പൊതുവിദ്യാഭ്യാസ സംരക്ഷണത്തില്‍ പങ്കാളിയാവുക

[santhosh v]

കേരളത്തിലെ പൊതുവിദ്യാഭ്യാസ മേഖല ഇന്ന് വലിയ പ്രതിസന്ധി നേരിടുകയാണ്.
അപേക്ഷിക്കുന്ന മുഴുവന്‍ CBSE, ICSE സ്കൂളുകള്‍ക്ക് N O C നല്‍കുക,
പൊതുവിദ്യാലയങ്ങള്‍ക്ക് ഇനി മേല്‍ ഖജനാവില്‍ നിന്ന് പണം ചെലവഴിക്കില്ല,
സ്കൂളുകള്‍ തുടങ്ങാന്‍ കോര്‍പ്പറേറ്റുകളെ സ്വാഗതം ചെയ്യും തുടങ്ങിയ പുതിയ
വിദ്യാഭ്യാസ മന്ത്രിയുടെ പ്രഖ്യാപനങ്ങള്‍ ഇക്കാര്യത്തിലേക്കാണ് വിരല്‍
ചൂണ്ടുന്നത്.
വന്‍കിട കോര്‍പ്പറേറ്റുകളെ കേരളത്തിലെ വിദ്യാഭ്യാസ മേഖലയിലേക്ക്
കൊണ്ടുവരാനുളള നീക്കം നടത്തിക്കഴിഞ്ഞു. വിദ്യാഭ്യാസ മന്ത്രിയായി സ്ഥാനം
ഏറ്റ ഉടനെ കോര്‍പ്പറേറ്റുകളെ സ്വാഗതം ചെയ്യുകയാണ് ആദ്യം ചെയ്ത‌ത്.
കേന്ദ്ര സര്‍ക്കാര്‍ ആരംഭിക്കാന്‍ പോകുന്ന വിദ്യാഭ്യാസ സ്ഥാപനങ്ങളില്‍
പങ്കാളിയാകാന്‍ ഐ ടി കമ്പനിയായ വിപ്രോ സമ്മതിച്ചിരിക്കുകയാണ്.
കോര്‍പ്പറേറ്റ് ഭീമനായ എവറോണ്‍ എഡ്യൂക്കേഷന്‍ ലിമിറ്റഡ് എന്ന കമ്പനി
കേരളത്തില്‍ 34 നഗര കേന്ദ്രങ്ങളില്‍ വിദ്യാഭ്യാസ സ്ഥാപനങ്ങളാരംഭിക്കാന്‍
ഭൂവുടമകളെ പങ്കാളികളാക്കാന്‍ പത്രപരസ്യം നടത്തി കഴിഞ്ഞു. കേരളത്തില്‍
സജീവമായ ഭൂമാഫിയായും വിദ്യാഭ്യാസ കച്ചവടക്കാരും തമ്മിലുളള കൂട്ടുകെട്ടിനെ
വഴി വിട്ട് സഹായിക്കാനുളള സര്‍ക്കാര്‍ തീരുമാനം കേരളത്തിന്റെ സമ്പന്നമായ
പൊതുവിദ്യാഭ്യാസ മേഖലയെ തകര്‍ക്കും.
540 സ്കൂളുകള്‍ക്ക് NOC നല്‍കുവാനും തുടര്‍ന്ന് 2000 ല്‍ പരം
സ്കൂളുകളുടെ അപേക്ഷ പരിഗണിക്കാനും ക്യാബിനറ്റ് എടുത്ത തീരുമാനം
നടപ്പിലാക്കുവാനാണ് വിദ്യാഭ്യാസ വകുപ്പ് ഇപ്പോള്‍ പ്രവര്‍ത്തിക്കുന്നത്.
പാഠപുസ്തക വിതരണം പൂര്‍ത്തികരിക്കുവാനോ ഹൈസ്കൂള്‍ എച്ച് എം പ്രമോഷന്‍
നടത്തുവാനോ കഴിഞ്ഞിട്ടില്ല. 450 ല്‍ പരം സുപ്പീരിയര്‍ പോസ്റ്റുകള്‍
ഒഴിഞ്ഞു കിടക്കുകയാണ്. 50 ലക്ഷം കുട്ടികള്‍ക്ക് പഠിക്കാനുളള സൗകര്യം
ഇപ്പോള്‍ കേരളത്തിലുണ്ട്. 44 ലക്ഷം കുട്ടികള്‍ ഇപ്പോള്‍ പഠിക്കുന്നു. 6
ലക്ഷം കുട്ടികള്‍ക്ക് കൂടി പഠിക്കുവാന്‍ സൗകര്യമുളളപ്പോള്‍ പുതിയ
സ്കൂളുകള്‍ അനുവദിക്കുന്നത് പൊതുവിദ്യാഭ്യാസം തകര്‍ക്കാനേ ഉപകരിക്കൂ.
ഇന്ത്യയില്‍ ഏറ്റവും കൂടുതല്‍ CBSE സ്കൂളുകള്‍ ഉളള സംസ്ഥാനമാണ് കേരളം.
പുതിയ സ്കൂളുകള്‍ ആരംഭിക്കുമ്പോള്‍ പതിനായിരക്കണക്കിന് അധ്യാപകരുടെ
തൊഴില്‍ നഷ്ടപ്പെടുന്ന സാഹചര്യം സംജാതമാകും. പൊതുവിദ്യാഭ്യാസം
സംരക്ഷിക്കാന്‍ കഴിഞ്ഞ ഗവണ്‍മെന്റ് സ്വീകരിച്ച പല നടപടികളും
നടപ്പിലാക്കാത്ത സ്ഥിതിയാണ്. അധ്യാപക വിദ്യാര്‍ത്ഥി അനുപാതം 1 : 30
ആക്കുക എന്നത് അടിയന്തിരമായി നടപ്പിലാക്കേണ്ടതുണ്ട്.
പൊതുവിദ്യാഭ്യാസ മേഖലയിലെ ദൗര്‍ബല്യങ്ങള്‍ പരിഹരിച്ച്
ശക്തിപ്പെടുത്തേണ്ട സര്‍ക്കാര്‍ അതിനെ തകര്‍ക്കുന്ന സമീപനമാണ്
സ്വീകരിച്ചു വരുന്നത് .
ഇതിനെല്ലാം ഒത്താശ ചെയ്യുന്നവരില്‍ ഭൂരിഭാഗവും പൊതുവിദ്യാഭ്യാസത്തിന്റെ
സംഭാവനയാണെന്ന വസ്തുത മറക്കുന്നു.
ഭാവിയില്‍ സാധാരണക്കാരന് വിദ്യാഭ്യാസം നേടാനുളള അവസരം ഇല്ലാതാക്കുന്ന
നടപടിയില്‍ നിന്നും സര്‍ക്കാര്‍ പിന്മാറണം.

[vivekstanley]

The way to protect government schools is not by preventing new CBSC/ICSE schools, but by going for steps like unified syllabus, increased focus in English and superior infrastructure in institutions.

Corporates coming into education is a welcome. As Government's resources are limited, let the capable pay and study.

-- 

vivek stanley | +91 9995376400
vivekstanley.blogspot.com | @vivekstanley
facebook.com/vivekstanley | linkedin.com/in/vivekstanley

[Joseph Thomas]

I donot subscribe to the idea expressed by Mr. Stanley.

I do share the apprehensions expressed by Santhosh.

But, the steps detailed to have  been taken or proposed  by the UDF ministry is part of their their neo-liberal policy frame work, which was expected of them. Despite these policy followed even earlier, UDF has been voted to power by the Kerala society. I think majority of the Govt and Aided School teachers also would have voted for UDF.

What right any body in Kerala got to oppose the UDF program when it is voted to power with a majority, though it is slender ?

Is it not the verdict of the people of Kerala ?

Is it not the UDF program in tune with the democratic norms of parliamentary democracy which we are following ?

Will it not be unfair to impose the will of the minority over the majority, so long as the society approve the parliamentary democracy.

Will it not be prudent on the part of the people who voted for LDF and the opposition to allow the UDF to implement their policies so that the people have a feel of the policies and its effects before any agitational path is resorted to ?


Joseph Thomas

.

2011, ജൂണ്‍ 13 6:41 വൈകുന്നേരം ന്, vivekstanley <viveks...@gmail.com> എഴുതി:

--
സ്വതന്ത്ര വിജ്ഞാന ജനാധിപത്യ സഖ്യം (സ്വവിജസ)
(Democratic Alliance for Knowledge Freedom)
പിരിഞ്ഞുപോകാന്‍ അറിയിക്കേണ്ടുന്ന വിലാസം dakf+uns...@googlegroups.com
സന്ദര്‍ശിക്കുക : http://groups.google.com/group/dakf?hl=en

--
 With warm greetings. 

                  Joseph Thomas,
  thoma...@gmail.com/tho...@fsmi.in,
Mob : +91-9447738369/Res : 04842792369

മതം ഗ്രന്ഥങ്ങളിലല്ല, ദേവാലയങ്ങളിലല്ല, അതു് സാക്ഷാല്‍ അനുഭവമാണു് എന്നു് നാം മനസ്സിലാക്കുമ്പോഴേ മതകാര്യങ്ങളിലുള്ള വഴക്കും തര്‍ക്കവും കലഹവും ശമിക്കുകയുള്ളു.

                    സ്വാമി വിവേകാനന്ദന്‍

[Anilkumar KV]

"സംസ്ഥാന പാഠ്യപദ്ധതിക്കു് ഗുണനിലവാരം കുറവാണെന്നും, ഇണക്കു് ഭാഷയായ ഇംഗ്ലീഷിനു് വേണ്ടത്ര പ്രാധാന്യം അതില്‍ കൊടുക്കുന്നില്ലെന്നും" തോന്നിക്കുമാറു് വിവേകു് നടത്തുന്ന നിരീക്ഷണങ്ങള്‍ വസ്തുതകള്‍ക്കു് നിരക്കുന്നതല്ല.

 CBSC/ICSE-ക്കു് കുട്ടികളെ  അയക്കുന്ന രക്ഷിതാക്കളും, അവരെ പഠിപ്പിക്കുന്ന അദ്ധ്യാപകരും സംസ്ഥാന പാഠ്യപദ്ധതിയെ കുറിച്ചു് നല്ലതു് മാത്രം പറയുന്ന ഒരവസ്ഥയാണു് ഇന്നു് നിലവിലുള്ളതു്.

പക്ഷെ, വിദ്യാഭ്യാസത്തിന്റെ ഗുണനിലവാരത്തേക്കാള്‍, പഠിക്കുന്ന സ്ഥാപനത്തിന്റേയും, പാഠ്യപദ്ധതിയുടേയും പൊലിപ്പിച്ചെടുത്ത സാമൂഹ്യമാനത്തിനാണു് രക്ഷിതാക്കള്‍ മുന്‍ഗണന നല്‍കുന്നതു് എന്നതു് നമ്മുടെ ഒരു ദുരവസ്ഥയാണു്.. ഈ അവസ്ഥയെ കൂടുതല്‍ രൂക്ഷമാക്കാനാണു് കേരളാസര്‍ക്കാരിന്റെ ഇപ്പോഴത്തെ നടപടി കാരണമാകുക,

പൊതുവിദ്യാഭ്യാസത്തെ തകര്‍ത്തു് അവിടെ സ്വകാര്യവല്‍ക്കരണം കൊണ്ടുവരുമെന്നറിഞ്ഞുകൊണ്ടു് വോട്ടു് ചെയ്തവരല്ല, ഇന്നത്തെ സര്‍ക്കാരിനു് വോട്ടുചെയ്തവരില്‍ ഭൂരിപക്ഷവും. അതുകൊണ്ടു് തന്നെ ആ ന്യായത്തില്‍ സര്‍ക്കാര്‍ നടപടികളിലെ ദോഷത്തെ മറച്ചു് പിടിക്കുന്നതു്, കേരളജനതക്കും, നമ്മുടെ പൊതുവിദ്യാഭ്യാസത്തിനും ഗുണകരമല്ല.

- അനില്‍ 

[DAMODARAN PARAYIL MANA]

Sorry, I do disagree. UDF has not specifically publicised, I think,  their future programme on education in their election-manifesto. Further they have not got mandate of >50% of Kerala-voters.

Actually, in the election process, it is sorry to say, no detailed discussion on the manifesto or the future policy and programmes for the next 5-year tenure are done. This is a serious deficiency in the present day electioneering, we experience. Further, even though some party-or front get majority votes.. that itself is not a mandate to them to do things reversely affecting the social welfare of the people (by people, I mean, the majority class) ..

In such contexts .. strong resistances / corrective forces are also to be expected.

Regards,

Damodaran PM

2011/6/13 Joseph Thomas <thoma...@gmail.com>

[vivekstanley]

Politicizing everything is part & parcel of malayalees. Rather than taking this as an LDF vs UDF issue, focus on what is good for our children. Focus on what is fair and what is practical. 

പക്ഷെ, വിദ്യാഭ്യാസത്തിന്റെ ഗുണനിലവാരത്തേക്കാള്‍, പഠിക്കുന്ന സ്ഥാപനത്തിന്റേയും, പാഠ്യപദ്ധതിയുടേയും പൊലിപ്പിച്ചെടുത്ത സാമൂഹ്യമാനത്തിനാണു് രക്ഷിതാക്കള്‍ മുന്‍ഗണന നല്‍കുന്നതു് എന്നതു് നമ്മുടെ ഒരു ദുരവസ്ഥയാണു്.. ഈ അവസ്ഥയെ കൂടുതല്‍ രൂക്ഷമാക്കാനാണു് കേരളാസര്‍ക്കാരിന്റെ ഇപ്പോഴത്തെ നടപടി കാരണമാകുക,

:

Give parents what they want. Denying more options to parents/children -- by restricting CBSC/ICSE schools -- is unfair. കേരളത്തില്ലെ പിള്ളര്‍ സര്‍ക്കാര്‍ സ്കൂളുകളുടെ കുത്തക അല്ല!  

All who are against having more private schools in the state are indirectly accepting that govt schools are less competent than private ones.

[Anilkumar KV]

2011/6/14 vivekstanley <viveks...@gmail.com>

Politicizing everything is part & parcel of malayalees. Rather than taking this as an LDF vs UDF issue, focus on what is good for our children. Focus on what is fair and what is practical. 

ഇവിടെ ഏതുപക്ഷം ചെയ്യുന്നുവെന്നതല്ല പരാമര്‍ശ വിഷയം. 'രാഷ്ട്രീയം പാടില്ലെന്ന' നിലപാടു്, ഇന്നത്തെ സാമൂഹ്യവ്യവസ്ഥയിലെ ഉച്ചനീചത്വങ്ങള്‍ മാറേണ്ടെന്നു് കരുതുന്നവരുടെ രാഷ്ട്രീയ നിലപാടാണു്. അതിനാല്‍ തന്നെ അതു് പ്രധാനമായും കപടരാഷ്ട്രീയമാണു്, സമൂഹത്തിനു് കൂടുതല്‍ ദോഷകരവുമാണു്.

ഇന്നട്ടെ നിലയില്‍ നമ്മുടെ കുട്ടികള്‍ക്കും അതുവഴി സമൂഹത്തിനും നല്ലതു് പൊതു വിദ്യാഭ്യാസമാണു്. അവ നല്‍കാന്‍ ഏറ്റവും പ്രാപ്തം സര്‍ക്കാര്‍ സ്കൂളുകളാണു്.

പക്ഷെ, വിദ്യാഭ്യാസത്തിന്റെ ഗുണനിലവാരത്തേക്കാള്‍, പഠിക്കുന്ന സ്ഥാപനത്തിന്റേയും, പാഠ്യപദ്ധതിയുടേയും പൊലിപ്പിച്ചെടുത്ത സാമൂഹ്യമാനത്തിനാണു് രക്ഷിതാക്കള്‍ മുന്‍ഗണന നല്‍കുന്നതു് എന്നതു് നമ്മുടെ ഒരു ദുരവസ്ഥയാണു്.. ഈ അവസ്ഥയെ കൂടുതല്‍ രൂക്ഷമാക്കാനാണു് കേരളാസര്‍ക്കാരിന്റെ ഇപ്പോഴത്തെ നടപടി കാരണമാകുക,

:

Give parents what they want. Denying more options to parents/children -- by restricting CBSC/ICSE schools -- is unfair. കേരളത്തില്ലെ പിള്ളര്‍ സര്‍ക്കാര്‍ സ്കൂളുകളുടെ കുത്തക അല്ല!  

പൊതു വിദ്യാഭ്യാസത്തെ തകര്‍ക്കുന്നതിലൂടെയാണു് സ്വാതന്ത്ര്യത്തിനു് കൂച്ചുവിലങ്ങിടുന്നതു്. ഇന്നിന്ന വിദ്യാലയങ്ങളില്‍ പഠിക്കണമെന്നു് ആരും ആരേയും നിര്‍ബന്ധിക്കുന്നില്ല. കൂടുതല്‍ CBSE സ്കൂളുകള്‍ വേണമെന്നുള്ളതു്, രക്ഷിതാക്കളുടേയോ, കുട്ടികളുടേയോ, പൊതുസമൂഹത്തിന്റെയോ ആവശ്യമായി ഇവിടെ ഉയര്‍ന്നിട്ടില്ല.  മറിച്ചു് ഒരുകൂട്ടം വിദ്യാഭ്യാസ കച്ചവടക്കാരുടെ സമ്മര്‍ദ്ദത്തെ, രക്ഷിതാക്കളുടേയോ, കുട്ടികളുടേയോ,സ്വാതന്ത്ര്യമായി അവതരിപ്പിക്കുന്നതു് മറ്റൊരു കപടനിലപാടാണു്.

All who are against having more private schools in the state are indirectly accepting that govt schools are less competent than private ones.

അതല്ല വസ്തുത, വ്യത്യസ്ത വീക്ഷണകോണുകളുടെ അവഗണിച്ചുകൊണ്ടുള്ള നിരീക്ഷണമാണിതു്.

- അനില്‍

[Dr.B.Ekbal]

നമ്മുടെ സർക്കാർ വിദ്യാഭ്യാസ സ്ഥാപനങ്ങളുടെ അടിസ്ഥാനസൌകര്യവും പഠന നിലവാരവും ഇടതു സർക്കാരിന്റെ കാലത്ത് വളരെ മെച്ചപ്പെട്ടു എന്നത് പൊതുവേ അംഗീകരിക്കപ്പെട്ടിട്ടുണ്ട്. ഐറ്റി@സ്കൂൾ പരിപാടിയിലൂടെ ആധുനിക സാങ്കേതിക വിദ്യകളും സ്വകാര്യ സ്കൂളുകളേക്കാളും സർക്കാർ സ്കൂളുകളിൽ ലഭ്യമാക്കിയിട്ടുണ്ട്. എന്നിട്ടും എന്തുകൊണ്ട് സർക്കാർ സ്കൂളുകളിൽ നിന്നും കുട്ടികൾ കൊഴിഞ്ഞുപോവുന്നു എന്നത് പരിശോധിക്കേണ്ട വിഷയമാണ്. മാതാപിതാക്കളുടെ അഭിപ്രായം ഇക്കാര്യത്തിൽ തേടേണ്ടതാണ്. കൊഴിഞ്ഞുപോക്ക് കൂടുതലും എയിഡഡ് സ്കൂളുകളിലാണെന്നതും ശ്രദ്ധിക്കപ്പെടേണ്ടതുണ്ട്. ഇതിനു കാരണം പല എയിഡഡ് മാനേജ് മെന്റും സിബി എസ് സി സ്കൂളുകൾ ആരംഭിച്ചതും അവരുടെ തന്നെ കീഴിലുള്ള എയിഡഡ് സ്കൂളുകളെ അവഗണിച്ചതുമാണെന്ന് തോന്നുന്നു.
ഇടതു സർക്കാർ അവസാന വർഷം മലപ്പുറം ജില്ലയിൽ 41 അൺ എയിഡഡ് സ്കൂളുകൾക്ക് അംഗീകാരം കൊടുത്തതും തെറ്റായിപ്പോയി
ഉന്നത വിദ്യാഭ്യാസം  സർക്കാർ, സാമൂഹ്യ നിയന്ത്രണത്തോടുകൂടിയ സ്വകാര്യ പങ്കാളിത്തം ,പൊതുവിദ്യാഭ്യാസം സർക്കാർ നേതൃത്വത്തിൽ സാർവ്വർത്രികവും സൌജന്യവും ആയി ലഭ്യമാക്കുക: ഇതാണ് പിന്തുടരേണ്ട മാതൃക.
ഇക്ബാൽ

2011/6/14 Anilkumar KV <anil...@gmail.com>

--

സ്വതന്ത്ര വിജ്ഞാന ജനാധിപത്യ സഖ്യം (സ്വവിജസ)
(Democratic Alliance for Knowledge Freedom)
പിരിഞ്ഞുപോകാന്‍ അറിയിക്കേണ്ടുന്ന വിലാസം dakf+uns...@googlegroups.com
സന്ദര്‍ശിക്കുക : http://groups.google.com/group/dakf?hl=en

--
Dr.B.Ekbal
Kuzhuvalil House, Arpookara East,
Kottayam-686 008, Kerala
Phone: 0481-2598305
Mobile: 94470 60912

[Kenney Jacob]

I have no idea how new private schools will affect the government schools. If the govt school is good enough will anyone send their children to a private school paying a huge fees ?  I have studied in a govt school (that school was in the news recently ). My parents moved me to a private school after that, I now wish they had moved me to a school in the city. The difference is huge and its really difficult to overcome it. 

The same thing is applicable to private engineering colleges also, many prefer govt engg colleges not because of the quality, but its cheaper and the degree certificate is good enough. But that not the case with schools, if your basics are not good.. you are not going to go anywhere. 

Kenney Jacob

2011/6/14 Dr.B.Ekbal <ekb...@gmail.com>

[vijayan raja]

The quality of education in a private school, in most of the case, is not better than that of a govt. school. The quality of teachers is far more better in govt. schools. One of the main reason is, of-course,   the job security. The fact is that most of the parents (people) are confused of the concept called 'quality'. What is quality of education? To most of the people, it may be make students to become competitive and fit for highly payed job. That is, fit for the present capitalist society, non-questioning, non political, compromising to corruption, and what not...... .[ To become  a good individual who can contribute for the humanity; co-operate for the well being of the common people; or thinking well-being of the humanity should be the aim of all activities, not the private profit, etc.; - these are mere ideology, or left politics, for many]. To impart ability to think independently and co-operate with the society, aim well-being of the humanity are the good qualities of education in schools. In any sense, the quality of education in Govt. Engineering Colleges are much better than that of the self financing colleges. This is a fact, agreed by employers widely. Media  advertisement may change popular concept in the near future, as was done, in the case of schools, misleading the parents.       

2011/6/14 Kenney Jacob <kenney...@gmail.com>

[sreejith g.s]

കേരളത്തിലെ പൊതു വിദ്യാഭ്യാസ സമ്പ്രദായത്തിനു തകര്‍ച്ച ഉണ്ടായിട്ടുണ്ടെങ്കില്‍ അതിനു വലിയൊരു കാരണം അധ്യാപകരാണ്.
നല്ല രീതിയില്‍ അധ്യാപനം നടത്തുന്ന ചെറിയ ഒരു ശതമാനം  അധ്യാപക സമൂഹത്തെ വിസ്മരിച്ചു കൊണ്ടല്ല ഇത്രയും പറയുന്നത്.
പൊതു വിദ്യാഭ്യാസത്തെ പറ്റി വേവലാതി പ്പെടെണ്ടത് ജോലി നഷ്ട പ്പെടാരാവുമ്പോള്‍ മാത്രമല്ല. ഞാന്‍ പഠിച്ചിരുന്ന നാട്ടിന്‍ പുറത്തെ സ്കൂളില്‍ പല അധ്യാപകരും വല്ലപ്പോഴും ആണ് ക്ലാസ്സ്‌ എടുക്കാന്‍ വന്നിരുന്നത്. കുട്ടികള്‍ ആവശ്യത്തിനു ഉണ്ടായിരുന്നു. പത്താം ക്ലാസ്സില്‍ പഠിപ്പിച്ചിരുന്ന ഞങ്ങളുടെ    ഒരു അദ്ധ്യാപകന്‍ ബഹു ഭൂരിപക്ഷം സമയം സ്വന്തം ഉടമസ്ഥതയിലുള്ള ഇഷ്ടിക കളത്തിലും ബാക്കി സമയം മാത്രം സ്കൂളിലും ആയിരുന്നു. ബഹു ഭൂരിപക്ഷം അധ്യാപ കരുടെയും കുട്ടികള്‍ പഠിച്ചിരുന്നത് ടൌണിലുള്ള ഇംഗ്ലീഷ് മീഡിയം വിദ്യാല യ ങ്ങളില്‍ ആയിരുന്നു. 

അത് കൊണ്ട് ഞങ്ങളെ പോലെ യുള്ള കുറച്ചു പേര്‍ ക്ക് പ്രശ്നം ഒന്നും ഉണ്ടായില്ലെങ്കിലും ബഹു ഭൂരിപക്ഷം പേരുടെയും വിദ്യാഭ്യാസം അവിടം കൊണ്ട് അവസാനിച്ചു.

അത്തരം സ്കൂളുകളില്‍ പിന്നീടു കുട്ടികള്‍ കുറഞ്ഞു എങ്കില്‍ അത് ആരുടെ പ്രശ്നമാണ് ?

ശ്രീജിത്ത്‌

2011/6/14 vijayan raja <vijaya...@gmail.com>

[sreenth prabhups]

അധ്യാപകരെ മാത്രം കുറ്റം പറയണ്ട.....
മാതാ പിതാക്കളുടെ മനോഭാവം എന്താന്ന് ???

മകന്‍ /മകള്‍ ഇംഗ്ലീഷ് മീഡിയം സ്കൂളില്‍ പോയ്യലെ നല്ല വിദ്യാഭ്യാസം വരൂ എന്നാ മനോഭാവം മാറ്റാതെ  കേരളം രക്ഷ്പെടതില്ല

 

[shaji padinjarethaiyil]

For those who would missed the editorial of mathrubhumi daily today

http://www.mathrubhumi.com/online/malayalam/news/story/991445/2011-06-14/kerala

regards

shaji

[RR]

ഇന്നലെ മറ്റൊരു പത്രത്തില്‍ വന്നത് അനാശാസ്യം നടത്തിയതിനു വനിത സി ഐ യെയും പുരുഷ സബ് ഇന്സ്പെക്ടരെയും അറസ്റ്റ് ചെയ്തു എന്നാണ് , ഇപ്പോള്‍ വീരഭുമിയില്‍ ദേ ഇങ്ങനെയും

ഏതാണ് വിശ്വസിക്കേണ്ടത് ??????????

 

രഞ്ജിത്

കുവൈറ്റ്‌.

2011/6/14 shaji padinjarethaiyil <sha...@hotmail.com>

[Kenney Jacob]

Its not about the English medium that matters, its the environment and who is sitting next to you that makes a difference. There is a saying, ones total wealth is the average wealth of his closest five friends. This is true not just for money, but for ones personality and capabilities also. We are severely limited by our circumstances and these parents are simply trying to improve their childs circumstances. You cannot blame them. 

Also you cannot take away a parents right to send his child to any school he wants, already a lot of restrictions are there which are not in the best interest of the students. Let them study wherever they want. 

Kenney Jacob

2011/6/14 sreenth prabhups <sreenath...@gmail.com>

അധ്യാപകരെ മാത്രം കുറ്റം പറയണ്ട.....
മാതാ പിതാക്കളുടെ മനോഭാവം എന്താന്ന് ???

മകന്‍ /മകള്‍ ഇംഗ്ലീഷ് മീഡിയം സ്കൂളില്‍ പോയ്യലെ നല്ല വിദ്യാഭ്യാസം വരൂ എന്നാ മനോഭാവം മാറ്റാതെ  കേരളം രക്ഷ്പെടതില്ല

 

--

[vivekstanley]

Also,

in private schools, children study what they are expected to study.
In government schools, they study both what they are expected to study, and what they are not expected to study. [usually]

[Joseph Thomas]

Yes, true, the discussion is not about English or Malayalam medium nor is it of the right of any body to send their ward to any type of institution.

The point of discussion is the policy of the new instituted Govt in granting hundreds of private, unaided schools of a different pattern than that of the public education system of the state.

The entities that apply for the license/permission to run the schools under CBSE scheme etc also are not worried about the right of the parents to send their wards to any particular institution. What they are aiming at is to make profit out of school education.

The profit is generated out of the huge fees from the students and through denying even a subsistence wage for the teachers.

Naturally, the teachers employed in such schools are under qualified, often, affecting the quality of teaching.


The Govt is allowing different systems to be established parallel to its own system. Ofcourse, Govt has got no liability for the new system, as it self financing. But, Govt is bound to maintain its system. Public money is being spent for it. Rather leads to wastage of resources. This is quite unbecoming of a Govt committed to the welfare of the people.

If there is any deficiency or defect in the present public education system run by the Govt, it has to be got remedied or corrected.

That means, the Govt is shirking off its responsibilities by blaming its own system and allowing parallel systems to be run on different pretexts.

This is the issue under discussion.

Yes, the contentious issue that is raised is, whether the minority sections consisting of parents, teachers and the public who favour public education system has got the right to oppose the sanction of private schools granted by a Govt instituted with majority votes.

This thread begins with a call for "Protecting the Public Education System".
The threat to it is said to be granting of hundreds of schools following different system.
Public education system as on date is sufficient to accommodate 50 lakh students while there are only 43 students seeking admission to schools. Number of students have fallen over the years.

The relevant questions are :


Why new establishments while those available now are under utilised ? (New establishments allowing existing ones to be underutilised is a clear wastage of resources that could be utilised otherwise to the advantage of the society)

If the answer is that the present system is inefficient or do not cater to the needs of the society, then it is upto the Govt to reform the system in whatever way the society wants.

If the answer is that they are unable to change the present education system for better, then they lapse their right to govern.

