Fraudulent selection

Sir, - ``We are making headway steadily backwards'' - the words are those of Winston Churchill but meant for our men in power. While the rest of the world is engaged in a race to improve education, we lie back and practise corruption on our students in selection for training, with customary aplomb.

The latest indictment by Mr. Justice P. Shanmugam, a most mild mannered judge of the Madras High Court, setting aside the selection of 600 candidates for admission to diploma courses in the Nagercoil cooperative institute for 1999-2000, is most disgraceful and this case eclipses previous instances of egregious corruption (TheHindu, Jan. 5).

The judge calls the entire exercise ``arbitrary and high-handed'' and, what is most damning, ``a pre-determined selection decided by the authorities even prior to the interview''. Strong words that should make the authorities quiver with guilt.

Obviously corruption is writ large on every line of this selection. A 40-second interview to divine the hidden genius of the students would be beyond Houdini the magician, but that was what the Cooperation department actually did!

Setting aside the selection is not enough. That action these officers and their bosses are used to. They must pay punitive damages to those who were denied selection and those who were wrongly put through this futile training.

Of course, everyone concerned should be eased out of public service; that is what political dharma demands. And failure should trigger pro bono litigation, for this is an ideal subject for a public interest litigation writ. It is a crying shame that even before the millennium began, we had spawned this scandal.

V. R. Lakshminarayanan,

Chennai

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