Flamboyant fraud

Less than five years ago, the Delhi-based Indian Institute of Planning and Management (IIPM, estb.1973), fronted by its flamboyant pony-tailed promoter-director Arindam Chaudhuri, was one of the biggest advertisers in the mainstream press with a penchant for full-page ads in the Times of India which trumpeted IIPM as one of the Top 10 B-schools in India — globally networked, ahead of its time and daring to dream. Well, that era is over. According to online magazine Scroll.in (March 24), Chaudhuri, who had filed criminal and civil defamation cases in courts all over the country — Assam, Haryana and Uttarakhand apart from Delhi — against Maheshwer Peri, publisher of Careers360, for daring to allege that the tall claims made about the six-figure salaries and fantastic capabilities of IIPM graduates were fictional, has withdrawn all of them and shut down IIPM’s 18 branches across the country. Nevertheless, it has to be conceded that for over four decades, the promoters of IIPM, first Dr. Malay Chaudhuri who claims to have been a professor at IIM-Bangalore and later his Saville Row-styled offspring, managed to lure thousands of gullible students mainly from small town India who paid up Rs.5-6 lakh per year for IIPM’s patchwork, home-brewed two-year MBA diploma programme, which wasn’t approved by UGC or AICTE. However, even the hard-nosed managers of Bennett Coleman & Co Ltd (BCCL), which owns the Times of India, were fooled into signing their famous equity-for-advertising ‘partnership treaty’ with the Chaudhuris, which explains the very expensive full-page ads IIPM was able to afford in TOI. Today BCCL’s shareholding in IIPM is as worthless as the MBA diplomas awarded to thousands of the institute’s graduates done in by the Chaudhuris. Contrary to what Abraham Lincoln famously said, you can fool all the people, even if not all the time, for long enough to make a fortune. And in the Indian socialist soft state, you may get away with it. Neta-babu  victory Institutionalisation of corruption is proceeding apace in the southern state of Karnataka which until recently enjoyed the reputation of being the most well-administered in the country. Now that’s history. In recent decades, as the state transformed into a hub of industry and commerce, it has steadily acquired a notorious reputation for government and institutional corruption. To his credit, in 1984 the late Ramakrishna Hegde, then chief minister of Karnataka took the initiative to appoint the country’s first Lok Ayukta (‘people’s friend’) aka ombudsman, to independently entertain, investigate and adjudicate charges of corruption against politicians and government employees. Although the seven ombudsmen — all of them retired Supreme Court or high court judges — appointed under the state’s Lok Ayukta Act were not able to stem Karnataka’s rising tide of corruption, the Lok Ayukta’s office in Bangalore investigated an average of 2,000 complaints against government officials per year, infusing some fear into the rampantly corrupt state machinery. In February 2013 after Justice Bhaskar Rao, a former chief justice of the Karnataka high court was appointed Lok Ayukta, the contagion of…