A Gorkhaland state: Exploring the possibilities

At a time when the Indian state is confronted with many critical socio-economic problems, it is really quite disturbing and disconcerting to see some dormant statehood movements rearing their heads in the wake of the recent formation of a new Telangana state through division of the extant state of Andhra Pradesh. Such demands inter alia include demands for a separate state of Gorkhaland (comprising Darjeeling and adjoining areas of Terai and Dooars), Kamtapur (comprising areas of Assam and North Bengal) and Greater Cochbehar (comprising most of North Bengal) in West Bengal, Bodoland and Karbi-Anglong in Assam, Harit Pradesh, Bundelkhand and Purvanchal in Uttar Pradesh, Mithilanchal in Bihar, Vidarbha in Maharashtra and Saurashtra in Gujarat.

It is really quite painful to know that even after 67 years of our hard-earned independence, we are yet to complete our state-building process, not to speak of the nation-building process. One feels that all these statehood movements of different genres are nothing but morbid expressions of these incomplete processes. Having seen, at least, one such movement at close quarters and having followed many others quite closely, one can definitely say that most of these statehood movements are more of a reflection of the selfish and egotistic desires, steeped in self aggrandisement, of the local elites of different hues than being embedded in the genuine aspirations of the local inhabitants. Most of the times, such movements are inspired by the politics and politicking of one or the other kind rather than being rooted in the real desire for a holistic development and good governance of the area concerned.

In West Bengal, the demand for a separate state of Gorkhaland is claimed to be as old as 107 years. The proponents of this movement advance many reasons in support of their demands. They argue that Darjeeling geographically was never a part of West Bengal, that Darjeeling has been hugely exploited and underdeveloped by West Bengal and that Gorkhas being a different ethnic community, they deserve a separate state of their own. Then, the Gorkhaland supporters also demand the 398 contiguous and non-contiguous mouzas (read villages) of adjoining Terai and Dooars areas of Siliguri and Jalpaiguri to be added to the proposed Gorkhaland state, mostly against the will and desire of the people therein. The argument proffered for such inclusion is the inhabitance of a substantive Nepali speaking population in these areas though there is already a counter movement by majority of the population in these areas against any such thinking or attempted move.

Now, if we dissect and discuss all these reasons along with some other more important associated factors of statecraft dispassionately, the demand for a separate Gorkhaland state definitely does not appear more than emotional outpourings of the people of Darjeeling. If we really consider the historicity of Darjeeling as a ground for formation of a separate state of Gorkhaland, then all the hard work done by our founding fathers led by the redoubtable Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel of unifying those 565 motley princely states into a united Indian federal state might come apart. The real idea behind consolidating all these small princely provinces into a larger unit to be part of a larger federal entity called India was to put together a unified and a more cohesive country. However, once we allow this logic of historicity, India should actually be having hundreds of states today with West Bengal itself being broken into many. Such regressive revisionism would be a very negative development and might unravel our composite co-existence as a modern nation-state.

Now, let’s consider some other issues involved here. The hill areas of Darjeeling (Gorkhaland movement is primarily confined to the three hill sub-divisions of Darjeeling district of West Bengal district namely Darjeeling Sadar, Kurseong and Kalimpong) has a population of around 9.75 lakhs of which around seven lakhs people can roughly fall into the category of Gorkhas, the remaining being Lepchas, Bhutias, Marwaris, Biharis, Tibetans and other non-Gorkha communities. So, the proponents of this movement are actually seeking a separate state for these seven lakh people, the others perforce being part of the movement with no choice being available to them. In fact, the Lepchas have already been expressly complaining of being shortchanged by the Gorkhaland champions. The term ‘Gorkhaland’ itself is not a hold-all concept and ergo, does not do justice to the identities of the various other ethnic communities as residing in Darjeeling.

So, if a recognition were to be given to a statehood demand for a people of seven to nine lakh population, then how many constituent states or provinces should we be having in this country of over 125 crore people. If our mighty Gorkhas were to be given a separate state, then how many states are we actually bargaining for in a country where we have over 5000 ethnic communities and castes with around 850 languages. If this demand is recognized, then what justification shall we have to deny a state for the Yadavas, the Jats, the Rajputs, the Santhals, the Meenas and what not, with most of them having a sizable population, in fact, many of them being much more numerous than the Gorkhas.