The LDF govt has proved itself capable. They tried to correct the system, change the system for better.

Why UDF cant adopt same strategy to implement its priorities, even if they are different from that of LDF.

Instead, wastage of resources, creation of unwanted establishments whether private or public, etc are quite illogical.

It is far better to convert the present Govt schools to CBSE etc if that is found demanding by the parents are arged by some.
 
If the present teachers are not coming to school and not teaching properly, they are to be dealt with under the normal rules. There are rules to deal with any indiscipline or inefficiency among them. Application of such rules, imposition of discipline, making the employees and teachers work etc are part of day to day management, administration and governance.

If UDF cannot do it, it lapses its right to govern. They shall quit.

Thomas

.  
  

Thomas

.   

2011, ജൂണ്‍ 15 7:16 രാവിലെ ന്, Kenney Jacob <kenney...@gmail.com> എഴുതി:

[sreenth prabhups]

i completely agree with you.................

but just look at professionals who are wroking with most of IT companies and other executives of most of them are coming from common aided/goverment schools and they are also equally competitive to other  English medium students


The education policy of current UDF goverment is very pathetic..........

it will help only for the traders who are working in education sector......


Their main aim is to make profit........... only profit......................

no social commitment.....no sympathy.............

LDF ministry was far far better than this.........................

[sreejith g.s]

മലയാളം മാധ്യ മ ത്തില്‍ പഠിച്ച ഭാഷ യെ സ്നേഹിക്കുന്ന ഒരാളെന്ന നിലയില്‍ തന്നെ പറയട്ടെ. നമ്മുടെ സാമൂഹിക, സാംസ്കാരിക , രാഷ്ട്രീയ രംഗത്തെ പ്രമുഖര്‍ തങ്ങളുടെ മക്കളെയും കൊച്ചു മക്കളെ യും എവിടെ യാണ് പഠിപ്പിക്കുന്നത്‌ ?
കുട്ടികളില്ല എന്ന് വിലപിക്കുന്ന സ്കൂളിലെ അധ്യാ പകര്‍ തങ്ങളുടെ കുട്ടികളെ എവിടെയാണ് പഠിപ്പിക്കുന്നത്‌ ?


ഇവരെല്ലാം പറയുന്നത് അവര്‍ ആദ്യം പറയുന്നത് പ്രവര്‍ത്തിച്ചു കാണിക്കട്ടെ. എങ്കിലേ സമൂഹം അതിനെ അംഗീകരിക്കൂ .
പൊതു വിദ്യാഭ്യാസം നില നില്‍ക്കണ മെങ്കില്‍ ഈ രംഗത്ത് ഗുണ പരമായ മാറ്റം ഉണ്ടാകണം.

ശ്രീജിത്ത്‌

2011/6/15 vivekstanley <viveks...@gmail.com>

Also,

in private schools, children study what they are expected to study.
In government schools, they study both what they are expected to study, and what they are not expected to study. [usually]

--

[Kenney Jacob]

2011/6/15 Joseph Thomas <thoma...@gmail.com>

Yes, true, the discussion is not about English or Malayalam medium nor is it of the right of any body to send their ward to any type of institution.

The point of discussion is the policy of the new instituted Govt in granting hundreds of private, unaided schools of a different pattern than that of the public education system of the state.

The entities that apply for the license/permission to run the schools under CBSE scheme etc also are not worried about the right of the parents to send their wards to any particular institution. What they are aiming at is to make profit out of school education.

We should not be worried about the profit they make, if they provide the quality which is affordable to parents they will send their children there. 

 

The profit is generated out of the huge fees from the students and through denying even a subsistence wage for the teachers.

That is a totally different issue and should be addressed separately. This has nothing to do with giving license to schools.    

Naturally, the teachers employed in such schools are under qualified, often, affecting the quality of teaching.


The Govt is allowing different systems to be established parallel to its own system. Ofcourse, Govt has got no liability for the new system, as it self financing. But, Govt is bound to maintain its system. Public money is being spent for it. Rather leads to wastage of resources. This is quite unbecoming of a Govt committed to the welfare of the people.

If there is any deficiency or defect in the present public education system run by the Govt, it has to be got remedied or corrected.

Preventing others from establishing is not a remedy.  

That means, the Govt is shirking off its responsibilities by blaming its own system and allowing parallel systems to be run on different pretexts.

This is the issue under discussion.

Yes, the contentious issue that is raised is, whether the minority sections consisting of parents, teachers and the public who favour public education system has got the right to oppose the sanction of private schools granted by a Govt instituted with majority votes.

Nobody has the right to say that a private school school should not be started. We are already living in a system where too many things are forced on us, especially in education. To give a strong example, why are we forcing students who joined for BSc courses to study language papers even after 14 years of compulsory language training ? 

This thread begins with a call for "Protecting the Public Education System".
The threat to it is said to be granting of hundreds of schools following different system.
Public education system as on date is sufficient to accommodate 50 lakh students while there are only 43 students seeking admission to schools. Number of students have fallen over the years.

The relevant questions are :


Why new establishments while those available now are under utilised ? (New establishments allowing existing ones to be underutilised is a clear wastage of resources that could be utilised otherwise to the advantage of the society)

If the answer is that the present system is inefficient or do not cater to the needs of the society, then it is upto the Govt to reform the system in whatever way the society wants.

If the answer is that they are unable to change the present education system for better, then they lapse their right to govern.

The LDF govt has proved itself capable. They tried to correct the system, change the system for better.

Why UDF cant adopt same strategy to implement its priorities, even if they are different from that of LDF.

Instead, wastage of resources, creation of unwanted establishments whether private or public, etc are quite illogical.

The notion that private schools are unwanted itself is illogical.  Its the basic freedom of an individual to start a school and its the freedom of the parent and the student to choose what to study. Unfortunately we dont have that freedom. 

It is far better to convert the present Govt schools to CBSE etc if that is found demanding by the parents are arged by some.

Its not the CBSE thats important, its the quality of whatever service is being provided.  Its more of a questions of accountability than syllabus. 

[Dr.B.Ekbal]

ഒരു മേഖലയിലും സ്വകാര്യ സംരംഭങ്ങൾ ആരംഭിക്കുന്നതിനെ നിലവിലുള്ള ഭരണവ്യസ്ഥക്കുള്ളിൽ നിന്നും നമുക്ക് തടയാനാവില്ല. പ്രത്യേകിച്ചും ന്യൂനപക്ഷ അവകാശങ്ങൾ തുടങ്ങിയ പ്രശ്നങ്ങൾ പരിഹരിക്കപ്പെടാതെ കിടക്കുന്ന സാഹചര്യത്തിൽ. സർക്കാർ വിദ്യാഭ്യാസമേഖലയിൽ കൂടുതൽ തുക മുടക്കുകു, കൂടുതൽ സ്ഥാപനങ്ങൾ ആരംഭിക്കുക, അവയുടെ നിലവാരം മെച്ചപ്പെടുത്തുക, അധ്യാപകരും മാതാപിതാക്കളും, വിദ്യാർത്ഥികളും പൊതുസ്ഥാപനങ്ങളുടെ സാമൂഹ്യ പ്രാധാന്യം മനസ്സിലാക്കി അവ മെച്ചപ്പെടുത്താൻ യജ്ഞിക്കുക, സ്വകാര്യ സ്ഥാപനങ്ങളെ കർശനമായ സമൂഹ്യ നിയന്ത്രണത്തിൽ കൊണ്ടുവരിക (ഫീസ്, അഡ്മിഷൻ നിയമങ്ങൾ, കോഴ്സ് ഉള്ളടക്കം, ഭാഷാ പഠനം) എന്നിങ്ങനെ നിലപാടുകൾ സ്വീകരിക്കേണ്ടിവരും,
ഇക്ബാൽ

2011/6/15 Kenney Jacob <kenney...@gmail.com>

--

[Joseph Thomas]

Right to learn or teach is different from the Govt giving sanction for the schools.
Any religious institution can have their own education institution. That shall be part of their right. But, they cannot have a right to run public education system.

Any body shall have right to attend the school of his/her choice. That shall be his individual right. But, he may not get a certificate from the public education system untill and unless he go through the process of its exam.
That shall be sufficient to meet the citizens' right and minority community right.

What is happening in Kerala and now throughout the country is an aberration took place in connection with the "Education bill" of the  First ministry of Kerala lead by the  Communis party, the subsequent liberation struggle launched by the vested interests and the corrections made in that bill through Court interventions and subsequent govt policies.

The Original bill stiputed Direct payment to the teachers and Selection of teachers by the govt.

What was implemented was direct payment to the teachers by the govt and selection and appointment by the management. That means in Kerala Govt pays the teacher who are selected and appointed by the management even by taking huge commission running to tens of lakhs.

This has become a burden for the govt.

But subsequent UDF govts too found it difficult to manage the education system with the above condtions.

They mooted the idea of autonomous institution to escape from such responsibility of Govt payment for teachers appointed by the management.

In the neo-liberal economic frame work followed by the Congress and the UDF they are shirking off social responsibility altogether.

This is the background in which the recognised education institutions and private institutions are being encouraged by the UDF.

Right to education of choice and right to education shall not be equated.
Same way, right to run education institution and Private (also religious) management of public education institution shall not be equated.

The above duo are different altogether.


Coming to the point of running the public education system efficiently, the teaching community has got the responsibility. It is true that the responsibility was not met by them adequately.

Every body want teaching job in Govt/Aided institutions.
They send their wards to private schools.

This attitude of the teachers (Only few, but that was sufficient to poison the system) caused much misunderstanding among the parents. Naturally, they took it as an indication that the private schools are better than the govt/aided schools.

In any case, the public education system with the Govt and Aided schools have better infrastructure and Efficient and qualified teachers (irrespective of whether they discharge their duties properly or not). Naturally, the Govt control and patronage, the organised teachers movements, the well qualified and efficient teaching community and the local community of parents put together gives unlimited scope for improvement of education compared to any privately managed one.

Tail piece : One of the recognised school teacher in Trivandrum in a famous school wrote in the students diary "The parents may be taught daily".

Guess what she actually meant ! Such is not a rare instance. They are the result of the poorly qualified hands handling the classes and happens every where with the recognised schools over which govt have no control.


Thomas

.  
 

2011, ജൂണ്‍ 15 9:03 വൈകുന്നേരം ന്, Dr.B.Ekbal <ekb...@gmail.com> എഴുതി:

[manual jose]

ഇത് കച്ചവടം തന്നെയാണ് . ഉള്ള സമയം കൊണ്ട് എത്ര കാശുണ്ടാക്കാം എന്നത് മാത്രമാണ് പുതിയ ചിന്ത.

2011/6/15 Kenney Jacob <kenney...@gmail.com>

[padmakumar vb]

2011/6/15 Dr.B.Ekbal <ekb...@gmail.com>

ഒരു മേഖലയിലും സ്വകാര്യ സംരംഭങ്ങൾ ആരംഭിക്കുന്നതിനെ നിലവിലുള്ള ഭരണവ്യസ്ഥക്കുള്ളിൽ നിന്നും നമുക്ക് തടയാനാവില്ല. പ്രത്യേകിച്ചും ന്യൂനപക്ഷ അവകാശങ്ങൾ തുടങ്ങിയ പ്രശ്നങ്ങൾ പരിഹരിക്കപ്പെടാതെ കിടക്കുന്ന സാഹചര്യത്തിൽ. സർക്കാർ വിദ്യാഭ്യാസമേഖലയിൽ കൂടുതൽ തുക മുടക്കുകു, കൂടുതൽ സ്ഥാപനങ്ങൾ ആരംഭിക്കുക, അവയുടെ നിലവാരം മെച്ചപ്പെടുത്തുക, അധ്യാപകരും മാതാപിതാക്കളും, വിദ്യാർത്ഥികളും പൊതുസ്ഥാപനങ്ങളുടെ സാമൂഹ്യ പ്രാധാന്യം മനസ്സിലാക്കി അവ മെച്ചപ്പെടുത്താൻ യജ്ഞിക്കുക, സ്വകാര്യ സ്ഥാപനങ്ങളെ കർശനമായ സമൂഹ്യ നിയന്ത്രണത്തിൽ കൊണ്ടുവരിക (ഫീസ്, അഡ്മിഷൻ നിയമങ്ങൾ, കോഴ്സ് ഉള്ളടക്കം, ഭാഷാ പഠനം) എന്നിങ്ങനെ നിലപാടുകൾ സ്വീകരിക്കേണ്ടിവരും,
ഇക്ബാൽ

2011/6/15 Kenney Jacob <kenney...@gmail.com>

2011/6/15 Joseph Thomas <thoma...@gmail.com>

Yes, true, the discussion is not about English or Malayalam medium nor is it of the right of any body to send their ward to any type of institution.

The point of discussion is the policy of the new instituted Govt in granting hundreds of private, unaided schools of a different pattern than that of the public education system of the state.

The entities that apply for the license/permission to run the schools under CBSE scheme etc also are not worried about the right of the p   

[vivekstanley]

If government spending should increase, tax collection should increase. How many are willing to pay more taxes?

[Dr.B.Ekbal]

Joseph Thomas wrote

"Any religious institution can have their own education institution. That shall be part of their right. But, they cannot have a right to run public education system."

This is the contentious issue which could not be settled even by the Supreme Court. As per the minority rights as such minority communities can run public education institutions. And in many instances they are also free from the rules imposed on the other educational institutions in terms of admission, fees etc. That is why the self financing institutions run by minority communities dont follow Government norms in Kerala. This issue need to be settled by a national consensus at national level. Because at the national level it is relevant to give minorities certain rights. BJP/RSS are against giving such rights. In Kerala since the minority communities are about >45% situation is different. So this is a complicated issue.
Ekbal

2011/6/15 padmakumar vb <vbpka...@gmail.com>

[Kenney Jacob]

2011/6/15 Joseph Thomas <thoma...@gmail.com>

Right to learn or teach is different from the Govt giving sanction for the schools.
Any religious institution can have their own education institution. That shall be part of their right. But, they cannot have a right to run public education system.

The public education system is something the government controls. Why are the private schools forced to run either the state syllabus or the CBSE syllabus ? Why cant we let a school create their own curriculum ? Ofcourse we need to check for any anti social teachings, but the idea of giving freedom to school and colleges itself has the power to bring about transformation in the society.  

 

Any body shall have right to attend the school of his/her choice. That shall be his individual right. But, he may not get a certificate from the public education system untill and unless he go through the process of its exam.
That shall be sufficient to meet the citizens' right and minority community right.

The exam and certificate system is not to provide any right to any one, its a method of control. What value does a certificate has ? I know many people with engineering degrees who has no clue as to what engineering is. Certificate only means that you have learned to get marks in an exam which is not a statement of his quality. 

 

What is happening in Kerala and now throughout the country is an aberration took place in connection with the "Education bill" of the  First ministry of Kerala lead by the  Communis party, the subsequent liberation struggle launched by the vested interests and the corrections made in that bill through Court interventions and subsequent govt policies.

The Original bill stiputed Direct payment to the teachers and Selection of teachers by the govt.

Very valid point. Govt should exercise control over those institutions that are run using government money. Instead of doing that the government is trying to get take away my freedom of choosing what to study and how to study.  

What was implemented was direct payment to the teachers by the govt and selection and appointment by the management. That means in Kerala Govt pays the teacher who are selected and appointed by the management even by taking huge commission running to tens of lakhs.

I know someone who paid 25 lakhs. I would rather have put that money in a fixed account and lived happily ever after with the interest.  

This has become a burden for the govt.

But subsequent UDF govts too found it difficult to manage the education system with the above condtions.

They mooted the idea of autonomous institution to escape from such responsibility of Govt payment for teachers appointed by the management.

In the neo-liberal economic frame work followed by the Congress and the UDF they are shirking off social responsibility altogether.

This is the background in which the recognised education institutions and private institutions are being encouraged by the UDF.

Right to education of choice and right to education shall not be equated.
Same way, right to run education institution and Private (also religious) management of public education institution shall not be equated.

The above duo are different altogether.

When you start a hotel govt only interferes with the quality of the food, they do not interfere in the menu decision or the pricing. We choose a hotel which provides the food which we like and something which we can afford. Why cant the govt let people create institutions in a similar manner, freedom to create the curriculum and freedom to fix the fees. Let them compete over quality and price. Each will have its own audience. 

More over we should not forget that Kerala lost crores of money and job opportunities to neighboring states due to out stupid education policy. Time are changing now, please dont stand in the way. 

 

Coming to the point of running the public education system efficiently, the teaching community has got the responsibility. It is true that the responsibility was not met by them adequately.

Every body want teaching job in Govt/Aided institutions.
They send their wards to private schools.

This attitude of the teachers (Only few, but that was sufficient to poison the system) caused much misunderstanding among the parents. Naturally, they took it as an indication that the private schools are better than the govt/aided schools.

Most private schools provide a better atmosphere. Can anyone contest this ?

[Krishna Das]

Dear comrades

Our slogan with regard to Education should be a DOUBLE-EDGED SWORD.

FOR EVERY POINT WE RAISE AGAINST A PRIVATE EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONAL SET UP, WE SHOULD RAISE A SIMULTANEOUS POINT DEMANDING CORRECTION/ACCOUNTABILITY/EFFICIENCY IN THE GOVERNMENT EDUCATIONAL INSTITUIONAL SET UP.

The fight should be SIMULTANEOUS AND BOTH IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN ITSELF


regards
DAS

2011/6/16 Kenney Jacob <kenney...@gmail.com>

--
KRISHNADAS M
OPEN SOFTWARE SOLUTIONS ICS LTD
KOCHI
das...@gmail.com
91-9447711124

[Shiju Paul]

Dear friends,

 

Here the issue is not whether to give freedom to start or not private schools or schools of ones choice. The issue is Government giving licenses to the schools already started and run by some persons or groups. There are schools that follow their own curriculum and never bothers to get a license from any government. Some famous ones too, you might have heard of 'Sarang' in Agali (Palakkad dt.) and 'Kanav' in Wayanad.

 

What you mean by "license from the government" and why do these schools need it? Only to abide by the exam and certification system! It is required only for the purpose that the children they admitted to their schools be enrolled to appear for the public examinations conducted by the Government for the students of 10^th and +2 of the Government curriculum, and get the certificates that the Government students get!

 

So that they could prove their EQUIVALENCE to the students who were taught the Government curriculum!

 

Now, by giving the license the Government is undertaking a lot of responsibilities. They have to make all the arrangements for each and every student with respect to these examinations. The increased quantity of question papers, invigilators, valuation, tabulation etc. etc. Too much resources, manpower and money are spent in each of these steps to ensure credibility, secracy and impartiality. Therefore the Government has to ensure so many things corresponding to the infrastructure, set-up and running of these institutions. That also involve public resourses being spent. Here the government machinery is used to safeguard the interests of a person or a group of persons who on their own have decided to start a school or whatever.

 

Why can't they think like Sarang and Kanav and ease the Government of this burden?

 

I request Mr. Kenny explain his arguments based on these facts.

 

Kenny says, "We should not be worried about the profit they make, if they provide the quality which is affordable to parents they will send their children there."

 

This is a dangerous argument: education that is affordable to parents! Affluent parents get affordable education for their wards and others watch this drama from outside! Then nobody shall try to regulating the self-financing colleges. Let them admit anyone and charge anything. "Those who may afford the rates would send their children there!"

 

Curious enough, the Government is fixing an MRP to every good that are manufactured in the country, with or without their help, and make sure that those who labour to manufacture it gets at least minimum wages. Based on the above argument what the government is doing is nothing but interfering ones freedom! Grave injustice! Alas!

 

Regards,

Shiju

 

 

2011/6/16 Kenney Jacob <kenney...@gmail.com>

[Kenney Jacob]

2011/6/16 Shiju Paul <shij...@gmail.com>

Dear friends,

 

Here the issue is not whether to give freedom to start or not private schools or schools of ones choice. The issue is Government giving licenses to the schools already started and run by some persons or groups. There are schools that follow their own curriculum and never bothers to get a license from any government. Some famous ones too, you might have heard of 'Sarang' in Agali (Palakkad dt.) and 'Kanav' in Wayanad.

If parents are brave enough, more schools like that will come up. 

 

 

What you mean by "license from the government" and why do these schools need it? Only to abide by the exam and certification system! It is required only for the purpose that the children they admitted to their schools be enrolled to appear for the public examinations conducted by the Government for the students of 10^th and +2 of the Government curriculum, and get the certificates that the Government students get!

 

So that they could prove their EQUIVALENCE to the students who were taught the Government curriculum!

Its not to prove any equivalence. They are forced to comply because you will not be eligible for many exams, job opportunities etc which again is controlled by the government. Its a vicious cycle and only those who have the means to stand apart can escape it. 

There are many MBA institutes, famous ones which are not affiliated to any university. They success because companies recognize those universities for their merit and give jobs to the students who study there. But they are not eligible for a govt job that requires and MBA from a govt approved university.  

 

Now, by giving the license the Government is undertaking a lot of responsibilities. They have to make all the arrangements for each and every student with respect to these examinations. The increased quantity of question papers, invigilators, valuation, tabulation etc. etc. Too much resources, manpower and money are spent in each of these steps to ensure credibility, secracy and impartiality. Therefore the Government has to ensure so many things corresponding to the infrastructure, set-up and running of these institutions. That also involve public resourses being spent. Here the government machinery is used to safeguard the interests of a person or a group of persons who on their own have decided to start a school or whatever. 

 

Why can't they think like Sarang and Kanav and ease the Government of this burden?

 

I request Mr. Kenny explain his arguments based on these facts.

 

Kenny says, "We should not be worried about the profit they make, if they provide the quality which is affordable to parents they will send their children there."

 

This is a dangerous argument: education that is affordable to parents! Affluent parents get affordable education for their wards and others watch this drama from outside! Then nobody shall try to regulating the self-financing colleges. Let them admit anyone and charge anything. "Those who may afford the rates would send their children there!"

Affluent parents will still send their children to better places, there is nothing that you can do about it. If you are suggesting standardization, then you will have to close down every private school. Also you will have to make law that says you cannot send your child to US, or UK or any other foreign country to study some course. 

We all choose what is affordable to us. We are living in a country that guarantee freedom to work, earn and spend, why cant someone spend on his children, after all its the dream of every parent to get his kids the best circumstances possible. 

 

 

Curious enough, the Government is fixing an MRP to every good that are manufactured in the country, with or without their help, and make sure that those who labour to manufacture it gets at least minimum wages. Based on the above argument what the government is doing is nothing but interfering ones freedom! Grave injustice! Alas!

Do you think government is deciding the price for the soap which you use ? The company decides based on their cost, their expected profit and the demand. If the demand is higher, they will charge more. Let everyone start private schools and the demand as well as the price is going to come down. 

If you have not noticed... maruti sells its cars at the same price it used to sell 10 years ago also. Price has not increased even though demand has gone high, because many companies came and there is a lot of choice avaialbe in the market. 

I dream of a time when we have 100 medical colleges in Kerala. "EE doctermarude jada kandendallooo" 

[Shiju Paul]

Dear Kenny,

 

The subject of discussion here is the State Government's policy of giving licenses indiscriminately to "all" CBSE/ICSC schools. It would be nice if you could speak about it. Let the parents be brave enough, I would also pray with you.

>> Its not to prove any equivalence. They are forced to comply because you will not be eligible for many exams,

>> job opportunities etc which again is controlled by the government.

 

Equivalence or forced to comply or whatever, the result is same. They get a certificate issued by government based on government's norm of eligibility, isn't it? The crux is that the many exams and job opportunities that you mention recognize the standard of the Government curriculum. The many exams and job opportunities are not controlled by the government. For example there are institutions like Manipal foundation, ICFAI and many others, and only 9% of the jobs is offerd by the government. The private schools may present their positives before these institutions and get their recognition directly.

 

What I wrote in the earlier mail the portions up to "Why can't they think like Sarang and Kanav and ease the Government of this burden? I request Mr. Kenny explain his arguments based on these facts." refers to the licensing issue. Please respond  to that part separately.

-----------------

Now, coming to the "affluent parent's deeds", my statements were limited to primary and secondary education and yours are unlimited. They don't match. Within the secondary education too there are strata (Like Doons and Lovedales), I know, but the education the majority receives from the Government is sufficient for them to achieve in life according to his ability and aptitude. But there should not be a scnario where less affluent will not get that opportunity at all and will be robbed off their genuine aspirations in life. Say, the future APJ Abdulkalams shall not be denied the right to educate.

 

>> Do you think government is deciding the price for the soap which you use ?

 

In the practical sense the price may be decided by the companies. But there is an unseen validation by the government mechanism. If the government gets a complaint about pricing of any produce, they may inquire into it and prevent the manufacturer from taking excessive profit.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_controls

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_ceiling

 

http://www.indianchild.com/indian_economic_policies.htm :Controls over prices, production, and the use of foreign exchange, which were imposed by the British during World War II, were reinstated soon after independence. The Industries (Development and Regulation) Act of 1951 and the Essential Commodities Act of 1955 (with subsequent additions) provided the legal framework for the government to extend price controls that eventually included steel, cement, drugs, nonferrous metals, chemicals, fertilizer, coal, automobiles, tires and tubes, cotton textiles, food grains, bread, butter, vegetable oils, and other commodities

 

Prices of many items are examined like that. I remember some instances in the prices of medicines in India in the recent past.  So technically it is the government that decides "the price for the soap" which you use.

 

I didn't mention it to equate with the issue in education. Some people are receptive to when it is explained in financial terms.

 

Regards,

Shiju

[sreenth prabhups]

Defintely current UDF goverment's education policy will create divide in society.

 

Beacause it is not secular.It is not taking in confidence to the majority sections of society.

 

Either it is in school level,plus two level,or college level

 

Educational Resrvation should be based on Financial rather than community or religion based

 

 

 

[Kenney Jacob]

2011/6/16 Shiju Paul <shij...@gmail.com>

Dear Kenny,

 

The subject of discussion here is the State Government's policy of giving licenses indiscriminately to "all" CBSE/ICSC schools.

I am yet to figure out why we are objecting it. The arguments that the state schools have enough seats is not valid.  

 

It would be nice if you could speak about it. Let the parents be brave enough, I would also pray with you.

>> Its not to prove any equivalence. They are forced to comply because you will not be eligible for many exams,

>> job opportunities etc which again is controlled by the government.

 

Equivalence or forced to comply or whatever, the result is same. They get a certificate issued by government based on government's norm of eligibility, isn't it? The crux is that the many exams and job opportunities that you mention recognize the standard of the Government curriculum. The many exams and job opportunities are not controlled by the government. For example there are institutions like Manipal foundation, ICFAI and many others, and only 9% of the jobs is offerd by the government. The private schools may present their positives before these institutions and get their recognition directly.

 

What I wrote in the earlier mail the portions up to "Why can't they think like Sarang and Kanav and ease the Government of this burden? I request Mr. Kenny explain his arguments based on these facts." refers to the licensing issue. Please respond  to that part separately.

I dont know the particular case of these schools, but I have been to a similar school in Kodaikanal where there are only 60 students in total. There are no class rooms and they study in groups. Students are not promoted every year. They simply continue to learn until they are ready to move out. Most students write an exam from cambridge or oxford, A level or O level to get a certificate and then continue to higher studies. 

Maybe we should try and give some awareness to schools and say you need not go after the govt to get a license. 

 

-----------------

Now, coming to the "affluent parent's deeds", my statements were limited to primary and secondary education and yours are unlimited. They don't match. Within the secondary education too there are strata (Like Doons and Lovedales), I know, but the education the majority receives from the Government is sufficient for them to achieve in life according to his ability and aptitude. But there should not be a scnario where less affluent will not get that opportunity at all and will be robbed off their genuine aspirations in life. 

First of all I dont agree with your statement that the government education is enough. I have studied in both schools and I still feel I could have gone to a city school, in my job I am competing with polished students from city schools whose language is better, social skills are better etc. Nobody can say.. something is enough just because he is satisfied with it. 

 Again I did not understand how private schools take away anyones right to a "good enough" education at a government school. 

Say, the future APJ Abdulkalams shall not be denied the right to educate.

 

>> Do you think government is deciding the price for the soap which you use ?

 

In the practical sense the price may be decided by the companies. But there is an unseen validation by the government mechanism. If the government gets a complaint about pricing of any produce, they may inquire into it and prevent the manufacturer from taking excessive profit.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_controls

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_ceiling

 

http://www.indianchild.com/indian_economic_policies.htm :Controls over prices, production, and the use of foreign exchange, which were imposed by the British during World War II, were reinstated soon after independence. The Industries (Development and Regulation) Act of 1951 and the Essential Commodities Act of 1955 (with subsequent additions) provided the legal framework for the government to extend price controls that eventually included steel, cement, drugs, nonferrous metals, chemicals, fertilizer, coal, automobiles, tires and tubes, cotton textiles, food grains, bread, butter, vegetable oils, and other commodities

 

Prices of many items are examined like that. I remember some instances in the prices of medicines in India in the recent past.  So technically it is the government that decides "the price for the soap" which you use.

 

I have seen soaps that cost 100Rs a piece. I dont think government controls prices in the market. A good example of a competitive market is the cheap phone calls you and I make these days. 

[bijoy]

I dont agree with the usage that Parents LIKE to send their kids to english medium schools, private schools, etc..

LIKE is a problematic word. Whose like, are we talking about?
Did we like to drink coca cola ten years back? Did we like to eat Mcdonalds' burger ten years back? Our grand parents used to wear "barmudas" then.

The amount of sugar in our diets items were much lower in old days. We were happy with other tastes as well. Now, we have increased amount of sugar in our diets. We have cadburys telling us to eat sugar every day and we obey.

"LIKE" is manufactured. It is manufactured by capitalists to increase their profit. It is not same across globe, across civilisations. Consensus is manufactured.

Thanking You

Bijoy Franco
mob. 9447688254

BE THE CHANGE WE WISH TO SEE IN THE WORLD

[Kenney Jacob]

Parents want a better life for their children and they think a private/English school education will provide a better chance over a government/Malayalam school. Can we blame them for that thinking ? Can we blame the capitalists ? 

