice-chancellor at JNU stipulated a student needed to attain a minimum grade to retain his or her lodging facility. The result was an agitation. For too long has lounging in colleges and universities passed off for higher education. It is time the government, in Uttar Pradesh and elsewhere, rationalised its educational outlay -- and transferred its priorities to primary schools. |
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There
are two views on the future of the Department of Telecom (DOT). The
sensible one is that it should be gradually abolished. With private and
public-owned telecom companies in place and a regulatory authority
monitoring their competition, the dot will be one great redundancy. The
other view is that the dot exists to look after itself, feed its
employees, subsidise every junior engineer's son's call to his
girlfriend
-- and nothing and nobody should be allowed to come in the way of this
cosy arrangement. That really is the upshot of Communications Minister Ram
Vilas Paswan's decision to dole out telephone connections gratis and offer
free calls to the 3.2 lakh-strong staff of the dot. The recurring annual
expense will be Rs 300 crore. When the economic cost of laying new lines
and other related charges are tabulated, the exchequer will find that the
cost it has to bear is much higher.
has proposed a 50 per cent
qualifying mark for admission into postgraduate courses. In one stroke
this will halve the postgraduate student population, make teaching in the
classroom that much more focused and meaningful, rid campuses of, frankly,
parasites and save the state some of the thoroughly undeserved subsidy it
provides higher education. With premier institutions in Allahabad, Banaras
and Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh was once the educational mecca of northern
India. Today, it has 17 universities and an astounding 636 postgraduate
colleges. They churn out armies of mediocrities who may have an MA in
English literature but would find it difficult to draft a job application.
There are PhD aspirants who rarely see the inside of a classroom but spend
their time intriguing in the union office, 40-year-olds still busy in the
crime and grime of the Hindi heartland's student politics.