A nation of cheats revisited

With parents complicit in most academic scams cheating seems to run in our blood

I had every intention of continuing on my current pet theme of garbage for this week too but then a short little story on our Business Standard website caught my attention.

The story is the usual one: a medical cheating scam — the kind we are pretty immune to as Indians. The college is one of the usual too — relatively unknown and prone to making rather dramatic claims: SRM University. With three campuses in the country, the college site informed me that SRM University is one of the “top ranking universities in India with over 38,000 students and more than 2,600 faculty across all the campus”, offering a wide range of undergraduate, postgraduate and doctoral programmes in — well, almost everything — engineering, management, medicine and health sciences, science and humanities. Fifty members from top universities across the world including MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley, Cambridge and NUS apparently help set global standards.

What kind of global standards these are I would be intrigued to know since the news item sets standards of a different kind. Here’s where it all gets quite exciting and begins to sound like a potboiler. B Madan of Vendhar Movies is the man in question. Besides collecting bribes from parents, he also produces Tamil films. He was arrested only last week after he was in hiding for five months. The police had received 133 complaints against him. He is accused of cheating at least 91 sets of parents of Rs 91 crore. The SRM management claims to have nothing to do with it. Yet mysteriously close to 180-odd people have paid Mr Madan a substantial sum of money to secure seats for their children in the medical college. They must have some reason to believe he can swing it although the SRM management reportedly could not figure it.

But the delightful nugget is yet to come. All parents have — on record — confessed to the Enforcement Directorate of having paid bribes of anywhere between Rs 50 lakh and Rs 1.05 crore for admission to the SRM Medical College. This for me was the icing on the cake. That implies that close to 180-odd people — parents — have admitted to cheating in this manner. They have actually paid the money to Mr Madan. But since he has gone back on his word — and has not been able to deliver the seats — they have had no option but to come clean about it. Who can allow Rs 50 lakh to Rs 1 crore to go down the drain?

Phew. Doesn’t it make you wonder? Are we or aren’t we a nation of cheats? I remember a column in this newspaper by columnist Sunil Sethi — which I agreed with wholeheartedly — titled a “We are a nation of cheats”. It attracted a lot of ire from many readers but hey, let’s just think about this once more.

A whole bunch of parents who don’t mind basing their children’s lives on a lie. 180 of them in fact. What kind of doctors would these make eventually? What kind of self-esteem would they have? What kind of competence? What kind of human beings are these parents hoping to raise or launch into the world? What kind of morals and ethical codes would these individuals live by?

Let me point out here that this is not the only scam of this kind. This is in fact my fourth piece on cheating and scams in the recent past — the second involving the medical profession. In all the cases, parents have been complicit in the scam. They in fact provide the funds. In the alleged medical scam involving Delhi University, a lot of the parents were doctors themselves who wanted their offspring to obtain seats the illegal way.

Two points need to be kept in mind here. One, as parents we need to draw some kind of balance in what we aspire for — for our children. Yes, as a parent, I want the best for my child but does that mean I can encourage him to lie and cheat his way to it? Let’s give that a thought.

And two, as Indians, we need to at some stage accept that cheating is some kind of second nature to us. Let’s start acknowledging some of our shortcomings — be it our attitude to garbage or to cheating. If we don’t ever acknowledge that we have a problem, we will never come closer to solving it.

Meanwhile, my sympathies are somewhat with Mr Madan, the movie-maker, who it appears is languishing in jail alone. He was after all only trying to deliver a service, one that people were willing to pay for and one that must have been delivered in the past too.