Is there any truth in the thinking process ?

Kenney Jacob

2011/6/16 bijoy <bijoy....@gmail.com>

[bijoy]

I have studied in a malayalam medium school. When i got a job in Chennai in an advertising company, i could hardly speak in English. So far, i have worked with 2-3 MNC advertising agencies in Mumbai and Bangalore. I have worked with IITians, IIMs, etc.. Have many City grown up colleagues/ Friends, etc.. Now when i look back, I dont regret in studying in Malayalam medium School. Instead i am proud of it. My only worry is that, Since i was away from kerala last 6-7 years, I have lost ability to write in Malayalam.

If somebody's son is a failure in his life, that is his fault, not his school's. Also what matters is that how do we measure success and failure.

2011/6/16 Kenney Jacob <kenney...@gmail.com>

[Anilkumar KV]

2011/6/16 Kenney Jacob <kenney...@gmail.com>

Parents want a better life for their children and they think a private/English school education will provide a better chance over a government/Malayalam school. Can we blame them for that thinking ?

രക്ഷിതാക്കള്‍ കുട്ടികള്‍ക്കു് നല്ല വിദ്യാഭ്യാസം നല്‍കാന്‍ ശ്രമിക്കുന്നു.  എവിടെ പഠിപ്പിക്കണമെന്ന സ്വാതന്ത്ര്യം അവര്‍ക്കുണ്ടു്. അതിനെതിരെ, ഈ വേദിയിലു് ആരെങ്കിലും ചിന്തിക്കുകയോ സംസാരിക്കുകയോ ചെയ്തതായി തോന്നുന്നില്ല.  

സ്വകാര്യ സ്ഥാപനത്തിലൂടെയുള്ള വിദ്യാഭ്യാസവും, മാതൃഭാഷയിലൂടെയല്ലാതെയുള്ള പഠനവുമാണു് നല്ലതെന്നു് പല രക്ഷിതാക്കളും കരുതുന്നുണ്ടു്. അതു് വിദ്യാഭ്യാസത്തിന്റെ ഗുണമേന്മയെ കുറിച്ചുള്ള തെറ്റിദ്ധാരണകൊണ്ടോ, വിദ്യാഭ്യാസത്തിന്റെ ഗുണമേന്മയെക്കാളേറെ പ്രാധാന്യം വേറെയെന്തിനൊക്കെയോ നല്‍കുന്നതിനാലോ ആകാം. എങ്കിലും അത്തരം തെറ്റിദ്ധാരണക്കനുസൃതമായിതന്നെ കുട്ടികളെ പഠിപ്പികാനുള്ള സ്വാതന്ത്ര്യം അവര്‍ക്കുണ്ടു്.

ഇവിടെ അത്തരം വ്യക്തിഗത തീരുമാനമല്ല ചര്‍ച്ചാവിഷയം. സര്‍ക്കാരിന്റെ ജനവിരുദ്ധ നയവും നിലപാടുമാണു്.

കെന്നി പറയുന്നതു് പോലെ, തന്റെ കുട്ടി "നല്ല നിലയിലുള്ള കുട്ടികളുടെ ഒപ്പം തന്നെ പഠിക്കണമെന്നു് ", ഒരു രക്ഷിതാവിനു് കരുതാം. പക്ഷെ വല്യവീട്ടിലെ കുട്ടികളും, ചന്തപ്പിള്ളേരും എന്ന നിലയില്‍ ഒരു ജനാധിപത്യ സര്‍ക്കാര്‍ വേര്‍തിരിച്ചു് കാണാന്‍ പാടില്ല. എല്ലാവര്‍ക്കും നല്ല വിദ്യാഭ്യാസം നല്‍കാന്‍ പൊതുവിദ്യാഭ്യാസത്തെ ശക്തിപ്പെടുത്തണം. വിദ്യാഭ്യാസ കച്ചവടം അവസാനിപ്പിക്കണം. ഇതിനു് രണ്ടിനും വിരുദ്ധമായ നിലപാടാണു്  കേരള സര്‍ക്കാര്‍ സ്വീകരിക്കുന്നതു്. അതിനാലാണു്  "പൊതുവിദ്യാഭ്യാസ സംരക്ഷണത്തില്‍ പങ്കാളിയാവുക" എന്ന ആഹ്വാനം ഇപ്പോള്‍ പ്രസക്തമാകുന്നതു്.
 

Can we blame the capitalists ? 

മുതലാളിത്തം ഇന്നത്തെ യാഥാര്‍ത്ഥ്യമാണു്.  ഈ സാമൂഹ്യ വ്യവസ്ഥയുടെ പ്രത്യേകതയാണു് മുതലാളികള്‍. പഴയ സാമൂഹ്യവ്യവസ്ഥയേക്കാള്‍ മെച്ചപ്പെട്ടതാണെങ്കിലും ഒരുപാടു് പ്രശ്നങ്ങള്‍ മുതലാളിത്തത്തിനുണ്ടു്. ബഹുഭൂരിപക്ഷം വരുന്ന ജനങ്ങളും കടുത്ത ദുരിതമനുഭവിക്കന്നവരാണു്. ജനാധിപത്യ വ്യവസഥയും തുല്യ വോട്ടവകാശവുമുണ്ടെങ്കില്‍ പോലും ചെറു ന്യുനപക്ഷമായ ധനികരുടെ താല്പര്യത്തിനായി ബഹുഭൂരിപക്ഷമായ ദരിദ്രരെ ദുതിതത്തിലാഴ്ത്തുന്ന സമീപനമാണു് ഭരണവര്‍ഗ്ഗത്തിന്റേതു്. അതിനു് കുറ്റപ്പെടുത്തേണ്ടത് ഇവിടത്ത ഒരോ മുതലാളിയേയുമല്ല. മറിച്ചു് മുതലാളിത്തമെന്ന സാമൂഹ്യവ്യവസ്ഥയെ തന്നെയാണു്.

ഈ സാമൂഹ്യവ്യവസ്ഥയില്‍ നിന്നുള്ള മാറ്റമാണു് നാമ്മള്‍ ലക്ഷ്യമിടേണ്ടതു്. ഭൂരിപക്ഷം ജനങ്ങള്‍ക്കു ജനാധിപത്യപ്രക്രീയയില്‍ പങ്കാളികളാകാന്‍ പറ്റുന്ന ജനകീയ ജനാധിപത്യമാകട്ടെ നമ്മുടെ ലക്ഷ്യം.

Is there any truth in the thinking process ?

 
നല്ല സംവാദങ്ങള്‍  നമ്മുടെ സാമൂഹ്യവീക്ഷണത്തേയും, ചിന്താരീതിയേയും പുഷ്ടിപ്പെടത്തും.

- അനില്‍

 

[kraje...@yahoo.co.in]

How many teachers can claim that their children study in the school they teach?

Any survey done among Govt teachers?

Can the govt teachers association declare that they will suspend members whose students study in private schools

Then the association will not have any leaders
So let us not open the Pandora's box. It may back fire

Please don't shed tears for division falls

Govt schools for others children, private school for us
Ha ha ha

Sent from my BlackBerry® smartphone

---

From: Anilkumar KV <anil...@gmail.com>

Sender: da...@googlegroups.com

Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2011 22:21:58 +0530

To: <da...@googlegroups.com>

ReplyTo: da...@googlegroups.com

Subject: Re: [DAKF] Re: പൊതുവിദ്യാഭ് യാസ സംരക്ഷണത്തില്‍ പങ ്കാളിയാവുക

--

[Shiju Paul]

Dear friends,

 

Response to Mr. Kenny's mail:

 

>> I am yet to figure out why we are objecting it. The arguments that the state schools have enough seats is not valid.

>> Again I did not understand how private schools take away anyones right to a "good enough" education at a government school.

 

When there are more schools than needed none would perform satisfactorily. It is true for every institution or enterprize. Every year there are between 4,20,000 and 4,50,000 children to join the first standard in our state. That means for every 2.5x2.5 sq.km area there will be around 70 students, which is just right for 2 divisions. When you have 3 or 4 schools in that area, they get divided into all of these. The 'unaccountable' schools may survive with less number of students because they can hike the fees to their convenience and give meagre salary to their staff. When people are stuck to believe that these kind of schools may give the child better education they will force themselves to carry the burden. The public schools suffer because of this and they become "uneconomical", as per the jargon of the Central government. That would stop any chance of their improving standards and would lead to their closure. And this would affect the economically backward sections of the society. Because they cannot afford to pay the fee and other expenses. Those who are always thinking of themselves may not feel pained about it, but...

 

Here our discussion is not the merits and demerits of public and private schools. Or the folly of the decisions of our parents. But a Government which is entrusted to look after and improve the educational conditions of the state's public schools paving way for the destruction of that. Clear?

---------------

Rajesh sends a mail from his blackberry to conduct survey among teachers. You can arrange a survey for that too. But that is another issue. Don't mix it with this. This is another issue with long-term implications. When the last school with less fee is closed, the less privileged might rush to your office and house and snatch you of all your luxuries.

[Regi P George]

സ്കൂൾ ടാക്സ് ഏർപ്പെടുത്തുന്നതിനെപറ്റി എന്താണഭിപ്രായം?
ഒരു തുക വർഷാവർഷം സ്കൂൾ ടാക്സ് ആയി പൊതു സമൂഹത്തിൽ നിന്നും പിരിച്ചെടുത്ത് അത് പൊതുവിദ്യാഭ്യാസത്തിന് ഉപയോഗിച്ചാൽ പൊതുവിദ്യാഭ്യാസത്തിന് ഒരു ഫണ്ട് ആകും.

പോക്കറ്റിൽ നിന്നും അല്പം പൈസപോകുന്ന ഏതുപൌരനും അത് വസൂലാക്കാൻ ചെയ്യാവുന്നതൊക്കെചെയ്യുകയും ചെയ്യും!
അപ്പോൾ കുട്ടികളെ പ്രൈവറ്റ് സ്കൂളിൽ വിട്ടാലും പൊതുവിദ്യാഭ്യാസത്തിനു പൈസാനല്കേണ്ട അവസ്ഥ കൂടൂതൽ ആളുകളെ പബ്ലിക് സ്കൂളൂകളീലേക്ക് അടുപ്പിക്കും!


റെജി

"Do not judge me by my actions;

Do not judge me from man's point of view"

"Judge me from God's - by the hidden purpose behind my actions.
Regi George wishing you Good Luck. Thanks

[Regi P George]

പൊതുവിദ്യാഭ്യാസം സംരക്ഷിക്കാന്‍ പോരാട്ടം അനിവാര്യം

പൊതുവിദ്യാഭ്യാസം സംരക്ഷിക്കാന്‍ പോരാട്ടം അനിവാര്യം

പിണറായി വിജയന്‍

Posted on: 17-Jun-2011 12:03 AM

കേരളത്തിലെ വിദ്യാഭ്യാസത്തിന്റെ പ്രശസ്തിക്കും ഔന്നത്യത്തിനും അടിസ്ഥാനം പൊതുവിദ്യാഭ്യാസത്തിന്റെ വളര്‍ച്ചയാണ്. സര്‍ക്കാരിന്റെ മുന്‍കൈയില്‍ , സേവനതല്‍പ്പരതയോടെ സ്വകാര്യ ഏജന്‍സികളും ഇടപെട്ടതോടെ പൊതുവിദ്യാഭ്യാസഘടന ശക്തിപ്പെട്ടു. ഇതിലൂടെ ഇന്ത്യയിലെ ഏറ്റവും സാക്ഷരതയുള്ള സംസ്ഥാനങ്ങളില്‍ ഒന്നായി കേരളം മാറി. ഏത് പാവപ്പെട്ടവനും ഏത് തലംവരെയും പഠിച്ച് വളരാന്‍പറ്റുന്ന ഒന്നായി കേരളത്തിന്റെ വിദ്യാഭ്യാസമേഖലയെ രൂപപ്പെടുത്തിയത് ഈ സമീപനമാണ്. ഇത്തരത്തില്‍ വികസിച്ച നമ്മുടെ പൊതുവിദ്യാഭ്യാസത്തെ തകര്‍ത്ത് സ്വകാര്യ കച്ചവടതാല്‍പ്പര്യങ്ങള്‍ക്ക് മേധാവിത്വം നല്‍കുന്നതിനുള്ള നീക്കങ്ങളാണ് ഇപ്പോള്‍ നടക്കുന്നത്. അതിന്റെ ഭാഗമാണ് അറുനൂറോളം അണ്‍എയ്ഡഡ് സ്കൂളുകള്‍ക്ക് അംഗീകാരം നല്‍കാനുള്ള യുഡിഎഫ് സര്‍ക്കാരിന്റെ തീരുമാനം. ഈ തീരുമാനത്തിന്റെ ഭവിഷ്യത്തുകള്‍ അറിയണമെങ്കില്‍ കേരളത്തിലെ വിദ്യാഭ്യാസത്തിന്റെ നിലവിലുള്ള അവസ്ഥയും അത് രൂപപ്പെട്ടുവന്ന രീതിയും മനസ്സിലാക്കണം.

 

2009-10 ലെ കണക്ക് പ്രകാരം 12,642 സ്കൂളുകളാണ് കേരളത്തില്‍ . അതില്‍ 4501 സര്‍ക്കാര്‍ സ്കൂളുകള്‍ . 7278 എയ്ഡഡ് സ്കൂളുകളും 863 അണ്‍എയ്ഡഡ് സ്കൂളുകളും. അതായത് 57.57 ശതമാനം എയ്ഡഡ് സ്കൂളുകളും 35.60 ശതമാനം സര്‍ക്കാര്‍ സ്കൂളുകളും 6.83 ശതമാനം അണ്‍എയ്ഡഡ് സ്കൂളുകളും. സര്‍ക്കാര്‍ സ്കൂളുകളും എയ്ഡഡ് സ്കൂളുകളും വിദ്യാര്‍ഥികള്‍ക്ക് സൗജന്യമായി പഠിക്കാവുന്ന സ്ഥാപനങ്ങളാണ്. കേരളത്തിലെ മൊത്തം വിദ്യാഭ്യാസ സ്ഥാപനങ്ങളുടെ 93 ശതമാനവും സൗജന്യമായി പഠിക്കാവുന്ന സ്ഥാപനങ്ങളാണെന്നര്‍ഥം. ഇതാണ് നമ്മുടെ പൊതുവിദ്യാഭ്യാസത്തിന്റെ കരുത്ത്. പാവപ്പെട്ടവര്‍ക്ക് പഠനാവസരം നല്‍കുന്നത് ഇത്തരം സ്ഥാപനങ്ങളാണ്. അണ്‍എയ്ഡഡ് സ്ഥാപനങ്ങള്‍ പില്‍ക്കാലത്ത് രൂപപ്പെട്ടതാണ്. വലതുപക്ഷ സര്‍ക്കാരുകള്‍ പൊതുവിദ്യാഭ്യാസത്തെ തകര്‍ത്ത് അണ്‍എയ്ഡഡ് സ്ഥാപനങ്ങളെ പ്രോത്സാഹിപ്പിക്കുന്ന സമീപനമാണ് സ്വീകരിക്കുന്നത്.

 

ഇതില്‍ ഏറെയും വലിയ ലാഭക്കൊതിയോടെയാണ് ഇന്ന് പ്രവര്‍ത്തിക്കുന്നത്. വിദ്യാഭ്യാസാവസരം പൊതുജനങ്ങള്‍ക്ക് ആകമാനം ലഭ്യമാക്കുന്നതില്‍ സേവനതല്‍പ്പരതയോടെ ഇടപെട്ട മിഷണറിമാരുടെ പങ്ക് പ്രധാനമാണ്. ഈ ഇടപെടല്‍ പിന്നോക്കം കിടക്കുന്ന ജനങ്ങള്‍ക്ക് വിദ്യാഭ്യാസം നല്‍കുന്നതിന് തുടക്കം കുറിച്ചു. പുതിയ ചിന്തയുടെയും ആശയങ്ങളുടെയും കടന്നുവരവ് നവോത്ഥാനപ്രസ്ഥാനങ്ങളുടെ രൂപീകരണത്തിനും ഇടയാക്കി. ഈ ഇടപെടല്‍ അടിസ്ഥാന ജനവിഭാഗങ്ങളുടെ വിദ്യാഭ്യാസത്തില്‍ വലിയ പുരോഗതിയുണ്ടാക്കി. മിഷണറിമാരുടെ വിദ്യാഭ്യാസപ്രവര്‍ത്തനത്തെ സഹായിക്കുന്നതിന് അന്നത്തെ സര്‍ക്കാര്‍ ഇടപെടലും ഉണ്ടായിരുന്നു- പ്രത്യേകിച്ചും തിരുവിതാംകൂറില്‍ . കേരളത്തിന്റെ സവിശേഷമായ സാമൂഹ്യരീതിയും മിഷണറി വിദ്യാഭ്യാസം ശക്തിപ്പെടുത്തുന്നതിന് ഇടയാക്കി. കേരളത്തിന്റെ ജന്മിത്വഘടനയില്‍ ജന്മിക്കും കുടിയാനുമിടയില്‍ നില്‍ക്കുന്ന വിഭാഗങ്ങളുണ്ടായിരുന്നു. ആദ്യഘട്ടത്തില്‍ ഈ വിഭാഗമാണ് വിദ്യാഭ്യാസത്തിലേക്ക് ആകര്‍ഷിക്കപ്പെട്ടത്. അടിസ്ഥാന ജനവിഭാഗത്തില്‍ വിദ്യാഭ്യാസപ്രവര്‍ത്തനം കൂടുതല്‍ ശക്തിപ്പെടുത്തിയത് നവോത്ഥാനപ്രസ്ഥാനങ്ങളുടെ ഇടപെടലാണ്. നവോത്ഥാനപ്രസ്ഥാനങ്ങള്‍ പ്രവര്‍ത്തനം ആരംഭിച്ചശേഷം തിരുവിതാംകൂറില്‍ ഉണ്ടായ മാറ്റം ഇത് വ്യക്തമാക്കുന്നുണ്ട്.

 

1914ല്‍ തിരുവിതാംകൂറില്‍ മൊത്തം ഈഴവ വിദ്യാര്‍ഥികള്‍ 23,893 ആയിരുന്നെങ്കില്‍ 1918ല്‍ അത് 51,114 ആയി ഉയര്‍ന്നു. അതായത് നാലുവര്‍ഷം കൊണ്ട് 114 ശതമാനം വര്‍ധന. ദളിത് ജനവിഭാഗത്തിന്റെ വിദ്യാഭ്യാസരീതിയിലും ഈ മാറ്റം കാണാം. 1914 ല്‍ 2000 പുലയക്കുട്ടികള്‍ വിദ്യാഭ്യാസം ചെയ്തിരുന്ന സ്ഥാനത്ത് 1918ല്‍ 17,753 ആയി വര്‍ധിച്ചു. നാലുവര്‍ഷം കൊണ്ട് 850 ശതമാനത്തിന്റെ വളര്‍ച്ച. ഇത് കാണിക്കുന്നത് പൊതുവിദ്യാഭ്യാസപുരോഗതിക്ക് അടിത്തറയിട്ടത് മിഷണറിമാരും അതിനെ വളര്‍ത്തി വികസിപ്പിച്ചത് സാമൂഹ്യപരിഷ്കരണ പ്രസ്ഥാനങ്ങളുമാണെന്നാണ്. തുടര്‍ന്ന് ഈ പ്രവര്‍ത്തനം മുന്നോട്ടുകൊണ്ടുപോയത് ഇടതുപക്ഷ സര്‍ക്കാരുകളാണ്. 1951ല്‍ 47 ശതമാനമായിരുന്നു കേരളത്തിലെ സാക്ഷരതാനിരക്ക്. ഇക്കാര്യത്തില്‍ വന്‍കുതിച്ചുകയറ്റമുണ്ടായത് 1951 നും 1971 നും ഇടയിലുള്ള കാലത്തായിരുന്നു. സാക്ഷരതാനിരക്ക് ഈ കാലയളവില്‍ 70 ശതമാനത്തോളം എത്തി. സ്ത്രീവിദ്യാഭ്യാസത്തിലും ഈ വര്‍ധന കാണാം. 1951ല്‍ 36.43 ശതമാനമായിരുന്ന സ്ത്രീവിദ്യാഭ്യാസ നിരക്ക് 1971 ആകുമ്പോഴേക്കും 62.53 ആയി വര്‍ധിച്ചു. ഇങ്ങനെയുള്ള വളര്‍ച്ചനിരക്ക് കൈവരിക്കുന്നതിന് ഇടയാക്കിയത് 1957ലെ സര്‍ക്കാര്‍ അടിത്തറയിട്ട വിദ്യാഭ്യാസപരിഷ്കാരങ്ങളാണ്.

 

ആവശ്യമുള്ള ഇടങ്ങളില്‍ സര്‍ക്കാര്‍ വിദ്യാഭ്യാസസ്ഥാപനങ്ങളും എയ്ഡഡ് വിദ്യാഭ്യാസസ്ഥാപനങ്ങളും ആരംഭിക്കുന്നതിനുള്ള നടപടികള്‍ ആ സര്‍ക്കാര്‍ സ്വീകരിച്ചു. കുട്ടികള്‍ക്ക് ഉച്ചക്കഞ്ഞി ഉള്‍പ്പെടെയുള്ള സൗകര്യങ്ങള്‍ ഏര്‍പ്പെടുത്തി. വിദ്യാഭ്യാസം സൗജന്യമാക്കുന്നതിനുള്ള പ്രവര്‍ത്തനങ്ങളും ഈ കാലയളവില്‍ നടന്നു. അധ്യാപകര്‍ക്ക് ശമ്പള സ്കെയില്‍ നടപ്പാക്കി പൊതുവിദ്യാഭ്യാസത്തെ ആകര്‍ഷകമാക്കുന്നതിനുള്ള നടപടികളും സമാന്തരമായി നടന്നു. 1967ലെ സര്‍ക്കാരിന്റെ കാലത്ത് മുന്നോട്ടുവച്ച ഭൂപരിഷ്കരണനടപടികളുടെ തുടര്‍ച്ചയും ഈ ദിശയിലുള്ള മുന്നേറ്റത്തിന് സഹായകമായി. സേവനതല്‍പ്പരരായ മിഷണറിമാരുടെയും നവോത്ഥാനപ്രസ്ഥാനങ്ങളുടെയും കമ്യൂണിസ്റ്റ് പ്രസ്ഥാനത്തിന്റെയും ഇടപെടലിലൂടെ ശക്തിപ്പെട്ട് വികസിച്ച പൊതുവിദ്യാഭ്യാസഘടനയെ തകര്‍ക്കുന്നതിനുള്ള നടപടികളാണ് വലതുപക്ഷശക്തികള്‍ സ്വീകരിച്ചത്. 1982 മുതല്‍ 1987 വരെ കേരളം ഭരിച്ച യുഡിഎഫ് സര്‍ക്കാര്‍ പൊതുവിദ്യാഭ്യാസത്തെ തകര്‍ത്ത് പണമുള്ളവന് വിദ്യാഭ്യാസം നല്‍കുന്ന തരത്തില്‍ അണ്‍എയ്ഡഡ് വിദ്യാഭ്യാസമേഖലയെ പരിപോഷിപ്പിക്കുക എന്ന നയം മുന്നോട്ടുവച്ചു. ഇതിനെതിരെയുള്ള ശക്തമായ ചെറുത്തുനില്‍പ്പ് ഇവിടെ ഉയര്‍ന്നുവന്നു. പിന്നീട് അധികാരത്തില്‍ വന്ന എല്‍ഡിഎഫ് സര്‍ക്കാര്‍ ഈ നയങ്ങള്‍ തിരുത്തി.

 

1996ല്‍ അധികാരത്തിലെത്തിയ എല്‍ഡിഎഫ് സര്‍ക്കാരാകട്ടെ പൊതുവിദ്യാഭ്യാസത്തെ കൂടുതല്‍ കരുത്തോടെ മുന്നോട്ടുനയിക്കുന്നതിനുള്ള നടപടികള്‍ സ്വീകരിച്ചു. സര്‍ക്കാര്‍ വിദ്യാലയങ്ങള്‍ക്ക് മുന്‍തൂക്കം നല്‍കിയും എയ്ഡഡ് വിദ്യാഭ്യാസസ്ഥാപനങ്ങളെ പരിഗണിച്ചും പ്ലസ്ടു അനുവദിച്ച സര്‍ക്കാരിന്റെ നയം ഇക്കാര്യത്തിലുള്ള പ്രതിബദ്ധത വ്യക്തമാക്കുന്നതാണ്. 2001 മുതല്‍ 2006 വരെയുള്ള കാലഘട്ടത്തില്‍ പൊതുവിദ്യാഭ്യാസത്തെ തകര്‍ക്കുക എന്നത് യുഡിഎഫിന്റെ അജന്‍ഡയായിരുന്നു. കേരളത്തിലെ വിദ്യാലയങ്ങള്‍ അണ്‍ -ഇക്കണോമിക് ആണ് എന്ന് പ്രഖ്യാപിച്ച് അവ അടച്ചുപൂട്ടാനുള്ള പദ്ധതികള്‍ക്ക് ഈ കാലയളവില്‍ അവര്‍ നേതൃത്വം നല്‍കി. എസ്എസ്എല്‍സി പരീക്ഷയും എന്‍ട്രന്‍സ് പരീക്ഷയുമടക്കം അട്ടിമറിക്കപ്പെട്ടു. എട്ടാം ക്ലാസുവരെ സ്വകാര്യപഠനം അനുവദിച്ചും പൊതുവിദ്യാഭ്യാസമേഖലയെ തകര്‍ക്കാന്‍ ശ്രമിച്ചു. 322 അണ്‍എയ്ഡഡ് ഹയര്‍ സെക്കന്‍ഡറി സ്കൂളുകള്‍ക്ക് അംഗീകാരം നല്‍കി. ഇന്ത്യന്‍ വിദ്യാഭ്യാസത്തെ ആഗോളകുത്തകകള്‍ക്ക് കാഴ്ചവയ്ക്കാനുള്ള പദ്ധതി തയ്യാറാക്കുന്നതിന് ആഗോള വിദ്യാഭ്യാസസംഗമം കൊണ്ടുവന്നു. സാക്ഷരത പോലുള്ള ബഹുജനവിദ്യാഭ്യാസ പ്രവര്‍ത്തനങ്ങള്‍ നടപ്പാക്കുന്ന കാര്യത്തില്‍ ഒരു ശുഷ്കാന്തിയും കാണിച്ചില്ല. ഈ നയങ്ങള്‍ തിരുത്തി പൊതുവിദ്യാഭ്യാസമേഖലയെ ശക്തിപ്പെടുത്തുന്ന നയം എല്‍ഡിഎഫ് സ്വീകരിച്ചു. എല്ലാ പഞ്ചായത്തിലും ഹൈസ്കൂളുകള്‍ ഉറപ്പാക്കി. സര്‍ക്കാര്‍ മേഖലയില്‍ 16 വൊക്കേഷണല്‍ ഹയര്‍സെക്കന്‍ഡറി സ്കൂളുകള്‍ പുതുതായി തുടങ്ങി. പഠനത്തില്‍ പിന്നോക്കംനില്‍ക്കുന്ന 104 സ്കൂളുകളുടെ പഠനനിലവാരം ഉയര്‍ത്തുന്ന പദ്ധതി നടപ്പാക്കി. അംഗീകാരം ഇല്ലാത്ത വിദ്യാലയങ്ങളില്‍ പഠിച്ചിരുന്ന വിദ്യാര്‍ഥികളെ പൊതുസംവിധാനത്തിന്റെകീഴില്‍ കൊണ്ടുവന്ന് പഠനം ഉറപ്പുവരുത്തുന്ന നിലപാട് സ്വീകരിച്ചു.

 

പഠനസൗകര്യം ഇല്ലാത്ത പിന്നോക്കജില്ലകളില്‍ പ്ലസ്ടുവിന് കൂടുതല്‍ സൗകര്യം ഏര്‍പ്പെടുത്തി. എല്ലാവര്‍ക്കും വിദ്യാഭ്യാസം പ്രാപ്യമായതോടെ ജനങ്ങളാകെ വിദ്യാഭ്യാസത്തിന് വലിയ പ്രാധാന്യം കൊടുക്കുന്ന നിലയുണ്ടായി. അതുകൊണ്ട് തന്നെ മികച്ച വിദ്യാഭ്യാസം എന്നത് സാധാരണ കേരളീയന്റെ പ്രധാനപ്പെട്ട ലക്ഷ്യമായി ഇന്ന് മാറിയിട്ടുണ്ട്. ആഗോളവല്‍ക്കരണനയം പൊതുവിദ്യാഭ്യാസത്തെ തകര്‍ക്കുന്നതാണ്. അടിസ്ഥാന ജനവിഭാഗത്തിന്റെ താല്‍പ്പര്യം സംരക്ഷിക്കുന്ന ഇടതുപക്ഷപ്രസ്ഥാനങ്ങള്‍ പൊതുവിദ്യാഭ്യാസം സംരക്ഷിക്കുക എന്നതിന് കൂടുതല്‍ പ്രാധാന്യം നല്‍കി. നിലവാരം ഉയര്‍ത്താനുള്ള ഫലപ്രദമായ ഇടപെടലുമുണ്ടായി. ജനങ്ങള്‍ ഇതുമായി നല്ല നിലയില്‍ സഹകരിച്ചു. പിടിഎ കമ്മിറ്റികളുടെയും അധികാരവികേന്ദ്രീകരണപ്രക്രിയയോടെ പ്രാദേശിക സര്‍ക്കാരായി വളര്‍ന്ന തദ്ദേശസ്വയംഭരണ സ്ഥാപനങ്ങളുടേയും ഇടപെടല്‍ ഈ രംഗത്ത് വമ്പിച്ച മുന്നേറ്റം ഉണ്ടാക്കുന്നതിന് സഹായിച്ചു. യുഡിഎഫിന്റെ കാലത്ത് എസ്എസ്എല്‍സി വിജയശതമാനം 42.89 ആയിരുന്നെങ്കില്‍ എല്‍ഡിഎഫിന്റെ കാലത്ത് 90.72 ആയി ഉയര്‍ന്നത് ഈ മാറ്റത്തിന്റെകൂടി ഫലമാണ്.