Again, the demand for ceding the contiguous mouzas or areas with sizable Gorkha population attacks the very concept of pluralism which is the hallmark of our salad-bowl or Ganga-Jamuni co-existential culture. The Gorkhaland proponents desire that all the nearby areas with substantial Nepali speaking population also be given to the proposed Gorkhaland state. Even if we ignore this most important factor of our societal pluralism being compromised as a result of such a parochial demand for a while, still such a demand is very difficult to be accepted for some practical considerations.

First, this is plainly wrong to assume that all the Nepali speaking people are ipso facto Gorkhas or want Gorkhaland. Secondly, most of the demanded areas have a predominant majority of the people other than the Nepali speaking population. Thirdly, even some of the areas where the Nepali speaking people are in majority are mostly enclaves within another district or other community dominated areas. Annexing these areas to the extant Gorkhaland Territorial Administration (GTA) or later to the demanded Gorkhaland state is administratively not a feasible proposition as also observed by the Justice Shyamal Sen Commission which was constituted to explore the feasibility of such inclusions. Also, the Nepali speaking population in most of these mouzas is estimated to be not more than 20-30 per cent meaning thereby that by ceding such areas to the new entity, a great disservice shall be done to the desire of the other communities who are in majority in those mouzas. In fact, there is already a strong counter movement against this desired merger with the proposed Gorkhaland state.

Besides, once we recognize such a demand, a Pandora’s Box shall be opened. It not only jeopardizes the plural character of our society by artificially trying to make it monochromatic, but also opens the flood-gates for similar such demands from vested interests in different parts of the country. After all, every state has some population of one or the other ethno-linguistic groups which can suitably be demanded by other states. By this logic, all the Bengali speaking areas of Assam should come to West Bengal or the Hindi speaking or tribal dominated areas of latter should go to Bihar or Jharkhand respectively. By the same logic, the entire Hindi heartland of North India should become a huge monolithic state. The resultant outcome of acceding to such a demand may indeed be very chaotic. It is a very archaic and regressive thinking which ought not to be given any further encouragement.

Again, the alleged historical exploitation of Darjeeling by the state of West Bengal does not hold because Darjeeling has the best of social development indicators in the country and is definitely among the best in West Bengal. As per the West Bengal Human Development Report, 2004 prepared under the supervision of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Darjeeling was ranked 2nd and 4th in terms of the gender and human development indices respectively, among all the districts of West Bengal.

If underdevelopment and exploitation of Darjeeling can be cited as a justification for statehood, then Darjeeling ought to fall much behind in the queue for promotion to statehood as there are many more regions in the country which would have the first claim to statehood. Be it the income, literacy rates, educational attainments, nutritional status, percentage of BPL (below poverty line) population, longevity, infant and maternal mortality, overall health status of people and infrastructures, Darjeeling fares much better compared to most parts of the country or the different districts of the state of West Bengal. Be it noted that Darjeeling has for the past more than two and a half decades been under such autonomous local self-government bodies as Darjeeling Gorkha Hill Council (DGHC) and GTA.

But still, if the statehood proponents believe that Darjeeling needs more development, then statehood is definitely no solution. We are all well conversant with the experiences of some of the already existing states whose development record is just pathetic, to say the least. Jharkhand became a state against the same background of alleged underdevelopment, but even after a lapse of more than a decade’s time, it is still much far off from realization of the developmental goals it set out to achieve way back in the year 2000. Jharkhand today fares very badly among the newly created states and has only become worse since its creation. The fact remains that the proponents of any such statehood movements including those of Gorkhaland should actually be talking of good governance and good administration than anything else. A statehood trapping sans the desideratum of good governance will achieve nothing but zilch.

