Professional Documents
Culture Documents
http://chronicle.com.offcampus.lib.washington.edu/article/In-India-Suitcases-of-
Mone/11102/
"Letters keep pouring in. Phone calls keep coming," sighs Mr. Doctor, who runs a
popular government college. "We don't answer. We have an answering machine,
but we never return any of the calls. People used to barge into our offices, talking in
a menacing way. That's why we had to call the police."
Graft and corruption in India is a fact of public life. Nearly every exercise, from
persuading the mailman to deliver your mail to getting the charges dropped for a
serious crime, requires "tea money" -- anything from a few coins to stacks of 100
rupee notes delivered in suitcases. The paying of bribes is simply the cost of doing
business.
In this country of more than a billion people, where there is a huge shortage of
educational resources and an insatiable demand for degrees, people also do
everything they can to work the system to gain admission into college. Today,
higher education has come to be seen as a commodity that can be bought or sold
like anything else. Corruption appears in every element of higher education, and in
every form: kickbacks, graft, bribes. An aspiring professor can buy a job, then
collect a salary but not bother showing up for class.
But it is in admissions that corruption is most endemic. If a local politician cannot
get a student admitted, everyone knows that money slipped under the table to the
right person will secure the student's place. Some institutions even use a
reservation system that sells places to the highest bidder.
While Indian citizens sometimes are moved to anger and protest over corruption --
the sale of government jobs in Punjab had this effect recently -- the sale of
admissions slots to universities rarely, if ever, even reaches the level of political
debate. In part, this is because the politicians themselves benefit from being able to
get friends and relatives into universities. Those who oppose corruption in Indian
higher education are often considered annoying gadflies.
Price of Admissions
One student, who asked that his name not be used, says the fees for manipulating
entrance test scores are between $80 for the least popular degree programs, such
as Sanskrit, to $500 for the most highly sought after ones, such as computer
science. Those are substantial sums, even for middle-class Indian families. "I take
papers of the students who cannot get admitted into the university because of
either bad marks or late submission and give it to the man who sits in the college
office," explains the recent graduate, who has helped a few friends gain admission.
"After a few days, the job is done. If you know the right people, it is not very hard."
The going rate is much, much higher at medical and engineering colleges, which
promise lucrative careers and have an admissions committee to bribe, instead of
one person who has to be paid off. Numerous interviews with students and
administrators suggest that the cost of buying a place in medical school is about
$20,000. Where this money goes, nobody knows, or at least nobody will say.
Deepak Dave, a managing committee member of the Forum for Fairness in
Education, an anti-corruption advocacy group in Bombay, says most of it ends up in
people's pockets. "I know cases where people are told to bring the money in
suitcases and put them in the lifts," says Mr. Dave. "The money goes up; when the
elevator comes back down, the money has disappeared."
The other way to get into college is not with cash, but by pulling strings. Across
India, there is a large and complicated "reservation" system at work. In the state of
Maharashtra, where Bombay is located, seats are divvied up along caste lines and
ancestral affiliations. Five percent of the total number of seats are allocated to the
administration to hand out as it wishes, that is, to students who scored below the
official cutoff. Out of the "management quota" the college has to accommodate
everyone, including athletes and the children of benefactors. At Tolani College, 1
percent of places, or 24 slots, are reserved for those with political connections.
Some consider this outright graft, others are not so sure. Ketan Shah, who heads a
group known as Vile Parle, a charitable trust that administers a half dozen colleges
in Bombay, argues that giving special preference is not the same thing as
corruption. The colleges he runs were founded by residents of nearby Gujarat state,
he says. Gujarati families donated the land and gave huge sums of rupees to build
these colleges. They expect their children to be admitted. Is this any different from
what happens at Oxford or Harvard? asks Mr. Shah.
"At least at those schools they can admit students of their own choice," laments Mr.
Shah. "We can't even do that. We are getting hit by all sides: by our own
community, by the politicians, and even by poor people [who claim discrimination if
they are not admitted]. In the end, the 5-percent management quota is not our own.
The allotment for sports is so small, we can't even put a cricket team together."
What often happens, however, is that these seats are sold off, contends Mr. Dave of
the Forum for Fairness. He says the situation is particularly bad at medical schools,
which by law reserve 15 percent of their seats for nonresident Indians. If a medical
school is unable to fill the quota -- and they never do since few British and American
citizens of Indian origin are interested in going to medical school in Asia -- the
remaining seats are up for grabs. The seats, which are not subject to public
scrutiny, are sold to the highest bidder, Mr. Dave says. "These schools are a 365-
day-a-year cash cow." Mr. Dave says.