 

പൊതുവിദ്യാഭ്യാസരംഗത്ത് ഇപ്പോള്‍ മാതൃകാപരമായ സിലബസും പഠനരീതികളും നിലവിലുണ്ട്. മാത്രമല്ല പൊതുവിദ്യാഭ്യാസമേഖലയില്‍ വിശിഷ്യാ സര്‍ക്കാര്‍ സ്കൂളുകളില്‍ ഏറ്റവും മികച്ചതും പരിചയസമ്പന്നരുമായ അധ്യാപകരാണ് പ്രവര്‍ത്തിക്കുന്നത്. അതുകൊണ്ടുതന്നെ മികച്ച അക്കാദമിക് അന്തരീക്ഷം പുലര്‍ത്താന്‍പറ്റുന്ന സ്ഥിതി നിലവിലുണ്ട്. ഈ മേഖലയില്‍ ന്യൂനത അനുഭവപ്പെടുന്നത് പ്രധാനമായും ഭൗതികപശ്ചാത്തലത്തിലാണ്. ഭൗതികപശ്ചാത്തലം മെച്ചപ്പെട്ടാല്‍ പഠനനിലവാരവും ഉയരും. വിദ്യാര്‍ഥികളുടെ വലിയ തോതിലുള്ള തള്ളിക്കയറ്റം ഈ മേഖലയില്‍ ഉണ്ടാകും. കഴിഞ്ഞ സര്‍ക്കാര്‍ നടപ്പാക്കിയ ചില ഇടപെടലുകള്‍ ഇക്കാര്യം വ്യക്തമാക്കുന്നു. സര്‍ക്കാരും തദ്ദേശസ്വയംഭരണ സ്ഥാപനങ്ങളും ഇടപെട്ട് കോഴിക്കോട് ആഴ്ചവട്ടം ഗവ. എല്‍പി സ്കൂളില്‍ കൂടുതല്‍ ഭൗതിക പശ്ചാത്തലമുണ്ടാക്കിയപ്പോള്‍ അത്ഭുതകരമായ ഫലമാണ് ഉണ്ടായത്-അതുപോലെ നിരവധി ഉദാഹരണങ്ങള്‍ ചൂണ്ടിക്കാട്ടാനാകും. ഇത് കാണിക്കുന്നത് പൊതുവിദ്യാഭ്യാസത്തിന്റെ നിലവാരം ഉയര്‍ത്തിയെടുക്കുന്നതിന് കൂടുതല്‍ സര്‍ക്കാര്‍ പങ്കാളിത്തവും ജനപങ്കാളിത്തവും ഉണ്ടാക്കുകയാണ് വേണ്ടത് എന്നാണ്. അതിനുപകരം അത്തരം സ്ഥാപനങ്ങള്‍ക്ക് നിലവാരം കുറവാണെന്ന് സ്ഥാപിച്ച് പണം കൊടുത്ത് പഠിക്കേണ്ട സ്വാശ്രയ വിദ്യാഭ്യാസസ്ഥാപനങ്ങള്‍ ആരംഭിച്ചാല്‍ പണം ഉള്ളവര്‍ക്ക് അതിലൂടെ അതിജീവിക്കാന്‍ കഴിഞ്ഞേക്കാം. എന്നാല്‍ , പാവപ്പെട്ടവന് പഠനം മരീചികയായിത്തീരും. കേരളത്തില്‍ ജോലിയില്‍ പ്രവേശിച്ച അധ്യാപകര്‍തന്നെ പുറത്തുനില്‍ക്കുന്ന സാഹചര്യവും വിദ്യാര്‍ഥികളുടെ എണ്ണക്കുറവും കണക്കിലെടുത്താല്‍ പുതിയ വിദ്യാലയങ്ങള്‍ അനിവാര്യമാണോ എന്ന കാര്യം പരിശോധിക്കുകയാണ് ആദ്യം ചെയ്യേണ്ടത്. ഇന്നത്തെ സാഹചര്യത്തില്‍ പുതിയവയുടെ ആവശ്യം ഉണ്ട് എന്ന് തോന്നുന്നില്ല. പകരം നിലവിലുള്ള വിദ്യാലയങ്ങളുടെ ഭൗതികപശ്ചാത്തലം മെച്ചപ്പെടുത്തി നിലവാരം ഉയര്‍ത്തുന്നതിനുള്ള ഇടപെടലാണ് ഉണ്ടാകേണ്ടത്. എന്നാല്‍ , അണ്‍ -എയ്ഡഡ് വിദ്യാഭ്യാസസ്ഥാപനങ്ങള്‍ക്ക് അംഗീകാരം നല്‍കി വിദ്യാഭ്യാസ കുത്തകകളെ ഈ രംഗത്ത് കൊണ്ടുവന്ന് പൊതുവിദ്യാഭ്യാസം തകര്‍ക്കുന്നതിനുള്ള നീക്കം തലവേദനവന്നാല്‍ തല വെട്ടിക്കളയുന്ന ശൈലിയാണ്. യുഡിഎഫിന്റെ ഈ ജനവിരുദ്ധനയത്തിനെതിരായാണ് പുരോഗമനവാദികള്‍ ഇപ്പോള്‍ നിലപാടെടുക്കുന്നത്.

 

1957ല്‍ത്തന്നെ ഇത്തരത്തിലുള്ള നയപരമായ ഏറ്റുമുട്ടല്‍ ആരംഭിച്ചിരുന്നുവെന്നതാണ് വസ്തുത. എല്ലാ ജാതിയിലും മതത്തിലുംപെട്ട പാവപ്പെട്ടവന്റെ പഠനാവകാശം സംരക്ഷിക്കാനുള്ള നിലപാട് ഇടതുപക്ഷം സ്വീകരിച്ചു. എന്നാല്‍ , ഇത്തരത്തിലുള്ള എല്ലാ വിഭാഗത്തിലെയും സമ്പന്നര്‍ക്ക് കൂടുതല്‍ സൗകര്യം ചെയ്തു കൊടുക്കാനാണ് യുഡിഎഫ് പരിശ്രമിച്ചത്. ഒരുകാലത്ത് ജാതീയമായ വിവേചനത്തിന്റെ അടിസ്ഥാനത്തിലാണ് വിദ്യാഭ്യാസത്തിന്റെ ഗുണങ്ങള്‍ ലഭിച്ചതെങ്കില്‍ ഇപ്പോള്‍ പണത്തിന്റെ അടിസ്ഥാനത്തിലുള്ള വിവേചനത്തിലേക്ക് നമ്മുടെ വിദ്യാഭ്യാസമേഖലയെ കൊണ്ടുപോകാനുള്ള ശ്രമമാണ് നടക്കുന്നത്. ഇതിനെതിരായി കേരളത്തെ സ്നേഹിക്കുന്ന മുഴുവന്‍ ജനങ്ങളും പ്രസ്ഥാനങ്ങളും അണിനിരക്കേണ്ടതുണ്ട്. പൊതുവിദ്യാഭ്യാസത്തെ തകര്‍ക്കാനുള്ള ഏത് നീക്കത്തെയും എതിര്‍ക്കുന്നതിനുള്ള പോരാട്ടം കേരളത്തിന്റെ മുഴുവന്‍ നേട്ടങ്ങളും സംരക്ഷിക്കാനുള്ള സമരമായി കാണേണ്ടതുണ്ട്. ഈ പോരാട്ടം വിദ്യാഭ്യാസമേഖലയില്‍ പ്രവര്‍ത്തിക്കുന്നവര്‍മാത്രം ഏറ്റെടുക്കേണ്ട ഒന്നല്ല. വിദ്യാഭ്യാസത്തെ സ്നേഹിക്കുന്നവരുടെ മുഴുവന്‍ കൂട്ടായ്മയായിരിക്കണം അത്.

"Do not judge me by my actions;

Do not judge me from man's point of view"

"Judge me from God's - by the hidden purpose behind my actions.
Regi George wishing you Good Luck. Thanks

2011/6/16 Regi P George <regip...@gmail.com>

[Shiju Paul]

>> സ്കൂൾ ടാക്സ് ഏർപ്പെടുത്തുന്നതിനെപറ്റി എന്താണഭിപ്രായം?

തീരെ മോശം അഭിപ്രായമാണ്‌. അത് ഹൈവെയ്ക്ക് ടോള്‍ പിരിക്കുന്നതു പോലെയാണ്‌. ഇതൊക്കെ ഗവണ്‍മെന്റിന്റെ പ്രാഥമികമായ ചുമതലയാണ്‌. യു. പി.എ. സര്‍കാര്‍ പറയുന്നത് ജി. ഡി. പി. യുടെ 6% വിദ്യാഭ്യാസത്തിനായി ചെലവഴിക്കാന്‍ അവര് ‍പ്രതിജ്ഞാബദ്ധരാണെന്നാണ്‌. ആ പറഞ്ഞതിന്റെ പകുതിയെങ്കിലും ചെലവഴിച്ചാല്‍ പൊതുവിദ്യാഭ്യാസത്തിന്‌ ഫണ്ടിന്‌ ഒരു കുറവും ഉണ്ടാകില്ല.

ഗവണ്‍മെന്റിന്റെ കൈയില്‍ ഒരു കാര്യത്തിനും പണമില്ലെന്നാണ്‌ പല്ലവി. അതേസമയം 6 കൊല്ലം കൊണ്ട് കോര്‍പ്പറേറ്റുകള്‍ക്ക് കസ്റ്റംസ്‌ ഡ്യൂട്ടിയില്‍ 10 ലക്ഷം കോടി രൂപ (2-G യുടെ 5-1/2 ഇരട്ടി) യും എക്സൈസ് ഡ്യൂട്ടിയില്‍ 7,50,000 കോടി രൂപയും ആദായ നികുതിയില്‍ 3,75,000 കോടി രൂപയും ആണ്‌ ഇളവു കൊടുത്തത്. ടോട്ടല്‍ 2-Gയുടെ 12 ഇരട്ടി! വിദ്യാഭ്യാസത്തിന്‌ ഒരു സംസ്ഥാനത്തിന്‌ ശരാശരി 5,000 കോടി രൂപ വീതം കൊടുക്കാന്‍ ഇതിന്റെ 16-ല്‍ ഒന്നു മതി.

 

Regards,

Shiju

2011/6/16 Regi P George <regip...@gmail.com>

സ്കൂൾ ടാക്സ് ഏർപ്പെടുത്തുന്നതിനെപറ്റി എന്താണഭിപ്രായം?

[Regi P George]

കലക്‌ടര്‍ മകളെ ചേര്‍ത്തത്‌ സര്‍ക്കാര്‍ സ്‌കൂളില്‍; ഉച്ചക്കഞ്ഞിയും ഉറപ്പാക്കി

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പാലക്കാട്‌: ആവശ്യത്തിനു കുട്ടികളില്ലാത്ത കേരളത്തിലെ സര്‍ക്കാര്‍ സ്‌കൂളുകളുടെ ദുരവസ്‌ഥയില്‍ പരിതപിക്കുകയും സ്വന്തം മക്കളെ കേന്ദ്രസിലബസുള്ള 'നക്ഷത്ര'സ്‌കൂളുകളില്‍ അയയ്‌ക്കുകയും ചെയ്യുന്നവര്‍ക്കു കണ്ടുപഠിക്കാന്‍ തമിഴ്‌നാട്ടില്‍ ഒരു മാതൃകാ കലക്‌ടര്‍. സ്വന്തം കുട്ടിയെ സര്‍ക്കാര്‍ സ്‌കൂളില്‍ ചേര്‍ക്കുക മാത്രമല്ല അവിടെനിന്നുതന്നെ സൗജന്യഭക്ഷണവും സൗജന്യ യൂണിഫോമും ഉറപ്പാക്കിയാണ്‌ ഈറോഡ്‌ ജില്ലാ കലക്‌ടര്‍ ആനന്ദകുമാര്‍ വ്യത്യസ്‌തനാകുന്നത്‌. ഗവ: സ്‌കൂള്‍ അധ്യാപകര്‍പോലും സ്വന്തം കുട്ടിയെ സര്‍ക്കാര്‍ വിദ്യാലയത്തിന്റെ പടിചവിട്ടിക്കാത്ത കേരളത്തിന്‌ ഒരുപക്ഷേ ഉള്‍ക്കൊള്ളാന്‍ കഴിയാത്ത മാതൃക! ധര്‍മപുരി കലക്‌ടറായിരുന്ന ആനന്ദകുമാര്‍ ദിവസങ്ങള്‍ക്കുമുമ്പാണ്‌ ഈറോഡ്‌ കലക്‌ടറായി സ്‌ഥലംമാറിയെത്തിയത്‌. ധര്‍മപുരി മെട്രിക്‌ സ്‌കൂളില്‍ ഒന്നാംക്ലാസ്‌ പഠനം പൂര്‍ത്തിയാക്കിയ മകള്‍ ഗോപികയെ രണ്ടാംക്ലാസില്‍ ചേര്‍ക്കാന്‍ കലക്‌ടര്‍ എത്തിയതു കുമലന്‍കുട്ടൈയിലെ സര്‍ക്കാര്‍ എല്‍.പി. സ്‌കൂളില്‍. മകള്‍ക്കൊപ്പം അപ്രതീക്ഷിതമായി സ്‌കൂളിലേക്കു കടന്നുവന്ന കലക്‌ടറെ കണ്ട്‌ സ്‌കൂള്‍ അധികൃതര്‍ അമ്പരന്നു. സ്‌കൂള്‍ പ്രിന്‍സിപ്പല്‍ റാണി, കലക്‌ടറെ എതിരേറ്റ്‌ ഇരിക്കാന്‍ സ്വന്തം കസേര നല്‍കിയെങ്കിലും കലക്‌ടര്‍ അതു നിരസിച്ച്‌ സ്‌കൂള്‍ പ്രവേശനനടപടികള്‍ പൂര്‍ത്തിയാക്കി. കുട്ടിക്കു സൗജന്യ യൂണിഫോം ലഭിക്കില്ലേയെന്നു തിരക്കിയ കലക്‌ടറോട്‌ സ്‌കൂളിലെ സൗജന്യ ഉച്ചഭക്ഷണം കഴിക്കുന്നവര്‍ക്കേ യൂണിഫോം നല്‍കാന്‍ വ്യവസ്‌ഥയുള്ളുവെന്ന്‌ അധികൃതര്‍ അറിയിച്ചു. രണ്ടാമതൊന്ന്‌ ആലോചിക്കാതെ തന്റെ കുഞ്ഞിനും മറ്റു കുട്ടികള്‍ക്കൊപ്പം ഉച്ചഭക്ഷണവും യൂണിഫോമും നല്‍കണമെന്ന്‌ ആവശ്യപ്പെട്ടാണു കലക്‌ടര്‍ മടങ്ങിയത്‌. ഡോ. ശ്രീവിദ്യയാണ്‌ ഗോപികയുടെ അമ്മ. കേരളത്തിലെ സര്‍ക്കാര്‍ സ്‌കൂളുകളില്‍ മാത്രം 39,000 കുട്ടികളുടെ കുറവാണ്‌ ആറാം പ്രവൃത്തിദിവസത്തെ കണക്കെടുപ്പില്‍ കണ്ടെത്തിയത്‌. ഇതിനിടെയാണു പുതുതായി സി.ബി.എസ്‌.ഇ, ഐ.സി.എസ്‌.ഇ. സ്‌കൂളുകള്‍ക്ക്‌ വാരിക്കോരി എന്‍.ഒ.സി. നല്‍കാനുള്ള സര്‍ക്കാര്‍ തീരുമാനം. -എന്‍. രമേഷ്‌

[vivekstanley]

Currently, there are enough schools to satisfy Kerala's needs. So lets stop having more. - Such a stand gives undue advantage to existing schools. It guaranties existing schools profit even without performing well. It denies opportunity for new managements who could have run schools better. Unfair!

 

On the other hand, if we have too many schools, only the best will have takers, and the rest will die. 

In such an environment, the effort that government will have to put in to ensure quality will be minimum; as competition will force schools to either perform or shut down. Good for Children.

Every year there are between 4,20,000 and 4,50,000 children bla bla bla...

:

This is the age of globalization. Think beyond Kerala. 

Why should we prevent Kerala from trying to become an educational hub? More, good quality, educational institutions can attract students from outside the state, and the country. That will give our state, many direct & indirect advantages. No NOC for new schools shuts down Kerala's such opportunities.

Regi, we already have something called educational cess. 

Off topics:

...അത് ഹൈവെയ്ക്ക് ടോള്‍ പിരിക്കുന്നതു പോലെയാണ്‌... 

:

Are vehicle owners so poor that they need roads funded by tax money? Shiju, government's resources are limited. The privileged should spend more for luxuries like better roads; so that govt can direct more resources to the weaker; for projects like 2 rupee rice.

ആദായ നികുതിയില്‍ 3,75,000 കോടി രൂപയും ആണ്‌ ഇളവു കൊടുത്തത്. 

:

Are you aware of the tax exemptions that China gave as part of their Economic Stimulus package? India & China are competing for more investments. If we tax more, we loose more; to China. #FDI

Corporates are not enemies. At least respect the jobs they create; and the superior service that they provide. 

There may be corrupt people in private sector but, public sector is more lazier & corrupt.

#2G

:

The money that telecom companies gave to govt is passed on to us. Just check out how expensive 3G is. 

If 2G was given away at low rates, that explains why our calls costs as low as half paisa per second.

[Kenney Jacob]

2011/6/16 Shiju Paul <shij...@gmail.com>

Dear friends,

 

Response to Mr. Kenny's mail:

 

>> I am yet to figure out why we are objecting it. The arguments that the state schools have enough seats is not valid.

>> Again I did not understand how private schools take away anyones right to a "good enough" education at a government school.

 

When there are more schools than needed none would perform satisfactorily. It is true for every institution or enterprize. Every year there are between 4,20,000 and 4,50,000 children to join the first standard in our state. That means for every 2.5x2.5 sq.km area there will be around 70 students, which is just right for 2 divisions. When you have 3 or 4 schools in that area, they get divided into all of these. The 'unaccountable' schools may survive with less number of students because they can hike the fees to their convenience and give meagre salary to their staff.

Sounds like a conspiracy theory to me. 

 

When people are stuck to believe that these kind of schools may give the child better education they will force themselves to carry the burden.

Are you still trying to say that govt schools are better than private schools ? If yes we can only agree to disagree. Id rather be a burdened parent than take a risk with my child. 

 

The public schools suffer because of this and they become "uneconomical", as per the jargon of the Central government. That would stop any chance of their improving standards and would lead to their closure. And this would affect the economically backward sections of the society. Because they cannot afford to pay the fee and other expenses. Those who are always thinking of themselves may not feel pained about it, but...

Even with the existence of the so called "quality education" from the government schools we are seeing a drop in the number of joiners in public schools which means they have joined some private school. Public schools are not killed by private schools, they kill themselves. Private schools compete against public schools on quality (may be perceived) even with the disadvantages of a fees and other expenses. 

 

 

Here our discussion is not the merits and demerits of public and private schools. Or the folly of the decisions of our parents. But a Government which is entrusted to look after and improve the educational conditions of the state's public schools paving way for the destruction of that. Clear?

We saw similar objections when new engineering colleges were started, I studied in a pathetic govt owned institution. My brother studied in a much much better private institution (even though he doesnt realize it) 

 

---------------

Rajesh sends a mail from his blackberry to conduct survey among teachers. You can arrange a survey for that too. But that is another issue. Don't mix it with this. This is another issue with long-term implications. When the last school with less fee is closed, the less privileged might rush to your office and house and snatch you of all your luxuries.

What does the govt schools lack to compete with the private schools ? They have well paid teachers, let them work hard to change the scenario. Let them also feel the heat of competition. Necessity is the mother of all invention.  

[JAGANADH G]

2011/6/17 Regi P George <regip...@gmail.com>

സ്കൂള്‍ ടാക്സ് ഏര്‍പ്പെടുത്തുന്നതിനെപറ്റി എന്താണഭിപ്രായം?

I think we are paying education ses or something like that. When i ever I review my phone bills there is an item called education ses which is 1% of my total bill . As far as I know such a tax is collected from us indirectly

--
**********************************
JAGANADH G
http://jaganadhg.freeflux.net/blog
ILUGCBE
http://ilugcbe.techstud.org

[Regi P George]

Currently, there are enough schools to satisfy Kerala's needs. So lets stop having more. - Such a stand gives undue advantage to existing schools. It guaranties existing schools profit even without performing well. It denies opportunity for new managements who could have run schools better. Unfair!

 

On the other hand, if we have too many schools, only the best will have takers, and the rest will die. 

In such an environment, the effort that government will have to put in to ensure quality will be minimum; as competition will force schools to either perform or shut down. Good for Children.

കേരളത്തിന്റെ പൊതുവിദ്യാഭ്യാസസമ്പ്രദായത്തെകുറിച്ച് അറിവില്ലാത്തതിനാൽ ആണ് ഇങ്ങനെ എഴുതേണ്ടി വരുന്നത്! ഇവിടെ 93% ശതമാനം സ്കൂളുകളും സർക്കാർ ശമ്പളം പറ്റുന്ന അദ്ധ്യാപകരുള്ളതാണ്! ഇതിനു മുമ്പ് കേരളത്തിൽ അധികാരത്തിൽ വന്ന യൂഡീഎഫ് സർക്കാർ ആണ് പൊതുവിദ്യാഭ്യാസ സമ്പ്രദായത്തെ അട്ടിമറിക്കുന്ന രീതിയിലേക്ക് കാര്യങ്ങൾ എത്തിച്ചത്! അന്ന് ആന്റണിയുടെ നേതൃത്വത്തിൽ അധികാരത്തിൽ വന്ന സമ്പൂർണ്ണ ലിബറലൈസേഷനെ പിന്തുണയ്ക്കുന്ന സർക്കാർ പൊതുവിദ്യാലയങ്ങളൾ അടച്ചുപൂട്ടുവാനും അദ്ധ്യാപകരെ തൊഴിൽ രഹിതരാക്കുവാനും നടപടി എടുത്തു അതിന്റെ പിന്തുടർച്ചയായി ആണ് ഇന്ന് കാശുവാങ്ങി വിദ്യാർഥികളെ പഠിപ്പിക്കുന്ന പുതിയ സ്കൂളുകൾ കേരളത്തിൽ അനുവദിക്കുവാൻ യൂഡീഎഫ് സർക്കാർ ഒരുങ്ങുന്നത്! സർക്കാരിന്റെ നിയന്ത്രണത്തിലുള്ള പൊതുവിദ്യാഭ്യാസ സമ്പ്രദായമാണ് സാമൂഹികമായി പിന്നോക്കം നില്ക്കുന്ന ദളിത് ആദിവാസി കളെ ഒക്കെ സാക്ഷരരാക്കിയത്! ആ വിദ്യാലയങ്ങൾ ഇല്ലാതായി അതിന്റെ സ്ഥാനത്ത് പുതിയ കാശുവാങ്ങി പഠിപ്പിക്കുന്ന സ്കൂളൂകൾ വരുന്നത് കേരളത്തെ തകർക്കും!

അതുമാത്രമല്ല ഇന്ന് കേരളത്തിലെ പബ്ലിക് സ്കൂളൂകൾ കൂടൂതൽ നവീകരിക്കപ്പെടുകയും, പഠനനിലവാരം ഉയരുകയുമാണ് ചെയ്തുകൊണ്ടിരിക്കുന്നത്! ഇങ്ങനെയുള്ള ഒരു സാഹചര്യത്തിൽ പൊതുവിദ്യാഭ്യാസത്തെ തകർക്കുന്ന രീതിയിൽ പുതിയ സ്കൂളൂകൾ കാശുവാങ്ങി പഠിപ്പിക്കുവാൻ ഒരുങ്ങുന്നത് ആപല്ക്കരമാണ്!

This is the age of globalization. Think beyond Kerala. 

Why should we prevent Kerala from trying to become an educational hub? More, good quality, educational institutions can attract students from outside the state, and the country. That will give our state, many direct & indirect advantages. No NOC for new schools shuts down Kerala's such opportunities.

സ്വകാര്യവത്കരണം കേരളത്തിലെ എത്ര സ്കൂളുകളെയാണ് പഠന നിലവാരത്തിന്റെ കാര്യത്തിൽ മെച്ചപ്പെടുത്തിയത്? എന്തെങ്കിലും കണക്കുകൾ ഉണ്ടോ?

എഡുജുക്കേഷണൽ ഹബ് എന്നൊക്കെ പറഞ്ഞാൽ എന്താണ്? ലോകത്ത് എവിടെ എങ്കിലും ഇങ്ങനെ ഒരു സമ്പ്രദായം ഉണ്ടോ?

ഗ്ലോബലൈസേഷന്റെ തലതൊട്ടപ്പന്മാരായ അമേരിക്കപോലും പബ്ലിക്ക് സ്കൂളുകൾ ആണ് പഠിക്കുവാൻ കുട്ടികൾക്ക് ഒരുക്കിയിരിക്കുന്നത്! ഒരു സ്കൂൾ ഡിസ്ട്രിക്ടിൽ കഷ്ടിച്ച് ഒരു സ്വകാര്യ സ്കൂളാണ് കാണുവാൻ കഴിയുക!

പ്രാഥമിക വിദ്യാഭ്യാസം എങ്ങനെയാണ് ഒരു കച്ചവടമാക്കിമാറ്റുവാൻ കഴിയുന്നത്? കുട്ടികൾ കഴിയാവുന്നതും മാതാപിതാക്കളോടോപ്പം ജീവിച്ച് പഠിക്കുക എന്നതാണ് അമേരിക്ക അടക്കം ലോകത്തെ ഒട്ടുമുക്കാലും മുതലാളീത്ത രാജ്യങ്ങളിലും പതിവ്! എഡ്യുക്കേഷണൽ ഹബ് സൃഷ്ടിച്ച് (ഫ്രീസോൺ പോലെ അല്ലെ?) അവിടെ വിദ്യാഭ്യാസ ഫാക്ടറികൾ തുറക്കുക എന്നു പറയുന്നതുതന്നെ ഞെട്ടിക്കുന്നതാണ്!

Are vehicle owners so poor that they need roads funded by tax money? Shiju, government's resources are limited. The privileged

 should spend more for luxuries like better roads; so that govt can direct more resources to the weaker; for projects like 2 rupee rice.

റോഡൂകൾ നിർമ്മിക്കുന്നതുതന്നെ പബ്ലീക് ട്രാൻസ്പോർട്ടിനും, സാധനങ്ങൾ ഒരറ്റത്തുനിന്നും മറ്റൊരറ്റത്തേക്കു എത്തിക്കുവാനുമാണ്! അതായത് റോഡുകൾ എന്നത് ഒരു സാമൂഹ്യ ആവശ്യമാണ് അത് സമൂഹത്തിന്റെ നിലനില്പിന് അനിവാര്യമാണ്! വിദേശരാജ്യങ്ങളിൽ റോഡ് ടാക്സ് ഉള്ളത് ഫ്രീവേകൾക്കും കാറുകൾ മാത്രം സഞ്ചരിക്കുന്ന റോഡൂകൾക്കുമാണ്! അതായത് സാമൂഹിക ആവശ്യങ്ങൾക്കും പൊതു ഉപയോഗത്തിനും വെളീയിൽ വരുന്ന റോഡുകൾക്കുമാത്രം ടാക്സ്! അതാണൊ ഇന്ത്യയിലെ സ്ഥിതി?

ആദായ നികുതിയില്‍ 3,75,000 കോടി രൂപയും ആണ്‌ ഇളവു കൊടുത്തത്. 

:

Are you aware of the tax exemptions that China gave as part of their Economic Stimulus package? India & China are competing for more investments. If we tax more, we loose more; to China. #FDI

Corporates are not enemies. At least respect the jobs they create; and the superior service that they provide. 

There may be corrupt people in private sector but, public sector is more lazier & corrupt.

ഭയങ്കര കോണ്ട്രാഡിക്ടീവാണ് ഇതും ഇതിന്റെ മുകളിൽ പറഞ്ഞിരിക്കുന്ന വാദവും!
ആദ്യം പറയുന്നു സർക്കാരിന്റെ കൈയ്യിൽ പണമില്ലെന്ന്!
അടുത്തിടത്ത് ടാക്സ് എക്സമ്പ്ഷനെ ന്യായികരിക്കുവാൻ ചൈനയെ കണ്ടുപഠിക്കുവാൻ പറയുന്നു!
പണമില്ലാത്ത സർക്കാർ എന്തിനാണ് ഈ കാര്യത്തിൽ ചൈനക്കു പോകേണ്ടത് സുഹൃത്തെ?

ഇന്ത്യയും ചൈനയും കോമ്പീറ്റിങ്ങ് ഫോർ മോർ ഇൻ.വെസ്റ്റ്മെന്റ് എന്നു പറഞ്ഞാൽ
ഏതൊക്കെ മേഖലയിലാണ് ഇന്ത്യ - ചൈനക്ക് ഒരു ഭീഷിണീ ആയിട്ടുള്ളത് എന്നുകൂടെ ഒന്നു വിശദീകരിക്കുമൊ?

അല്ലാ ഇന്ത്യ എന്തിനാണ് ചൈനയുമായി ഈ കാര്യത്തിൽ കോമ്പീറ്റിങ്ങിന് പോകുന്നത്?
ചൈന ലോകത്തിലെ ഏറ്റവും വലിയ രാജ്യങ്ങളിൽ ഒന്ന്!
ഇന്ത്യ ഇവിടെ ജനങ്ങൾക്കു പാർക്കുവാൻ സ്ഥലം ഇല്ലാത്തപോലെ തിങ്ങി നിറഞ്ഞ ഒരു രാജ്യം!
ഒരു 50 കൊല്ലം കൂടെ കഴിഞ്ഞാൽ ചൈനയിൽ സ്ഥലം വാങ്ങേണ്ടീ വരും ഇന്ത്യ ഇന്ത്യക്കാരനെ പാർപ്പിക്കുവാൻ!

