By all accounts the selection of America’s golden couple, Bill and Melinda Gates as Time magazine’s persons of the year (with rock star Bono) for their philanthropy of earning and giving (the $ 29 billion Gates Foundation has saved 700,000 lives in third world countries through investments in vaccinations; provided internet access to 11,000 public libraries in the US and has funded 9,048 minority students into college), has not thawed the hard consciences of India’s political class or the country’s business community which hosted them in early December. Quite obviously even the fabulous wealth of the contemporary world’s richest ever couple cannot set right the half century of neglect of education and health in developing countries of the third world, India included. But at least they are making an attempt.

Unpalatable as it may be for India’s perpetually US-bashing intelligentsia and trendy lefties, the plain truth is that the American people, even if not Washington, are the world’s most generous philanthropists with particular bias towards funding education and health causes- the blind spots of shining India’s thick-skinned pillars of the establishment. This perhaps explains why Harvard University has the world’s largest education endowment of $ 69 billion (Rs.317,000 crore) and virtually every university in the US has built huge corpuses through corporate and alumni donations. America’s top 50 universities have accumulated an aggregate corpus of $ 160 billion from which they provide subsidies and freeships to scholars from around the world.

On the other hand the practice of endowing alma maters is completely foreign to India’s over-hyped politicians and business tycoons. Last year a Times of India, (Bangalore) investigation revealed that the primary schools which provided free education to three of Karnataka’s chief ministers are crumbling, ramshackle institutions doubling as cowsheds and gambling dens. And while a handful of the country’s newly rich IT millionaires have made private contributions to their alma maters, the IT companies themselves which save hundreds of crores by way of income tax exemption, have done comparatively little to help India’s neglected schools and colleges by way of endowment grants and bequests.

Quick to learn about wealth creation from America, India’s business leaders have not learned the art of giving it away. And that’s earning Indian capitalism a bad reputation.

Also read: Top philanthropists of the century

Life imitates art

In the quasi-literate Hindi heartland states of India life imitates kitsch art with deadly seriousness. Teachers and administrators in the grandly nomenclatured King George’s Medical University, Lucknow are grappling with the “Munnabhai syndrome”- an affiliction flowing from a Bollywood hit film titled Munnabhai MBBS. In this tedious, over-the-top movie widely eulogised as a successful comedy, a notorious mafia don qualifies as a medical practitioner (MBBS) through the simple expedient of coercing surrogates to write his exams. Last month, three KGMU students were booked by the Kanpur police for kidnapping a Jhansi-based student, Mahendra Singh to find surrogates to write their exam papers.

The son of an impecunious farmer, Singh owns a pharmaceutical company and two homes in Lucknow, zips around in luxury limousines and is a prominent socialite. Now the police is investigating if his mysterious affluence comes from the racket of supplying meritorious students as surrogates to write the exams of his clients. Rumours are rife that Singh himself qualified with the help of an impersonator, and since then has facilitated the admissions of scores of students into KGMU and medical colleges in UP.

Unsurprisingly rackets involving faculty as much as students are widespread on the KGMU campus. In 2002 an assistant professor of the general surgery department was arrested on charges of leaking the All India Post Graduate Medical Entrance Examination question paper. Earlier this year, two KGMU faculty were arrested for aiding surrogates to write the postgrad entrance test.

By all accounts Munnabhai MBBS which ran to full houses in Uttar Pradesh was a hugely successful comedy. But as life imitates art, and unqualified hacks start wielding surgical knives in the unpoliced Hindi heartland states, the laughter is fast evaporating.

Excess and deficits

One of the many advantages of a vigorously free press is that often nuggets of information can be unexpectedly found in any one of the estimated 50,000 newspapers and magazines published across the country. One of them provided an insightful answer into why former external affairs minister Natwar Singh who was nailed by the UN appointed Volcker Commission investigating Iraq’s oil-for-food scandal during the last years of the Saddam Hussein regime, clung to office for 40 days after the Volcker storm broke in the media and Parliament.

According to Coomi Kapoor a Delhi-based journalist, under government of India rules and regulations pertaining to ministerial perquisites of office, the officially allotted household of the minister for external affairs is entitled to- take a deep breath- 10 motor cars and a staff of 43 apart from the usual perks of unlimited phone calls, free electricity, domestic and foreign air travel in customised Embrarer jet airplanes which the heirs of the Mahatma have voted themselves. Writing in the The Indian Express (December 6) Kapoor says it was the prospect of losing these lavish perquisites and privileges of office which persuaded Singh to settle for the reduced position of minister without portfolio which offers the perquisite of two motor cars and 11 retainers. Ultimately even these relatively modest perks had to be surrendered when Singh resigned from the government to save the Congress party from further embarrassment.

Against this backdrop of lavish official getting and spending, it’s hardly surprising that the capital’s ministers and officials are unable to make any provision for shelter-less citizens camping in Delhi’s streets even as the city is in the grip of an unprecedented cold wave. Particularly poignant is the plight of hapless citizens freezing in a subway adjacent to the All India Institute of Medical Sciences as they await attention from the notoriously callous doctors and paramedics of this showpiece government-run hospital. 

Wouldn’t it serve the public interest if AIIMS constructed a modest hostel for out-of-town patients and relatives? Out of the question. The Union and state governments have massive revenue and fiscal deficits!