So far there has been little pressure from the public to reform the system. While a
handful of activists have made inroads in the courts, there is no groundswell of
support to clean out the rot. By and large, most parents would be willing to
mortgage everything they own, sell their bullock cart, and go to a moneylender, in
order to pay a bribe that would secure a place for their children in India's middle
class.
Few people view corruption in higher education as a great social evil or see it as
lowering the quality of the student body. Few are concerned that those who pay
bribes to get into college are outright unqualified. Instead they are seen as a little
"less qualified" than those who made the test cut off. After all, the cutoff is simply a
line drawn by colleges and universities based on the number of openings available.
"The numbers are so large that there are enough well qualified, competent people,"
says Udaya Kumar, an assistant professor of English at the University of Delhi. "The
best students in India are as good as the best anywhere else."
Because the level of corruption reflects the level of desperation, many feel that the
only way to clean up the system is to expand educational opportunities. Yet as the
federal budget for higher education shrinks each year, few people believe the
government will be the solution; indeed, they view it as part of the problem. Ashish
Nandy, a senior research fellow with the Center for Developing Societies, a Delhi-
based think tank, says the government's monopoly on higher education is partly to
blame for the vast corruption and declining quality of education. He welcomes the
entry of private colleges that are mushrooming across the country. While the
privatization of higher education has had a bumpy start, with colleges of
questionable quality springing up, more and more people feel that only the private
sector can meet India's pressing educational needs.
"People have the capacity to pay," says Harkant H. Mankad, the director general of
the Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies. His gleaming new building with
dozens of high-speed computers, modern classrooms with air conditioning, and the
sight of industrious students appears to be proof of this.
Mr. Mankad, whose institute receives no government money, says he faces none of
the pressures to admit students that his public-college colleagues face, and he
takes no bribes for admissions. As a private graduate institution, he has neither
quotas he has to fill nor spaces to sell off. He is selling an education. With tuition
costing $2,000 a year, a large sum in India, students demand a great deal from
their courses and give a lot in return.
"The system is becoming more transparent by default," says Mr. Mankad. "We are
becoming more open. I believe that open commercialization will clean out the
system."
http://chronicle.com.offcampus.lib.washington.edu/article/In-India-Courage-Under-
Fire/2989/
By SHAILAJA NEELAKANTAN
Three days after Ram Prakash Singh took over as vice chancellor of the University of
Lucknow in January 2005, a drunken student leader barged into his office screaming
obscenities, Mr. Singh says. Rajpal Kashyap, president of the student union,
allegedly smashed furniture and shattered the windows, raving against the vice
chancellor's attempt to break the stranglehold that student politicians held on
nearly all aspects of campus life, by awarding a contract to build a new cafeteria to
an outsider, rather than to a student leader.
This northern Indian university in the capital of Uttar Pradesh — where student
leaders have routinely harassed students and faculty members, incited riots, and
indulged in gunplay — has always been one of the country's most violent campuses.
So Mr. Kashyap's tantrum came as no surprise. What has stunned observers is the
way the vice chancellor, who runs the university, has fearlessly taken on disruptive
students and their patrons, the state's political parties, over the last two years.
Last December Mr. Singh expelled Mr. Kashyap and about 60 other student leaders,
most of whom have criminal charges pending against them, including attempted
murder, illegal possession of firearms, and rioting. Mr. Singh also suspended about
160 students for participating in violent demonstrations, and canceled student-body
elections for this academic year.
For now, at least, Mr. Singh has achieved the unthinkable — bringing peace and
quiet to the university. A survey conducted in December by a local newspaper
asked a cross-section of society to name Uttar Pradesh's "Person of the Year."
Almost 97 percent of respondents named Mr. Singh. The vice chancellor, wrote one
person, "gave back hope to those who actually want to study."
Mr. Singh's aggressive effort to instill order has also garnered praise from
administrators at other Indian universities, where violence is common, and inspired
students on his own campus.
"I've seen three VC's in my time here, and there was political pressure on them so
they didn't do anything," says Rahul Dev Verma, a master's student in history, who
also earned his undergraduate degree at Lucknow. "Yet, this VC, by himself, has
made all these changes. His life could be in danger."