Then, given its size, both demographically and geographically, Darjeeling already receives a disproportionate per capita share of resources compared to many other parts of the country. And a substantial share of these resources come from the state of West Bengal meaning thereby that West Bengal has traditionally been providing disproportionate resources to Darjeeling, often at the expense of the more backward and deserving areas of the state. The extant Gorkhaland Territorial Administration’s revenue from all sources is assumed to be not more than three crores annually. If we also include the revenue received by the state government from such sources as land, excise, transport, professional and sales tax, then at most the figure is likely to go up to around 30 crore rupees. At the most and at its best, tapping all the obtaining and potential sources of revenue, it can barely go up to 100 crore rupees annually in the most ideal of situations. In the shorter run, however, a 50 crore rupee annual revenue appears a more practical figure.

Moreover, GTA reportedly has a non-plan expenditure of around 600 crores at the moment which with plan and schematic expenses would come to around 1400 crores. If at all Darjeeling comprising the three hill sub-divisions becomes the cherished Gorkhaland state, the combined plan and non-plan expenditure is likely to shoot up to, at least, 2000 crores factoring the expenses for general and police administration, not to speak of various attendant expenses which comes with the formation of a new state. So, if a region which has the best of developmental indicators and which has the revenue generation potential of only around 50 crore rupees, why should they be getting a disproportionate 2000 crores at the expense of the more deserving parts of the countries, particularly those areas of Chhattisgarh, West Bengal, Orissa, Bihar, Jharkhand, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and other states reeling under extremist menace.

The Gorkhaland proponents should show that they are in a position to bear all the non-plan and, at least, a portion of the plan expenses of the proposed Gorkhaland state before demanding the same. If such a new entity expects to be spoon-fed through the Central government’s doles, would not there be similar justified demands from different parts of the country. And if we allow this for one particular region, can we deny the same to others. We ought to understand that an eponymous Gorkhaland state is not just about emotional wishes of our countrymen in Darjeeling, but has much far-reaching insidious implications for the rest of the country as the same would only spur more and more such demands as already seems to be happening in the wake of the announced creation of a new state of Telangana.

The Gorkhaland proponents often compare their status with the neighbouring Sikkim or the smaller states of North East when they claim statehood or disproportionate share of the developmental pie. We are all aware of the historical reasons and circumstances which led to the statehood or special status of these north-eastern states. If Telangana has today been proposed to be a state, it is because of its geographical compactness, a suitable demographic size, administrative viability and self-sufficient resources. But the same does not apply to many such demands elsewhere including Gorkhaland. If all of us keep demanding statehood on such grounds, then our state-building process shall never come to an end, not to speak of the nation-building process. The Gorkhaland proponents should actually aim at making the GTA work successfully, which came into being through a tripartite agreement between the Central Government, the Government of West Bengal and the dominant hill party i.e. Gorkha Jan Mukti Morcha (GJMM) on 18th July, 2011. GTA is an autonomous and empowered body which has just completed one year of its existence and can be suitably harnessed to fulfill the developmental aspirations of the local people, if development is what they are looking for.

One really feels that our policy makers should really do some serious thinking to consider all such statehood demands dispassionately once and for all through the instrumentality of a second States Reorganization Commission or any other such mechanism as might be practically possible. Any such decision by the said Commission should be predicated on some logical pre-determined criteria including geographical contiguity and compactness, administrative cohesiveness and financial viability. If we continue dithering on such issues and allow them to be decided by the narrow forces of politics and politicking, then we are certainly doomed as a modern nation-state with the entrenched vested interests slowly but surely eating into the vitals of our beloved country.

