On several occasions, the frequent — once every nine days — peregrinations abroad at public expense of Dr. Montek Singh Ahluwalia, deputy chairman of the Planning Commission (exposed by India Today), have provoked trenchant comment on this page.

Now it transpires that the itch for free foreign travel is not peculiar to Ahluwalia. Information reluctantly provided under the Right to Information Act, 2005 by the Lok Sabha secretariat to civil rights activist Subhash Agarwal, reveals that Meira Kumar, speaker of the Lok Sabha, travelled abroad 29 times in the past 35 months since her election in 2009, billing the public exchequer a cool Rs.10 crore. And who can forget that the gracious President of the Republic ran up a foreign travels bill of Rs.204 crore during her undistinguished five-year term in office which mercifully ends next month?

Yet if the nation’s uncaring netas and babus are robbing the country blind, the undemanding public and complicit establishment are as much to blame. Although the media — perhaps the only effectively functional estate of the republic — routinely exposes the depredations and shenanigans of the country’s overweening politicians, bureaucrats and businessmen, the great majority of the population is stoically indifferent to the great exchequer robbery. For instance, EducationWorld has been persistently pressing for disclosure — under a separate head — of the annual wages and salaries (including travel and conveyance) expenditure of the Central government.

Yet despite this publication reaching a million readers, including the country’s top academics, this routine request for full disclosure has not attracted a single comment — let alone support — from its reputedly learned readers. Proof of the adage that a nation gets the government(s) it deserves. 

Wrong man

An IT (information technology) software and services company which is enjoying a series of public relations triumphs of late is the Mumbai-based Tata Consultancy Services Ltd (TCS). In a nationwide poll recently conducted by the Delhi-based fortnightly Business Today (February 2012), TCS was voted the best company to work for in terms of employee satisfaction. Moreover with the sudden precipitous decline in the market value of the Bangalore-based Infosys Technologies, TCS has emerged as the country’s undisputed No.1 IT corporate. And recently the company received wide exposure for sponsoring the TCS World 10 K half-marathon on May 27 in Bangalore which attracted 25,000 participants, many rich and famous.

As a consequence of these public relations triumphs, the stock of N. Chandrasekaran — appointed managing director and chief executive of TCS in 2009 — is riding high. Yet it is pertinent to note that if TCS and its recently appointed CEO are basking in the sunshine of public approbation, Chandrasekaran is a mere inheritor of decades of painstaking spadework done by Fakir Chand Kohli, the founder chief executive for four decades and latterly his chosen successor S. Ramadorai in the new millennium. On the contrary, there is some evidence to prove that Chandrasekaran may well be a square peg in a round hole within TCS.

Notwithstanding that TCS is one of the country’s largest employers of well-educated professionals, Chandrasekaran unilaterally breached an agreement between the company and this publication under which we had instituted an annual award for primary and secondary teachers under the name and style of TCS-EducationWorld Best Teachers Awards. Instituted in 2005, these awards attracted 20,000-30,000 entries countrywide every year and acknowledged and celebrated the country’s most innovative school teachers who tend to be neglected by Indian society. For mysterious and perhaps spiteful reasons — Kohli had overruled his objection to TCS co-sponsoring the awards — as soon as he was appointed CEO, this worthy abruptly abrogated the company’s contract for the awards. That such an individual with no respect for contract and precedent heads TCS, doesn’t bode well for India’s largest IT company which seems all set to slide the Infy way.

Educate Bollywood!

It’s a telling comment on the quality of education dispensed within the country’s 2 million schools and 31,000 colleges that Bollywood megastar Aamir Khan’s chat-cum-reportage weekly television show Satyamev Jayate (‘the truth shall prevail’) has done more to arouse public indignation against obstinately ubiquitous social evils such as female foeticide, dowry system, wedding extravagance, sexual harassment of women and medical malpractice, etc than all journalistic exposés, editorials and printed literature put together. According to TAM, a television viewership measurement agency, the first few episodes of SJ aired across  eight channels of Star India, and the government-owned  Doordarshan on Sunday mornings since May 13, have received TVRs (television viewership ratings) averaging 4.09 which  translates into a viewership of 90 million — the highest ever for a telecast.

By all accounts, the one-hour telecasts have made great impact and prompted action within hitherto dormant urban and rural communities. A village sarpanch in Rajasthan has vowed to ruthlessly prosecute parents practising female foeticide and the state government has issued a close-down notice to several medical clinics. Likewise after telecast of the second episode highlighting India’s worst kept secret — widespread sexual and other abuse of children — child helplines in Bhopal and several cities across the country were flooded with distress calls.

Yet the success of Satyamev Jayate raises disturbing questions about the intellectual development of India’s much-hyped middle class. It indicates that the anti-social consequences of evils such as female infanticide, child abuse, and nuptial extravagance, explained in school classrooms and texts, has made no impact. They have to be explained in comic-book graphics or audio-visually to become meaningful.

However, Khan would do well to educate his Bollywood fraternity, whose films routinely glorify sexual harassment of women as an acceptable courtship ritual. In most Bollywood movies, comely heroines are routinely harassed by gangs of youth in song sequences until they succumb to the boorish charm of the most pasty-faced of the lot. This social evil dressed up as entertainment, also needs to be addressed by the new conscience-keeper of the nation.