That might sound like an exaggeration to outsiders, but Mr. Verma is right. During
campus elections at Lucknow and some other Indian universities, student politicians
and their supporters, all of whom are affiliated with national or regional political
parties, have gone on rampages, destroying university and public property,
extorting money from local businessmen at gunpoint, fighting pitched battles on
campus, and even murdering their opponents. In 2004 two Lucknow students were
killed on campus before student elections.
"These people who called would say they are going to resort to guerrilla warfare,"
says the vice chancellor. Far from supporting him in his bid to restore order, the
state's political leaders called for Mr. Singh's dismissal and pulled the armed guards
who are traditionally provided to the head of the university.
A tall, bespectacled man with a stentorian voice, Mr. Singh comes across as
forthright and accessible. His past gives few clues that he would end up becoming
one of the most reform-minded leaders in the university's recent history.
The son of a postal worker, Mr. Singh was raised in a small town about 125 miles
from Lucknow. His father, who never went beyond junior high school, wanted him to
become a government bureaucrat.
"In the town I grew up in, the district collector was the top boss, and he lived in this
huge bungalow," says Mr. Singh. "It was a big thing to be a civil servant." But he
discovered the appeal of academic life when he enrolled at the University of
Allahabad, in southern Uttar Pradesh. "I felt the job of a university don is much more
fulfilling and respectable," he says.
He applied to the state's governor, who is also the chancellor of all the state's public
universities, to become vice chancellor of Lucknow, and took over the position a
little more than two years ago.
Faculty members say that as a scholar, Mr. Singh is more concerned with restoring
academic standards than kowtowing to politicians. "He has genuine concern for
education and students," says Rakesh Chandra, a professor of philosophy who has
taught at the University of Lucknow for 22 years. "Other vice chancellors weren't
student-centric. They thought they were too high and mighty for that."
Mr. Singh has also returned the university's focus to education by introducing 30
new courses, doubling existing scholarships for needy students, introducing a
semester system at the graduate level, and enhancing laboratory facilities. He has
removed corrupt officials who he says were in cahoots with student leaders and
made admission rules stricter so relatives and friends of student leaders aren't
admitted without merit.
On the ninth day of his tenure, he announced that he would see to it that there
would be no cheating — which had been practiced openly for years under the
patronage of student leaders — in the scheduled law exam or any other exams.
"The student leaders became furious and came and surrounded my office, saying,
'Cheating is our birthright' because teachers don't teach properly," says Mr. Singh.
On the day of the exam, he sealed the campus and deployed police at the gates to
stop the leaders from entering.
The student politicians tried to prevent other students from entering to take the
exam but, inspired by Mr. Singh's example, the students defied them. The student
leaders "were humiliated," Mr. Singh says. "That was probably their first breaking
point."
Mr. Singh's most significant challenge, though, began last November, when he
announced that student elections would be held in accordance with
recommendations issued by a committee appointed by India's Supreme Court. The
recommednations are not formal legislation, but the Supreme Court's sanction has
given them the moral force of law.
The recommendations bar from the elections students charged with criminal
activity, students older than 28, and students who have not attended at least 75
percent of class sessions during the academic year. The recommendations also set
a campaign-spending limit of $115.
Those rules disqualified many of the university's prominent student leaders. Many
have criminal charges pending against them. Most are considerably older than 28
and have been roaming the halls of the University of Lucknow for seven to 10 years,
acquiring multiple degrees simply to stay on and run in the student elections.
Local politicians and student leaders were outraged at Mr. Singh's decision to follow
the Supreme Court recommendations. At a public function, Mulayam Singh Yadav,
Uttar Pradesh's chief minister, who has a role similar to that of a governor in the
United States, and a former student leader, called Mr. Singh a dictator, and charged
that he was acting at the behest of the state governor, who he said was politically
motivated. Neither Mr. Yadav nor the governor could be reached for comment.
In a televised interview, Ram Singh Rana, a student leader and close confidant of
Mr. Yadav, was even more candid about his anger. Speaking in Hindi, he threatened
the entire city: "I will burn the whole of Lucknow. I will spare nobody."
"When they realized none of them could contest under the new recommendations,
it unnerved them," says Mr. Singh. For two weeks, he says, student leaders and
their thugs stopped students and professors from entering the campus at gunpoint
and destroyed thousands of dollars worth of property, including faculty members'
cars and residences. The police stood by as mute spectators on the orders of Mr.
Yadav's government, Mr. Singh says. Other faculty members and students
confirmed his account. (Government officials did not return phone calls.)
The protesters even hurled a bomb at the university proctor's residence, destroying
his car. In response, Mr. Singh shut down the university, evacuated the student
dormitories, expelled the student offenders, and canceled the elections.
