Kashmir is bottomline

Improvement in relations with Pakistan will not bring any tangible benefits to India.

Improvement in relations with Pakistan will not bring any tangible benefits to India. Pakistan will continue its covert support to the terrorists operating in Kashmir. India is pursuing a flawed policy of putting Kashmir as a secondary issue in its relations with Pakistan. It should have insisted on the elimination of the terror machine in Kashmir as a condition for negotiations with Pakistan.

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Kamal Hak

via e-mail

II

Pakistan will never give up its claim on Kashmir which has been an effective tool for bleeding India through a proxy war. This cause has helped Pakistan groom a jehadi army that can be put to effective use without incurring much expenditure. This helps it to block India’s claim to permanent membership of the UN Security Council.

Aditya Agnihotri

via e-mail

III

Pakistan is so bent on exploiting Kashmir that they will not leave this issue ‘till death’ as they claim.

Deepak Vidhyarthi

Muzaffarnagar

Levelling the fees

When it comes to dreaming up solutions for a problem, why do government experts act like Don Quixote? (IIT or IIM at Rs 6,000 a year? Panel tells Govt. to reduce fees, January 4). The government wants to make it easy for poor students who qualify for IIT/IIM admission to join the institution. So why not increase the government financial assistance to qualified poor students instead of artificially reducing the tuition fee? Those who can afford to pay the current level of fees should jolly well pay.

The annual fee structure at Harvard, Yale, MIT and other Ivy League institutions is in the $ 35,000-40,000 range for graduation programmes — far above what a middle-class US family can afford. The poor students are supported through a variety of financial assistance programmes.

Satyam Jayanth

Bangalore

II

It seems the HRD ministry is trying to destroy the autonomy of our prestigious institutions. The latest proposal is designed to make the IITs and the IIMs more dependent on the government for funding. A sum of Rs 70,000 a year for tuition and hostel accommodation at an IIT is extremely cheap and almost all students can afford it.

For the select few who cannot, there are bank loans and scholarships. Moreover, since a large fraction of the graduates take up lucrative jobs outside India, spending the taxpayers’ money to subsidise this brain drain is unjustified.

Kunal Talwar

via e-mail

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