Golgappa University and the Chinese kutta

 

The biggest contribution of India AI Impact Summit 2026 has been to the English language. So many new words and phrases. “Galgotian blunder,” which is just like Himalayan blunder, but bigger. “Galgotian presentation," "Galgotian exaggeration,” “Galgotiafication of media, education, etc.,” “Galgotia kutta,” “Chinese kutta with Indian Aadhaar card.” “Are you studying at a University or at Galgotia?;” “Are you normal or Galgotian?;” “From make in India to pack in India.” “Galgotias syndrome,” “Galgotiyapa,” “Galgoat” and “Golgappa University.” 

When India lost to South Africa in the t20 super 8 yesterday, someone said, “Looks like, Gautam Gambhir did his Cricket coaching course at Galgaotias.”

Time was when Galgotia was a revered name. It was a regular must-visit for all of us students in Delhi - as a bookstore (E.D. Galgotia & Sons, set up in 1933) in Connaught Place in Delhi which had possibly the largest and most extensive collection of books in the country. The bookshop resembled more of a large library. Then, reading methods changed; Galgotias closed shop and reinvented themselves, first as Publishers and then as a University. 

Now it has come to this. It didn’t happen overnight. It took years of assiduous efforts to achieve the “Galgotian” fiasco. Right from the beginning, the founders were vocal about their alignment with a particular dispensation. In 2014, the current Prime Minister (then Chief Minister, Gujarat) attended DQ CyberMedia ICT Awards function at Delhi and handed over the award for being the top Indian university for excellence in academics and global linkages (whatever that means) to Mr. Suneel Galgotia, Chancellor, Galgotias University. In 2015, Galgotias University was awarded for Excellence in Academics by then Union Home Minister Shri Rajnath Singh at the National Make in India Conclave. Galgotias’ convocations and other events are regularly graced by various ministers at the Centre and the state (Uttar Pradesh) and Sambit Patra.

In 2020, there was a paper from the same university, “Corona Virus Killed by Sound Vibrations Produced by Thali or Ghanti: A Potential Hypothesis” (Journal of Molecular Pharmaceuticals and Regulatory Affairs). The same has now been retracted, most probably after the Chinese kutta controversy.

Going by all their full-page ads all over the place, I presumed it must have taken off as a posh, expensive university. It was expensive all right but my first inkling of not-everything-being-kosher came during the lead up to the 2024 Parliamentary elections. While there were assertions of “aapke bhains chura lenge,” “aapke tonti nikal lenge,” “aapke magalsutra chheen lenge” aur kya kya in political speeches, there was a demonstration by some students in front of the Congress offices against the Congress manifesto and the wealth redistribution and inheritance tax it espoused. The students were carrying placards with “Down with Urban Naxals,” “No Inheritance Tax,” and so on written on them. Some reporters asked them about these things. Turned out, they didn’t have the slightest clue as to what was an Urban Naxal, what was inheritance tax or what wealth redistribution meant. The only question which elicited a clear answer was which institution they were from and it was the same Galgotias University. Here’s a video on this: 

youtube.com/watch?si=-v599egJJ3ZzpfOX&v=0vd4rMruHeE&feature=youtu.be

Galgotias highlights the fact that between 2017 and 2024, it filed for 2,430 patents. (Compare this to the most research-intensive IIT - IIT, Madras - filing for 2,550 patents since 1975!) What Galgotias doesn’t say is, it has managed to receive exactly zero patent rights against these applications.   

For the AI enclave, Galgotias bagged a booth bigger than what 4 IITs combined got. Doordarshan ignored the other stalls and laser-focused on the Galgotias stall highlighting its robot, its 3-D printer and so on. The Minister of Electronics and IT tweeted a picture of the robo-dog. Then, in that Doordarshan PR package thinly disguised as news, appeared Prof. Neha Singh who proudly showed the robo-dog called Orion as “developed” by a Galgotias centre. When it turned out that it was actually a Chinese product called Unitree Go2 readily available in the market for Rs. 3 lacs or so, she doubled down, saying, “Your 6 can be my 9.” All that carefully choreographed event aimed at wowing the world even at the cost of complete chaos for actual participants and visitors and forcibly grabbing the hand of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to his acute awkwardness got overshadowed by the Chinese kutta. The Minister hastily removed his tweet. Then Galgotias were asked to remove themselves. Looks like, they resisted, so the power supply to their stall had to be cut off. In their ignominious departure, they left behind a thermocol aeroplane which also became fodder for further memes with reporters demonstrating how it can be deployed to obliterate Pakistan from the face of the earth.

 

It has been widely apprehended that AI will take away human jobs. Well, it seems to have taken away at least one. Neha Singh’s LinkedIn profile now reads:

IMHO, the problem is not with Galgotias or Neha Singh. The actual problem is AI, i.e., the Artificial Image-making that has been normalised over the last decade or so. All these choreographed events, obsession with curated imaging, emasculation of the media to the point of converting them into PR agencies, outrageously exaggerated claims of achievements when there is none, replacement of any inconvenient data by complete fictions, words like Vishwaguru and so on. The hollowness of all these is now breaking surface. 

I think, any media report should now carry the statutory declaration, “No Galgotians were harmed during the process.” Galgotia, yeh tune kya kiya?!

Apex pettiness

 

Till very late in the IPS career, I didn’t know about the most important reason or purpose, the raison d'être for a civil servant’s existence, which is attaining the apex scale. This particular hallowed endowment is allowed only at the very top when one hits the level of Secretary to government of India, Chief Secretary in states and a few select DGPs in my service. 

