Read on for this IIT-IIM alumnus' 12-year-long inspirational war on graft

The sudden showers spell ready relief from the searing summer heat. Away from the sun city of Jodhpur, 46 km along the highway to Jaipur, water serves as a metaphor for hope not only for survival but also for an equally critical ongoing battle for change.

Varun Arya scans the 94.4 acre spread around him with satisfaction. The earlier-than-expected rains will help replenish the small lakes that he has nurtured over the past six years. He has persevered and proved the so-called experts wrong. This, after all, is certified barren land, with ground water six times as saline as sea water, which means it is as unsuitable for construction as it is for farming. There is so much salt and sheer acid in the heart of the earth below the surface here that it turns stones gradually into powder. He says the water in the first lake turned completely saline within a couple of months. But in subsequent years water has remained sweet for longer periods, with the result that water in the first lake has been sweet for as long as 11 months at last count. That means, within a year, water in the first lake will remain sweet throughout the year. The lakes fill up even if it rains for just an hour, he says, and the pattern suggests that water in each lake will turn sweet within seven years at most. He has already turned this land into an oasis of organic farming and sustainable development, with ten lakes, which will increase to 15 after the next rains, solar panels and 7,000 trees which are surviving despite all odds.

Photo by Ashish Sharma

Arya bought 94.4 acres of saline, barren wasteland after the government reneged on its promise to give land under educational quota. Now, he has turned this land into an oasis for his institute, complete with ten lakes.

From the desert state of Rajasthan, which has spawned many legends and tales of derring-do, this is not just a timeless tale of one man’s indomitable will against the forces of nature. This is also a contemporary story of one man’s refusal to compromise with corruption that has seeped so deep into the edifice of everyday governance.

It is this land that he has been struggling to save from the machinations of successive state governments. It is this private land that he bought six years ago to build a quality management institute but has not been able to use for the desired purpose because the government refused to give him the required clearances. Just because he steadfastly refused to grease the palms of the politicians and the officials concerned.

It is this land that he managed to secure rights to when he finally sat on an indefinite fast for six gruelling days and nights at New Delhi’s Jantar Mantar soon after the Anna Hazare-led agitation at the same spot turned the spotlight on the need for a potent anti-corruption watchdog.

His story, however, goes back further than 2005 when he bought this dangerously saline barren wasteland. The year was 1999 and IIT-Delhi’s 35,000-member strong alumni association was holding a grand event at Jaipur’s Birla Auditorium to launch its Rajasthan chapter. Both the governor and the chief minister, who were present on the occasion, lamented that the students from Rajasthan who had gone to elite educational institutions seldom returned to the state and they exhorted the alumni to open educational institutions there. As the president of the association, and alumnus of both IIT-Delhi and IIM-Ahmedabad, he happened to be the only one from Rajasthan among the alumni. He was a general manager with the world’s largest chemicals company, Dupont, at the time and he had already spent 16 years with the corporate world.

“I was earning Rs 2 lakh a month then, I was living in south Delhi and my children were studying at Air Force Bal Bharti School. Yet, I believed the chief minister, gave up my corporate career and took up the challenge,” he says, “During my days with American multinational companies, I had never been able to recruit anybody from Rajasthan. I knew there was acute need for a quality educational institution in my state and I wanted to do my bit for it.”

Thus began what would turn into a seemingly eternal nightmare.

Since chief minister Ashok Gehlot had promised him land for his proposed institute, he chose to set up base in the chief minister’s native place Jodhpur and he was promptly shown various plots of land by the officials. Before he could be allotted his promised plot, though, he was told that he would first have to meet one of the chief minister’s henchmen. He refused to meet any middleman and confronted the chief minister instead. The message was still the same: he should either pay a bribe for the allotment or forget the entire matter. “Having studied at IIT and IIM, I knew that great institutions are built on strong foundations of ethics and not bribes. I was very clear that I was going to be in the education of business and not in the business of education. There was no way I was going to pay a bribe to get the land. I asked them to issue a demand note and get the payment by cheque. The chief minister however asked me to leave the state. I refused and started an institute in rented premises in Jodhpur. The state government slapped a number of false cases against me and my family and I were even physically attacked,” he says.

When the Congress lost the assembly elections in 2003, and Bharatiya Janata Party’s Vasundhara Raje (who was a member of his institute’s board of governors) became chief minister, he found out to his dismay that the change of guard did not quite result in a change of attitude. “Vasundhara Raje told me that if the state government were to allot land without a bribe it would set a wrong precedent, which, of course, could not be allowed. But while Gehlot told me to leave the state and harassed me when I refused, she did not bother me thereafter,” he says. The land, however, still remained elusive.

Photo by Ashish Sharma

The students and faculty at the Jodhpur-based Aravali Institute of Management. Most students find Arya's war on corruption inspiring.

When it became clear that there was no way the government would allot him a plot of land, he put out an advertisement for purchase of private land with full payment through cheque. “Of the 24 sellers who responded to the ad, 23 backed out when they realised I actually meant full payment on cheque. The only person who agreed to my terms did so because his was the worst piece of land in the entire state. I bought this 236 bigha or 94.4 acre plot for Rs 40 lakh by selling a flat in Delhi’s Dwarka and another in Jodhpur,” he says.

