My Father, page 10
This is a period I distinctly remember. I was already eleven years old then and our home had served as an initial office of the proposed college. Even before Father had taken charge as OSD, letters from Garde had begun arriving at regular intervals at our home address. We children would diligently place these brown envelopes on Father’s desk in his room for him to see when he came from the secretariat in the evening.
A small first batch of the proposed college in electrical and mechanical engineering had begun classes in the Birla Institute of Technology and Science in Pilani in July 1963. The plan was to start classes for this batch, and for a second batch to be admitted shortly, on 1 July 1964, in Jaipur. Therefore, my father had just eight months to put all the pieces of the puzzle in place. These pieces included an office, student admissions, faculty recruitment, hiring of office staff, as well as physical infrastructure including classrooms, hostels, laboratories and workshops, and equipment for the laboratories and workshops. Work had to be done simultaneously on all fronts and progress at breakneck speed to ensure that the deadline was met.
The first thing my father did was to find a suitable building available on rent to set up an office. He found one on Mahatma Gandhi Marg, which cuts Jawaharlal Nehru Marg perpendicularly at the Gandhi Circle, a short distance south of the main entrance to Rajasthan University. To make the office functional, he brought in two stenographers and two assistants on deputation from the secretariat and purchased two typewriters. He was now equipped to begin correspondence with the numerous entities with which he needed to deal over the next several months. The next important challenge was to find land on which temporary classrooms and hostel buildings could be built before he could look for a proper permanent site for the college.
It so happened that the government owned empty land opposite the office building he had rented. The state government planned to build houses for its employees on this land. My father asked Chief Secretary Mehta to spare that land for constructing temporary classrooms and hostels for the college, promising that the construction would be done in such a way that the buildings could be converted into employee housing once the college shifted to its permanent location. Mehta liked the idea and got the chief minister to agree. Construction began immediately, under the supervision of a brilliant engineer from the Public Works Department of the state government. Much to the amazement of everyone, construction was completed within four months. There remained the issue of the workshops, however. But it turned out that a well-equipped workshop at the nearby Podar Secondary School had existed and remained unused for the past several years. All the college required was permission from the government to use it. The government, naturally, granted it.
Positions for faculty and administrative staff were advertised in parallel, and all recruitment was completed by the end of May 1964. All faculty members were in place by 15 June 1964. Furniture for the classrooms, offices and the hostels, and all equipment, including utensils, for the hostel kitchen, were purchased. Admissions for the second batch of the college were completed too. The batch that had studied in Pilani during 1963–64 moved to Jaipur. That batch and the new one began their classes as per schedule on 1 July 1964. In a country where the bureaucracy has been known to move at a snail’s pace, my father successfully brought this first phase of the project to a conclusion at extraordinary speed. Both Principal Garde and Chief Secretary Mehta were mighty surprised and pleased.
With classes begun at the temporary site, my father turned to the second phase of the project. This involved creation of a permanent campus of the college. Principal Garde, himself a visionary, and my father felt that the permanent location of the college should be on a large enough piece of land so that its future expansion would not be constrained and it could have a shot at conversion into an Indian Institute of Technology. A committee chaired by Garde considered the matter in detail and concluded that the college ought to be located on a piece of land that was at least 150 acres in area. Luckily, my father found that a 200-acre piece of barren land existed on the southern boundary of Rajasthan University. Upon inspection, Garde, Mehta and the chief engineer of the Public Works Department agreed that this was the ideal tract of land on which to locate the permanent campus of the college.
The government had allotted the land to an individual a few years earlier, and it now needed to acquire it back from him. The authority for acquisition rested with the collector of Jaipur. My father knew him well. He met the latter and gave him the requisition letter. The collector acted fast. He invoked the emergency powers available under the then prevailing Land Acquisition Act and managed to complete all the formalities in a month’s time. A compensation of Rs 56,000 to the owner was determined, which my father paid immediately on behalf of the college. Garde was deeply impressed by the speed of acquisition of the land and congratulated my father, who replied that the credit for it belonged to the collector, not him.
The next step for my father was to hire a firm to prepare a master plan for the college. A Delhi firm was selected and assigned the task. It completed the plan within six months, which the governing council of the college approved. Based on the plan, the central government allotted the necessary funds, and construction began on the main site of the college soon after. To shift the college to the permanent campus as soon as possible, priority was given to the main building, which had the classrooms and hostels. The office building was to be taken up the last. The plan was to shift the classes to the site on 1 July 1966.
Coincidentally, around this time Ravi decided to apply for admission to the college for the academic year 1965–66. He had been a meritorious student throughout, ranking eleventh and ninth in Rajasthan University in his pre-university and first-year BSc examinations, respectively. Therefore, he had no difficulty in getting admission to the college, which was strictly by merit. The college had introduced two new branches of engineering – metallurgy and civil – in the year 1965–66. Ravi opted for the metallurgical branch for his degree.
