A dismaying national character flaw that has manifested itself with painful impact during the crushing Covid-19 pandemic is that post-independence India — a country of free men and women expected to hold the moral high ground envisioned by Mahatma Gandhi and leaders of the freedom movement — has degenerated into a nation of price gougers. One of the most depressing revelations of the pandemic is that too many — perhaps the majority — of hospitals, suppliers of life-saving equipment and medications and all too often medical practitioners and personnel, took advantage of shortages of hospital beds, oxygen and medicines, to indulge in shameless profiteering.

In civilised societies, the normative reaction is to extend a helping hand and perhaps even offer price concessions and fee waivers, to fellow citizens in distress. Yet in the professedly socialist society fashioned by the Mahatma’s unworthy heirs, the instinctive reaction of people in authority and suppliers of goods and services to any natural or man-made disaster is to mark-up prices to earn windfall profits. This tendency to exploit and profiteer is by no means restricted to the medical and related vocations. It’s not unusual in the legal profession for lawyers to take upfront fees, and taking advantage of the law’s horrendous delays, to squeeze clients. Ditto corporate entities, traders and retailers. The minute there’s a shortage of any commodity or grocery item, price graphs head for the ceiling.

Nor is price gouging a middle class phenomenon. It’s routine for taxi and rickshaw drivers to rip off or refuse to ply even manifestly sick and ailing fellow citizens. And as for the ubiquitous gouging within government — denial of services until illegal gratification is paid — let’s not even go there. Suffice it to say that on the corruption index of the Berlin-based Transparency International which measures the incidence of government corruption in countries around the world, India is regressing every year and is currently ranked 86 among 180 countries.

With greedy price gouging — defined as “to force somebody to pay an unfairly high price for something; to raise prices unfairly” — increasingly being accepted as normal behaviour in Indian society, it’s time right-thinking citizens, especially educators, academics and teachers reflect upon the utter inhumanity of gougers and name and shame them in social and other media. Moreover it’s imperative that morality, ethics and socially responsible behaviour — subjects that seem to have gone out of fashion in school curriculums — are re-introduced in the country’s classrooms.

Regrettably because of adoption and propagation of inorganic ideology and poor policy formulation, seven decades after independence, high-potential India has remained a poor backward, and worse a cruel country, routinely practising man’s inhumanity to man. To a large extent the blame has to be laid at the doors of the educators and teachers community.

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