Ramadoss’s AIIMS

This is unfortunate. Foreign “experts”, who rubbished us for investing in high level research and knowledge based institutions created by our founding fathers, now talk of this as India’s strength in the global arena. It takes vision and sagacity to build institutions. They are not just brick and mortar, but are reliant on the strength of the women and men who man and support them. Rajiv Gandhi asked me to chair the committee which reports to Parliament on the Indian Statistical Institute’s budget. I read the parliamentary debates on the setting up of the ISI. Nehru Chacha, replying to the debate, made a great contribution on “audit” looking at the past and the ISI looking to the future.

Kenichi Ohmae introducing the Next Global Stage in 2005 prophetically says: “If, as I believe, the global economy is powered by technology, then knowledge is its precious metal. India’s strength, for example, can be substantially attributed to the sheer volume of its PhDs in science.” If we don’t show the strength to support knowledge based institutions now, the future is bleak.

There has been some media appreciation of the deprivation points JNU gives for OBC candidates, but it is wrongly said that this was done in the seventies, since anyway the OBC categorisation was not there then. JNU had an elaborate admission system, which was changed in its traumatic year of 1984. The OBC deprivation points were developed in the quinquennial admission policy review when I was vice chancellor.

It is not the system, but the way it was developed that I would like to refer to. In a monograph in the Nagoya Series on History of Civilisation and Culture, a Japanese scholar has described JNU as a merit based organisation with great democratic strength. In the Admissions Review it took us a year to develop the deprivation points, with a transparent and lengthy debate and discussion process, where the teachers, students union and many external experts participated. The system was developed without the education ministry intervening. Every proposal was hammered by the logic of “practicality”, “transparency” and of course the paramount need to follow more inclusive social goals. The best in the land participated. Sitaram Yechury and Prakash Karat were there as former JNU presidents. “Voting” amongst expert bodies as a solution was a non-sequitor, since issues have to be discussed in detail and differences hammered out. Finally, if you were a girl, took your qualifying degree from a backward district and were poor, you got the maximum nine points and a poor OBC male got three. This kind of a process is simply not possible if all the rules are forced down by a bureaucracy. I am happy that the Moily oversight committee is giving the issue the attention and patience it deserves and I am sure it will use the experience of autonomous institutions.

The most venal pressures come in appointments and policies for the public sector. As power minister, I set up a committee under the no-nonsense M.R. Srinavasan, the former Atomic Energy Commission chief and then a member of the Planning Commission, to “advise” the minister on the appointments in very powerful PSUs of the power sector. If the compulsions of coalition politics are making autonomy of public institutions a target, we need to build phalanxes against them. I don’t know the details of the governance structure of AIIMS, but to ask a distinguished surgeon to “explain” his conduct in raising the autonomy issue is, to put it mildly, ill advised. If this happens at Delhi, state satraps already let loose will destroy us.

As India powers itself to roar into the 21st century it can do so only on the back of its great strengths, autonomous knowledge based institutions and not with the mindset of a thanedar. You don’t have to be Jawaharlal Nehru to understand that by giving up power you can actually become more powerful. The people at large appreciate leaders who support and build functioning institutions. A famous French leader was asked why he was at the rear of the crowd in the Paris disturbances of the late sixties. He is reported to have said that he led from the rear. The health minister is doing a superb job in many things and must place himself in line of leadership.

The writer is a former Union minister for power, planning and science and was also vice chancellor of JNU alagh@icenet.net