“History is a race between education and catastrophe.”
H G Wells

“All who have meditated on the art of governing mankind have been convinced that the fate of empires depends on the education of youth.”
Aristotle

I think this is the first time I have started a write-up with quotes from famous people. I normally do not do that, because I usually feel so strongly and passionately about issues that I simply start writing and words just flow out in a torrent. But I am making an exception this time. And I have strong reasons for doing so.

Let me digress a little before stating them. This will be the 10th consecutive year that I have written and presented an ‘Alternative Budget’. This will be the 5th consecutive year that the ‘Alternative Budget’ appears in Business & Economy (Yes, your favourite magazine – when it comes to sharp, incisive and thought-provoking intellectual analysis – is about to complete 5 years!). For close to 10 years, I have been repeating ad nauseam that India can never hope to be a country that is respected in the 21st century unless there is a drastic and dramatic overhaul of social infrastructure. Apart from occasional good news on that front, budgets over the last decade have been largely disappointing when it comes to dealing with social infrastructure. Of course, lip service and wise quotes from historical personalities have always been offered by successive finance ministers. Of course, ambitious schemes with thousands of crores of budgetary allocations have been launched. Of course, well meaning policies have been designed and implemented. But has there been a really substantive improvement in outcomes? Do poor Indians actually have better access to healthcare now than they had when the 21st century began? Do they actually have better access to education? You know the answers as well as I do.
I have often been frustrated and dismayed by the answers. This prompted me to present an Alternative Budget in 2008 with a headline Ban the Budget. My logic was that too much needless attention was lavished on the Union Budget. My suggestion to the Finance Minister was to use the Union Budget to launch some path-breaking policies for the social infrastructure sector and let nitty gritty issues be handled through the year during the normal course. In 2009, I went a step ahead and presented an Alternative Budget with a headline Khao aur Khilao Budget. My logic was simple. I raised a fundamental question: How come China and South Korea with levels of corruption as deep and endemic as India have delivered fantastic outcomes in social infrastructure while India has failed to do so? I also argued that economics was all about incentives and if a Union Budget offered the right kind of incentives, stakeholders in India, too, could dramatically improve social infrastructure. Just in case you are interested in what the Khao aur Khilao Budget suggested, please visit www.businessandeconomy.org/09072009/storyd.asp?sid=4485&pageno=1.

Having digressed a little, let me come now to the theme and headline of my Alternative Budget this year. It is called A Budget for Three Idiots. You guessed it. It has been inspired by the iconoclastic movie that revealed how hollow our education system is. It also offered us hope and redemption. And it told us poignantly that the biggest challenge for India in the 21st century is to transform its education system. The quotes that appear right at the top of this write-up tell me that thinkers and philosophers throughout history have consistently argued that a society, a nation or a civilization simply cannot survive – far from flourish – without the right kind of education. Aristotle mused about the power of education to sustain an Empire more than 2,000 years ago. And in the 20th century, George Orwell, the author of timeless classics like Animal Farm and 1984 highlighted the importance of education in an equally compelling manner.

Of course, you don’t need to be a philosopher to understand the value and power of education to make or alternatively mar the future of India in the 21st century. And the way things are going at the moment, only the naïve will believe that India is on the cusp of an era where it will reap the much talked about ‘demographic dividend’. Just a few days ago, the international body UNESCO released a report called ‘Education for All Development Index’. It tracks the progress made by various nations on the key Millennium Development Goals of achieving universal education by 2015 from 1999 to 2007. The results in the report are sobering, if not disturbing for those who keep prattling childishly about India’s demographic dividend. The rank given to India is 105, below Bhutan, Zambia, Vietnam and Ghana to name just a few. That is not really surprising since India is consistently ranked pathetically when it comes to human development indicators; and justifiably so. More disturbing are results buried in some tables in the 300-plus page report. A staggering 49 percent of the children drop out of school before they reach elementary level. And before you start talking about some sinister western conspiracy to show India in a poor light, please remember that the report is based on government released statistics.     Read More....

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We had started our magazine with the first edit headline written as “We will change your outlook”. Yes, the idea was to change your outlook in all respects including the one I am writing today. Well, the story started way back in 2002 when Outlook – the magazine – did a B-School ranking and ranked IIPM – our parent institute – very high! We had participated for the first time ever in a B-School survey and the reason was it claimed to be the only survey where everything was quantitative; so there was no question of value judgment! And the result really excited us. The next year also we participated and their magazine ranked us high; in fact one rank higher! Just that there was one problem. The surveyor who had come to rank us, the owner of a one-man market research firm (on behalf of another gentleman named Maheshwar Peri – the publisher of Outlook) had told me that he had already surveyed all other B-Schools and we were the last B-School he was coming to. And going by our figures on one parameter – that of industry interface – he was sure that our rank will be No 1 in that category.

