India blocks 73 URLs criticizing IIPM, an MBA college | Hacker News Reader

India blocks 73 URLs criticizing IIPM, an MBA college

medianama.com

138 pointsdotmanish44 comments

It's been proven time and time again that whenever any censorship blacklist is created, for whatever "good reason", it will end up being abused for purposes that have nothing to do with the original purpose of the list. Although, in this case India actually telegraphed from the beginning that it will be used like this, when they said it will be used against "negative" comments or something like that.

Fascinating.

Currently our (UK) Prime Minister is in India trying to sell our universities (amongst a lot of other things) to Indian students. Lovely bit of inter-cultural exchange right? Generally speaking, yes, absolutely. The more the merrier as far as I am concerned. However...

Back here in the UK, the very same PM has trebled the costs of going to university for English and Welsh students, pricing many out, raised the education thresholds meaning less students can qualify, while he is supported by racist right wing tabloid Murdoch press who hate immigration, foreigners and most of all dark skins who threaten middle class house prices. Oh yeah, our right wing is that racist. Yet there he is offering unlimited places for rich Indians who can afford UK universities, while clearly snubbing Indian education. If proof of a substandard Indian education system were needed, the rich flocking to the UK for it will do the mass Indian population nicely.

So, here we have our PM pricing out his own country's students, claiming immigration is out of control and evil, while offering to open the flood gates to Indian rich kids who can afford UK education, while snubbing their own, which clearly has its problems as shown by this article.

While I personally am all for immigration, (and believe me Indians in particular have done the UK proud, and me personally, so much so I argue they are more British than us fairly useless white lot) I cant quite work out how this all plays out for both the Brits and Indians. Seems like a perfect slap in the face to both of us.

This whole thing is a bizarre contradiction to me. If we in the UK really wanted to help India out, perhaps we could have out flag ship universities help the Indian education department (whatever) improve its own situation. Er, freely share our education knowledge.

Oh.... Freedom of information. Can't have that, can we?

Anyway, I'm a bit confused by the whole thing. And I can't help thinking our PM is making it worse, mostly for the Indians. If the cream of their crop flock here, then where does that leave their education system? If Indians fill out the university places left by Brits who can no longer afford it, where does that potentially leave race relations in the UK?

Oh, last thought. What if these students stay on afterwards? Brilliant for us, but aren't we then brain draining India? Again, at a detriment to them?

Yup, confused.

(For Brits reading... yes I know Scotland's education is separate.)

Just to set facts straight - for best of Indian students UK hasn't been destination of choice for higher studies (for awhile I think). I come from one of the top 10 engineering universities and none in my batch selected UK for higher education. I repeat None.

It may sound little weird, but the reason UK, Australia and New Zealand universities needs selling in India is because "it needs selling". UK isn't attracting brightest Indians (probably just richer students), it is US that gets best of them.

As for India's education system - it is meh agreed. But I believe our undergrad (read B.S) is just fine. It is higher education and research facilities where we have done a thorough whack job. But this won't be fixed overnight. Problem starts from rather poor salary of university professors, little research grants and last but not the least, smart people attract other smart people.

Brain drain[1] indeed is a problem for us, but the problem will need fixing by improving quality of higher education.

1.http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/tech-careers/the-global-bra...

One could expect engineering students to stick to top Indian schools and a few in the US, but someone interested in law, history, humanities, etc., would have a very difficult choice between Oxbridge and anywhere else at all.

"But I believe our undergrad (read B.S) is just fine." - That is not true.

Could you elaborate on that (I know nothing about the Indian education)? I was under the impression that the IITs were good. Would you disagree with that? Or is it that there is a couple of schools which are good but the rest is so-so.

The IITs take a bunch of smart people in. These are people who have the necessary drive, intelligence to succeed in any environment. That doesn't necessarily mean the institute itself is good or something.

As far as the rest of education system, my experience was that rote memorizing was encouraged and people were not necessarily taught how to think or even encouraged how to think. I dunno, maybe it is a cultural thing but I didn't like it.

It's like this:

* Indian PoV: I get to study abroad, make more money and increase my social prestige.

* UK PoV: Indians bring in a lot of money, making our country even richer. Let's have more of them.

In short, it's all about money, not about education or freedom of information.

> here in the UK, the very same PM has trebled the costs of going to university for English and Welsh students, pricing many out

As far as I was aware, under the new scheme, graduates only start paying back their student debt once (and only if) their income crosses a certain threshold. That seems like a fairly good deal to me--a crude approximation of saying 'you only pay for your degree if you get financial value from it'.

