[Text missing] that Mr. Achary has swiftly moved to shut down certain public dining halls consequent upon the Madras government taking exception to the practice of feeding the Brahmins from public kitchens is certainly a feather in his cap of administrative reforms. But what is most worrying in this connection is that the axe of reform has fallen on those who rightly deserve to be fed from public kitchens as well. The lame, the blind, and the maimed among the poor are those who genuinely deserve charity and we know that all civilised countries of the world have programmes to help them. We have on many occasions before said that the Travancore government must take steps to transform the public dining halls into orphanages, and make sure that assistance to the poor out of charity is not interrupted under any circumstance. People who are qualified to enter such orphanages besides the blind and other invalid people, who are entitled to ration from public dining halls, have already come up with complaints that since the shutting down of the dining halls their rationing has also been stopped. It is learnt that these complaints are turned down as deserving no reply. No diplomacy or ethical nitpicking is needed to give such a reply. However, in order to seek out spots of hardships among the people and suggest ways to get rid of them, a sizable amount of these ingredients is certainly required. If the rulers of a country, who pretend to take care of the welfare of the people, fail to be in the know of the difficulties of people, their very claim to authority itself will be suspect. Since His Highness the Great King is especially inclined to undertake acts of charity and is compassionate towards the plight of the blind and other handicapped people, we believe that he will lose no time in passing orders for a course correction in the government policy in this regard.

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If you happen to take a look at the list giving details of the examiners, their qualifications and the amount of remuneration paid to each of them for middle and higher school exams conducted in the past year, you will be able to see many interesting instances of corruption. You will remember that we had already cautioned against the Educational Undersecretary granting the job of examiners to those who are favoured by the king. The aforementioned list makes it sufficiently clear that some teachers as favourite dependants of the king were appointed as examiners in subjects with scope for higher rates of pay despite having lesser qualifications and limited experience. The list also records lower pay being paid to highly qualified and more experienced examiners as if to preclude any possible complaints about the disparity in pay being paid to examiners! One of the teachers favoured with a higher pay is ‘a smart guy’ who managed to earn the pleasure of the king by presenting him with a tub of the famed Ambalappuzha payasasm (sweet, liquefied milk kheer given as temple favours from the famous Ambalappuzha temple in Kerala). There is a Brahmin Munshi (teacher), who similarly earned the pleasure of the king and subsequently a pay hike after he had appeased him with sweetmeats and delicacies while the king was on official tour in the kingdom. There are many similar such examples. The king may have been large-hearted enough to be generous towards his sycophants. However, in our opinion the circumstances in which lesser qualified and inexperienced teachers came to be appointed examiners over the more experienced teachers with university degrees, who were also vying for the job, have certainly taken the sheen off the Education Department. If Dr. Mitchell himself had scrutinised those answer scripts of last year’s middle school examination, which were especially called for by him, he could have easily spotted some malpractices. If marks entered on an answer script are found to have been erased and gone over, what action will be initiated against the examiner responsible for it? Although we believe that the job of the examiner will no longer be dished out to the sycophants, at least for as long as Dr. Mitchell remained the supervisor of the Education Department, he would still be well advised to thoroughly scrutinise every list of examiners put out henceforth.