The downside of the consumer boom following economic liberalisation and deregulation is a rising tide of effete epicureanism, aka love of luxury, which is sweeping India’s much-hyped, subsidies-addicted middle class off its feet.

Earlier this year as reported on this page, despite the current boom in civil aviation which has made air travel easier for all, the Union government deemed it necessary to establish its own airline comprising five Brazil-manufactured Embraer jet airplanes, priced at $50 million (Rs.250 crore) each, for the President, cabinet ministers and nabobs of government. Moreover recently, the country’s time-wasting members of Parliament voted themselves a massive pay hike. Similarly other constituencies of the Indian establishment — civil servants, the judiciary, armed forces etc — have also experienced sharp rise in living standards, never mind their falling productivity. Little wonder revenue deficits of the Central and state governments are proving unbridgeable.

Unfortunately, this rising tide of epicureanism is sweeping Indian academia as well. Despite crumbling infrastructure, ill-equipped labs, locked libraries and ramshackle classrooms being the defining characteristics of India’s institutions of higher education, the pay and perquisites of university vice-chancellors of even obscure varsities are hitting unprecedented highs. Right now two vice-chancellors in Karnataka are under investigation for utilising public funds for extravagant personal expenditure. In his capacity as chancellor of the Karnataka State Women’s University, Bijapur and Tumkur University, Karnataka governor T.N. Chaturvedi has constituted a panel to investigate “irregularity charges” against Syeda Akhtar and O. Anantharamaiah, vice-chancellors of the two varsities.

The charges against Akhtar are that she splurged Rs.8 lakh on dry fruits and lunches, evaded paying income tax of Rs.1.80 lakh, and indulged in blatant nepotism in recruiting faculty and staff for KSWU.

However Akhtar’s alleged extravagance pales into insignificance compared to Anantharamaiah’s profligacy. Among his purchases out of the newly-promoted (2005) Tumkur University’s budget: a home office furbished for Rs.4 lakh; a digital washing machine (Rs.25,333), a mobile phone (Rs.28,000) and a plasma television set (Rs.31,102). Moreover most of these purchases were made through cash payments.

Ironically almost the entire political and academic communities bitterly opposed liberalisation of the Indian economy in 1991. Now they’ve become its biggest beneficiaries.

Lyngdoh’s bitter prescription

The Lyngdoh committee’s recommendations for the conduct of student union elections which have received the endorsement of the Supreme Court (see p.9) have caused much heartburn in Lucknow University where union elections are big business. To the dismay of Lucknow’s infamous student politicians, the committee has barred students above the age of 28, those who can’t prove 75 percent attendance and even those who have failed a year, from contesting campus polls. That’s real bad news for students whose higher learning experience often spans a decade or more as they keep repeating classes and enrolling in Ph D programmes to remain listed as students.

Little wonder that a damage control exercise is in full swing in LU. Among the placatory strategies being adopted to protest the Lyngdoh Committee recommendations is Gandhigiri, a typically simplified Gandhian philosophy popularised by the Bollywood blockbuster movie Lage Raho Munna Bhai. Student leaders in Gandhi caps and roses recently implored vice-chancellor R.P. Singh to ignore the Lyngdoh Committee’s recommendations.

One presidential hopeful who has five criminal cases registered against him expressed the hope that gentle persuasion would work, although another student leader, Vinod Tripathi whose honour roll of four criminal cases includes one attempted murder, forthrightly informed Singh that Gandhi’s hour is over and that students are being pushed to violence by the varsity administration’s policies.

When the soft touch approach failed to move Singh who cited compulsion of the Supreme Court’s endorsement of the Lyngdoh Committee’s order, the very next day the vice-chancellor was waylaid and yanked out of his car to discuss student demands. LU’s student unions are unanimous that the university’s administration is to blame for the Lyngdoh Committee’s report. Following prolonged agitation, the vice-chancellor has called in the police to patrol the LU campus.

While opinion within the university remains divided on how effective implementation of the Lyngdoh Committee’s report will be, the administration’s firm initial response has enthused bona fide students intent on learning subjects other than politics Indian-style, even as an uneasy calm has descended on the campus.

Fitness profiling

High-handed injustice demonstrated once by a service company can be a mistake. Repeated, it’s probably corporate policy.

Three years ago in August, young Kshitij Bansal (15), a student of Delhi’s Apeejay School (Noida) who had a confirmed ticket to fly to the US to represent India in the 15th Informatics Olympiad 2003, was offloaded from an overbooked flight by rude and uncompromising ground staff of Italy’s national airline Alitalia. The excuse: Bansal was “unfit for travel” because of a recent knee surgery. Although the young student produced a doctor’s certificate of fitness, he was denied a boarding pass ruining his chances of bagging a medal in the olympiad.

Cut to August 22, 2006. Alitalia ground staff in Delhi prevented Santraj Maurya, a waste collector who had been sponsored by Chintan, a Delhi-based NGO to attend a conference on the impact of privatisation on waste pickers round the world, from boarding a confirmed flight to Brazil. His disqualification: he had been given a business class ticket by Chintan. According to Alitalia’s comprador ground staff, Maurya didn’t fit their profile of a business class traveller. Consequently he missed the flight and the conference.

It could be argued that many Italians fit the profile of mafia hitmen rather than of bona fide airline travellers. Is that a valid ground for denial of their right to travel? Over to Alitalia!