In addition to overseeing construction of the new campus of the college, as registrar, my father was also in charge of its day-to-day administration. This occasionally brought him into conflict with one or two particularly contentious faculty members who would intrude into administrative matters. My father feared that these conflicts might lead the faculty members to become hostile towards him and that might eventually harm Ravi, which was the last thing he wanted. Additionally, he felt that with construction of the new campus well underway, he had been left with only the routine work of the registry. Therefore, rather than complete his three-year term as the OSD, he decided to return to the government early.
Accordingly, he informed Garde that he would soon be returning to the government. Garde was keen for him to stay two more years, but Father politely declined. Garde respected his decision, and my father left the college in October 1965. The government rewarded him with two months of privilege leave for the hard work he had put in to get the college on its feet. He was glad to have the break before resuming his duties at the secretariat. The concept of a vacation, in the sense of going to a resort or travelling to another part of the country, was non-existent in Jaipur in those days. Besides, even if such a concept had existed, a vacation would have been too costly for the family to afford. Since my father had a passion for books on contemporary politics and history and for the card game of bridge, those were the activities on which he chose to spend his relaxation time. At the end of his leave, in December 1965, he returned to the government, where he was appointed as assistant secretary in the revenue department.
The college successfully moved its classes to the main campus on 1 July 1966, as per plan. Beginning with his second year in the college, Ravi thus found himself on the main campus. It was a long commute for him to the college on bicycle, but he did it all diligently, completing his five years and earning the bachelor of engineering degree in 1970. As he had ranked fourth in his class, he got selected to serve on the faculty of the college as a lecturer. He served for four years before moving to the private sector, where he had an illustrious career.
I had left India for the United States on 1 September 1974 to pursue doctoral studies and therefore did not follow the progress of the college. But in December 2015, a full fifty years after my father had left it and Ravi had joined it, I had the privilege to visit it in my capacity as vice chairman of NITI Aayog, the think tank Prime Minister Narendra Modi had created as the successor institution to the erstwhile Planning Commission. It was deeply satisfying for me to see that the institution, with just four branches of engineering that my father had helped create, had evolved into a major technology institute. From Malviya Regional Engineering College, it had been rechristened Malviya National Institute of Technology (MNIT) in 2002. Five years later, in 2007, the central government recognized it as an Institution of National Importance, thereby conferring a considerable degree of autonomy of operation on it.
Today, MNIT boasts of thirteen engineering departments at eight centres of excellence for undergraduate studies, a school of management and twenty-seven specialized programmes for master’s and doctoral studies. Its Centre for Advanced Design has nine well-equipped computer labs. The Vivekananda Lecture Theatre Complex has a combined capacity to accommodate 6,500 students. Its hostel now comfortably houses 5,000 students. In 2020, the National Institutional Ranking Framework ranked MNIT thirty-fifth among all engineering colleges in India.
When seen in today’s context, it is difficult to believe that there was a time in independent India when a major academic institution could be built from scratch within eight months of appointment of the principal and registrar to the point of having full-fledged hostels and classrooms of its own. It is equally difficult to believe that in another two years the college could come to have its own brand-new campus on a two-hundred-acre piece of land that the government had to acquire from its owner. Today, our processes and procedures have become so multi-layered and complex that even the most efficient and empowered officers cannot accomplish in twice the time what my father accomplished in the mid 1960s. If my father had had to acquire the same land under the byzantine Land Acquisition Act of 2013, he would have had to extend his tenure as OSD by at least three years. Today, it is commonplace to see new colleges and universities struggle for several years, not only for acquisition of land but also for building their campus.
In the revenue department, my father was given charge of two sections: jagirs and forests. There was very little work related to jagirs at the level of the secretariat. But the case with forests turned out to be quite different. Here, he found himself defending the public interest in yet another important case. As a consequence, he infuriated the forest minister, who saw to it that he was immediately transferred to another department.
Fundamentally, the case had its origins in the fact that India lacks conclusive land titles. All it has are revenue records and records of purchase and sales of land between buyer and seller, carried out on stamp papers issued by the government. Also called settlement records, revenue records go back to the British government days when the latter began keeping such records on a systematic basis for fixing responsibility for land tax. The records are not always up to date, however. For instance, the person recorded as the owner of a piece of land in the settlement records may sell it to someone else. Even if they register the sale with the registration office, the revenue records may not get updated. For reasons such as these, courts do not accept revenue records as the final proof of ownership, and as a result property disputes throughout India are common. In 2016, Rajasthan became the first state to enact a law known as the Rajasthan Urban Land (Certification of Titles) Act, under which conclusive land titles may be issued. But few owners have been issued such titles to date.