"I was not scared because I was convinced I am right," says Mr. Singh, "and I knew
they would not do anything to me because the public supports me. There are
38,000 students in this university, and a mere 300 of them are the crypto-criminals
that are creating a reign of terror."
He considers these students "hidden criminals," he says, because they are enrolled
in the university for the sole purpose of gaining a role in state and national politics.
In 2005, for instance, Mr. Rana allegedly threatened to kill Nishi Pandey, then head
of a women's dormitory, after she stopped him and his friends from entering the
dormitory late at night. "He said, 'How do you think you are going to live on campus
after this? I'm going to get you killed,'" recalls Ms. Pandey, who is now dean of
student welfare.
Neither Mr. Rana nor Mr. Kashyap, the former student-union president who allegedly
smashed Mr. Singh's furniture, could be reached for comment. But Bajrangi Singh,
another student leader who was expelled by Mr. Singh, says he is outraged over the
vice chancellor's actions. "Canceling student elections is not all a good idea," says
the former student, who was head of the student union at the time the vice
chancellor took that action. "Now we won't be able to deal with students' issues,
and this is against our democratic rights. This is harmful for democracy."
Bajrangi Singh has eight cases pending against him, involving the detonation of
crude bombs on the campus and attempted murder, according to police officials.
"There is nothing special about violence in the university," he says. "In any
elections, even for the national parliament, there is violence. Does that mean
national elections should also be stopped?"
'Like A Dream'
Most students at Lucknow, though, are firmly in favor of the vice chancellor's
reforms.
"It is like a dream, the atmosphere has changed so much, and I never thought it
could be like this," says Shashi Bhushan Verma, a master's student in history at the
university. "Other VC's never came out of their offices, but he has been to every
classroom and interacted with so many students."
"Some goondas are still left on campus, sir, what are you going to do about them?"
asked one student, using the Hindi word for thug or hooligan. "Are you going to take
back the suspended students, sir?" asked another. "Have you thought about the
semester system for more courses?" asked yet another.
Mr. Singh patiently answered these and other questions, mostly acknowledging that
he has plans to tackle all the issues, but adding that sweeping change takes time
and cannot happen overnight. The students urged him to tackle all fronts at once
and immediately. "I am not fast enough for them," he joked.
Mr. Singh, whose three-year term ends next January, hasn't decided if he will stay
on if his contract is renewed.
"I feel if I continue here I can consolidate some of these changes I've made, but at
the same time I am a working scientist and I have been getting very little time for
my scientific work," he says.
He certainly has enough work cut out for his remaining 10 months here. In early
February, he suspended four more students, one of whom abducted a businessman
and kept him hostage in his dormitory room to extort money. The other three
severely beat up some fellow students, witnesses said.
Now he is wrestling with a recent state high-court decision that requires the
University of Lucknow to consider readmitting students if they provide affidavits
swearing they won't indulge in criminal activities. Faculty members have
reservations about ceding control over university discipline to the courts, but Mr.
Singh has readmitted seven students who were first-time offenders.
"We are keeping a close watch on the suspended students that we take back, and if
they start behaving badly again, we will throw them out again," says Mr. Singh. "It is
a long process. This kind of cleaning-up operation takes time."
http://chronicle.com.offcampus.lib.washington.edu/article/India-Begins-Sweeping-
Crack/47900/
The bureau filed corruption charges against R.A.Yadav, chairman of the All India
Council for Technical Education, the regulator, and three other top officials accused
of demanding bribes to allow an increase in seats at an engineering college. The
regulator’s approval is required before any technical institute, whether public or
private, can offer degree courses.
The regulator, one of 16 in India, has often been accused of corruption, and its
officers across India have been accused of approving colleges with poor facilities in
exchange for money. Many engineering schools have also been started by
politicians who, it is alleged, are complicit in the bribery process. Many colleges
themselves have been accused of taking money, euphemistically referred to here as
“capitation fees,” to admit students to engineering courses that are in high
demand. —Shailaja Neelakantan
December 3, 2004
By SHAILAJA NEELAKANTAN
Last month Tyler Walker Williams, a 26-year-old graduate student who had earned
his bachelor's degree at the University of California at Berkeley, campaigned to
represent the School of Languages, Literature, and Culture Studies in the student
union at Jawaharlal Nehru University, in New Delhi.
Although he is American, Mr. Williams says he ran for office because he wanted to
push for an increase in scholarships for deserving students and for improvements to
the library. But he unwittingly kicked up a row at his university by entering the
election, illustrating how closely student campaigns mirror national politics in India.