#2G

:

The money that telecom companies gave to govt is passed on to us. Just check out how expensive 3G is. 

If 2G was given away at low rates, that explains why our calls costs as low as half paisa per second.

അങ്ങിനെയാണൊ സംഭവിച്ചത്?
എന്തിനെയാണ് നിങ്ങൾ ന്യായികരിക്കുവാൻ ശ്രമിക്കുന്നത്?
അഴിമതീയെയൊ? കൊള്ളയെയൊ?
മന്മോഹൻ സിംഗ് പോലും പറയാത്ത ന്യായമാണ്
കൊള്ളക്കും മോഷണത്തിനും എന്റെ ഇന്ത്യക്കാരൻ സുഹൃത്ത് നിരത്തിയിരിക്കുന്നത്!
കഷ്ഠം!

2ജി ലൈസൻസുകൾ മൊത്തം കിട്ടിയ രാജാ, സോണീയാ കിങ്കരന്മാർ കിട്ടിയ വിലക്ക്
വിറ്റു കാശാക്കുകയാണുണ്ടായത്!

എന്തിനാ ഇത്ര ബുദ്ധിമുട്ടുന്നത്? ഇതൊക്കെ ബീ.എസ്.എൻ എൽ കൈകാര്യം ചെയ്യുമല്ലൊ
നല്ല ബോധവും വിവരവുമുള്ള ആളുകൾ തലപ്പത്തുണ്ടെങ്കിൽ?


റെജി!

 

"Do not judge me by my actions;

Do not judge me from man's point of view"

"Judge me from God's - by the hidden purpose behind my actions.
Regi George wishing you Good Luck. Thanks

2011/6/16 vivekstanley <viveks...@gmail.com>

--

[Kenney Jacob]

This discussion will not conclude cos its a argument between policies. Some including me  advocate privatization and liberalization and some are against it. This is not a question of what is good, but its a question of what ideology you believe in. 

Kenney Jacob

2011/6/17 Regi P George <regip...@gmail.com>

Currently, there are enough schools to satisfy Kerala's needs. So lets stop having more. - Such a stand gives undue advantage to existing schools. It guaranties existing schools profit even without performing well. It denies opportunity for new managements who could have run schools better. Unfair!

[Dr.B.Ekbal]

കേന്ദ്രസർക്കാർ ഇപ്പോൾ തന്നെ ഇൻ കം ടാക്സിനോടൊപ്പം വിദ്യാഭ്യാസ ടാക്സ് ഈടാക്കുന്നുണ്ട്
ഇക്ബാൽ

2011/6/17 Regi P George <regip...@gmail.com>

Currently, there are enough schools to satisfy Kerala's needs. So lets stop having more. - Such a stand gives undue advantage to existing schools. It guaranties existing schools profit even without performing well. It denies opportunity for new managements who could have run schools better. Unfair!

[vivekstanley]

Some of us believe in free markets. Others are for regulation.

I am 100% for free markets because I am convinced by its merits. Look at aviation, telecom,.... competition has made the ordinary feel like kings. 

Everything controlled by government ideology sounds pleasing, but is Utopian.

All I can remember from India's pre liberalization/privatization/globalization era was a DOT where we had to wait for ages to get a phone connection, and an Air India that was looting travelers with exorbitant fares. With liberalization, we have more companies, more job opportunities, cheaper services, better quality and rapid innovation. Of course, that made the less competent BSNLs and AirIndias suffer, but we can't do anything other than to let those white elephants die.

With more Private schools, I expect a similar scenario in the education sector too. Of course, the share of public sector schools will tumble; but students/parents will be happier; for the options they then have. 

At that time, if cost of education remains high -- which is less likely -- then government should think of schemes like scholarships for the poor. 

[sreejith g.s]

2011/6/17 vivekstanley <viveks...@gmail.com>

This is not true. Considering that even pre-schools charge a lot of money in Bangalore. Costs around 1 Lakh on an average from what I heard from friends. Such huge fees doesn't make any sense and since there is no regulation from the government they are exploiting parents. Most parents don't have much option other than paying huge fees. One of the reason for the huge cost is a lack of good public education system in Banglaore . In Kerala even if there are issues with the public education system there is an option. Here simply it doesn't exist or pathetic even if it is available.

Kerala government schools despite all their limitations are much better compared to what is there in states like Karnataka
Even for courses like BA/BCOM the fees they charge is very high. Some one from the poor or lower middle class back ground has to struggle a lot to find resources for his education. I have a first hand experience with a few of my students whom I taught as part of voluntary work.

Education is not considered as a commodity not even in capitalist countries. Government regulation is definitely required.

Sreejith

[Kenney Jacob]

2011/6/17 sreejith g.s <sreej...@gmail.com>

 

This is not true. Considering that even pre-schools charge a lot of money in Bangalore. Costs around 1 Lakh on an average from what I heard from friends. Such huge fees doesn't make any sense and since there is no regulation from the government they are exploiting parents. Most parents don't have much option other than paying huge fees. One of the reason for the huge cost is a lack of good public education system in Banglaore . In Kerala even if there are issues with the public education system there is an option. Here simply it doesn't exist or pathetic even if it is available.

You are partially correct, the preschools charge a high amount because there are not enough preschools to handle the volume of kids there. The solution is to start more preschools to control the demand. 

[sreejith g.s]

The school managements charge huge fees not only because there is demand. 
Ideally in a competitive world charges should be low if there is competition.  But most of the time there is a huge nexus between managements to exploit parents. They help each other and also has the support from politicians to keep a very high profit margin.

That is why there should be government intervention to set an upper limit for the fees. The production cost of bottled water is less than 5 rupees including all the packaging for a bottle and we were forced to buy it for 15 rupees because of the middle men and nexus between the manufactures and the dealers. They dont allow any one to fix a lower price.

But in the education sector we can't consider it as any other commodity and say let any one do whatever they want.
Government should regulate this sector instead of allowing every one a free hand.

Thanks,
Sreejith

2011/6/17 Kenney Jacob <kenney...@gmail.com>

[bijoy]

I believe in freedom of the people over freedom of the market. Free market does not give people its freedom.

Bijoy

2011/6/17 sreejith g.s <sreej...@gmail.com>

--

[vivekstanley]

Sreejit, will not giving NOC to newer schools help create a nexus among existing players?

I believe in freedom of the people over freedom of the market. Free market does not give people its freedom. 

:

Bijoy, what freedom does restricted markets give people? Freedom to choose?

There is no point in continuing this thread. The ideologies we believe in will never let us conclude.

[Shiju Paul]

Friends,

 

The real issue in this discussion is the reluctance of Kenny and Vivek to discuss the real issue which is the recent state Government decision to give license to all schools who have applied for license. It is not difficult to smell a conspiracy.

 

But my friends here are more interested to discuss whether the pubic schools or the private schools are better. They have a prejudice that private schools are better. I beg to differ. You cannot say it in general. There are good private schools as well as good public schools. There are bad public schools too. But there are atrocious private schools as well, worse than the bad public schools. First admit this. There are "Apple-a-day"s also among them. Those have played with the future of children. It is also notable that 8 out of 10 children still goes to government schools.

 

99% of these said CBSE school requests had come at the time of the last government. Governments cannot decide not to entertain any request. It also cannot stay away from giving license if the schools that comply with all the regulations. In that background the last gvernment had given permission to 41 schools in 5 years. It implies that the remaining are not like that. Now to overturn this hurriedly poses a lot of suspicion.

 

It certainly involves liberalization policies but first of all this is a politician-educational businessmen nexus. So again if you ask in your next reply, not reply, the little blue 'comments' to compare the standards of private and public schools I may resort to sanyas.

 

Now some comments in the latest mails, the statistics seems as conspiracy, then the conspiracy is by our census and government dept. It is based on the population by age from Kerala census data. You may cross-check it.

And Vivek had commented that "if we have too many schools, only the best will have takers, and the rest will die.

In such an environment, the effort that government will have to put in to ensure quality will be minimum; as competition will force schools to either perform or shut down. Good for Children

."

 

It is the most irresponsible comment in the whole discussion. You cannot say something about education so casually without considering the future of the students involved in it. If the "rest is allowed to die", what will be the fate of the children studying in those schools? What will happen if they were forced to discontinue? So it may not be "Good for Children" but disaster for them. Hence you cannot take a relapse and look for firefighters after the fire has started. The destruction may be much more grave than you could think of.

 

Regards,

Shiju

 

 

 

2011/6/17 sreejith g.s <sreej...@gmail.com>

[Shiju Paul]

Dear Stanley,

 

How much is the tax exemption China had given to the corporates? What is the data availble with you?

 

Regards,

Shiju

2011/6/17 vivekstanley <viveks...@gmail.com>

--

[john M]

Dear Vivak stanley,

Debate on the merit of private vs public sector is meaningless and
irrelevant.In a social economy there should be both private and public
sectors. On the one side, the economic crisis in the US and the West
since 2008 is due to over dependence on the private sector. On the
other side, we have seen impressive record about the performance of
Indian Railways recently. While Enron, the flagship of Private sector
in the US , and Sathyam in India collapsed, there are good stories of
public sector companies. So, let us stop a debate on this. In a social
economy, certain sectors should be left for the private sector, and
other sectors like health care, education, insurance , pension funds
and defense industries should be reserved for the public sector.
Profit should not be the criterion for these activities. This is the
issue.

John M.Itty

On Fri, 17 Jun 2011 16:35:09 +0530 wrote

>Some of us believe in free markets. Others are for regulation.
I am 100% for free markets because I am convinced by its merits. Look

at aviation,telecom,.... competition has made the ordinary feel like
kings.
Everything controlled by governmentideology sounds pleasing, but is

Utopian.

All I can remember from India's

preliberalization/privatization/globalizationera was a DOT where we

had to wait for ages to get a phone connection, and an Air India that

was lootingtravelers withexorbitantfares. Withliberalization, we have

more companies, more job opportunities, cheaper services, better

quality andrapidinnovation. Of course, that made the
lesscompetentBSNLs and AirIndias suffer, but we can't do anything

other than to let those white elephants die.
With more Private schools, I expect a similar scenario in the
education sector too. Of course, the share of public sector schools
will tumble; but students/parents will be happier; for the options
they then have.
At that time, if cost of education remains high -- which is less
likely -- then government should think of schemes like scholarships
for thepoor.

--
>
സൠവതനൠതൠര വിജൠഞാന ജനാധിപതൠà
´¯ സഖൠയം (സൠവവിജസ)

>
(Democratic Alliance for Knowledge Freedom)
>

പിരിഞൠഞൠപോകാനൠ†അറിയികൠകേà
´£àµ ടൠനൠന വിലാസം dakf+uns...@googlegroups.com
>
സനൠദരൠ†ശികൠകൠക :
http://groups.google.com/group/dakf?hl=en
>

Treat yourself at a restaurant, spa, resort and much more with Rediff Deal ho jaye!

[bijoy]

vivek Stanley,

If a government ready to give me rice for Rs. 2/kg, It does not restrict me. But it restrict corporates, who tries to monopolise the rice market.
If a government gives universal education for free, it does not restrict the people of India. But it restrict the education mafia. But if a government prioritize private education over public education, it restrict me because i cannot afford it.

I am for the free market which prioritize people over profit, not profit over people.

Bijoy

2011/6/17 vivekstanley <viveks...@gmail.com>

--

സ്വതന്ത്ര വിജ്ഞാന ജനാധിപത്യ സഖ്യം (സ്വവിജസ)
(Democratic Alliance for Knowledge Freedom)
പിരിഞ്ഞുപോകാന്‍ അറിയിക്കേണ്ടുന്ന വിലാസം dakf+uns...@googlegroups.com
സന്ദര്‍ശിക്കുക : http://groups.google.com/group/dakf?hl=en

[vivekstanley]

The real issue in this discussion is the reluctance of Kenny and Vivek to discuss the real issue which is the recent state Government decision to give license to all schools who have applied for license. 

:

NOC would be issued only to those schools that meet the basic requirements; including infrastructure.

See: http://me.lt/8B05Q 

How much is the tax exemption China had given to the corporates? What is the data availble with you?

:

My comment was out of the intuition I got from a Bloomberg show during the budget. It said, already some financial parameters are way too higher in India than China, and that, it will have an impact on the foreign investments that we get. Sorry, I don't remember the names of those parameters. 

On the one side, the economic crisis in the US and the West since 2008 is due to over dependence on the private sector. On the 
other side, we have seen impressive record about the performance of Indian Railways recently.

:

I am not impressed by the performance of Indian Railways. Despite being a monopoly, it for the last 2 years has been running in red. It is just another example of how companies will run if managed by government. Indian Railways is a service, but they had never made me feel like being served! Railway passengers will get cockroach free cabins and airlines like service [at phone call like fares] only if we start allowing TATAs and Kingfishers run trains. 

[vivekstanley]

Ref: http://www.thehindu.com/business/Economy/article2113303.ece

Chinese city woos Indian IT-BPO sector

After Shanghai and Shenzhen, it is the Northern Chinese city of Xuzhou that is wooing the Indian information technology and BPO industry to set up shop in the Xuzhou High-speed International Business Outsourcing District especially created for the IT-BPO sector.

“India is known for its IT and BPO industry globally …we want Indian IT and software majors to come to Xuzhou and take advantage of the infrastructure that we have created, besides financial aid that the government is offering for setting up establishments,” Vice-President of Xuzhou High-speed International Business Outsourcing District Liu Shuang told this correspondent.

Xuzhou that falls in the Jiangsu province and is in the middle between Beijing and Shanghai is known as a major transportation hub due to expressways and high-speed railway links.

“Xuzhou is the key stop of the high-speed railway connecting Beijing and Shanghai and country's East to West. Xuzhou as a transportation hub is of great advantage to every industry,” she added.

Ms. Liu, who was recently in India meeting all potential investors for the specialised IT-BPO park at Xuzhou, said: “Though Xuzhou is mainly known for the production of world-class machinery, we are now focussing on developing the IT-BPO sector. “We have already developed two world-class IT parks and are now looking at MNCs for its occupancy. Companies are being offered government subsidy, tax exemption and deduction on expenditure incurred on training of employees, besides relaxation in payment of rent. Based on the size of investment, the business characteristics and project scope, the government will also offer special benefits to the companies.”

Human resource

Ms. Liu pointed out that trained human resource, which includes over 1.6-lakh English-speaking IT talent pool from over 12 universities and 340 institutes, would help bridge the language barrier. “India's core competency lies in the BPO industry. Last year China came in second in the worldwide market share of the BPO industry, just behind India which was ranked first. China aims to expand this combined market share with a view to complementing India and together raising the market share of India and China as BPO destinations,” she said.

Stating that they were looking at establishing good trade and working relationship, she said: “While India can get some of its expertise in terms of IT-BPO practices, China can provide a good infrastructure to the business thus improving the overall efficiency of both countries. Many Indian big companies like TCS and Infosys have already made their presence felt in Shanghai, Beijing and Hangzhou…now Xuzhou can be support in many ways to these cities with the distance advantages. We are sure Indian companies would leverage these and grow exponentially,” Mr. Liu added.

[Kenney Jacob]

2011/6/17 Shiju Paul <shij...@gmail.com>

Friends,

 

The real issue in this discussion is the reluctance of Kenny and Vivek to discuss the real issue which is the recent state Government decision to give license to all schools who have applied for license. It is not difficult to smell a conspiracy.

Ohhh come on. Why do you always have to see conspiracy everywhere ? BTW we are discussing the the governments decision and our argument is that its good because it will create competition and thereby quality. Now isnt that directly related to the govt decision ?

 

But my friends here are more interested to discuss whether the pubic schools or the private schools are better. They have a prejudice that private schools are better. I beg to differ. You cannot say it in general. There are good private schools as well as good public schools. There are bad public schools too. But there are atrocious private schools as well, worse than the bad public schools. First admit this. There are "Apple-a-day"s also among them. Those have played with the future of children. It is also notable that 8 out of 10 children still goes to government schools.

Exceptions dont make examples. There are bad private schools and good public schools, I agree. I have no idea why an "Apple a day" issue is dragged into the discussion, should I drag in some govt corruption here ? 

 

 99% of these said CBSE school requests had come at the time of the last government. Governments cannot decide not to entertain any request. It also cannot stay away from giving license if the schools that comply with all the regulations. In that background the last gvernment had given permission to 41 schools in 5 years. It implies that the remaining are not like that. Now to overturn this hurriedly poses a lot of suspicion.

 

It certainly involves liberalization policies but first of all this is a politician-educational businessmen nexus. So again if you ask in your next reply, not reply, the little blue 'comments' to compare the standards of private and public schools I may resort to sanyas.

Again I am getting the feel that its our views that differ, and its totally fine as long as this forum remains neutral. 

 

 

Now some comments in the latest mails, the statistics seems as conspiracy, then the conspiracy is by our census and government dept. It is based on the population by age from Kerala census data. You may cross-check it.

And Vivek had commented that "if we have too many schools, only the best will have takers, and the rest will die.

In such an environment, the effort that government will have to put in to ensure quality will be minimum; as competition will force schools to either perform or shut down. Good for Children

."

 

It is the most irresponsible comment in the whole discussion. You cannot say something about education so casually without considering the future of the students involved in it. If the "rest is allowed to die", what will be the fate of the children studying in those schools? What will happen if they were forced to discontinue? So it may not be "Good for Children" but disaster for them. Hence you cannot take a relapse and look for firefighters after the fire has started. The destruction may be much more grave than you could think of.

I studied in a government owned engineering college in which we had no staff for many subjects during the last year. We are crabs, we never let anyone get ahead. This logic deprived our poor people of the chance to get a good education and a good job 

I am from a place where the most poor people save money every way possible so that they could send their daughter to a "private" nursing school in Karanataka. I am from a place where prosperity has come mostly because every home has nurse who studied outside Kerala and is working outside India. 

Let the private schools operate, our time should be spend discussing how we can improve the public education system.  

[manual jose]

അധ്യാപകനെ ചവിട്ടി കൊന്ന പാര്‍ട്ടിക്ക് വിദ്യാഭ്യാസം കയ്യില്‍ കിട്ടി . അവര്‍ അതിനെയും ചവിട്ടി കൊന്നുകൊണ്ടിരിക്കുന്നു

[Regi P George]

Companies are being offered government subsidy, tax exemption and deduction on expenditure incurred on training of employees,

ഇതൊരു നല്ല കാര്യമല്ലെ?
പണീയെടുക്കുവാൻ വരുന്നവർക്ക് ഇംഗ്ലീ‍ഷ് അറിയില്ലാത്തതിനാൽ അതിനു ട്രെയ്നിംഗ് കമ്പനിയെകൊണ്ടു കൊടുപ്പിക്കുക!
അതിന്റെ ചിലവിന്റെ ആനുപാതികമായി ചില സബ്സിഡികളും ഇളവുകളും!

ഇതൊക്കെ ഇന്ത്യയിൽ പ്രാവർത്തികമാകുമൊ?
ഇന്ത്യയിൽ ഒരു കമ്പനി തുടങ്ങിയാൽ ആവശ്യം വന്നാൽ തൊഴിലാളിയെ ഇറക്കുമതിയും ചെയ്യും സബ്സിഡിയും കൈപ്പറ്റും
ഇല്ലെ?

റെജി

"Do not judge me by my actions;

Do not judge me from man's point of view"

"Judge me from God's - by the hidden purpose behind my actions.
Regi George wishing you Good Luck. Thanks

2011/6/17 vivekstanley <viveks...@gmail.com>

--

[Joseph Thomas]

Our discussion is progressing. But those advancing divergent view do not try to grasp what others are saying. As Kenney has pointed out this is a dialogue between two supporters of two policies. When each party sticks to their statements, there is no scope of a dialogue. Each shall try to understand others, why others stick to their point etc.

Kenney sticks on to his view that the citizens are having their right to send their wards to schools of their choice. This is true. Kenney is right. Let them send and continue to send. So he argues that the Govt shall grant schools of any sorts, any management, any curriculum, to all those who apply for them. It will result in having diverse systems that could be selected by the people. Ok, this is a welcome argument for those who can afford to have any of them. Out of this competition better systems may come up and that may contribute to the evolution of still better systems. So he is welcoming the step taken by UDF govt to allow CBSE/ICSE schools numbering over 600 in addition to the existing ones.

The other side argues for strengthening the public education system. Their apprehension on the sanction of 600 CBSE/ICSE schools are not that some people will get better schooling than what they get. Their apprehension is that once this lot of private schools come up and those who can afford them go to the new schools, the viability and hence the existence  the now existing govt/aided schools will be affected. This situation will affect the poor sections of the people. It will lead to poor quality of education for the poor. They are also right in their views.

Then, the question is raised why the public education system is inefficient ? Why not the teachers teach the students well ? Why not the management, the Govt manage them well ?

Yes, these are to be answered by the Govt. It is the duty of the management to run the institution properly.

But here what we see is that the Govt itself is shirking off its responsibilities to run the public education system efficiently.  The management blames the teachers and tell the people that the public education system is inefficient because of the teachers. The teachers, in turn, blame the management, the Govt. 

According to the UDF govt, the solution is private schools. So they approve the CBSE/ICSE schools to all those who applied.

According to the LDF govt the solution was making the public education system efficient. They tried to enhance the quality of education and was successful. They approved few CBSE/ICSE schools based on some stringent criteria.

The question still remains, how many of the Govt/Aided school teachers did support the efforts of the LDF govt to improve the efficiency of the govt/aided schools !!!!!

It is a fact that our psyche has to under go drastic changes.

Whether LDF of UDF supporter, every body would like to have jobs in govt/aided schools. No body who stands a chance to get the govt/aided school teachers' job go for the job in CBSE/ICSE. But, even the govt/aided school teachers send their wards to CBSE/ICSE schools prompting the general public to follow suit.

At the same time, fact remains that the teaching in public education system remains better than those of any private school on many counts.  It is also a fact that education in the medium of mother tongue remains far far better than the education in the medium of alien language.

This is not to say that English is not required. This only means that for Malayalees, education in Malayalam medium is better to learn English and other languages. Study of mathematics in the medium of mother tongue is far far better to have the correct logic of mathematical principles assimilated by the student.

Let their be the choice open to everybody.
The wiser will choose the medium as mother tongue.

This dialogue shall be continued.

We have to learn from our experience.

I think, the quality of education in govt/aided schools as against private schools also shall be discussed and studied here.
 
Thomas

.

2011, ജൂണ്‍ 17 9:33 രാവിലെ ന്, Kenney Jacob <kenney...@gmail.com> എഴുതി:

[Shiju Paul]

Dear Mr. Thomas,

 

>> I think, the quality of education in govt/aided schools as against private schools also shall be discussed and studied here.

Can you suggest any tool to examine it objectively? No point in getting subjective opinions.

 

Regards,

Shiju

2011/6/19 Joseph Thomas <thoma...@gmail.com>

[Shiju Paul]

Dear Reji and friends,

 

I had asked the issue of tax foregone to corporates on purpose. Because, tax forgone is only a miniscule portion in China's system. It cannot be compared to the millions..billions..trillions foregone in India. There are tax exemptions. But to forego means to refund or relax at the time of payment or even after payment than previously agreed exemptions. In China it is limited to very rare areas like

 

Companies engaged in

- heavy industry and plant construction

- extraction of raw materials

- rail construction, agricultural projects, R&D

& Companies

- whose export ratio is more than 70%

- If profit (not less than 15% of existing capital) reinvested in capital or in Chinese companies

 

Here also the forgone percentage is different and usually never more than 50%. It is also not applicable for an indefinite period - usually extending the tax exemption period from 2 or 3 years to 5 years.

 

There are tax exemptions for companies functioning in Special Economic Zones and Economic & Technological Development Zones if they are scheduled to operate for more than 10 years. But in India we have similar exceptions without that assurance. We give 100% exemption for the first 5 years, but in China most of the exemptions are no tax for first 2 years and 50% exemption for the next 3.

 

Now it is a convenience to bring in China if you can't justify something directly. We have seen that in the 123 Agreement stage. China did it, why can't we. It is used to create frenzy that if we don't do what China did we would end up a loser. Patriotism, patriotism... Another frenzy is also raked up if the opposer is left: Left is opposing here what China did there because the Left doesn't want India to prosper like China. It is true that the only morality with capitalism is money.

 

Regards,

Shiju

 

 

2011/6/18 vivekstanley <viveks...@gmail.com>

--

[Joseph Thomas]

RT Shiju,

My suggestion was to have a discussion as also study on the subject.
I didnot mean only subjective assessments.
Let us have objective analysis.
May be it may take time and effort.
We have umpteen number of social organisations, educational institutions, universities and Research  Study organisations. Some of them could take up this study.

It could be a community project as well.
Data could be made available on voluntary basis.
But there shall be a core team behind this to ensure time bound completion of the study.

As regards, tool for the study, I donot have any thing to suggest.
But we can devise analytical tools based on relevant parameters for the study.
Evolving the required parameters and devising tools too shall be part of the project.

It is worth that effort.

We are yet to come out of the colonial legacy of the system, in so far as education, at least.

Thomas

.

2011, ജൂണ്‍ 19 8:32 വൈകുന്നേരം ന്, Shiju Paul <shij...@gmail.com> എഴുതി:

[Vijayan Raja]

സര്‍ക്കാര്‍ സ്കൂളില്‍ ജോലി കിട്ടണം എന്ന് അധ്യാപകര്‍ കരുതുന്നു. എന്തുകൊണ്ട്? അവിടെ ജോലി സ്ഥിരത ഉണ്ട്. അണ്‍ എയ്ടെട് സ്ക്കൂളില്‍ അതില്ല. എന്നാല്‍, അവര്‍ അവരുടെ കുട്ടികളെ സി.ബി.എസ്.സി. സ്ക്കൂളില്‍ അയക്കുന്നു. എന്തുകൊണ്ട്? സര്‍ക്കാര്‍ സ്കൂളിന്റെ നിലവാരം മോശമായതു കൊണ്ടല്ല. ഇവിടെ നില നില്‍ക്കുന്ന ഒരു പൊതു ബോധം ഉണ്ട്: കുട്ടികളെ സ്ക്കൂളില്‍ അയക്കുന്നത് ഭാവിയില്‍ വലിയ ശമ്പളം ഉള്ള ജോലി കിട്ടാനാണ്‌. സ്റ്റാടസ് കൂടുതല്‍ ഉള്ള ജോലി ആവണം. അത് വിദേശത്ത് ജോലി കിട്ടിയാല്‍ കൂടുതല്‍ നന്ന്. എങ്കില്‍ ഇംഗ്ലീഷ് മീഡിയവും സി.ബി.എസ്.സി യും തന്നെ നല്ലത്. അധ്യാപകര്‍ സമൂഹത്തിലെ സാധാരണ ക്കാരുമാണ്. പൊതു മിഥ്യാ ധാരണകള്‍ അവരുടെതുമാണ് . നിലവാരമുള്ള ഒരു സമൂഹം ഉണ്ടാവട്ടെ എന്ന ധാരണ അല്ലാ, എന്റെ കുട്ടി,( ഒറ്റപ്പെട്ട വ്യക്തി,), സുഖമായി ജീവിക്കട്ടെ, എന്ന ധാരണയാണ് ഇവിടെ നയിക്കുന്നത്. മുതലാളിത്ത സമൂഹം ഒറ്റപ്പെട്ട വ്യക്തി കള്‍ആയാണ്  ജനങ്ങളെ കാണുന്നത്.

2011/6/19 Joseph Thomas <thoma...@gmail.com>

[kraje...@yahoo.co.in]

In kerala affordability is to be redefined as the standard of living of all sections have improved

Left rule for 5 years, advancing economy, our rich human capital are all factors.

Let us discuss the issue keeping our political ideology in sideline let us discuss rational else it will be arguements

Sent from my BlackBerry® smartphone

---

From: Joseph Thomas <thoma...@gmail.com>

Sender: da...@googlegroups.com

Date: Sun, 19 Jun 2011 18:38:01 +0530

To: <da...@googlegroups.com>

ReplyTo: da...@googlegroups.com

Subject: Re: [DAKF] Re: പൊതുവിദ്യാഭ് യാസ സംരക്ഷണത്തില്‍ പങ ്കാളിയാവുക

[vivekstanley]

Our discussion is progressing. But those advancing divergent view do not try to grasp what others are saying. As Kenney has pointed out this is a dialogue between two supporters of two policies. When each party sticks to their statements, there is no scope of a dialogue. Each shall try to understand others, why others stick to their point etc.

Kenney sticks on to his view that the citizens are having their right to send their wards to schools of their choice. This is true. Kenney is right. Let them send and continue to send. So he argues that the Govt shall grant schools of any sorts, any management, any curriculum, to all those who apply for them. It will result in having diverse systems that could be selected by the people. Ok, this is a welcome argument for those who can afford to have any of them. Out of this competition better systems may come up and that may contribute to the evolution of still better systems. So he is welcoming the step taken by UDF govt to allow CBSE/ICSE schools numbering over 600 in addition to the existing ones. 

The other side argues for strengthening the public education system. Their apprehension on the sanction of 600 CBSE/ICSE schools are not that some people will get better schooling than what they get. Their apprehension is that once this lot of private schools come up and those who can afford them go to the new schools, the viability and hence the existence  the now existing govt/aided schools will be affected. This situation will affect the poor sections of the people. It will lead to poor quality of education for the poor. They are also right in their views.

:

When such a day comes, we should persuade the government to adopt the poor.  

In private engineering colleges, fees of the poor are paid by the government (not sure if it is restricted to some casts only). Why should that not be done at school level? 

That way, the poor will be happier as their children would be able to learn in the more expensive set of  schools. Government would be happier as [i assume] the cost of paying for a few poor at private schools would be cheaper than running an infeasible public school properly.