When I was holding the post of a mere joint secretary in government of India and, by a set of fortuitous circumstances, managed to be assigned to hold the post of a DGP, I saw a file when previously another Joint Secretary level officer in the IAS had been similarly assigned (for a short while); he had moved the file to be given the same salary as that of the DGP whose post he was temporarily holding, and was granted the same. Lo and behold, the post carried that apex scale! So I moved the same file, with the same reasoning. 

The file went to my Ministry, then DoPT, then MHA and I was granted the coveted Apex scale. Then the file moved down to me through all those channels and I felt good. The Secretary retired. I was seeking to build a good, working relation with the new Secretary. Things were going well until I had to visit a foreign country on official work. For the political clearance, I had to fill up a form. It was a routine thing. However, when this Secretary saw the pay column and “Apex scale” written there, he saw red. 

He asked his colleagues how come a mere joint secretary level officer was getting the same scale which he had attained after long toil, asked my office for the file, went through the contents and went ballistic. His colleagues tried to inform him that it was all examined at various levels and in three different departments and was as per the rules. Despite this, the discomfort of the Secretary was so much that while allowing me to visit abroad, he erroneously ordered that all my perks would be as per my original scale. It didn’t make any difference but I thought that would make him happy. However, he continued to be agitated. I was told that he wrote a Demi Official letter to various authorities to cancel the “abominable” grant. Apparently, it took him 10 full days to draft that letter, crossing out a comma here, making a word bold there, and so on. Despite all this, the replies came back upholding the earlier decision. 

The Secretary called up many of his counterparts to annihilate this “anomaly” but didn’t get anywhere. It became so much the talk of the town that whenever I attended any party of civil servants and was introduced to anyone, the first response was, “Oh, B.B. Dash, you’re getting the apex scale?!” 

Probably, the Secretary felt “thwarted” or something but, try as I might, our relations never recovered after that. In all my Performance Appraisal Reports, I always used to fill in only quantified targets and achievements. I had exceeded all the various targets. The Secretary had to agree because they were hard facts. However, he wrote, “these were achieved because of close supervision by the ministry.” With that, he justified a sub-Outstanding grade, knowing fully well that that would kill my chances of promotion. However, the Minister saw this and overruled him and put me at the highest of the outstanding points. 

An Apex scale can create quite a heartburn. 

Guess what, that apex scale as of today is a basic pay of Rs. 2,25,000 and those days, it was just Rs. 80,000. That’s all. Considering the pay and perks I’d walked out on by quitting the corporate sector for the civil services, I was really amused by it all. The amount involved was paltry. The Secretary was petty. On an epic apex scale.

Budget, bakwaas and a wish list

 

Another budget has just been announced. The budget speech was one hour and 25 minutes long. This was the one thing I liked. The only thing. It’s still not ideal. What’s the point of these long speeches? Longest budget speech ever in the Indian Parliament has been over 2 hours and 42 minutes, by Nirmala Sitharaman herself, in 2020. In fact, some of the Godi media anchors were sounding a little apologetic that she didn’t catch up with or exceed her own record in terms of the length of the speech. 

Does anyone really listen to it? No. Is there any meaningful discussion to be had, based on the long, tedious ramble? Again, no. The treasury benches dutifully thump the desks from time to time. Opposition dutifully cries, “Shame, shame.” Then the finance minister does the rounds of TV studios saying what a great budget she’s produced and how it’ll solve every single problem in India. The opposition guys do the rounds decrying how it is anti-poor, anti-this state or this region, and so on. 

Here’s my wish list for making things a little more meaningful. 

The budget speech should start sharp at 11 AM. Not because Parliamentarians shouldn’t start work at 9.30 like the rest of Delhi but because there’s a lot of briefing and mock question-answer, etc. that need to be gone through by the ministers. The officials also need to be prepared. Having spent a lot of time in the official gallery in the Parliament, I know how hectic these preparations can be. 

After laying the budget speech and the details on the floor of the house, the Finance Minister should make the budget speech for exactly half an hour and not a second more. If she exceeds the time, the microphones should be switched off. 

This half an hour should be divided into three broad parts of 10 minutes each. The first 10 minutes should be devoted to a maximum of 10 schemes announced in the previous budget and the achievements against that. The second 10 minutes should detail at least five and not more than 10 thrust areas for the new budgetary year. The last 10 minutes should give the new taxes introduced and old taxes scrapped and a broad overview of how each rupee would be earned and how it’d be spent. Also, what would be likely to be cheaper and what would be costlier. No shero shayari, no grandstanding – those could come on subsequent days. 

After this, rather than having any knee-jerk reactions to the budget, the Parliament should adjourn till 3 PM so that the members and their minders can study the budget proposals. There should be meaningful discussion thereafter only till 5 PM, with at least five questions allotted to the LoP or the leader of the largest party. 

That’s it for budget day. All the major discussion should take place on subsequent dates. 

The stock market should be closed on budget day to avoid rigging/ spot-fixing, influencing the sentiments, etc.. 

The budget speech should serve merely as an introduction to the budget statement. Frankly speaking, even if the FM takes three hours over it, she can’t do more. The Devil and the God lie in the details. As soon as the speech starts, the entire budget statement and the tables should be made available on the Finance Ministry website – the tables should be in both PDF and machine-readable form so that the data can be analysed quickly. [There can be a disclaimer that if there’s a conflict between the PDF and the machine-readable format, the former would prevail.] 

The idea of the budgets should be make the budget progressively irrelevant. 

One last thing – all that drama about halwa making and feeding the FM dahi-chini, etc. should stop. If we want to be a mature nation, we should behave like one. According the budget less importance and symbolism would truly be getting away from the colonial yoke, not banning bandhgalas.