Just five months after the deposed Bharatiya Janata Party had protested the
Congress (I) Party's possible selection of Italian-born Sonia Gandhi as India's prime
minister, the party's student wing cried foul over Mr. Williams's nomination.
Arguing that the student union's constitution bars persons of foreign origin from
seeking elected office, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad tried to block his
campaign before it began. The student party also said it would file a case against
Mr. Williams based on the Indian Constitution, which bars foreigners from
competing in any elections.
Mr. Williams ran as a representative of the All India Students' Association, the
student wing of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), which calls for
armed revolution to achieve class equality. His supporters brushed aside the
protests, arguing that the student union did not bar any student, Indian or foreign,
from campaigning for office.
In the end, the controversy fizzled out when Mr. Williams was defeated by the
Parishad party's candidate. But he found his introduction to the hurly-burly of Indian
politics an interesting learning experience.
"Although in the U.S. there are campus Republicans and Democrats, those groups
are small and have virtually no involvement with national politics," Mr. Williams
says. In India, however, the affiliation of student parties to national parties "is a
good thing for the simple reason that politics on campus is connected to politics
outside."
http://chronicle.com.offcampus.lib.washington.edu/article/An-American-Student-
Gets-an/9728/
December 5, 2008
Indians Are Generous Donors to Universities Abroad, but Corruption Concerns Limit
Giving at Home
By SHAILAJA NEELAKANTAN
This year the Indian press cheered as several American universities announced
multimillion-dollar donations from Indians here and abroad. The articles cited the
generosity as evidence that India has become a philanthropic nation, no longer just
a poor supplicant looking for handouts.
But more telling is the fact that the money went to institutions in the United States,
even though Indian universities are in far greater need.
Among the big spenders were Ratan Tata, an industrialist and chairman of Tata
Sons Ltd., who donated $50-million to Cornell University; Nandan M. Nilekani, a
founder of Infosys Ltd., a software-services provider, who gave $5-million to Yale
University; and John N. Kapoor, a pharmaceutical entrepreneur, who gave $11-
million to the State University of New York at Buffalo.
"It is strange that they are not doing it in India," says Sam Pitroda, chairman of the
National Knowledge Commission, an advisory body to the Indian government on
higher-education reform.
To be fair, the Tata family has contributed a lot to Indian higher education.
The Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and several other higher-education
enterprises were started with the help of the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust, a family entity
established in 1932.
The private, highly regarded Indian School of Business, in southern India, has also
received generous contributions from Indians here and abroad. And the renowned
Indian Institutes of Technology — the biggest beneficiaries of Indians' largess —
have received millions of dollars from their graduates living here and in the United
States.
Limited Impact
But the effect of all this philanthropy has been limited because it has gone entirely
to elite institutions.
Indian donors "need to give to local colleges, not to the IIT's," Mr. Pitroda says,
referring to the fact that the elite engineering institutes receive much more money
from the government than other public universities do.
Graduates like giving to the institutes because they have more autonomy than
other public institutions in India, and therefore have more control — with more
openness — over how donations are spent. Fund-raising experts say prospective
donors here believe that any money given to a typical public university in India
would be frittered away or siphoned off by corrupt officials.
The engineering institutes' alumni networks are also strong, something that cannot
be said of those of most Indian universities.
Making fund raising even more challenging is the government's practice of cutting
the amount of money it provides to a university by the amount it has raised
privately.
"If we raise one lakh rupees (100,000 rupees), the [government] will cut one lakh
rupees from the money it gives us," said Deepak Pental, head of the University of
Delhi, in an interview with The Chronicle last year.
"As I've seen at Stanford, to raise a dollar of funds you have to spend 15 cents,"
says Arogyaswami Paulraj, an engineering professor there who studied at one of the
elite Indian engineering institutes.
The growing number of Indians who are donating to universities they attended
abroad could be a sign that domestic philanthropy will eventually take root in India.
But, say many academics, that will take a long time.
http://chronicle.com.offcampus.lib.washington.edu/article/Indians-Are-Generous-
Donors/35895/
http://www.hindustantimes.com/News-Feed/india/PM-for-dramatic-reform-in-legal-
education-system/Article1-537939.aspx
http://www.hindustantimes.com/News-Feed/lettertoeditor/Free-education-from-
politics/Article1-372857.aspx
http://www.indiaedu.com/education-india/
http://www.indiaedu.com/goa/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/4793311.stm