[Vijayan Raja]

Good suggestion!! and, this may be extended to police, judiciary, defense etc. everything goes to outsourcing; government need not involve in any matters; private business will look-after everything. let them make more profit out of any thing! soon the earth may become a heaven!! 

2011/6/21 vivekstanley <viveks...@gmail.com>

--

[Kenney Jacob]

That is a very very biased view. Private players are proactive and seek profit and of course there will be corruption, favoritism, bullying etc. 

Public sector is lazy, is not supposed to seek profit, still they are also corrupt, there is favoritism and bullying.  

Private players try to minimize cost, managers think about ways to reduce the expenses. Government officers sit on a budget and think about ways on how to spend it all. 

I have a vodafone mobile connection, I am planning to change the operator. I can change it any day I want. My home has a BSNL connection which went out of order a week ago and is yet to be repaired. I have no option to change it. 

BSNL got 3g services an year ahead of everyone else. Did they make use of it properly ? You can blame the nexus between BSNL management and private players. Air India is also in a similar situation. But who is to blame for weeks delay in repairing ? the so called nexus ? 

Can we bring accountability in the public sector ? Can we fire the inefficient ones ? Is it possible in a land where we pay "Nokkukoli" ?

Kenney Jacob

2011/6/21 Vijayan Raja <vijaya...@gmail.com>

[Sarath Chander]

Dear Kenny,

Please share about the experience and number of instances you have paid 'Nokkukooli'. 

regards

Sarath

2011/6/21 Kenney Jacob <kenney...@gmail.com>

[Shiju Paul]

Dear friends,

 

When we make arguments based on general perceptions, we do it sincerely. But the sad fact is many a times the general perception is not the truth. Most of those are manufactured purposefully.

 

Please see the Attachment of performance of the unaccountable, inefficient Public Sector companies, published by Government of India through Public Enterprize Survey 2009-10 (it is an annual affair). It shows that PSUs are profit making companies and their contribution to national exchequer is substantial.

 

The salient points>

* Public Sector companies made profit and paid divident EVERY YEAR from 2000-01 to 2009-10.

 

* During 2009-10, the Overall net profit of all 217 CPSEs stood at Rs.92,593 Cr.

 

* Contribution of CPSEs to the central exchequer is Rs.139,830 Cr. in 2009-10

 

Please visit:

http://dpe.nic.in/newsite/survey0910/pesurvey.html

Lick Overview > Content

 

Regards,

Shiju

 

2011/6/21 Kenney Jacob <kenney...@gmail.com>

[Pratheesh Prakash]

2011/6/21 Kenney Jacob <kenney...@gmail.com>

That is a very very biased view. Private players are proactive and seek profit and of course there will be corruption, favoritism, bullying etc. 

Public sector is lazy, is not supposed to seek profit, still they are also corrupt, there is favoritism and bullying.

ലാഭം ഉണ്ടാക്കുന്നത് മാത്രമാണോ ഒരു സമൂഹത്തെ മുന്നോട്ട് നയിക്കുന്നത്, അല്ലെങ്കില്‍ സാമൂഹിക വികസനം ലാഭാധിഷ്ഠിതം മാത്രമാണോ? പ്രൈവറ്റ് പ്ലെയേഴ്സ് മാത്രമുള്ള ഒരു വ്യവസ്ഥതിയില്‍, ഇന്ന് കേരളം നേടിയിട്ടുള്ള പോലെ നൂറ് ശതമാനം സാക്ഷരതയോ അല്ലെങ്കില്‍ ഇന്ത്യയിലാകെ implement ചെയ്ത പോലെ പത്താം ക്ലാസ്സ് വരെയുള്ള നിര്‍ബ്ബന്ധിത വിദ്യാഭ്യാസ പദ്ധതികളോ നടപ്പിലാക്കുവാന്‍ സാധിക്കുമോ? നടക്കില്ല എന്ന് പറയുവാന്‍ എനിക്ക് കാരണങ്ങളുണ്ട്. ഇവിടെയും സ്വകാര്യ സ്കൂളുകളില്‍ പഠനത്തില്‍ താരതമ്യേനെ പിന്നോക്കം നില്‍ക്കുന്ന വിദ്യാര്‍ത്ഥികളെ പുറത്താക്കിയിട്ടല്ലാതെ സമ്പൂര്‍ണ്ണ വിജയം ആഘോഷിക്കുന്ന എത്ര സ്വകാര്യ സ്കൂളുകള്‍ ഉണ്ട്? അത് പോലെ തന്നെ പഠനച്ചിലവ് സ്വകാര്യ സ്കൂളുകളില്‍ എത്ര അധികമാണ്.

ആരോഗ്യം, വിദ്യാഭ്യാസം, ഭക്ഷണം പോലെയുള്ള കാര്യങ്ങള്‍ ആരുടെയും ഔദാര്യമല്ല, ചാരിറ്റി ആയി ലഭിക്കേണ്ടതുമല്ല. മറിച്ച്  അതെല്ലാം ഒരു മനുഷ്യന്റെ അവകാശങ്ങളാണ്. ഒരു സര്‍ക്കാരിന്റെ ചുമതല എന്നത് ആ പറഞ്ഞ കാര്യങ്ങള്‍ 'വിറ്റ്' ലാഭമുണ്ടാക്കുക എന്നതല്ല, മറിച്ച് അത് സാര്‍വത്രികമായി അതിന്റെ ലഭ്യത ഉറപ്പു വരുത്തുക എന്നതാണ്. അതിനു വേണ്ടി സ്വകാര്യ സ്ഥാപനങ്ങള്‍ക്ക് അതിന്റെ ചുമതല വച്ചു കൊടുത്താല്‍ അവര്‍ അത് സാമൂഹിക സുരക്ഷിതത്വത്തിനെ മുന്‍നിര്‍ത്തി ചെയ്യുമോ അതോ ലാഭേച്ഛയോടെ പ്രവര്‍ത്തിക്കുമോ?

എനിക്ക് സ്വകാര്യ സ്കൂളുകളിലെ അധികച്ചെലവ് താങ്ങുവാന്‍ കഴിയും എന്ന് കരുതി അതിന് ബുദ്ധിമുട്ടുള്ളവരെ നാം മറക്കണമോ? ഈ നാടിന്റെ resources അവയെന്ത് തന്നെ ആയാലും എല്ലാ പൗരന്മാര്‍ക്കും കൂടി അവകാശപ്പെടതല്ലേ?
 

Private players try to minimize cost, managers think about ways to reduce the expenses. Government officers sit on a budget and think about ways on how to spend it all.

പൊതുമേഖലാ സ്ഥാപനങ്ങള്‍ ലാഭത്തിലും പ്രവര്‍ത്തിച്ചിരുന്നില്ലേ? ഗവണ്‍മെന്റിന്റെ നയങ്ങളുമായി അതിന് ബന്ധമില്ലേ? [തുടരുന്നു...]
 

I have a vodafone mobile connection, I am planning to change the operator. I can change it any day I want. My home has a BSNL connection which went out of order a week ago and is yet to be repaired. I have no option to change it. 

BSNL got 3g services an year ahead of everyone else. Did they make use of it properly ? You can blame the nexus between BSNL management and private players. Air India is also in a similar situation. But who is to blame for weeks delay in repairing ? the so called nexus ? 

ബി.എസ്.എന്‍.എല്‍ എന്ന പൊതുമേഖലാ കമ്പനി ഇപ്പോള്‍ പിടിപ്പുകേടിന്റെ തറവാടാണ് എന്ന കാര്യത്തില്‍ സംശയമേതുമില്ല. നഷ്ടത്തിലാക്കി വില്‍ക്കുക എന്ന യു.പി.ഏ. സര്‍ക്കാരിന്റെ നയവൈകല്യങ്ങളുടെ ഭാഗമാണതെന്ന് ഞങ്ങള്‍ കുറച്ച് പേര്‍ പറയുമ്പോള്‍ കെന്നിക്കും കൂട്ടര്‍ക്കും അതിനെ പുച്ഛിച്ച് തള്ളാം, പൊതുമേഖലയുടെ സ്വതവേ ഉള്ള സ്വഭാവമാണതെന്ന് അനുമാനിക്കാം. പ്രശ്നമില്ല. കാഴ്ചപാടിന്റെ വ്യത്യസ്തകളെ പൂര്‍ണ്ണ മനസ്സോടെ അംഗീകരിക്കുന്നു.

എന്നാല്‍, ബി.എസ്.എന്‍.എല്‍. കടന്നു വരുന്നതിന് മുമ്പ് മൊബൈല്‍ ഫോണ്‍ മേഖല മുഴുവനും, ഏതാനും സ്വകാര്യ കമ്പനികള്‍ കയ്യടക്കി വെച്ചിരുന്ന സമയത്ത് മൊബൈല്‍ ഫോണ്‍ ചാര്‍ജ്ജുകള്‍ എത്രയധികമായിരുന്നു? ബി.എസ്.എന്‍.എല്‍ ഇറങ്ങിയ ശേഷം അതെത്ര കുറഞ്ഞു. സര്‍ക്കാര്‍ ഇടപെടാതെ, സ്വകാര്യ കമ്പനികള്‍ മാത്രം പരസ്പരം മല്‍സരിക്കുന്ന ഒരു വ്യവസ്ഥയില്‍, തനിയേ വില കുറയുമെന്നും, ഗുണനിലവാരം കൂടുമെന്നും സിദ്ധാന്തം ചമയ്ക്കുന്നവര്‍ എന്തേ അന്നത്തെ അവസ്ഥയ്ക്ക് നേരെ കണ്ണുകള്‍ മുറുക്കനെയടച്ചു നില്‍ക്കുന്നു? ഇന്‍കമിങ്ങിന് വരെ ഉണ്ടായിരുന്ന ചാര്‍ജ്ജ് പിന്നീടെപ്പോഴാണ് എടുത്ത് കളഞ്ഞത്. ബി.എസ്.എന്‍.എല്‍. മൊബൈല്‍ സര്‍വ്വീസ് തുടങ്ങിയ കാലത്ത് ഏറ്റവും മികച്ച സെര്‍വ്വീസ് പ്രൊവൈഡര്‍മാരില്‍ ഒരാളായിരുന്ന ബി.എസ്.എന്‍.എല്ലിന്റെ ഇന്നത്തെ ഗതിക്ക് കാരണം പൊതുമേഖലാ സ്ഥാപനങ്ങളില്‍ കെന്നിയാരോപിക്കുന്ന പിടിപ്പുകേടോ അതോ കേന്ദ്ര ഗവണ്‍മെന്റിന്റെ നയവൈകല്യങ്ങളോ?

 

Can we bring accountability in the public sector ? Can we fire the inefficient ones ?

Firing the inefficient ones may be the 'right' way, but correcting them and involving them in the developmental process is the alternate way which ensures social security. I accept your point that there are bottlenecks, but firing/liquidating is not the solution.

 

Is it possible in a land where we pay "Nokkukoli" ?

സി.ഐ.ടി.യു.-വിന്റെ തൊഴിലാളികള്‍ നോക്കു കൂലി ആവശ്യപ്പെട്ടാല്‍ നിങ്ങള്‍ക്ക് receipt ചോദിക്കാം, യൂണിയനോഫീസില്‍/ലേബറോഫീസില്‍ പരാതി നല്‍കാം. ഇത് വല്ലതും കെന്നി ചെയ്തിട്ടുണ്ടോ?

സ്വകാര്യ കമ്പനികള്‍ എഴുതി തരുന്ന തൊട്ടതിനും പിടിച്ചതിനുമുള്ള കൂലികള്‍ അവര്‍ക്ക് ലാഭമുണ്ടാക്കുവാനുള്ളതല്ലേ എന്ന ന്യായം പറഞ്ഞ് നമ്മുക്ക് മറക്കാം. പക്ഷേ ഭീകരന്മാരായ തൊഴിലാളികള്‍, ദിവസം 20 രൂപയ്ക്ക് മേല്‍ വരുമാനമുള്ള കോടീശ്വരന്മാര്‍, അത് ചെയ്യുന്നത് നമ്മുടെ വികസനത്തെ ബാധിക്കില്ലേ?

[vivekstanley]

Shiju, if a 1000 crore company makes a profit of 1 crore, then it is technically profit, but it is like loss.

What is the total worth of all our PSUs? What is their Return on Investment?

My perception is, PSUs are a lot less efficient, innovative & customer friendly than their private peers.

I think the social & economic benefits that we had after liberalization was way too higher than what we had during the PSU only era.

 

I feel government's role should be limited to ensuring a level playing field. If government too does business directly, that results in bias; like what we see at BSNL & AirIndia.

Let me stress, I did not mean that government should not intervene anywhere. Government should intervene at situations/areas where private players cannot intervene; like law & order, upliftment of the poor, etc. 

 

If government can ensure a competitive environment everywhere else, then our entrepreneurs will do the rest.

[Shiju Paul]

Dear Vivek,

 

>> What is the total worth of all our PSUs? What is their Return on Investment?

 

Please go through the attchment. It is just 1 page! All these information are there.

 

Anyway, for your info, the profit to capital employed ratio is 17.56%. For every 100 rupees 17.56 rupees profit. Enough? Also note that some areas these PSUs work where no private company is willing to work.

 

We didn't have a "PSU only era" in India anytime in history.

 

>> If government can ensure a competitive environment everywhere else, then our entrepreneurs will do the rest.

 

Yes, we have seen it in USA with the housing finance companies doing the rest :-) and causing an international crisis.

 

Regards,

Shiju

2011/6/21 vivekstanley <viveks...@gmail.com>

--

[Kenney Jacob]

I assume this question came because you thought I am just repeating what the media says. Ill give you 2 experiences where I not just paid nookukooli but also got manhandled and both happened in Trivandrum. 

First instance happened when we were moving a really small set of furniture on an "petti auto" to a newly rented house. When the auto entered the house compound a few guys came in a bike and an auto, apparently they were following us.  we said since its just some small furniture we will manage ourselves, they said "OK.. lets see how you unload" My friend went to unload and he got beaten up. Finally we had to pay them. 

Second instance happened when we were moving some furniture to a new office in Pongamoodu, some guys came after we unloaded everything, since we had a bad experience we negotiated and settled for an amount, clean money with out doing any job. 

Kenney Jacob

2011/6/21 Sarath Chander <chander...@gmail.com>

[k rajesh]

In  KSEB  when we have loaded computers in Our departmental vehicle ( our employees even in officer cadre done the physical work)  these Chetans came and asked rs 100 per box finally SETTLED for Rs-50. It is there hobby. They will keep mom  till the consignment is tied. They are trained or educated for that ??? Now you will ask for the evidence???? K.Rajesh --- On Tue, 21/6/11, Sarath Chander <chander...@gmail.com> wrote:

[Kenney Jacob]

2011/6/21 Pratheesh Prakash <royal....@gmail.com>

2011/6/21 Kenney Jacob <kenney...@gmail.com>

That is a very very biased view. Private players are proactive and seek profit and of course there will be corruption, favoritism, bullying etc. 

Public sector is lazy, is not supposed to seek profit, still they are also corrupt, there is favoritism and bullying.

ലാഭം ഉണ്ടാക്കുന്നത് മാത്രമാണോ ഒരു സമൂഹത്തെ മുന്നോട്ട് നയിക്കുന്നത്, അല്ലെങ്കില്‍ സാമൂഹിക വികസനം ലാഭാധിഷ്ഠിതം മാത്രമാണോ? പ്രൈവറ്റ് പ്ലെയേഴ്സ് മാത്രമുള്ള ഒരു വ്യവസ്ഥതിയില്‍, ഇന്ന് കേരളം നേടിയിട്ടുള്ള പോലെ നൂറ് ശതമാനം സാക്ഷരതയോ അല്ലെങ്കില്‍ ഇന്ത്യയിലാകെ implement ചെയ്ത പോലെ പത്താം ക്ലാസ്സ് വരെയുള്ള നിര്‍ബ്ബന്ധിത വിദ്യാഭ്യാസ പദ്ധതികളോ നടപ്പിലാക്കുവാന്‍ സാധിക്കുമോ? നടക്കില്ല എന്ന് പറയുവാന്‍ എനിക്ക് കാരണങ്ങളുണ്ട്. ഇവിടെയും സ്വകാര്യ സ്കൂളുകളില്‍ പഠനത്തില്‍ താരതമ്യേനെ പിന്നോക്കം നില്‍ക്കുന്ന വിദ്യാര്‍ത്ഥികളെ പുറത്താക്കിയിട്ടല്ലാതെ സമ്പൂര്‍ണ്ണ വിജയം ആഘോഷിക്കുന്ന എത്ര സ്വകാര്യ സ്കൂളുകള്‍ ഉണ്ട്? അത് പോലെ തന്നെ പഠനച്ചിലവ് സ്വകാര്യ സ്കൂളുകളില്‍ എത്ര അധികമാണ്.

ആരോഗ്യം, വിദ്യാഭ്യാസം, ഭക്ഷണം പോലെയുള്ള കാര്യങ്ങള്‍ ആരുടെയും ഔദാര്യമല്ല, ചാരിറ്റി ആയി ലഭിക്കേണ്ടതുമല്ല. മറിച്ച്  അതെല്ലാം ഒരു മനുഷ്യന്റെ അവകാശങ്ങളാണ്. ഒരു സര്‍ക്കാരിന്റെ ചുമതല എന്നത് ആ പറഞ്ഞ കാര്യങ്ങള്‍ 'വിറ്റ്' ലാഭമുണ്ടാക്കുക എന്നതല്ല, മറിച്ച് അത് സാര്‍വത്രികമായി അതിന്റെ ലഭ്യത ഉറപ്പു വരുത്തുക എന്നതാണ്. അതിനു വേണ്ടി സ്വകാര്യ സ്ഥാപനങ്ങള്‍ക്ക് അതിന്റെ ചുമതല വച്ചു കൊടുത്താല്‍ അവര്‍ അത് സാമൂഹിക സുരക്ഷിതത്വത്തിനെ മുന്‍നിര്‍ത്തി ചെയ്യുമോ അതോ ലാഭേച്ഛയോടെ പ്രവര്‍ത്തിക്കുമോ?

എനിക്ക് സ്വകാര്യ സ്കൂളുകളിലെ അധികച്ചെലവ് താങ്ങുവാന്‍ കഴിയും എന്ന് കരുതി അതിന് ബുദ്ധിമുട്ടുള്ളവരെ നാം മറക്കണമോ? ഈ നാടിന്റെ resources അവയെന്ത് തന്നെ ആയാലും എല്ലാ പൗരന്മാര്‍ക്കും കൂടി അവകാശപ്പെടതല്ലേ?

I also agree that every citizen has got rights, I never said we should deny the rights of the poor, what I am saying is that we should not try to standardize, we should not say this is what you should study and this is how you should study, let is be the rich or the poor. Govt is free to improve its education, but it should not be restricting the private players. 

BTW I did not understand what resources you are taking about here ? Is the private schools using up any special resources ?

 

 

Private players try to minimize cost, managers think about ways to reduce the expenses. Government officers sit on a budget and think about ways on how to spend it all.

പൊതുമേഖലാ സ്ഥാപനങ്ങള്‍ ലാഭത്തിലും പ്രവര്‍ത്തിച്ചിരുന്നില്ലേ? ഗവണ്‍മെന്റിന്റെ നയങ്ങളുമായി അതിന് ബന്ധമില്ലേ? [തുടരുന്നു...]
 

I have a vodafone mobile connection, I am planning to change the operator. I can change it any day I want. My home has a BSNL connection which went out of order a week ago and is yet to be repaired. I have no option to change it. 

BSNL got 3g services an year ahead of everyone else. Did they make use of it properly ? You can blame the nexus between BSNL management and private players. Air India is also in a similar situation. But who is to blame for weeks delay in repairing ? the so called nexus ? 

ബി.എസ്.എന്‍.എല്‍ എന്ന പൊതുമേഖലാ കമ്പനി ഇപ്പോള്‍ പിടിപ്പുകേടിന്റെ തറവാടാണ് എന്ന കാര്യത്തില്‍ സംശയമേതുമില്ല. നഷ്ടത്തിലാക്കി വില്‍ക്കുക എന്ന യു.പി.ഏ. സര്‍ക്കാരിന്റെ നയവൈകല്യങ്ങളുടെ ഭാഗമാണതെന്ന് ഞങ്ങള്‍ കുറച്ച് പേര്‍ പറയുമ്പോള്‍ കെന്നിക്കും കൂട്ടര്‍ക്കും അതിനെ പുച്ഛിച്ച് തള്ളാം,

The DOT was pathetic, we got a phone connection after waiting for 3 years in the queue. BSNL improved a lot when they were faced with competition. The government officers also should feel that competition, they also must be threatened, that is the only way most of us will improve. 

 

പൊതുമേഖലയുടെ സ്വതവേ ഉള്ള സ്വഭാവമാണതെന്ന് അനുമാനിക്കാം. പ്രശ്നമില്ല. കാഴ്ചപാടിന്റെ വ്യത്യസ്തകളെ പൂര്‍ണ്ണ മനസ്സോടെ അംഗീകരിക്കുന്നു.

എന്നാല്‍, ബി.എസ്.എന്‍.എല്‍. കടന്നു വരുന്നതിന് മുമ്പ് മൊബൈല്‍ ഫോണ്‍ മേഖല മുഴുവനും, ഏതാനും സ്വകാര്യ കമ്പനികള്‍ കയ്യടക്കി വെച്ചിരുന്ന സമയത്ത് മൊബൈല്‍ ഫോണ്‍ ചാര്‍ജ്ജുകള്‍ എത്രയധികമായിരുന്നു? ബി.എസ്.എന്‍.എല്‍ ഇറങ്ങിയ ശേഷം അതെത്ര കുറഞ്ഞു. സര്‍ക്കാര്‍ ഇടപെടാതെ, സ്വകാര്യ കമ്പനികള്‍ മാത്രം പരസ്പരം മല്‍സരിക്കുന്ന ഒരു വ്യവസ്ഥയില്‍, തനിയേ വില കുറയുമെന്നും, ഗുണനിലവാരം കൂടുമെന്നും സിദ്ധാന്തം ചമയ്ക്കുന്നവര്‍ എന്തേ അന്നത്തെ അവസ്ഥയ്ക്ക് നേരെ കണ്ണുകള്‍ മുറുക്കനെയടച്ചു നില്‍ക്കുന്നു? ഇന്‍കമിങ്ങിന് വരെ ഉണ്ടായിരുന്ന ചാര്‍ജ്ജ് പിന്നീടെപ്പോഴാണ് എടുത്ത് കളഞ്ഞത്. ബി.എസ്.എന്‍.എല്‍. മൊബൈല്‍ സര്‍വ്വീസ് തുടങ്ങിയ കാലത്ത് ഏറ്റവും മികച്ച സെര്‍വ്വീസ് പ്രൊവൈഡര്‍മാരില്‍ ഒരാളായിരുന്ന ബി.എസ്.എന്‍.എല്ലിന്റെ ഇന്നത്തെ ഗതിക്ക് കാരണം പൊതുമേഖലാ സ്ഥാപനങ്ങളില്‍ കെന്നിയാരോപിക്കുന്ന പിടിപ്പുകേടോ അതോ കേന്ദ്ര ഗവണ്‍മെന്റിന്റെ നയവൈകല്യങ്ങളോ?

Its not BSNL that brought about the change that you mentioned here, its Reliance. We also must not forget that BSNL got an undue advantage over every other player, they had the network, they had the infra, they had the sales channels, still they are just BSNL. 

You can blame the govt policy for the current state of BSNL, but can you blame the government for a landline which is not fixed even after a week ? 

 

 

Can we bring accountability in the public sector ? Can we fire the inefficient ones ?

Firing the inefficient ones may be the 'right' way, but correcting them and involving them in the developmental process is the alternate way which ensures social security. I accept your point that there are bottlenecks, but firing/liquidating is not the solution.

Ok lets not fire them. Suggest something that can be done to a union leader who does not turn up in the office on time. 

 

Is it possible in a land where we pay "Nokkukoli" ?

സി.ഐ.ടി.യു.-വിന്റെ തൊഴിലാളികള്‍ നോക്കു കൂലി ആവശ്യപ്പെട്ടാല്‍ നിങ്ങള്‍ക്ക് receipt ചോദിക്കാം, യൂണിയനോഫീസില്‍/ലേബറോഫീസില്‍ പരാതി നല്‍കാം. ഇത് വല്ലതും കെന്നി ചെയ്തിട്ടുണ്ടോ?

Nadakkunna karyam vellom para mashe..... if this logic worked we should not be having any problem in our state, we have the police.. we have the judiciary.. we have everything. 

 

സ്വകാര്യ കമ്പനികള്‍ എഴുതി തരുന്ന തൊട്ടതിനും പിടിച്ചതിനുമുള്ള കൂലികള്‍ അവര്‍ക്ക് ലാഭമുണ്ടാക്കുവാനുള്ളതല്ലേ എന്ന ന്യായം പറഞ്ഞ് നമ്മുക്ക് മറക്കാം. പക്ഷേ ഭീകരന്മാരായ തൊഴിലാളികള്‍, ദിവസം 20 രൂപയ്ക്ക് മേല്‍ വരുമാനമുള്ള കോടീശ്വരന്മാര്‍, അത് ചെയ്യുന്നത് നമ്മുടെ വികസനത്തെ ബാധിക്കില്ലേ?

I have nothing to say about this, I bet you calculated the income after the amount that is spend on liquor and party contribution, something that reaches their family.  

[vivekstanley]

Shiju, 17.56% is decent enough; but sadly that is after enjoying undue benefits from the government; benefits which no other player enjoys.

Also note that some areas these PSUs work where no private company is willing to work.

:

Though I cannot make out which all are those unattractive areas, in such areas where private players cannot work, government should intervene. In all other areas, government should give way to competition. 

-

By "PSU only era", I meant the licence raj!

-

Yes, we have seen it in USA with the housing finance companies doing the rest :-) and causing an international crisis.

:

We can learn from that superpower's mistakes :)

Cheers!

[Sarath Chander]

Kenney,

Both instances mentioned by you are pukka cases of street robbery. Which ever be the colour of the union, it is highly deplorable. It is also very painful to hear this because in my days of serious activism (in Palakkad) I have had chance to be involved in the setting up of 2 unions- one was Headload and other was in a SSI unit. There was not a single case of man-handling or even indirect mild threatening in both cases at least over a period of 10 years  till about 2004. 

Trade unions should establish healthy public spheres in the locale of their functioning. They should be the pride of the working class and not embarassment. 

Thanks again Kenny for such a shocking feedback. 

But I would like to beleive that these instances are not representative of entire Kerala in general. 

[Vijayan Raja]

Whenever we say about "nokkukooli", we have to consider the same charged by private business profit makers. One famous private Insurance Company invited me for a friendly talk, and finally persuaded me to take a policy. Then I payed first premium of Rs. 20000.00. They gave me a receipt for Rs 7000.00 as premium; the remaining 13000.00 was their service charge, commission etc. Now, is it not their "nokkukooli"? They do business, taking all expenses from us; not from their profit. All the nice words, posh building, color, coffee, stylish English, were charged. There is no private business without charging too-much, and without "nokkukoolis", but the media is in favor of them. Commission, kickback (famous after Bofors), agent's fee etc. in any business are as good as "Nokkukooli".

2011/6/21 Sarath Chander <chander...@gmail.com>

[Joseph Thomas]

A counter affidavit to Kenneys BSNL bashing.

It was DoT which gave us the telegraph and telephone services in India till the private players were allowed by 1990's.

DoT never took the full installation charges from the customer, whether rich or poor. Per line cost was heavy running to tens of thousands those days. The idea was that installing infrastructure was a commercial operation which fetched revenue ever after. For example, an aplicant may be staying at a distance for which line over 100 posts are to be erected. Still the installation charge levied was only Rs.600. Whatever be the amount invested for the line, it used to attract additional customers in that area which will contribute to further revenue. This is the classic example of commercial operation without being trumpeted as by the private operators these days. Now, TRAI is for recovering the full per line cost all of a sudden from each customer. This enables the operators to levy additional charges from each customer. In fact customers are being looted now.

Kenneys portraying of DoT as that owned by somebody else is wrong. It belongs to the state in India, which in turn means owned by the people. The distance between them is due to the fact that the people donot have free access to the state apparatus or state is alienated from the people. While, the private means owned by other individual or group. Both are not to be treated as same.  

2G scam and the Gas deal that has come out recently indicates one thing. These deals with private operators are used to syphon away the resources from the people.

2G spectrum allotment was done to private entities on first come first allotted basis. A company which had no previous business or asset other than their initial capital share of few crores and got an allotment for Rs.1600 Crores sold the company for around Rs. 20000 crores. This difference is the profit made by the nascent company on the strength of the spectrum allotted for it by the UPA. This difference also indicate the future revenue that the company is going to recover from its customers, we the people. Had the DoT alone be the operator available, this much loot wouldnot have taken place.

In case of the production cost of Natural Gas, it was $1.80 for ONGC so far. Now for Reliance it is calculated at $.4.18. This difference represent the added profit for the private operator. It is the excess loot from the people too.

Whatever be the charge collected by the DoT or ONGC (Public owned outfits), whether it is more or less, it rests with the society, but for the pilferage caused due to the mismanagement and corruption resorted to by the govt officials. The pilferage could be avoided through proper intervention and assertion of democratic right of the people.

Here there are two warring positions taken by different participants in this discussion.

One for public ownership and the other private ownership of schools.

Those who are for public ownership often use the term public to completely negate the role of individual entrepreneurship. Some are for role of individual entrepreneurship too, with competition among them.

Those who are for private ownership insist that everything public is inefficient. Some are for total private ownership, the Govt being keeping away from services and production. Some argue that there shall be competition between the two sectors.

There is the duality of society and individual. Individuals constitute the society and society consists of individuals. Hence, there cannot be a one sided view of both society and individual. Both are to be there. Ownership also has to be both social and individual. Individual entrepreneurship will always be more dynamic than the social by the very nature of its structure. Individual neednot consult any body for a decision except for his own wisdom, while the social entity, the decision making is a lengthy process.

