Despite Official claims to the contrary, for ease of doing business or conducting an honest enterprise, post-independence India is one of the world’s most difficult countries. Even running an education institution which by definition is in the public interest, is a very difficult vocation. Under Indian beggar-thy-neighbour socialism, private school and college promoters and managements are subject to dozens of rigorous laws, rules and regulations legislated to prevent them — horror of horrors — making a profit, anathema in the socialist lexicon.

One would have thought that with the country’s 1.2 million government schools ruined by interfering politicians and bureaucrats, the great Indian middle class would be grateful for the initiatives of philanthropists, religious missionaries and edupreneurs who have established 450,000 pre-primary to class XII schools and higher education institutions, some of them globally respected. On the contrary, India’s middle class parents community has also emerged as a hostile community given to routinely harassing private education providers for suspicion of “profiteering”. Despite schools being locked down for over 15 months and having suffered huge financial loss for providing, or attempting to provide, online education while also paying teachers and staff, most parents are far from grateful.

This hard reality was brought to light recently by an audio recording of a parent of the highly ranked Daly College, Indore, roundly abusing a housemaster for his temerity to call him and remind him that his son’s term fees were overdue, which went viral on social media. That the parent, one Hemendra Singh Dhar, a self-proclaimed royal who threatened the housemaster in the coarsest language for “interrupting his breakfast”, is an old boy of the school is a bad advertisement for Daly College (estb. 1882), in which the board of governors is reportedly divided on every issue. Especially on ways and means to spend the school’s Rs.70 crore endowment. Indeed radix malorum cupiditas est.