Page 78 - EW April 2021

Postscript

Vocation & business establishment weekly column in the Express notable for
its unsparing criticism of the BJP/NDA government, was
N THE ISSUE OF REGULATION OF THE tuition too forthright for the noveaux riche trustees of this pro-
and other fees of private independent (‘unaided’) fessedly independent university. In 2019, Mehta stepped
Oschools by state governments which has become down as vice chancellor and more recently resigned from
a hot button subject lately, the stand of your editors has the faculty after he was informally informed by the pro-
been clear and unambiguous. The decision to determine moter-trustees that he had become a “political liability”
chargeable fees is of school promoters/management and for AU. Since then, all hell’s broken loose with academics
is a contractual agreement between parents of candidate abroad, and faculty and students of AU up in arms.
children who accept the offer of institutional manage- Your editor who travelled a long way to AU’s Sonipat
ments to educate their children. The Supreme Court of campus five years ago to write a cover feature on this
India agrees. In the landmark T.M.A. Pai Foundation high-minded private university’s debut, isn’t surprised
Case (2002), an 11-judge bench held that all citizens have by this turn of events. Right then, it became apparent
a fundamental right to engage in the vocation of educa- that the trustees who manage the university want to have
tion and earn a reasonable surplus on their investment in their cake and eat it too. Since this publication was not
education institutions. quite in the pink at that time, it was agreed that AU’s
However, implicit in the judgement is that school regular lensman would shoot the cover photograph.
managements should negotiate fee increases with formal However, after the issue was out, AU’s billionaire
or informal parents associations. But some school pro- trustees who practice a curious mix of philanthropy
moters don’t seem to be aware of this directive implicit in and penny-pinching parsimony, declined to pay their
the landmark T.M.A. Pai Case. pricey photographer’s Rs.32,000 bill. After a somewhat
Right now the new millennium CISCE (Delhi) and unseemly argument, the bill was paid in full by this
IB (Geneva)-affiliated Neev Academy, Bengaluru (NAB, publication. Similarly, it’s very likely that the AU trustees
estb.2005) is experiencing a flight of students follow- recruited Mehta with tall promises, but became weak-
ing unilateral imposition of a 50 percent fees hike in the kneed about honouring them.
new academic year beginning July. NAB is the first K-12
school promoted by Lupin Labs heiress and Harvard Rediscovery of India
Business School alumna Kavita Sabharwal.
Sabharwal’s imperious “my way or the highway” deci-
sion, to steeply hike 2021-22 fees unmindful that the Co- NE OF THE FEW UPSIDES OF THE Coronavirus
vid pandemic has depressed the incomes of a substantial pandemic is that foreign travel curbs and exten-
number of even the school’s high net worth parents, has Osive testing of outbound and incoming travellers,
disillusioned a minority of parents whose children were has cured not a few nouveau citizens of vacations-abroad
of the school’s first batch, and some of them have pulled mania. Perhaps because of drastic foreign exchange pur-
their children out to enrol them in less pricey interna- chase controls imposed on citizens for over four decades
tional schools. “Even partial scholarships are an un- in the heyday of neta-babu socialism to conserve “pre-
known concept in this hard-headed business enterprise. cious foreign exchange”, after liberalisation of the econo-
However, brand names such as Gucci and Ferragamo are my in 1991 and especially in the new millennium, India’s
very well-known,” says a bitter parent who has pulled her burgeoning middle class started holidaying abroad with
teenage daughter out after ten years in NAB. a vengeance. In pre-pandemic 2019, an estimated 27 mil-
The learned justices of the Supreme Court chose their lion Indians — including your correspondent — travelled
words with care. There is a difference between vocation abroad on vacation. That’s three times the number of
and business. tourists who visited India that year.
The unexpected pandemic has cured the foreign
travel fervour of our countrymen. Suddenly it’s become
Promise & performance apparent that exploring our own sub-continent has all
the charm of travelling in Europe and then some. For
HE RESIGNATION OF INSIGHTFUL AND widely one, there is as much ethnic, cultural, heritage and
admired public intellectual Dr. Pratap Bhanu topography diversity in India as in Europe and the
TMehta, star columnist of the multi-editions Indian US put together. Moreover with all state capitals and
Express, from the faculty of the high-profile crowd-fund- tourism sites now linked by shorter and cheaper air
ed Ashoka University (AU), Sonipat (Delhi NCR), has se- hops and road and rail links, and globally bench-marked
verely dented the carefully curated reputation of this new hotels mushrooming everywhere, it makes greater sense
genre private liberal arts university. AU was promoted in to vacation within the country. And the greatest plus
2014 with the objective of providing liberal arts educa- point of domestic holidays is the infinitely superior and
tion with “highest level of academic integrity”. warm service visitors get in local destinations. Vastly
In 2017, its trustees and management were able superior to the grudging, surly service one gets in under-
to persuade Oxford and Princeton alum Mehta, then staffed, over-priced hotels and restaurants abroad. This
president of the Delhi-based think-tank Centre for Policy latter day discovery of India has become a widespread
Research, to come aboard as vice chancellor on condi- phenomenon.
tion that he would be free to write his weekly column Certainly your editor won’t be vacationing abroad for
for the daily. However, quite obviously Mehta’s anti- a long time.

80 EDUCATIONWORLD APRIL 2021