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Uneasy heads

EducationWorld May 06 | EducationWorld
Dr. Ashok Ganguly, chairman of the pan-India Central Board of Secondary Education (number of affiliated schools: 8,700), is under investigation by the Central Vigilance Commission (CVC) for flouting service rules and allegedly promoting textbooks of private publishers at the expense of government publications. Preeti Karmayogi, a Delhi-based correspondent of the Asian Age who filed an application under the Right to Information Act, 2005 to the CVC to solicit information on this issue, has received confirmation that Ganguly is being investigated by the commission. However the CVC declined to provide better particulars on the ground that “it may impede the process of investigation,” says Karmayogi. Educationists in the national capital are inclined to discern a link between a mysterious shortage of NCERT textbooks and Ganguly having penned the complimentary forewords of six textbooks of private publishers. An allegation against Ganguly is that he deliberately under-ordered textbooks from the government-owned NCERT (National Centre for Education Research and Training), so that private publishers make up the shortfall running into millions of copies of popular textbooks. Yet the reclusive Ganguly (who has repeatedly denied interviews to EducationWorld ) is not facing the firing squad alone. Francis Fanthome chief executive of the country’s most upscale school examinations board, CISCE (Council for Indian School Certificate Examination), was suspended and sent on long leave in May 2005 on charges of unauthorisedly “authoring, editing, presenting, compiling and endorsing” 47 textbooks. An enquiry by the Bangalore-based Justice (Retd) M.F. Saldanha is reportedly being spun out to coincide with Fanthome’s retirement next month (June). Uneasy indeed are the heads that wear the crowns of India’s top two school examination boards. Advertiser’s flight The small but growing community of the discerning who appreciate the importance of hoisting education to the top of the national development agenda, and who follow the steady pilgrim’s progress of this pioneer publication, will no doubt have noticed that our modest effort to advertise EducationWorld as cost-effectively as limited budgets will allow, has driven us to advertise the newsstand availability of EW on national television. Thereby hangs a tale with a moral in it. Instinctively the first choice television channel to advertise EW’s unique charms was the English language Delhi-based NDTV 24×7, promoted by the nationally heralded Cadillac communists Prannoy Roy and spouse Radhika, who by mysterious alchemy swung the remarkable feat of getting requisite permissions to take NDTV public and raise over Rs.100 crore in 2004 despite the company never having made a profit and showing a loss of Rs.47 crore in the year preceding. Following this with the channel riding high in the public esteem, your grovelling editor was obliged to importune the effortlessly superior prima donnas of the NDTV Bangalore office (since the Comrade Roy neither returns calls nor replies letters) for a twice-monthly slot on the 9 o’clock news for a chastening, non-negotiable Rs.1,000 per second. Under the terms of the unequal contract, all paperwork had to be just so and dispatched to the Delhi politbureau on the dot with the advertising material, or else. When particulars were solicited regarding NDTV’s viewership ratings and soaring
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