> This whole thing is a bizarre contradiction to me.

I agree that education is a special case within international trade. But I do think that it is a matter for India and not Britain to curtail the ability of Indians to study abroad, if India believes that is (a) fair, and (b) beneficial to their domestic education system. I don't find it at all bizarre or morally perverse that the PM should act as a cheerleader for influential domestic interests such as our higher education system, especially when full fee-paying international students effectively subsidise UK students. And I've never seen Cameron say he wishes to reduce the number of fee-paying foreign students attending accredited UK institutions.

And a also disagree with the implication in your comment that the UK general taxpayer subsidies higher education too little. More higher education than a free market would provide is beneficial, but after a certain point the net benefit to society of the next marginal student buying subsided education would be less than the added public benefit. If you watch the front page of HN, there's occasionally an article or two about a higher education bubble; people are (probably) already buying more education (and certainly in some sectors if not others) than the job market can stand.

I like the idea of free education as a 'right', naturally or socially constructed. But moving towards that reality in Britain has to come from innovation slashing the marginal cost of education, and in the short term, by increasing the number of full fee-paying foreign students. Allocating revenue or large tax rises to up the number of students in higher education are going to be politically infeasible for at least a generation. (Not forgetting the looming demographic crisis on top of the current downturn.)

graduates only start paying back their student debt once (and only if) their income crosses a certain threshold

Interesting, I had missed this (but I'm not British, so haven't been following closely). It looks like the new scheme defers repayment if you earn less than £21,000 (US$32,500), and then it further caps annual payments to 9% of your income that exceeds that amount.

This is very very similar to how it works for tertiary education in Australia too.

>If the cream of their crop flock here, then where does that leave their education system? If Indians fill out the university places left by Brits who can no longer afford it, where does that potentially leave race relations in the UK?

This is a solved problem. You see, England was never as aspirational as Silicon Valley for Indians in general - and that immigration has been going on for many decades.

Reverse brain drain (going abroad, studying and coming back) is something that both India amd China have engineered very successfully. We have awards for distinguished Non Resident Indians given by the Prime Minister which, I daresay, is designed for nostalgia. IMHO no other country makes such a big deal of its non resident citizens.

This is precisely one of the reasons that Obama is trying to introduce the startup bill - Indian and Chinese immigrants are very happy going back and starting companies at home.

I think Cameron is responding to the US and Australian attraction for Indian students. England is least preferred anyway because of the racism (a couple of Australian incidents font make it as bad as England).

(and believe me Indians in particular have done the UK proud, and me personally, so much so I argue they are more British than us fairly useless white lot

It seems to be ideological where that type of thinking comes from.

Yes, I am uncomfortable with the implied reverse racism here too (Not sure if that was OP was intent...).

This is about more than censorship. As has been repeated by many others IIPM is a Degree Mill at best and an active in-progress scam with many victims at the other end of the awfulness spectrum.

The "Dean" of IIPM - an extremely charismatic fellow by the name of Arindam Chaudary - likes to use every weapon at his disposal to silence those that want to expose his shenanigans. Think about how Scientology goes after its critics - this person is in the same boat. He has managed to sue/pressurize and bully anyone that wants to stand-up to him.

The media have been just as guilty - they get many full page adverts and TV spots so they have no issues hyping this "institute". This is a tragedy for pretty much every student of that institute.

For those of us living outside India, FakingNews and such other sites are still accessible. "The Hindu" newspaper [1] asked the right question: why weren't the defendants given a chance to explain their "defamatory" opinions? It's like, "Oh, I don't agree with you. You must be censored and punished!". Wonder how is Internet surviving in India at all.

[1]: http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/this-gag-order-is-no-f...

I think a lot of people are confused with the hawkish name of this institution. It represents the very worst of Indian education system, not the best or anywhere near it. Infact, it's a diploma mill which is not even in the Top 100 management institutes of India. Arindam, the director, himself comes from a family of illustrious cheats with a larger than life image.

Easiest way is skim through this site: http://www.iipm-fraud.com/

The govt has little clue of what it is doing. Hopefully 1 more year, and we can get rid of this regime for good.

They've done this before against an excellent piece of investigative journalism done by an Indian magazine called The Caravan, called "The Sweet Smell of Success: How Arindam Chaudhuri made a fortune off the aspirations -- and insecurities -- of India's middle classes."