While on the other side, the impact wise, social will be much ahead than the individual. Once, the social entity is moved in the correct direction with optimum efficiency, there can be no match for it in any number of individual entities. A qualitative superiority will be visible.

Now coming to the present scenario, there are the other entities, other than individual and social. I mean the corporates, the religious institutions, the caste outfits etc that indulge in social activities. Where could we fit them in ? Social ? Or Individual ? They have got social character in respect of its activities when the volume, impact and such other characteristics are considered. But, they have got individual character in its ownership, appropriation of benefits and such other characteristics are considered.

Here, the real problem, the crux of the issue is that of democratic functioning of these outfits and their commitment to the people they represent. Whether social organisations, religious institutions or caste based institutions (I donot mean that all they are essential, but accepting them as they are as they are there today), they are not run democratically. Individual upperhand is maintained through a number of special privileges established by the concerned individual over the mass of the people who follow them. It may be the bishops like Powathil or Leaders like Narayana Panicker or Vellappalli or Gaffoor. If these leaders are committed to the interest of the people they represent, can they resort to education business. Taking lakhs from teachers and students (neednot necessarily be from the community it claim to be serving). If they are committed to the people they supposed to be representing, they shall agree for the norms.

On another count, all these are the manifestations of ownership mode. The so called individual ownership is really lacking. Vast majority of the people do not own any thing of their own. Whatever they owned, naturally, are usurped by the corporates or the religious or caste outfits. They are truncated at the expense of the individual. 

Another point of contention is the power of market forces. Yes, here again there are two sides, one for the market and other against it. This again is the reflection of the invisible power of capital. Capital is in fact the output of labour accumulated over the period. The question is whether the market shall have freedom or the individual and their collective, the society, shall have the freedom. In fact the market is not free in its reality.  Here in the neo-liberal environment, the market is supreme, they say. Who controls the market ? Whether it is controlled by the state ? Social organisations ? Individuals ? The answer is No. It is controlled by the capital. No individual, no social organisation, not even the nation state shall control the market.  That means, the capital is allowed to control the market. Capital, something that is inhuman, is allowed to control the market. The individuals and the society is thrown to the mercy of market controlled by capital.  But, capital is a product of human labour, accumulated over the years. The product exerting control over the creator. Should it be allowed ?

Shall the world be for capital or for individual or society ?
My answer is the world shall be for the society to facilitate the individual and the society.
Wealth in any form shall be a means to serve the interest of the individual and society.
Capital shall not be allowed to loot the people, the people who work for their livelyhood.
Market shall be meeting place of all, the sellers and buyers, for interaction/exchange.
It shall be controlled by the society, run to suit and serve the interest of the society/individual.

Even the UPA like state outfits also cannot be considered a social entity as it is not democratically managed. What exists in India is only a formal democracy where voters are allowed to choose the rulers sponsored by the capital. Democracy doesnot exist in its true spirit, for which we have to advance much further.

What shall be supreme is society and it shall be democratically managed. That is possible only with a society where everybody is given equal opportunity. That shall not be a donation by any body. That has to be wrested by the individuals through social or collective intervention.

Under such an environment, every thing social will have its due role and every individual will have full freedom to decide upon its individual needs and aspirations, ofcourse, without infringing upon the freedom of others or the society.

Thomas

.

2011, ജൂണ്‍ 21 10:38 വൈകുന്നേരം ന്, Sarath Chander <chandet...@gmail.com> എഴുതി:

--

[Dr.B.Ekbal]

In  my experience BSNL gives excellent coverage and service to their broad band connections. In their service centre at KTM once I had a bad experience. But I brought this to the attention of the higher authorities and the Union leaders and got rectified. Yes of course there  are badly run public institutions and industries. But we should not put all in the same category. One of the well run Postal Service in the world is the Indian Postal service run by the Government. See the way our private couriers are functioning. For a mere 25/50 paise you can reach any body in this vast country.
Ekbal

2011/6/22 Joseph Thomas <thoma...@gmail.com>

--
Dr.B.Ekbal
Kuzhuvalil House, Arpookara East,
Kottayam-686 008, Kerala
Phone: 0481-2598305
Mobile: 94470 60912

[Kenney Jacob]

Sir,

I totally agree with you, we should not put all public companies in the same category. But there are really bad public enterprises, there are even public enterprises that should not even exist. 

In the same manner we should not put all private enterprises also into the same category, there are schools that charge 300 Rs per month as fees and then there are school which charge 3000 Rs per month. 

I did most of my schooling in a school that charged 75Rs monthly fees. 

 

Kenney Jacob

2011/6/24 Dr.B.Ekbal <ekb...@gmail.com>

[Dr.B.Ekbal]

It is also important to decide which are the areas where Govt should run public sector companies. Mostly these are socially relevant areas where profit margin may be low so that private agencies may not be interested (public transport) or areas where there is scope for exploitation (drug industry, medical equipments) also strategically important areas to protect wider national interests (power sector, Telecommunication etc ). Whether the Government should run hotels etc can be debated.
Ekbal

2011/6/24 Kenney Jacob <kenney...@gmail.com>

[Regi P George]

I think most of the public sector companies are badly managed and that is the primary reason these companies making loss! Most of the time Managers and Ministers responsible to those companies are not capable to do their respective duty is one of the main reasons these companies are in disaster! After 50 years of congress rule this country end up buying huge loans from IMF to run the day to day affairs of the state is the best example for how incapable congress party is to rule the nation.

How can some one blame the public sector companies for making loss without a proper government and capable management? Putting your house under fire is the right way to solve the trouble you created in your home or allowing other capable household members to run the show is the right way?

How can simply a Finance Minister or his wife to appear for a Lottery Mafia in the court and stand against the policy of the state and his own party?

When Public Sector companies start making loss some people start crying for privatization! Are they not responsible to do the same thing when one political party fail to run the nation and its business?

Can we expect that the apostles of Privatization demanding a dissolution of congress party under the same merit they want to dissolve the public sector companies?

If the public Schools are failing to keep up its standards whom to be blamed the mere teacher who assigned to give a lecture for 30 or 45 minutes or the one suppose to manage the show?

Logically it is a failure of the ruling party only. Here in India and Kerala such failures and disaster will bring in front of the public as an excuse with a polished alternative which otherwise can never sell in ANY market! And the responsibility of the failure of the ruling party goes on the shoulders of the victims as a blame!

For the failure of Public School education whom to be blamed? = The Teachers
For the failure of Public Sector Companies whom to be blamed? = The Trade Unions and People who working in these companies





Regi

"Do not judge me by my actions;

Do not judge me from man's point of view"

"Judge me from God's - by the hidden purpose behind my actions.
Regi George wishing you Good Luck. Thanks

2011/6/23 Dr.B.Ekbal <ekb...@gmail.com>

[bijoy]

well said regi

2011/6/24 Regi P George <regip...@gmail.com>

--
Thanking You

Bijoy Franco
mob. 9447688254

BE THE CHANGE WE WISH TO SEE IN THE WORLD

[Vijayan Raja]

Regi has pointed out some truths. How do they manage public sector badly? By allowing private sector to loot the public money. Also, they receive some commission for it. That is why public sector shows loss, in many of the occasions. In addition to this, think of the notion of "profit". In the case of public sector, not only the money shown in the balance sheet as profit is to be considered; but also varies benefits people may get as service; the tax remitted to government; the low price people has to give; jobs created; self-respect of employees got protected; reliability; the merit basis of employee selection; less pollution that can be insisted; and so on. In the case of private sector, they aim only for their profit. Now-a-days, they make profit by looting public property; or, cheating people by advertisements; giving non-essential items; and so on. Of course, the public sector should make profit for its existence; that is enough. They need not essentially  make huge profit, as their counter parts in the private sector usually claim. The overall benefits to the people is more important.  And, there are any number of private enterprises in loss. Who bothers! If some public sector enterprises show loss, it is taken as evidence for supporting privatization. 

2011/6/24 Regi P George <regip...@gmail.com>

I think most of the public sector companies are badly managed and that is the primary reason these companies making loss! Most of the time Managers and Ministers responsible to those companies are not capable to do their respective duty is one of the main reasons these companies are in disaster! After 50 years of congress rule this country end up buying huge loans from IMF to run the day to day affairs of the state is the best example for how incapable congress party is to rule the nation.

[kraje...@yahoo.co.in]

Hi

Dot should not be waived off for all its Mis doings
For around 18months BSNL was Paralyzed with out chairman

During the period all electrical distribution utilities inCluding KSEB were forced to by bandwidth from Airtel reliance tulip etc.
BSNL was paralyzed so that it could not take the price war.
Do you know who was the teleco. Minister then ~ the RAJA ~King of corruption

Sent from my BlackBerry® smartphone

---

From: "Dr.B.Ekbal" <ekb...@gmail.com>

Sender: da...@googlegroups.com

Date: Fri, 24 Jun 2011 07:32:34 +0530

To: <da...@googlegroups.com>

ReplyTo: da...@googlegroups.com

Subject: Re: [DAKF] Re: പൊതുവിദ്യാഭ് യാസ സംരക്ഷണത്തില്‍ പങ ്കാളിയാവുക

[Joseph Thomas]

Yes, Regi puts is very correctly.

The management is to be blamed for the ills of any enterprise. Whether it is the public or private. It is the duty of the management to address the issues including that of the labour. Management cannot scape its responsibilities by blaming the labour. These days, it is a fashion to blame the labour to escape ones responsibility.

In so far as the public sector enterprise is concerned, it is the Govt, the public limited is concerned, the managing body mostly controlled by business groups and the private, it is the proprietor who are to be held responsible.

But, the general notion exhibited is to blame the ownership pattern, for being owned by public, for the ills of public sector. While, the failures and wrong doings of private sector, occurring even due to mind boggling greed for profit goes unnoticed.

An immediate and current example is the KSEB and its power distribution.

When LDF was in power, till 13th May, 2011, the distribution was quite in order, beyond expectation.

Now, with the UDF in saddle, from the middle of May, 2011, the distribution has gone astray.

The reason, the attitude and aptitude of the management.

During LDF period, power cut was avoided even by running the costly installations like Diesel Power Plants and procuring power from central pool at high cost running upto Rs.8 or Rs.9 for distribution at Rs.2 to Rs.3. The result, there was no power cut. The customers were satisfied. There was no need for UPS and Inverters. The accumulated loss of the KSEB too was brought down by proper management of generation, distribution and revenue collection.

Now with UDF in power, it is learnt that the Minister has ordered shutting down of Brahmapuram Diesel Plants (News item appread is print media) due to the high cost despite the tripping of Idukki generators due to fire accident. The result is daily power cuts for varying timeslots. This disruption in distribution will only aggravate the over all loss of KSEB rather than making it profitable as expected by the UDF leaders as they donot have a proper management strategy for generation, distribution and revenue collection. In addition, the customers are put to suffer. They will be compelled to procure UPS and such devises, resulting in additional cost for the customers, but at the same time distribution planning becoming impossible.

Thomas

.
 

2011, ജൂണ്‍ 24 8:54 രാവിലെ ന്, bijoy <bijoy....@gmail.com> എഴുതി:

[Joseph Thomas]

Yes, the issues pointed out by  Vijayan Raja too are very valid.

The PSU is not being evaluated properly.

Thomas

.

2011, ജൂണ്‍ 24 12:02 വൈകുന്നേരം ന്, Joseph Thomas <thoma...@gmail.com> എഴുതി:

[Dr.B.Ekbal]

In a well controlled societies based on socialist principles like China and Cuba also there are major instances of the failure and stagnation of public institutions. We have to learn from their experiences . Also it is to be conceded that the work culture existing in many of the public instituions are anti people and abysmal.This is because we still follow the colonial model of administration which pits people against the administration. The system of  files being handled by several clerks in offices was decided by the colonial rulers who did not take the native people into confidence and hence the system of checks and counter checks. We still follow this colonial model just to keep the number of posts and promotion avenues in tact.
All these are to be examined when we talk about the poor performance of the public sector.
Ekbal
 

2011/6/24 Joseph Thomas <thoma...@gmail.com>

[bijoy]

