OLD SCHOOL SCRIMMAGE

Indore's Daly College sees its hallowed name dragged into unseemly battle for turf control

- By Rahul Noronha

THE DALY COLLEGE OF INDORE carries a certain elite cachet, owing to its colonial vintage and also by how it ramifies all the way into the modern hallways of power and wealth. The who's who of Madhya Pradesh politics and business can be said to have a direct or indirect stake in the 155-year-old public school. Imagine a canvas brimful with former and latter-day rajas. Add litigious busybodies to the mix. Any wonder, then, that Daly is yet again in the eye of a storm?

The prize catch: the Board of Governors, the school's apex body. In the latest ground assault, Sandeep Parekh, a board member and alumnus from 1979, has secured an order from the Assistant Registrar of Firms and Societies, Indore, directing school authorities to amend their bylaws. The effect will be to ensure the board is answerable to a bigger group: the electorate that elects five out of its nine members. Trifling matter? No, it's dominating conversations among the social elite in Indore and beyond.

A brief resume would explain all the interest. Set up in 1870 by Sir Henry Daly, the Political Agent of Malwa, the institution moved into its present 118-acre Indore campus in 1912. Among its alumni, count former chief minister Digvijaya Singh, economist Prabhat Patnaik, US-based orthopaedist Dr Chitranjan Ranawat, the state's top mandarins (including Neeraj Mandloi, additional chief secretary to the CM), besides a gallery of former ministers and legislators like Surendra Singh 'Honey' Baghel, Sachin Yadav, Sudesh Rai and Brijendra Pratap Singh aka 'Dau Saheb'.

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