That article was taken down, but I'd pulled a PDF of it then, so here it is for anyone that wants to know more about the shadiness that is IIPM.

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/15497688/Sweet%20Smell%20of%20Succe...

Would anyone buy a used car from this man?

http://goo.gl/mmEuI

I am an Indian and this is worrying situation. The university in which I study has censored a lot of things(game websites are blocked among many other) and many others are doing same.

The thing is that people are making it a habit to block Internet. And shady institutes like this are just going out and asking far away courts for blocks which they can easily get.

Just to be clear- The university that you study has the right to censor certain websites because they are providing you internet and hence they can stipulate the rules(for the service they are providing). However, the argument here is that the government should not block URLs because they are not providing the service and they are just regulators of this service. The argument here is that as regulators, they are going out of their purview by curbing on freedom of expression (guaranteed by the constitution).

By your argument, censorship by ISPs is justified.

Yes. If they do, what might happen is you might choose a different ISP. Its simply not in their business interest to censor content, hence they dont!

Typically, if they have to censor, it would have to be based on an agreement with the customer before hand, else it would be a violation of consumer rights!

When you join the unviersity you must have signed any terms of service. That usually includes statements like, internet from univ will be used only for academic purposes. This is why they block the websites

IIPM, welcome to the Streisand effect :)

Never heard about them before, but guess that this case will get so widespread now that it will be impossible to sue and block all the critics. Maybe this is a case they can analyse at there school?

Very much so! normally no one would have stumbled across many of those links, now all news articles publish all the urls at one place, and of course everyone is curious what they say

"an educational institution"

Aka "diploma mill", most likely.

This times a million. We've had a LOT of suspicious unverifiable qualifications presented to us from that part of the world.

Indian here. It is.

It is not even a diploma mill. It has absolutely no recognition from any government body for anything related to education.

To know more about Arindam - https://www.quora.com/Who-Is-X/Who-is-Arindam-Chaudhuri

Thanks for removing 'educational institution' from the description. IIPM is probably an educational institution as much as a circus is a wildlife reserve.

This isn't the first time I've heard or read negative news about IIPM. The background story behind this institution is a gigantic red flag.

They always advertise in the Times of India which is the largest English language daily in the world (more than NYT, WSJ, and USAT combined).

What was funny was that they said hurry the deadline for the next batch/semester is a certain date. APPLY NOW! ...of course what would happen after that date? Oh wait now its some new date to apply for the same batch/semester. All you had to do was look at the site to know it was a highly questionable place to get an education.

The reality is that the policy in India, has not been formally formed about copyright. Whoever takes this battleground, will have a significant advantage on his side.

IIPM, is actually a viral sort of university, with an aggressive strategy of hard marketing, slight overstatements, and over time, they are indeed becoming better and better. But at the cost of many lambs.

as someone said here, its a degree mill for now.

How come most comments are about UK? The link is about how freedom of speech has been strangulated in India by a university which is not recognized by law.

It does not look quite so bad to me. There is a big difference between saying "the food was so bad that I puked" and saying "the cook tried to poison me". The issue is being debated, both, in public and, via the court.

IIPM says it offers "graduate degree in management" [1] in cooperation with IMI, Belgium. But IMI and IIPM have both been de-recognized in Europe, and it happens that IMI itself is not recognized in Belgium [2]. Yet their homepage [3] claims, even today, that it is recognized by CEEMAN.

[1]: http://www.iipm-india.net/iipm-joint-degree-programs.html

[2]: (pdf): http://www.english.schwertfeger-mba-channel.com/wp-content/u...

[3]: (CTRL+F CEEMAN) http://www.iipm.in/

[4]: Letter from Netherland's Accreditaion Organization (pdf): http://www.mediafire.com/view/?w97el537gj7rxp7

What if there's actual evidence of 'the cook trying to poison'? http://www.careers360.com/news_3067-IIPM-Best-only-in-claims (If you are from India, you may need to use a VPN to access this.

you can always use google cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

Airtel (Indian ISP) has gone ahead and blocked google cache of the page as well.

Here you go: (PDF)

https://anonfiles.com/file/ccf0d66fbf4ec550c57e7f0776e8479d

Let us see how many websites can they block :)

Fortunately their website doesn't redirect you to the canonical URL of the article, so you can change the URL and still access it. Like, http://www.careers360.com/news_3067-screw-censorship

They only do DNS-level blocking.

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