The case that landed on my father’s desk involved a two-hundred-acre piece of forest land located east and south of Malviya Regional Engineering College, which was still under construction. A private individual had claimed ownership of this land on the basis of an entry in the old settlement records. He submitted an application with a certified copy of the relevant entry in the settlement records to the minister in charge of forests, Bhikhabhai Bhil, requesting transfer of the land. In the application, he alleged that the forest department of the former Jaipur state had occupied the land in an unauthorized manner. Rather than obtain a report from the chief conservator of forests (CCF) or the forest department in the secretariat, the minister passed an order for the handing over of the land in question to the applicant within three days.
The file containing the order came for compliance from the minister to the secretary of the revenue department, who in turn sent it to my father. When my father saw the order, he was in a state of shock. The land had not been of much value in the pre-Independence era under Jaipur state. But having just helped build the engineering college adjacent to this land, he knew that this land now had huge public value. He immediately requested the CCF to dig out the relevant file from the records of the former state of Jaipur and send it to him. The CCF complied with the request the very next morning. When my father examined the file, he found that the land in question had been entered in the name of the forefathers of the applicant in the settlement record of 1890. In subsequent years, the settlement records reported it as Crown land. It was likely that, having no use for the barren land, the applicant’s forefathers had abandoned it. The applicant had no papers to show that he or his forefathers had ever paid rent for it. He had filed a claim for ownership of the land to the forest officer when the former Jaipur state began proceedings to bring the land under an afforestation scheme. But Jaipur state had rejected that claim. The applicant had then approached the collector, Jaipur, of the former Jaipur state government, and finally the high court, but was rebuffed by all.
After the formation of the state of Rajasthan, the applicant had filed a fresh application before the settlement officer, Jaipur, seeking entry of his name against the land in question on the basis of the 1890 entry in the former Jaipur state settlement records. The section officer followed the routine practice of issuing a show-cause notice to the state government for why the applicant’s claim should be denied. Evidently, no one in the state government had paid any attention to the notice. The section officer had then issued an order for entry of the name of the applicant against the land in the settlement records. It was on the basis of this entry that the applicant had approached the minister to seek possession of the land.
My father wrote a long note narrating the full history of the case. He pointed out that the former Jaipur state government and the highest judicial court of the state had rejected the applicant’s claim and that an entry in the settlement records could not serve as conclusive evidence of ownership. He further stated that the land now being worth more than Rs 10 million, a final decision should be taken only after consultation with the law department and finance department.
After examining the note written by my father, the secretary of the revenue department was left with no option but to send the file to the law department. The latter concurred with my father’s view. When Minister Bhikhabhai Bhil learned of what had transpired in the matter, he was furious. He called my father to his office and told him to be prepared to face the consequences of going against his decision. My father politely replied that in order to protect himself as a public servant, he had no choice in the matter.
The fallout from the incident for my father was that the government immediately transferred him out of the revenue department to the operations and management (O&M) department. Rather than wait for the appointment of his successor in the revenue department, Father handed over the charge immediately to the section officer and assumed his duties in the newly assigned department. It was unfortunate that the secretary and the chief secretary turned out to be too timid to come to the defence of a junior officer who acted fearlessly to protect the public interest.
Though my father was punished for defying his minister, valuable public land was saved from being grabbed by a private individual. In due course, Malviya Nagar, a beautiful residential colony, sprang up on this land. Today, even a 250 square metre plot in the colony goes for Rs 20 million. One can guess the enormous value of the two hundred acres that Father was able to save from unlawful possession by a private individual.
This episode brings into sharp relief the cost India and Indians pay on a continuous basis for lacking a system of conclusive legal ownership titles to immovable property. The owner of any such property in India has undisputed ownership right to it only so long as no one disputes it. A challenge to ownership rights can be mounted by almost anyone at any time, with a prolonged court battle almost guaranteed. The result has been the accumulation of millions of land disputes around the country over time, with concomitant costs in terms of economic efficiency and growth.
Any large-scale enterprise requires a large piece of land. Given the large number of ownership disputes in existence in India, assembling such a piece of land is a real challenge for an entrepreneur, even when she is willing to pay the market price for such land. With multiple claimants to at least a number of parcels of land within any contiguous piece of fifty to hundred acres, the buyer does not know whom to buy those parcels from. In most countries with weak or no land title systems, the government can solve the problem by acquiring such parcels of land on behalf of the entrepreneur. But in 2013, India adopted a highly restrictive Land Acquisition Act, which makes it extremely difficult for the government to acquire land on behalf of a private enterprise. Therefore, in addition to inflexible labour laws, land markets too have become a major constraint to the growth of large-scale enterprises in India.