He had scrutinised our papers thoroughly and cross questioned us like an Income Tax officer before saying what he said about ranking. So, when the ranking came out and we saw we got ranked 4th, I was a little amused. But since the ranking was really high, I didn’t bother much. However, while closing the magazine, I saw one line written below the article. It said that the details of the rankings are available at a website whose address was given. So I went there just out of curiosity. Our overall rank was 17th and the industry interface rank was 4th. And in most other quantitative parameters, we were in top ten to fifteen. Then how was our rank 17th? Well, after all claims of quantitative parameters of ranking came four ranking parameters, which we were never told of. These were parameters like industry perception, faculty perception, student perception etc., where our ranks were 46th to 49th! Out of 50 BSchools!! Below the names no one had heard till then!! I then realised the game. To keep our rank low, this was the game he had played – that of perception parameters where he could freely manipulate. So I called him up and said what he has done is most unethical and we will never participate in his fraud rankings ever again and banged the phone down! The next day I read it in a leading national daily that IIPM has been taken out of the Outlook B-School rankings due to heavy complaints of data fudging. There were no complaints in the first year! So they came during the second year too; and they ranked us one step higher! And suddenly complaints came when I caught their fraud. Well, I took this matter up as aggressively as possible with the paper. But strangely, they refused to listen to us. Every other media house was satisfied with our logic and didn’t bother to pick up the false story. But they didn’t budge. Later, I came to know that this man’s close relative is very close to the people at the top in that newspaper and is a big media personality who got him the Outlook B-School ranking account too. So it was obvious. And the matter ended there.

Peace prevailed for a few years. Till we decided to enter the media business ourselves. We started with Business & Economy. Almost immediately, one competing business magazine, which was behind the market leader Business Today (and knew they would be hit most with the success of Business & Economy) initiated one of their consulting editors to do a word by word blatantly false and patently negative story about us in her private yellow journal. And then they spread that story in every other media. Unfortunately, not many picked it up again and it remained a petty blog thing. Seeing the failed effort, the business magazine concerned picked the story itself only and did a hatchet job – unable to hide their agenda anymore, i.e. to defame us and harm our business so that our magazine cannot take off . Of course, our magazine took off . In fact, it sky rocketed; and ate into the business of the competing brand immensely. That’s when we started planning to do what we wanted to do always. Launch our own weekly news magazine. The word spread and Outlook magazine, rather Maheshwar Peri again got activated and hyper active. They knew India Today was the leader and the magazine which will be hit most by the launch of a new weekly newsmagazine would be Outlook.

So, through Outlook, Peri again started a malicious campaign against us. We decided to respond back with legal action. That’s when they probably came up with a brilliant idea. They decided to allow their publisher, the same Peri fellow to start an education magazine of his – with obvious support from them and other vested interest groups. Thus, Peri today is perhaps the only publisher of a media house whose owners are gracious enough to have let him start a profit making education magazine too on the side – at least that’s how we are made to believe!! And now while Outlook stays clean, this poor in quality and shady new yellow journal called Career 360 keeps doing illogical and brazenly false stories about IIPM! The latest being a story based upon the response to a false question sent to the education authorities in Europe where our partner Institute is based in – a process they followed in past too. Of course, we at IIPM like answering all these disgusting yellow journalists in court. And the courts have admitted our defamation cases against them. And it is only a matter of time before justice is done.     Read More....

For More IIPM Info, Visit below mentioned IIPM articles.

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Prof. Rajita Chaudhuri's Website

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SRK is great! Not just because he is such a star, but because he genuinely is the most amazing person and has such a logical and sound brain. And now the entire nation idolizes this man all the more because he has become a symbol of sheer courage as well! And I think all it required was someone like him to stand up coolly and say, “This is not right, I’ve done nothing wrong and I won’t apologise.” When he was saying this, one could almost see the schoolboy rebel in him – not ready to cow down to an illogical man trying to act as the school headmaster. I am writing this editorial immediately after coming back from a show on NDTV 24x7, which was on the topic, “Is Sena the real power in Mumbai?” I was one of the speakers. It was sad to see Uddhav Thackeray, who was another speaker in that show, sticking to a stance that cannot be defended by any sense of logic. When questioned on the show by the NDTV anchor on his tendentious comments against SRK, Uddhav’s reply was that one should ask the average man on the streets how many times had he (Uddhav) troubled him on similar issues. True, he hasn’t. Then why now? Uddhav’s answer was an illogical “everyone should do their own work rather than commenting on everything” – implying that SRK should keep acting instead of speaking on issues! What a joke! We live in a democracy – and look at what we are saying! That we don’t have the right to speak on subjects of national interest? Unbelievable! And then, there was Gul Panag too on the show, who, in a most apologetic manner, kept stammering that after all, Shiv Sena had the people’s mandate, so they should be respected; and that issuing these kinds of threats wasn’t fair on the Sena’s part. It’s unbelievable we don’t realise that in an illiterate democracy, many people get the so-called “people’s mandate” often; but that doesn’t automatically make them or their actions right!

And then, we had a few others on the show giving exactly similar diplomatic answers. It’s so sad that despite seeing that someone had taken a brave stance and decided to stand up to illogical hooliganism, no one was ready to speak forthrightly in his favour! What’s more amazing is that the entire Bollywood is standing like a mute spectator virtually. It’s sad... Very sad... They make us really feel as if the real power is with the Sena. But the truth is that it isn’t! The real power rests with the State and the intellectuals. Unfortunately, with the intellectuals abandoning their duty and most people more interested in protecting their personal interests, it all becomes an illusion.