Again, however, the state politicians and bureaucrats materialised to demand their pound of flesh in return for permission to use this land. When he refused to pay a bribe yet again, a minister directed the tehsildar to issue a notice for auction of the land. He managed to intervene in the nick of time, with the help of a fellow alumnus who was an important bureaucrat in the city, and applied for conversion of the land use by paying Rs 60 lakh in advance. Six months later, however, he got his cheque back, with the government citing a change in rules and the conversion still pending. Again, he completed all formalities and paid the conversion charges. This was in October 2009, and instead of carrying out the conversion, a year later the government slapped him with a show cause notice that he had violated the land ceiling which prohibited ownership of land more than 135 bigha. This, despite a clear exemption in law in cases of the land meant for educational institutions.

When nothing else seemed to work, he filed a writ petition in high court in February this year, but the state government still refused to respond. With Gehlot back at the helm, he knew the entire state machinery was ranged against him. Yet, he repeatedly sought an appointment with the chief minister to plead his case and to remind him that it was upon his invitation that he had returned to his home state 12 years earlier. The chief minister, however, refused to grant him an audience.

Amid high drama, punctuated by false promises by the state government, he finally began his fast at Jantar Mantar on April 13. Though the chief minister had refused to meet him, the district collector had suddenly started communicating with him and promising him that the government was about to send across the approval for land use conversion. When he and his wife started for Delhi along with 60 students and faculty members, they were first promised that they would get the conversion letter en route in Kishangarh and later they were told they would get it in Jaipur. The state government however held out for six long days even as his wife fell critically ill from fasting.

Despite them, he won in the end, just as he had won against the AICTE (All India Council of Technical Education) earlier. He had publicly announced that the AICTE had demanded Rs 5 lakh as bribe for granting approval. This had led to a probe by the central bureau of investigation and the subsequent sacking of the AICTE chief.

Two things emerge from Arya’s astounding grit in the face of entrenched culture of corruption. While his rare courage made him stand his ground, what saved him time and again from the might and wrath of the state was his powerful IIT-IIM network. Yet, even this network and the illustrious board of governors of his Aravali Institute of Management – with P Chidambaram, Abid Hussain, Gopi K Arora, late LM Singhvi, Maharaja of Jodhpur and the Maharaja of Jaipur, among others, as members – could not prevail upon the state government to make an exception in his case from its usual corrupt practices.

What has sustained him over the years, he says, is the fact that his needs have remained minimal and he has led an unblemished life. “I live in a two-bedroom house which has not been whitewashed for years. I can afford a driver but I choose to drive myself. I have brought up my children (a daughter and a son who live in Mumbai and Gurgaon respectively) with the same values. That’s why I could switch overnight from a corporate career to this struggle without any complaints whatsoever,” he says, “If you are taking on the system, it is important that you don’t have any skeletons in your cupboard. In my case, they slapped false cases against me but later they not only had to withdraw all these cases but also had to apologise. Whatever time has been lost is not only my loss; it is the loss of the entire society.”

With no confirmation or denial from the government – Jodhpur’s collector and district magistrate Sidharth Mahajan remained elusive despite several requests and visits to his office – this is his story as he tells it. It is also the story that he has painstakingly documented in his repeated reminders to the government. Yet, you cannot but wonder whether one person’s refusal to pay a bribe in Rajasthan can indeed lead to such harassment? “Kar ke dekho (just try it),” he says, “You see, what I did was to try and disturb the status quo. They couldn’t tolerate this.”

As somebody who has been president of the alumni associations of both IIT-Delhi and IIM-Ahmedabad, and has increasingly been a source of pride to both these institutions, he has indeed come a long way from his childhood days. “I had never spoken up about my family background until Murli Manohar Joshi, as HRD (human resources development) minister, came up with this idea that fees should be subsidised for poor students. I said this was rubbish and this was just the government’s way of controlling these institutions,” he says, “As a small boy in Abu Road (near Mount Abu in Sirohi district), I lived in a mud house. My father had studied only until the 2nd standard and he did some odd jobs. My mother never went to school. I was the first person in my village to finish schooling. Then I went on to study at IIT-Delhi and later at IIM-Ahmedabad. Until I finished my studies at IIM-Ahmedabad, we didn’t have a proper roof at home. Yet, I took just one year to pay off the loan for my MBA. If somebody like me could afford to study at IIM-Ahmedabad, so can the others.”

As you listen on in awe, you can sense that he is proving to be just the right kind of influence for the students at his institute who will carry with them much more than just a marketable postgraduate diploma in management. “Environment is what you make,” says Said Umair Ali, one of the students who participated in the relay fast in Delhi. “We can’t change the entire system, but we can change what is within our domain. That is what we have learnt from Arya Sir’s refusal to give in,” says Rajendra Soni. Punit Bhati speaks for all when he says, “Being associated with Aravali Institute of Management, we will never give a bribe, not even a penny, ever.” Rishi Agnihotri strikes a note of pragmatism when he says, “It is not easy to live by these principles in every situation, but we have learnt that it is often possible to turn the situation in your favour. Things can change.”

The faculty members have been similarly enthused. Neeti Manihar, who has been teaching marketing and communications for the past two years, says, “It has been an incredible experience for all of us. We have learnt the value of Prof Arya’s oft-repeated dictum that you can succeed in your endeavour if you don’t give yourself a choice. Almost every individual has a run-in with the government but now we know that if you are committed to your principle you can still get your due.”

As the clouds begin to lift, Arya takes in the sweeping panorama of his painstakingly prepared plot of land. “Why should we give up even an inch of this land to the government?” he states determinedly more than asks, “We owe it to the future students to give them the best we can. See, we are starting out by building a school in our campus for the villagers here who don’t have any school to send their children to.”

(This story first appeared in the June 1-15, 2011 issue of Governance Now.)