India's Tommy Hilfiger utopia is a bluff that will soon be called across the globe | Pankaj Mishra | Comment is free | The Guardian

In other words, private universities have become a pretext for real estate speculators to acquire expensive land from the government: another example of the collusion between state and private business manifested recently in some of India's biggest corruption scandals. These sweetheart deals would be somewhat excusable if, unlike most Indian institutions of learning, the private universities offered an education rather than degrees. But they are only interested in extracting steep tuition fees from parents anxious for their children to join India's new economy.

CEO-struck writers and journalists – the "useful idiots" of the rich and powerful – hold up another end of what the economist Ha-Joon Chang calls the "financial-intellectual complex".

India's Tommy Hilfiger utopia is a bluff that will soon be called across the globe | Pankaj Mishra | Comment is free | The Guardian

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