Barring once, the Sena has never ever won the assembly elections in Mumbai; and never got more than a 25% mandate in the state! Despite that, we not only see the film fraternity – filled with security-less individuals – not coming forth, but also notice a similar shameful behaviour from the State. It’s time for the State to show its power. And with Rahul Gandhi showing a clear tilt against the Sena, let’s hope this will happen soon. However, what I want to say goes much beyond this.

I want to challenge the very concept of Bombay belonging to Marathi manoos – not just from the perspective of India being a democracy and the city belonging to everyone, but even from the perspective of history. Bombay, till 1960, combined Gujarat and Maharashtra till the two states were separated. What then came to be known as Bombay – that is, today’s Mumbai – was built literally by the Gujaratis and the Parsis, with the Marathi manoos playing a much lesser role. It symbolises the ‘city of the great dream’ – if we were to borrow this phrase from the Great American Dream – where people from everywhere came and chased their dreams. They made Bombay what it is today. Even today, fi ft y percent of people are non-Marathis who run this city – a city that is the backbone of the Indian industry. So even historically, this concept of Bombay being for the Marathi manoos, is incorrect. Of course, one doesn’t really need to care too much about history when the key question is about the democratic right of an Indian to live anywhere he wants and say anything he wants. It’s a shame that such an incident is actually happening... and there is still no guarantee that this will be stopped soon!     Read More....

For More IIPM Info, Visit below mentioned IIPM articles.

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Arindam Chaudhuri's Portfolio - he is at his candid best by Society Magazine

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Resul Pookutty was an obscure name and would have remained like that, had he not won the Oscar. In his own country, he would have always remained a dispensable and not so important sound technician, had the Oscar jury not decided to give him the coveted award. When the Oscar jury had shown to the world what Resul Pookutty was and what talent he had, his country’s government suddenly realized that it was time to give him something. And thus, he was given the Padma Shri award – thanks to the Oscar of course! One is forced to think then how many such Resul Pookuttys might be there in this country, people who are never recognized.

Since Independence, the Padma awards have been one of the most coveted set of awards of this country, and for not just the award in itself, but for the prestige and honour that it carries. It is meant for the best and is meant to encourage others to strive for excellence. Yet, in spite of all these, and in spite of the supreme importance attached to it, one is left to wonder how the decisions about conferring these awards are taken. One is also forced to wonder who all decide the awards and how much can personal interest or influence decide the matters vis a vis institutional procedures. The Oscars – awarded by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences – are considered to be one of the best in the world for not just the fact that the awards are given only to the best of the best and that too in the US, but also the fact that the whole process of selecting the films and scrutinizing nominations by a large jury of eminent individuals, reflects the level of scrupulous transparency. Thus, it becomes very difficult for anyone to influence the ultimate result. Needless to say, the Oscars have their own process in place wherein the government of US has no role to play. And the same is true for all globally recognized awards. The question is, for the Padma awards, do we have a jury of eminent people who decide the winners’ names based on certain transparent and structured processes? On the contrary, it has been revealed most shockingly through an RTI (Right to Information Act) application that it is the Cabinet Secretary, Home Secretary, Principal Secretary of Prime Minister and the President’s Secretary, along with four non-official members, who decide on the names (of the winners) and then send the same to the Prime Minister and the President for final approval. The ‘exclusive’ credentials these secretaries ostensibly have to decide about who all deserve to be given the highest national award of the country, remain questionable in themselves! And what guarantees that there is no scope for lobbying and favouritism in awarding the awards? To top it all, there exist no set parameters for these awards, which makes it even simpler for the above team to act on their whims and fancies. Isn’t the whole Padma award process getting transformed into the way the bureaucracy runs this nation? Today, no one bothers about who becomes the minister and who votes for whom in the Parliament – as it has become rather an open and perhaps an acceptable secret that everything can be bought with the right infl uences in place. So, are we witnessing a scenario wherein the Padma awards too are going in that direction? How does one justify then that in response to an RTI application fi led in 2009 by Subhash Agarwal, it has been revealed that Olympic medalists Vijender Singh and Sushil Kumar’s names were not included in the final 2009 awardees list by the Padma Awards Committee, even when their names had been forwarded to the Committee by the Sports Ministry within the due date.
   Read More....


For More IIPM Info, Visit below mentioned IIPM articles.

IIPM B-School Detail
IIPM makes business education truly global
IIPM’s Management Consulting Arm - Planman Consulting
Arindam Chaudhuri (IIPM Dean) – ‘Every human being is a diamond’
Arindam Chaudhuri – Everything is not in our hands
Planman Technologies – IT Solutions at your finger tips
Planman Consulting
Arindam Chaudhuri's Portfolio - he is at his candid best by Society Magazine

IIPM ranked No 1 B-School in India
domain-b.com : IIPM ranked ahead of IIMs
IIPM: Management Education India
Prof. Rajita Chaudhuri's Website

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