Below is an article tells how IIPM without even having recognized by Government of India cheating the middle class India. It is very relavant in this context of Privatising Education. Pls also note that, Caravan magazine and Google has been sued for publishing this article. Hence circulating it may cause some harm to us.
How Arindam Chaudhuri made a fortune off the aspirations—and insecurities—of India’s middle classes By SIDDHARTHA DEB Published :1 February 2011
A PHENOMENALLY WEALTHY INDIAN who excites hostility and suspicion is an unusual creature, a fish that has managed to muddy the waters it swims in. The glow of admiration lighting up the rich and the successful disperses before it reaches him, hinting that things have gone wrong somewhere. It suggests that beneath the sleek coating of luxury, deep under the sheen of power, there is a failure barely sensed by the man who owns that failure along with his expensive accoutrements. This was Arindam Chaudhuri’s situation when I first met him in 2007. He had achieved great wealth and prominence, partly by projecting an image of himself as wealthy and prominent. Yet somewhere along the way he had also created the opposite effect, which—in spite of his best efforts—had given him a reputation as a fraud, scamster and Johnny-come-lately. Once I became aware of Arindam Chaudhuri’s existence, I began to find him everywhere: in the magazines his media division published, flashing their bright colours and inane headlines from little newsstands made of bricks and plastic sheets; in buildings fronted by dark glass, behind which earnest young men imbibed Arindam’s ideas of leadership; and on the tiny screen during a flight from Delhi to Chicago, when the film I chose for viewing turned out to have been produced by him. It was a low-budget Bombay gangster film with a cast of unknown, modestly paid actors and actresses: was it an accident that the film was called Mithya? The word means falsehood, appearances, a lie—things I would have much opportunity to contemplate in my study of Arindam. Every newspaper I came across carried a full-page advertisement for Arindam’s private business school, the Indian Institute of Planning and Management (IIPM), with Arindam’s photograph displayed prominently. It was the face of the new India, in closeup. His hair was swept back in a ponytail, dark and gleaming against a pale, smooth face, his designer glasses accentuating his youthfulness. He wore a blue suit, and his teeth were exposed in the kind of bright white smile I associate with American businessmen and evangelists. But instead of looking directly at the reader, as businessmen and evangelists do to assure people of their trustworthiness, Arindam gazed off at a distant horizon, as if pondering some elusive goal. There were few details about the academic programme or admission requirements in these advertisements, but many small, inviting photographs of the Delhi campus: a swimming pool, a computer lab, a library, a snooker table, Indian men in suits, a blonde woman. A fireworks display of italics, exclamation marks and capital letters described the perks given to students: “free study tour to Europe etc. for twenty-one days,” “world placements,” “Free Laptops for all.” Stitching these disparate elements together was a slogan: “Dare to Think Beyond the IIMs”—referring to the elite, state-subsidised business schools, and managing to sound promising, admonishing and mysterious at the same time. The new India needed a new kind of university, and a new kind of attitude, and Arindam, said the ads, was the man who could teach you how to find it. "I 'VE SPOKEN TO THE BOSS about you,” Sutanu said. “He said, ‘Why does he want to meet me?’” Sutanu ran the media division of Arindam’s company from a basement office where there was no cellphone reception, and it took many calls and text messages to get in touch with him. When I finally reached him, he sounded affable enough, suggesting that we have lunch in south Delhi. We met at Flames, an “Asian Resto-Bar” in Greater Kailash-II with a forlorn statue of the Buddha tucked away in the corner. Sutanu was in his 40s, a dark man with a bushy moustache and glasses, his raffish 1960s air complemented by a bright blue shirt and a red tie patterned with elephants. He was accompanied by Rahul, a journalist who worked at one of the magazines published by Arindam. Although they couldn’t have been there long, their table held two packs of Navy Cut cigarettes, a partly empty bottle of Kingfisher, and a battered smartphone that thrummed insistently throughout our conversation. “The boss is a great man, and sure, his story is interesting,” Sutanu said. “The question is whether he’ll talk to you.” SAURABH DAS / AP PHOTO Chaudhuri poses with the stars of Faltu, the third film that he produced, at a press conference in 2006. Arindam Chaudhuri had started out in 1996 as the proprietor of a lone business school. Founded by Arindam’s father, it had been—Sutanu said dismissively—a small, run-of-the-mill place located on the outskirts of Delhi. But Arindam expanded it to nine branches in major Indian metros, and now he was going international. He had an institute in Dubai and had allied with a Belgian management school with campuses in Brussels and Antwerp. He was about to open an institute in London, and was planning another in an old factory building in Pennsylvania. And that was just the management institute. Arindam’s company, Planman, had a media division that included a newsweekly, The Sunday Indian—“perhaps the only magazine in the world with 13 editions”—and three business magazines. He also owned a software company, a consulting division that managed the “HR component of multinationals,” and a new outsourcing company, which claimed to produce the entire content of The Guardian online, as well as proofreading and copyediting the Daily Mail. “There’s also a film division, and he’s produced a major Bollywood blockbuster,” Sutanu said. “It was meant to be a blockbuster,” Rahul said quietly. “But it flopped.” “Yeah, yeah, no big deal,” Sutanu said. “He’s on other blockbuster projects. He’s a man of ideas. So sometimes they flop.” He lit a cigarette and waved it around, the rings on his hand flashing. “What he’s doing, he’s using intellectual capital to make his money. But people don’t get that and because he’s been badmouthed so much, he’s become suspicious. He’s been burned by the media. You know, cynical hacks they are. They make up stories that he’s a fraud. A Johnny-come-lately. Everyone asks, ‘Yaar, but where does all that money come from?’” There was a moment of silence as we contemplated this question. “They don’t ask these things of other businessmen,” Sutanu said. “That’s because when the mainstream media does these negative stories on him, just hatchet jobs, you know, they’re serving the interests of the big industrialists. The industrialists don’t like him because our magazines have done critical stories on them. The government doesn’t like him and harasses him all the time. They say, ‘You can’t use the word “Indian” in the name of your management school because we don’t recognise your school.’ They send us a letter every six months about this. Then, the elite types are after him. The Doon School, St Stephen’s, Indian Institute of Management people. There were these bloggers writing silly stuff about him, saying that the institute doesn’t give every student a laptop as promised in the advertisements. You want to know how he makes money? It’s simple. There are 2,000 students who pay seven lakhs each. The operating costs are low. You know how much teachers get paid in India. So the money gets spun off into other businesses.” We ate hot-and-sour soup and drank more beer, our conversation widening out to include our careers and lives, and the unforgiving city of Delhi. Rahul told us a story about covering the war in Iraq and being arrested by Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard while crossing over the border from Jordan. When it was time to depart, I felt reluctant to break up the drunken afternoon bonhomie but nevertheless asked, “When do I get to meet Arindam Chaudhuri?” “The good thing about the boss is that he’s a yes or no sort of person,” Sutanu said. “You’ll find out in a couple of days whether he wants to meet you.” A COUPLE OF DAYS stretched to a week. I kept pestering Sutanu with calls and text messages. Then it was done, an appointment made, and I entered the wonderland to meet Arindam Chaudhuri, the management guru, the media magnate, the business school entrepreneur, the film producer, the owner of IT and outsourcing companies, to which we should add his claims of being a noted economist and the author of two “all-time best sellers,” The Great Indian Dream and Count Your Chickens Before They Hatch. The drive from Delhi to IIPM’s main campus, which is located on the city’s outskirts in an area called Satbari, is a fairly quick one. First come the temples of Chattarpur, modern structures with crenellated, fluted walls, where memories of old Hindu architecture have been transformed into a simple idea of excess. A gargantuan statue of Hanuman stands with a mace on his shoulder, looking down dismissively at the traffic. The road is dusty, and the clusters of shops and houses soon give way to large stretches of land partitioned off for the very rich. A few boutique hotels crop up, looking empty, but the land is mostly colonised by the farmhouses of Delhi’s newly affluent. All I saw on my first drive were walls edged with broken glass, the occasional flash of green from a well-tended lawn, and a young peasant woman with a suitcase sitting in front of a farmhouse. The high-walled Delhi campus of IIPM squatted amid these hotels and farmhouses. Compared to the sprawling campuses of the IIMs, it is tiny—five acres instead of a hundred— and thus seems more like a miniature, model school than a real one. The gates were kept shut, and the campus appeared sleepy until just before Arindam’s arrival. Then the security guards hovered around the guardhouse, looking at their watches and fingering their walkie-talkies. The scruffy management students, who, in their odd assortment of blazers and flashy shirts, had the air of men just coming off an all-night wedding party, tried not to look as if they were loitering. The gates were hurriedly opened for Arindam’s metallic blue luxury car, a million-pound Bentley Continental, as it coasted down the driveway and parked in front of the building lobby. Arindam, dressed in blue, passed through a knot of sycophants and disappeared inside the building, leaving behind nothing but the frisson of his arrival and the Bentley gleaming in the fierce Delhi sun. The power and the glory! A million pounds! Custom-made in the mother country of England! A Bentley was the ultimate status symbol of the Indian rich, expensive and relatively uncommon. A business journalist had told me the probably apocryphal story that Arindam had ordered the special paint scraped off when his car arrived from England and then had it repainted to match the blue of one of his favourite shirts. The campus building was split along two levels. Most of the classrooms were on the basement floor, and were filled with the chatter of students, some of them dressed in suits to attend a class in “Executive Communications.” The ground floor contained a computer lab, a tiny library and some classrooms, but it was dominated by a boardroom in the center. On the other side of this was an open-plan office. The employees sitting in front of computers and phones were mostly in their 20s and 30s, and although they looked busy, they didn’t give the impression that they were running a global megabusiness. Arindam referred to them as “managerial staff,” but when I introduced myself to one of the managers, a balding, middle-aged man, he seemed to be making cold calls, dialing numbers from a database and asking people if they were interested in taking management seminars. Up close, Arindam was a few shades darker than his picture, though with the same glossy hair tied back in a ponytail. Beneath his blue pinstriped suit he wore a white shirt open to show his smooth, hairless chest. There were rings on his fingers and bright sparkling stones on the frame of his designer glasses, silver cufflinks on his sleeves and argyle socks and shiny pump shoes on his feet. All these harsh, glittering surfaces were accompanied by a youthfulness that softened the effect. He was in his late 30s, a year younger than me, with a boyish air that took over when he became sarcastic about his critics and rivals and said, “Wow!” Our first meeting took place in the boardroom. There were about 50 chairs in the room, most of them pushed to one side, and Arindam and I sat at one end of a long table. The air-conditioning was fierce, and after a couple of hours, I began to feel cold in my summer garb of short-sleeved shirt and cotton trousers, but Arindam went on speaking, slowing slightly only when a worker brought us chicken sandwiches and cups of Coca-Cola. Like most of the new rich in India, Arindam hadn’t started from scratch. He inherited the management institute from his father, Malay Chaudhuri, who began it in 1973. But the original institute had hardly been cutting-edge. The admissions and administrative office in a house in south Delhi doubled as a family bedroom at night. As for Gurgaon, where the institute’s students convened, “it was the least developed place on earth.” I understood why Arindam wanted to emphasise this: before the office parks, condominiums and shopping malls sprouted, Gurgaon was little more than an assortment of unpaved roads meandering through fields of wheat, with electricity and phone lines in short supply, a no-man’s-land between Delhi and the vast rural hinterland of India, where a management school must have seemed like just one more of those strange, minor cults that crop up in this country from time to time. COURTESY IIPM The Indian Institute of Planning and Management campus. Arindam wanted to go to college in the United States, but his father convinced him to enroll in the family institute. Before he had even graduated, he was teaching a course. “I took advantage of being the director’s son,” Arindam said, laughing but making it clear that he had been perfectly qualified to teach his fellow students. Three years after finishing his degree, he started a recruitment consulting firm. By getting into a position where he was hiring people for other companies, he intended to find jobs for IIPM graduates. The placement of IIPM graduates was a pressing problem at the time, and although Arindam would disagree, it remains a problem now, even after all his success. During those early years, Arindam’s ambitions were disproportionate to his abilities and experience. He started a magazine and a research division, but the magazine closed quickly and his recruitment firm failed to take off. He had nothing to sell except himself. “In 1997, I announced my first leadership workshop for senior executives under the banner, ‘Become a great leader.’ My thinking was that if they can take leadership lessons from me, they will give me business. So they came, not realising from the photos how young this guy was. And then it didn’t matter, because that first workshop was a rocking interactive super-success.” His voice rose, his chin lifted with pride, and he looked me in the eyes. “That is how we built a brand.” A T THE IIPM CAMPUS, I had picked up a brochure that featured a two-page spread of the articles that appeared when Arindam first made his mark as “The Guru with a Ponytail.” Indistinguishable from press releases, these articles reproduced Arindam’s thoughts on everything from “how not to create more Osamas” (the key, apparently, was “wholesome education”) to the negative influence of “the MBA mafia,” as he called the IIMs. But if Arindam was “Guru Cool” in these articles, he was also combative, attacking the IIMs and pushing his “Theory i Management” (the lower case “i” stood for “India”) as part of a compassionate form of capitalism that took into account the country’s overwhelming poverty. He talked about “trickle-down economics” and “survival of the weakest,” and although it was never clear from these extracts how such concepts could be put into practice, they showed Arindam’s desire to project himself as a thinker as well as an entrepreneur. In June 2005, nearly a decade after his first failed attempt to start a magazine, Arindam began publishing a magazine called Business & Economy. This led to a newsweekly, The Sunday Indian, and a marketing magazine called 4Ps. Each was printed on glossy paper, heavy on graphics and syndicated material, thin on original content and, to judge by the misspelled names on Sunday Indian covers (“Pamela Andreson”), short of copy editors. In 2007, Arindam began bringing out an Indian edition of PC Magazine under licence from Ziff Davis Media. At the same time, he began discussions with Foreign Affairs in New York to bring out an Indian edition, and when that fell through, he began negotiations with Foreign Policy in Washington DC. “In the school, I have an audience of only 6,000 students,” he had said to me (the actual enrolment, according to Sutanu, was closer to 2,000). “Now, every week, I reach one lakh people.” The business schools also produced “academic” journals with names like Indian Economy Review, Human Factor, Strategical Innovators, and Need the Dough? But the most significant arena of influence seemed to be his film business, which had turned Arindam into something approaching a household name. In 2002, Arindam decided to enter the movie business. A few days before his first Bollywood film was to be shot, he told me, the director walked out on him. Arindam, naturally, decided to direct the film himself. He admitted to me that he had not been entirely qualified. “But I hope, some day, when I have more experience, to make a truly revolutionary film.” With a plot lifted from the American comic strip Archie, that first film flopped commercially and was panned by critics. Even the DVD stores in the Palika Bazaar underground market were unable to procure a copy for me. But Arindam learnt quickly. Before long, he had developed a careful corporate approach to filmmaking that differed from the older Bollywood model of massive budgets, dubious financing (often from underworld sources) and a hit-or-miss approach to success. Arindam’s films, by contrast, focused on the bottom line, keeping the budget small and aiming not for huge audiences but for as much presence as possible in the multiplexes proliferating in the new India, places where a number of films ran simultaneously in theatres far smaller than their predecessors. He also sought out prestige; some more recent ventures of Arindam Chaudhuri Productions have been directed by the Kolkata-based Rituparno Ghosh, who has something of a reputation as an auteur. Within IIPM, meanwhile, Arindam was surrounded by fierce loyalists. Former students and classmates became employees and continued to refer to him in the nice, middle-class Indian way as “Arindam sir.” They were so enamored of Arindam that when I visited him at the IIPM campus or stood too near him, some of them displayed a barely disguised hostility. Upset at the proximity I had stolen, sensing perhaps that I did not entirely share their faith in their guru, they seethed with the desire to protect Arindam from me. Almost all of Planman’s employees—90 percent, according to Arindam—were former IIPM students. The same was true of the faculty members, who tended to morph from students to teachers as soon as they had finished their courses. Rohit Manchanda, a short, dapper man who would have been shorter without the unusually high heels of his shoes, taught advertising and headed Planman’s small advertising agency. The dean of IIPM, Prasoon Majumdar, was also economics editor for the magazines published by Planman. Other employees were family members as well as former students. Arindam’s wife, Rajita, a petite woman who drove a Porsche, had been a student of Arindam’s before they got married and now taught Executive Communications. Arindam’s sister’s husband, a young man with shoulder-length hair and a shirt left unbuttoned to reveal a generous expanse of chest, was a former student, a faculty member and the features and lifestyle editor of the magazines. When Arindam met with his division heads, all of whom had been his classmates at IIPM, they joked and chatted for an hour before turning to their work. They seemed to derive immense pleasure from showing me just how closeknit they were. “We’re like the mafia,” Arindam said. It was a comparison that had occurred to me, although other metaphors also came to mind. They were like the mafia in their suspicion of outsiders, like a dot-com in their emphasis on collegiality, and like a cult in their belief in a mythology made up of Arindam’s personal history, management theories and the strange ways in which the company functioned. But perhaps this is simply another way of saying that they were a business, operating through an unquestioning adherence to what their owner said and believed. During our first meeting, Arindam explained to me in a five-hour monologue that his business was built around the “brand” of Planman Consulting, the group that includes the business school and numerous other ventures from media and motion pictures to a charitable foundation. To an outsider, however, the brand is Arindam. Even if his role is disguised under the description of “honorary dean” of IIPM, the image of the business school and Planman is in most ways the image of Arindam Chaudhuri. With his quirky combination of energy, flamboyance, ambition, canniness and even vulnerability, he is the promise of the age, his traits gathering force from their expression at a time in India when all that is solid melts into air. O NE EVENING IN SEPTEMBER, I went to the Grand Ballroom auditorium of the Park Royal Hotel to hear Arindam speak. I had heard him address a crowd before, but that had been a familiar audience, made up of graduating IIPM students herded into a hotel auditorium near the Satbari campus. The students seemed awestruck but restless, their attention wandering whenever the talk veered away from the question of their future to trickle-down theory; no doubt they were more concerned with trickle-up. Arindam hectored them a little, and he had been worried enough about this to send me a text message a few hours later, asking me to “discount some of the harsh words i said to students.” The event at the Grand Ballroom was different. It was the final performance of a daylong “leadership” seminar for which people had paid 4,000 rupees, the previous speakers having included Arindam’s wife and several IIPM professors. Over 100 people, quite a few women among them, sat under the chandeliers as a laptop was set up on stage. They looked like aspirational rather than polished corporate types, the men with red sacred threads around their wrists, the women in saris and salwar kameezes, a gathering of middle-class, middle-rung, white-collar individuals whose interest in leadership skills had a dutiful air. After a number of children—it was unclear to whom they belonged— clustered around Arindam to get copies of the all-time best-seller Count Your Chickens Before They Hatch signed, Arindam took the stage. He wore a shiny black corduroy suit, the jacket displaying embroidery on the shoulders, and loafers that appeared to be made of snake skin. COURTESY ARINDAMCHAUDHURI.COM Chaudhuri and his wife, Rajita, a former student of his at IIPM who now teaches at the school. Arindam wasn’t a natural speaker. In prolonged one-to-one conversations, he had the tendency to look away, not meeting the listener’s gaze. This was less of a problem in a public gathering, but he also had a high-pitched voice and a tendency to fumble his lines. He started by asking people what leadership meant to them. As his listeners spewed out answers, using phrases (“dream believer,” “reach the objective,” “making decisions,” “simplifying things”) that seemed to have been lifted from some ur-text of self-help and management, they seemed both eager and slightly combative, as if not entirely convinced of his ability to teach them about leadership. “Here’s the great Arindam Chaudhuri,” a man next to me muttered, using great in the Indian way to mean someone fraudulent. Arindam seemed aware of the hostility: his responses were hesitant, and his English was uncertain and pronouncedly Delhi middle-class in its inflection. As the session went on, however, it became evident that these qualities weren’t drawbacks, not among the people he was addressing. The mannerisms gave Arindam an everyday appeal, and it was the juxtaposition of this homeliness with his wealth, success and glamour that created a hold over the leadership aspirants in the audience. By themselves, the Bentley Continental, the ponytail and the designer glasses, or the familiar way Arindam had of dropping names like Harvard, McKinsey and Lee Iacocca would have made him too remote. But the glamour was irresistible when combined with his middlebrow manner. He was one of the audience, even if he represented the final stage in the evolution of the petit bourgeoisie. Arindam was well aware of this. If he wasn’t a natural speaker, he nevertheless had a performer’s ability to gather strength the longer he stayed on stage. Thirty minutes into the leadership session, as I began to be drawn into his patter, I realised that Arindam was telling the Indian middle class a story about itself, offering his audience an answer to the question of who they were. “I am trying to be a mirror,” he said, a comment remarkably attuned to the way he represented a larger-than-life version of the people he addressed. His listeners had come to the session with a rough sense of who they were supposed to be. They received instruction about this from the culture at large, especially the proliferating media outlets that obsessed about them as members of “India Shining.” The Western media characterised them in a similar manner. Arindam’s audience knew that as middleclass, well-to-do Indians, they were supposed to be modern and managerial. They were a people devoted to efficiency, given to the making of money and the enjoyment of consumer goods while retaining a touch of traditional spice, which meant, for instance, that they used the internet to arrange marriages along caste and class lines. Still, they needed further affirmation of their role, and this is what Arindam provided, mixing that cocktail of spurious tradition and manufactured modernity, while adding his signature flavor to the combination. He told his listeners stories about traveling to America, Europe and Japan—the ultramodern places that middle-class India had been emulating and suddenly found within its reach. Yet few people in the audience had been to these countries, and if they did go, they would not encounter them with any degree of intimacy. The very places they were most drawn to—the business centres, the shopping plazas, the franchise restaurants— would remain slightly unreal in spite of the photographs taken, the souvenirs bought, the money spent. In the Grand Ballroom, though, these places were conjured anecdotally and made to resemble the India the audience knew, or thought they knew. So there were jokes about national stereotypes, comments about the different strengths and weaknesses of the Americans, the Japanese, the French and the Indians. There were no individuals in these stories, only nameless businessmen met by Arindam in anonymous boardrooms, and the world itself seemed no more than a string of Grand Ballrooms, each dominated by a different ethnic group of capitalists. After Arindam had given the audience this touch of the foreign, he returned to more familiar territory. He made fun of regional Indian identities, something done rather easily among a largely Hindi-speaking Delhi crowd that tends to see itself as national. He pandered to their middleclass prejudices, attacking the government as inefficient and corrupt, and then satisfied their nationalism by speaking of the Indian Army as the most efficient and disciplined wing of the state. As Arindam became more comfortable, he slipped into Hindi, segueing into the story of the Mahabharata. This was his way of approaching the “Theory i Management” concept of leadership. Like many contemporary Hindus who have tried to cut from their sprawling beliefs the hard lines of a modern faith, Arindam wasn’t interested in the complex ethical questions or sophisticated narrative strategies of the Mahabharata. Instead, his focus was on the Bhagavad Gita. The Gita emerged as a foundational religious text only in modern times, when Hindu revivalists reeling from colonialism sought something more definitive than the amorphous set of practices and ideas that had characterised Vedic religion until then. Then in the early 1990s, the Gita again received new life, when the Indian elites simultaneously embraced free-market economics and a hardened Hindu chauvinism. They discovered in the Gita an old, civilisational argument for maintaining the contemporary hierarchies of caste, wealth and power, while in the story of Arjuna throwing aside his moral dilemmas and entering wholeheartedly into the slaughter of the battlefield, they read an endorsement of a militant, aggressive Hinduism that did not shrink from violence, especially against minorities and the poor. Given this appeal of the Gita among the Indian middle and upper classes, Arindam’s use of it was a canny choice. He was extending into the realm of management theory a story that his audience would be both familiar with and respectful toward, so that to challenge Arindam’s ideas would be tantamount to questioning a sacred text. Arindam began the elaboration of his Indian theories, naturally enough, by pulling a red Gita out of a pocket. A Planman photographer ran forward to capture the moment and, for the first time in the session, the audience began scribbling notes. Arindam turned to the laptop as if he were going to boot Krishna into existence, but the laptop refused to comply. As one, two, three, and then four people hurried to help, Arindam gave up, turned away from the computer, and faced the audience. He began a performance that was part television soap and part stand-up comedy, hamming the roles of housewives, husbands returned from work, fathers and babies, management trainees and their bosses. The audience burst into laughter as each little cameo played out. The laptop was finally made to work, and on the screen appeared a matrix of character types Arindam had extracted from the Hindu scriptures. There was the tamas or pleasure-loving type, who could be led only by domination; the rajas, ambitious but greedy, who needed a combination of encouragement and control; and the sattva, who was brilliant and talented and needed to be left alone. “Leadership is about changing your colors like a chameleon to suit the situation,” Arindam said, citing Krishna, the androgynous, slippery god, as the role model for the ideal CEO. Laborers and blue-collar workers were tamasic, young management trainees rajasic, and highly skilled professionals like research scientists were sattvic. He had reinvented the caste system in two hours. Arindam finished to all-round applause, and as he came down the stage, he was mobbed by his listeners. I went outside to the passageway, where tamasic workers in overalls were installing gates decorated with marigold garlands for a wedding reception that would take place later in the evening. I sat down beside a disheveled-looking man in a suit who was holding a plastic shopping bag that said “More Word Power.” He had attended the entire day’s session, and when I asked him what he thought, he replied that it had been interesting. He had enjoyed some of the earlier speakers, especially A Sandip, the editor-in-chief of all of Planman’s magazines. “And what did you think of Arindam Chaudhuri’s talk?” I asked. “Rubbish. It made no sense at all,” he said. He fell silent, avoiding my gaze, and when he looked at me again, it was with embarrassment. “You are a friend? You work for the company?” He cheered up as soon as he found out that I was writing about Arindam. “The man is a fraud,” he said, “but a very successful one.” He was a small publisher who churned out language education books. He would be publishing a management book during the World Book Fair in Delhi in February, a work written by a Canadian living in Beijing. “It is mostly China-focused. You are aware that there is great interest in China these days? So I wanted to have an event like this for the Canadian during the book fair, and I decided to come and see this. You are writing about Arindam Chaudhuri?” He handed me his business card, leaned toward me, chuckled and said, “You must find out how he makes his money.” I knew by now how Arindam made his money, or much of it—through IIPM’s tuition and (as in his movie business) by keeping costs low. But what was mysterious was the air of disrepute that clung to him; his wealth, oddly, had not bought him a free pass. People like this publisher seemed to see in Arindam a more successful version of themselves: far enough away to be envied, yet close enough to be resented. A RINDAM HAD TOLD ME A STORY about his childhood that involved a strike at his father’s management school in Gurgaon. He described the strikers as “rowdy elements,” students who had failed their courses and objected to the academic demands made of them. The strike climaxed in a telephone call late one night to his father. An anonymous man, speaking hurriedly, said that a student had been stabbed on campus. Arindam’s father took a taxi, accompanied by one of his employees, a canteen manager. Two hundred metres from the campus, he saw a group of students armed with iron rods waiting for him. He told the driver to turn around, went home and took his family to a hotel. The stabbing had been a ruse to bring him to the campus, and even the canteen manager had been part of the conspiracy. The strike continued for four months. When the Chaudhuri family moved back home from the hotel, they were greeted by protesting students. “They were carrying horrible placards calling us thieves and murderers,” Arindam said. “The neighbours, who talked to the students, began calling my father ‘Bada Chor’ [Big Thief] and me ‘Chota Chor’ [Little Thief].” But what was most distressing, Arindam said, was that they eventually discovered that members of the faculty were behind the strike. “All the people we trusted were involved, and I decided that I would not let this happen ever again.” COURTESY ARINDAMCHAUDHURI.COM Chaudhuri launched The Sunday Indian (“perhaps the only magazine in the world with 13 editions”) in 2006. It was a touching story, a young boy seeing his father threatened by enemies and deciding to take them on. “My father named me Arindam,” the grown-up man in front of me said. “That means ‘destroyer of enemies.’” Since Arindam had been named a decade and a half before the incident, his father must have possessed either a remarkable ability to foresee the future or a pronounced sense of enemies lurking everywhere. But the rowdy students, the traitorous canteen manager, and the conspiratorial faculty members had no discernible motives in the story Arindam told me. They were there to provide Arindam a motive for his success, and to demonstrate that people couldn’t be trusted. It was as if Arindam were explaining to me why his business was so close-knit; why outsiders were viewed with suspicion; why his public relations person had demanded, unsuccessfully, that I show him everything I wrote; and why this same person refused to respond to the most elementary queries about the company’s business practices and revenues. There was more than the usual organisational secrecy at work here. Instead, a fundamental vision of life was involved, and underneath all the expansive theories of management, below all the chatter of a world brought closer by corporate globalisation, there was, ultimately, only this Manichean idea of people divided into the loyal and the disloyal, of Arindam at odds with the world. Arindam started, he said, by competing for students with the “mafia” of management education in the country, but it was when he started a media division that his troubles began. “The elite now saw that I was challenging them directly, in the realm of ideas.” He was no longer operating merely within the confines of business schools; he was breaking down “the establishment hold on thought.” Arindam’s voice dropped low. “That is the reason why I am hated by a lot of people.” He was referring in part to a harsh piece about IIPM by an alumna of the elite IIM Ahmedabad business school. “It was the world’s most stupid article,” Arindam said, adding that he couldn’t remember the name of the journalist. But the ensuing public imbroglio (“we had no clue what is the blogger world,” he told me ruefully) put a dent in Arindam’s reputation, even as it solidified, at least for a while, his tenuous alliance with his own student body. The woman whose name Arindam couldn’t remember was Rashmi Bansal. Responding in part to an especially frenzied media blitz from IIPM (it was reported that they’d spent more than 1 million dollars to advertise in a number of prominent Indian newspapers and magazines), she wrote an article, ‘The Truth Behind IIPM’s Tall Claims,’ for JAM (Just Another Magazine—“India’s Most Loved Youth Magazine Since 1995”), a small periodical that she published herself for a young, English-speaking audience. Bansal’s article claimed that IIPM’s advertising was misleading: only the Delhi campus had the facilities prominently displayed in the pictures, from swimming pool to library, while campuses in other cities were housed in crowded office buildings; the scholars from institutions like Wharton, New York University, Columbia and Harvard claimed as “visiting faculty” were people who had merely passed through, delivering one-time lectures; the degrees IIPM awarded were not recognised by the Indian government; the company fudged data from media surveys to claim top rankings; and, contrary to its claims, it did not place its graduates in multinational corporations like McKinsey. The story was linked to by a young blogger and IBM salesman in Mumbai named Gaurav Sabnis. His post, ‘The fraud that is IIPM,’ was vicious. IIPM responded immediately, and clumsily: it wrote to Sabnis, threatening to sue him, and obtained a court injunction against the original article in JAM, which was temporarily taken offline. It also contacted IBM, from whom it purchases the free laptops that it gives to students, asking them to pressure Sabnis to take down his post, and threatening that the students would march to the IBM headquarters in Delhi and burn their laptops in protest. IBM claimed that it did not pressure Sabnis, but Sabnis resigned anyway to spare his employer’s embarrassment. This—in addition to abusive comments left by IIPM students on various blogs where criticisms of IIPM appeared— inflamed an already excited blogosphere, which decided that Sabnis was a martyr to truth and freedom of expression. They set about challenging IIPM’s claims with ever greater energy, discovering, among other things, that its “campuses” in Antwerp and Brussels consisted of a loose affiliation with a rather questionable institute not recognised by the Belgian government. Soon the mainstream press took notice. The large weekly Businessworld—for which Bansal was a columnist—reported that it had accepted Arindam’s request to look into the case for and against his institute, but was fobbed off with generalities about IIPM and its “enemies” when it asked for specific information. The resulting article, ‘When the Chickens Come Home…,’ while more moderate in tone than Bansal’s, was skeptical of IIPM’s claims, especially regarding the placement of graduates and the consultancy work done by Planman. Most of the multinational corporations named in IIPM advertisements, when contacted by Businessworld, said that they had few if any dealings with Arindam’s organisation. It was unquestionably a public relations disaster for Arindam, though his students stood by him. If anything, their commitment to the school was redoubled. In sifting through the long, labyrinthine posts on the anti-Arindam blogs, it is hard to avoid the impression of a virtual world being torn apart by virtual tools. Most often, the claims made by IIPM and Planman depended on a careful selection of pictures, comments and data, and the creation of numerous websites. This approach had worked well because it was part of a larger narrative of corporate success in India. Most mainstream journalists were too lazy and untrained, and too enamored of wealth, to subject these claims to the most basic scrutiny. But this was not true of the bloggers, who relentlessly probed the web, emailed people listed by IIPM as contacts, checked IP addresses, and conducted background research. The most interesting investigation the bloggers carried out involved IIPM’s history, focusing not merely on Arindam and his faculty but also on Arindam’s father, the man who had started it all by beginning a management school in Gurgaon. In F Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel of Jazz Age America, The Great Gatsby, there are two questions asked of the mysteriously wealthy title character: Where did he get his money? And, where did he go to college? These are necessary questions in a time when money is being made too quickly and in too many ways for established social networks to keep track. In the gap between old networks and rapidly changing times lies opportunity. Gatsby hopes to make good the promise of capitalism that ambitious people can have second acts to their lives. So when he tells people in a voice laced with British affectations (“old sport”) that he went to Oxford, he is trying to transform his new money, procured by questionable means, into old money. And because assuming the persona of a blue-blooded heir leads naturally to questions about why he hasn’t attended one of the Ivy League colleges where wealthy young men like Tom Buchanan are sent for a final polish, he adopts Oxford as his alma mater, a place so far away that it is difficult for people to check up on him. Arindam, unlike Gatsby, wasn’t a working-class upstart from the interior of the country. He was a middle-class man who grew up in Delhi, alert from the very beginning to the opportunities provided by the capital city, and who thus demonstrates that the mobility provided by the new India is significantly more limited than that of America at the turn of the 20th century. As for the degrees claimed by Arindam, they came not from some exotic overseas institution but from the business school set up by his father. The question of pedigree, the bloggers realised, could be transferred back one generation to Arindam’s father, “Doctor” Malay Chaudhuri, and his claim to have a doctorate from the Berlin School of Economics. The bloggers discovered that it was hard to pinpoint any such school with certainty. Dr. Chaudhuri had once contested elections to the Indian Parliament—he received so few votes that he lost his deposit—and in his application to the Election Commission, he credited his doctorate to an institute in the other Berlin, in the former East Germany. What records could one possibly locate when the country itself no longer existed? The bloggers concluded that there had never, in all likelihood, been a Berlin School of Economics, and that Malay Chaudhuri’s doctorate was simply the first of many fictitious degrees handed out by the Chaudhuri clan. I COULD SEE THE RATIONALE of the bloggers, just as I saw how the Delhi publisher’s question about how Arindam made his money was important. In spite of the friendliness with which Arindam treated me, he was always on his guard. My questions about revenues and the size of the company continued to go unanswered, which seemed even more interesting when I discovered that the Indian tax authorities were investigating the company. Although it spent roughly 8 million dollars on advertising in 2006, it paid no income tax that year or the previous. There was also the company’s social responsibility campaign, directed through its charitable Great Indian Dream Foundation. Arindam claimed that the foundation was building schools in slums and villages, setting up a hospital in a rural area of West Bengal, and giving “experimental” seeds to farmers. “We will have 52 schools in seven metros by the end of the year. Sixty thousand villages will be covered in the future. Eventually, I hope to fulfill my father’s dream of doing something for the downtrodden in Africa.” Within the glittering capitalist lived a closet radical, someone who admired Ché Guevara so much that he had named his only son Ché. But I found it impossible to verify any of these claims, and Arindam’s promise to take me to a school for the poor in a Delhi slum never materialised. Other things remained beyond my scrutiny. I realised I had met Arindam only in hotels and at the main IIPM campus in Satbari, where he spoke, in expansive terms, of expanding to America. “Let Harvard fume, ‘We are 200 years old,’” Arindam had said, lopping two centuries off Harvard’s past. “Eventually they will recognise how good we are.” It was astonishing, this equation of America, through Harvard, with the old, while the India he represented was new, young and modern. And perhaps he was right. His institute was a fluid, virtual business school of the future, one that had done away with the arduous task of institution building. Arindam had first moved the school from Gurgaon to the Qutab Institutional Area, on the southern fringe of Delhi, where it occupied a leased building that finally ran afoul of the city’s zoning laws. Now they were operating from Satbari, somewhere between Gurgaon and Qutab, but even this building, its bright colors and abstract designs done to Arindam’s specifications, its small gym and swimming pool throwing out a challenge to the well-funded IIMs, might not be the final stop. It was a leased space, and Arindam told me that negotiations were already in progress to set the campus up somewhere else. If the school was mobile, Arindam was even more so. After our meeting at the campus, I had wanted to meet him in his office. “I don’t really operate from a fixed space,” he said. “I am so much on the move.” One day in September, after he’d missed an appointment with me, he sent me a text message at 7 am. “Good morning!” it said. “Totally totally forgot that day. However in the airport right now. And free. Can call. Do let me know if you ve woken up! Sorry about this early morning missive!” He was going on a long business trip to Toronto and London, and I called him back hurriedly, trying not to sound sleepy. He would be attending the Toronto Film Festival, where one of his films, the Rituparno Ghosh directed The Last Lear, was being screened. At London, he would be joined on the plane by the stars of his film, Preity Zinta and Amitabh Bachchan. After the festival, Arindam would stop by his London office for a couple of days. I remembered an article in the Financial Times that said he would be opening his London institute at Chancery Lane, and so I asked him, “Where exactly is your London office?” There was a pause. “That’s a good question,” he said. “Where is it?” He sounded boyish and vulnerable, and I found myself wanting to respond kindly, as if speaking to a child I didn’t want to embarrass about an insignificant lie. “It’s hard for you to keep track of all the offices you have,” I suggested. “That’s right,” he replied, seemingly relieved that I had offered him a way out. One day at the Satbari campus I asked Arindam about the criticism that his institute didn’t really offer careers. It was undoubtedly successful in attracting students, but the students, on graduating, seemed to end up in the very organisation that had given them their expensive degrees, teaching at the institute and working for Planman. Arindam told me that his organisation was a “family,” one that offered a continuation of the camaraderie experienced by the students. He also pointed out that, unlike the IIMs, he was not using public money to produce a small number of MBAs who then received extravagant salaries from multinational corporations. “They’ve cornered 100-acre campuses in India. The six IIMs, taken together, teach 1,000 students. And because they have so few students, the average pay package [for graduates] is eight to nine lakhs. That is aura! Wow!” He was right in pointing out how higher education for the Indian elite, from the engineering colleges to the IIM business schools, was funded by the state, producing technocrats and corporate executives who then went on to attack the state for being inefficient and wasteful. “Every American president should start by thanking the Indian taxpayer,” he said, noting that US multinationals benefited most from the training given to Indian Institute of Technology and IIM graduates. By contrast, he had privatised management education, applying to it the genuine rules of the marketplace. His graduates might get smaller starting salaries. They might be working, he said sarcastically, for distinctly unglamorous companies like ‘Raju Underwear’ and ‘Relaxo Hawaii Chappals.’ But they were not coasting on the taxpayer’s money. He was training people who would work in Indian organisations that needed their skills. “Our placements are improving. Foreign companies are also coming,” he added defensively. The bulk of IIPM students still ended up working for Arindam. It was hard to find out how much they were paid, but I had a rough idea because Arindam had, in a different context, divided his organisation’s salary structure into three groups: those making up to 25,000 rupees a month; up to 75,000 rupees a month; and more than 75,000 rupees a month. It seemed reasonable to assume that a starting IIPM graduate fell into the first category; at 6,000 dollars a year, he or she earned a third of what an IIM graduate did, which doesn’t seem bad. On the other hand, this is only twice what a call centre worker with a basic—and cheap— college degree can earn, even if managerial work offers better hours and prospects for advancement. The problem with Arindam’s approach lay deeper than the salaries his graduates made. Even in the world of closed Indian companies, Arindam’s organisation is unusual. It is not publicly traded, and was incorporated only very recently. The success and failure of IIPM students depends largely upon what happens to Planman, and what happens to Planman depends on what happens to Arindam. As for what happens to Arindam, that depends on whether the students keep coming. If the business school produces the greater part of the company’s revenues and employs most of the graduating students, this model can keep functioning only as long as a growing body of students remains willing to put up substantial sums of money for their degrees. COURTESY ARINDAMCHAUDHURI.COM Chaudhuri launched The Sunday Indian (“perhaps the only magazine in the world with 13 editions”) in 2006. Although the bloggers were right about many things, they seemed unable to comprehend that Arindam wasn’t so much a rogue management guru as a particularly blatant, though uncredentialed, manifestation of standard management principles. Arindam tended to invoke the elite IIM mafia as a way to evade questions, but it was true that the initial criticism had been levelled by Bansal, an IIM Ahmedabad graduate, and then picked up by Sabnis, who studied at IIM Lucknow. It was equally true that the bloggers were remarkable snobs. Alongside more substantive criticism of IIPM and Planman, they posted many comments about the way Arindam and his acolytes dressed and spoke, with an element of distaste and surprise that such pretenders could claim to belong to the corporate world from which most of the bloggers came. None of the bloggers seemed willing to consider that their cherished corporate practices would necessarily spawn imitators. IIPM has the same relationship to IIM as knockoff goods do to branded products; there is always a market for the knockoff version among the aspirational crowd. In other ways too, the cult of Arindam—the bloggers were puzzled by the vehemence with which IIPM students, the people apparently being defrauded, defended him—is only part of the larger cult that is contemporary India. Arindam’s management factory produces something less tangible, but more resonant than durables or consumer products. It takes people who have a fair bit of money but little cultural or intellectual capital and promises to turn them into fully fledged partners in the corporate globalised world. The students at IIPM are not from impoverished backgrounds. They can’t be because the courses are expensive. Many come from provincial towns, from small-business families that have accumulated wealth and now feel the need to upgrade themselves so they can compete in the realm of globalisation. Arindam gives youth from these backgrounds a chance to tap at IBM laptops, wear shiny suits and polished shoes, and go on foreign trips to Geneva or New York. All this involves a considerable degree of play-acting, and the students spend the most impressionable years of their lives in what is in essence a toy management school—mini golf course, mini gym, mini library. But play-acting is what the Indian middle and upper classes are doing anyway, wandering about the malls checking out the products purveyed by more established, easeful play-actors like Tommy Hilfiger and Louis Vuitton. A RINDAM'S FORTUNE, ultimately, was built on the aspiration and ressentiment of the Indian petite bourgeoisie. Without the aspirers emulating, admiring, and parting with their cash, moguls like Arindam would not exist. He had made a business out of their aspirations, calibrating the brashness and insecurity that had come to them on the wings of the market economy and its political partner, right-wing Hinduism. Arindam understood well how these aspirers had been given a language of assertion by the times in which they lived, and how they had also been handed a vocabulary of rage that is quite disproportionate to their perceived provocations. It is one of the triumphs of our age that aspirers can be made to feel both empowered and excluded; all over the world, one sees a new lumpenbourgeoisie quick to express a sense of victimisation, voicing their anger about being excluded from the elite while remaining callously indifferent to the truly impoverished. I had begun feeling some of this aspiration myself. One afternoon, I ate lunch with a former IIPM student who was one of Arindam’s prized employees. His name was Siddharth Nambiar. Wearing a suit and designer sunglasses, his head shaven, he appeared in front of me with long strides, car keys dangling from his right hand. He was late because he had rammed his car into the back of a bus, but he was unfazed by this “fender bender,” as he put it. We met at a shopping plaza just across the street from where I lived at the time, an odd mix of multinational franchises, rundown shops and a multiplex that often seemed to be showing one or the other of Arindam’s films. Nambiar led me up the stairs to an Italian restaurant called Azzurro. It was quite empty: the call centre workers preferred the kathi roll stand around the corner or the TGIF outlet across the square and it was too early for Western expats and upper-class Indians. The waitstaff knew Nambiar, as did the woman who ran the restaurant. He took off his sunglasses, ordered with a flourish, and began telling me about his career with Planman. He had been a student at IIPM Delhi, joined the company upon graduating, and had soon taken charge of the media division. He was 23 years old. Arindam had put considerable thought into sending Nambiar to meet me. If his primary business was churning out management graduates, he had sent me his finest product, glistening and confident, someone who could compete effortlessly with the MBAs from IIM. Nambiar’s shaven head shone in the bright afternoon light as he spoke about how he had negotiated with Foreign Affairs about publishing an Indian edition (although the effort was unsuccessful, he impressed Foreign Affairs with his presentation, according to a friend of mine who worked there). He had travelled around the world with Arindam, and in a few weeks he would be leaving for Oxford, where he would earn an MBA. When he returned, he expected to work at Planman again. I asked about Arindam’s conspicuous consumption, and he was delighted to give me the details. “The car?” he said. “It’s a Bentley Continental four-door. Actually, he got it because of me. We were in London, near Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and I saw a Bentley parked outside this restaurant where I was having lunch with friends. I had one of them take a picture of me leaning on the hood of the Bentley with a glass of champagne in my hand.” He laughed, waiting for the image to be fully processed in my brain. “It looked so cool, you know? Then, I went to see Arindam at the Ritz, where he was staying. I was showing someone else the picture on my laptop, and he grabbed the laptop from me, looked at the picture, and said, ‘What kind of car is that? I’m going to get one.’” I asked him if he could describe Arindam’s Delhi office for me. “Let me think,” he said. “I’d say it has a nightclub in the daytime look.” We laughed at this. Nambiar’s laughter had a doubleness to it—it conveyed the knowledge that he himself was too sophisticated to make such a mistake but also revealed his admiration for a man who had the money to flaunt his taste, however questionable. He described the long, curved, red leather couch, the shelves filled with management books and magazines. An anteroom contained a treadmill, a television, and a pullout sofa where Arindam’s son Ché sometimes slept in the afternoon. The office floor had blue granite tiling, and the building’s exterior was of tinted blue glass. From the windows of Arindam’s office, Nambiar said, it was possible to see the Ernst & Young building. What gave Nambiar’s description a touch of virtual reality was the fact that Arindam’s Delhi office no longer existed. It had been closed down for violating zoning laws and survived only in the images that Nambiar so expertly created. When I asked for the bill, the waiter said that it had been taken care of by the manager. “She’s my girlfriend’s mother,” Nambiar said. “That’s really too bad, because I was hoping to treat you.” I insisted that the waiter bring me the bill. The waiter smiled and disappeared, while Nambiar looked surprised. I said something about journalistic ethics, but I could see that this made no sense to him. I was beginning to lose my temper, and I wondered why. Who would really care if I let Nambiar’s girlfriend’s mother pay for lunch? Who would think that my honesty as a writer had been compromised? As I cornered the waiter again and forced him to bring the bill, I found myself wondering why I didn’t have a suit, designer sunglasses, and car keys. I wondered why I wasn’t making money at a time in India when moneymaking opportunities seemed everywhere for the asking. Like Arindam’s students, I was an aspirer, finally, oblivious to anything but my own inchoate desires, filled with a sense of anger that I had no wealth to flaunt, as well as a trembling awareness of opportunities that it was perhaps not too late to capitalise. “I don’t like an image of me that isn’t me,” Arindam had told me, anxious to clarify his essential self. And here was I, not liking the image of me that was me. I felt that I was beginning to lose myself in this world of appearances and aspirations, and that paying the bill was the only way to return to steady ground. Adapted from The Beautiful and the Damned: A Portrait of the New India, forthcoming from Viking Penguin in June.

 

2011/6/24 Dr.B.Ekbal <ekb...@gmail.com>

[Kenney Jacob]

Just because IIPM was dragged into this discussion, how do we compare IHRD and IIPM ? Which one is better ? 

Kenney Jacob

2011/6/24 bijoy <bijoy....@gmail.com>