Mohammed going to the mountain, the mountain will come to Mohammed!

Sanjaya Baru on Higher Education

• ….a decade of destruction under the whimsical and arbitrary leadership of two policy dinosaurs, Murali Manohar Joshi and Arjun Singh, their ideological thought-managers and bureaucratic know-it-alls.

• Defending his latest initiative, the proposed Foreign Educational Institutions (Entry and Operation) Regulation Bill 2010, in a television interview to Karan Thapar last week, Mr Sibal likened his initiatives for education reform to the economic reforms of the early 1990s. The opposition to his proposed foreign education Bill was coming, Mr Sibal said, from the same kind of quarters that criticised economic liberalisation in 1991.
• Look where India is now. QED, suggested Mr Sibal, today’s critics will be tomorrow’s beneficiaries. In 1991, the opposition to reform melted quickly as middle class households saw tariff rates come down and stock market indices go up! Rahul Bajaj was hamara, but the Mumbaikar did not like his Bombay Club.