3 / 5 stars
Juno director Jason Reitman makes a spirited attempt to capture the essence of modern digital life, as porn-addicted husband Adam Sandler finds he’s not the only one seeking online solace
There’s a funny YouTube compilation from dozens of modern thrillers and horror films, simply showing panicky people all saying: “My cellphone! I can’t get a signal!” Modern movie-making is unhappy about modern digital devices messing up traditional plot devices. Cyber-interconnectedness is spoiling solitude, ruining jeopardy. So this movie from director Jason Reitman and his co-writer Erin Cressida Wilson (which they adapted from the 2011 novel by Chad Kultgen) is an interesting, spirited, if finally rather sentimental attempt to tackle this issue and set it to rest. It wants to show 21st-century lives being lived out on screen and online, with both older and younger generations now dependent on the web. Teens get bombarded with adult material unimaginable to their parents at the same age; grownups are infantilised, tempted into digital arenas of fantasy and irresponsibility.
It’s a watchable soapy drama, though audiences who remember films by Todd Solondz or Antonio Campos on similar themes – or indeed Erin Cressida Wilson’s own great screenplay for Secretary (2000) – may find it a bit softcore. One subplot incidentally comes close to reproducing the punchline of Rupert Holmes’s song about piña colada and getting caught in the rain.
The film has a dreamy framing sequence set in space, accompanied by deadpan narration from Emma Thompson, musing on Planet Earth being in Carl Sagan’s words, a “pale blue dot”. This puts the teen angst into perspective, rather like the observatory scenes in Rebel Without a Cause.
The taciturn male at the centre of this ensemble is Don, a depressed guy in a stagnant marriage played by Adam Sandler; his only solace is online porn, far more important than the old-fashioned staples of TV and beer. In search of his fix, he one day finds that the Wi-Fi is only working for the computer in his 15-year-old son’s bedroom, where a browser history reveals that young Chris (Travis Tope) is consuming harder stuff than his dad. This is impeding his relationship with super-hot cheerleader Hannah (Olivia Crocchicia), whose failed-actress mom Donna (Judy Greer) now manages Hannah’s own lucrative subscription porn/voyeur fansite. Meanwhile, Tim, played by Ansel Engort (from The Fault in Our Stars) has dropped out of the school football team to dedicate himself to (or, in his words, “invest in”) an immersive online fantasy roleplay game, and has now formed a relationship with shy Brandy (Kaitlyn Dever), whose uptight, controlling mom (Jennifer Garner) monitors her every keystroke. The kids’ cyberfreedom is dependent on the adult bill-payer.
What a fantastically unwholesome situation it all is, and yet interestingly this film is both a melodramatic intensification of real-life web addiction, and also a cautious dilution. There’s nothing in this film about people walking hilariously into lamp-posts while looking at their phones – but also nothing about revenge porn, nothing about private humiliation going viral. Yet there are sharp moments of alienation and fear. Reitman and Wilson show that Donna’s creepy fansite becomes acceptable to mother and daughter simply because they are so deeply excited by the increasing numbers of subscribers and the accretion of homemade celebrity, very like the weekly uptick in follower numbers that no Twitter user admits to being interested in.
At first, Reitman makes quite a conspicuous play of showing online graphics on the screen itself: the Facebook pages, the web browsers, the text messages get flashed up over the frowningly entranced faces bent over their laptops and phones. There is some ironic comedy to be had here: particularly in two people secretly and derisively texting about a third person who is right in front of them, a dysfunctional practice camouflaged by the fact that everyone is on their phones all the time. As the movie advances, and ironic detachment recedes, this on-screen gimmick noticeably declines, too, and by the end it has disappeared altogether, although everyone’s web use has not really diminished one bit. Yet while it lasts, this is an interestingly metaphorical display of movies and online content competing for our frazzled attention.
In some ways, Men, Women & Children is a little like those movies of yesteryear about how TV (and particularly TV news) is terribly worrying. But this one inevitably tends towards emotional fence-sitting because of its reluctance to condemn its characters and satirically abandon them to their supposed web enslavement. A movie that really engages with web use still eludes us. In the meantime, this engaging black-comic sketch will do.

Thousands of students enrolled with a new breed of private higher education colleges are not registered to take recognised exams, the government’s spending watchdog revealed on Tuesday, raising fears that huge numbers of undergraduates have been benefiting from taxpayer subsidy without undertaking meaningful study.

The National Audit Office also warned that the dropout rate among students at nine of the “alternative higher education providers” set up following reforms introduced by the former higher education minister David Willetts in 2012 was in excess of 20%. That is five times the dropout rate seen in traditional universities, with which the new colleges were designed to compete.

The NAO warns that the private institutions, which can charge students £6,000 a year in fees, have not been properly monitored and pointed out that students attending them were eligible for cheap loans and in some cases grants.

Students at “alternative providers” – organisations which the government was hoping would lead ground-breaking market reforms in the higher education sector – received £425m through the Student Loans Company in the academic year 2012-13. Most study higher national diplomas (HNDs) or certificates (HNCs).

By comparing data on those claiming student fees with those registered with exam board Pearson/Edexcel, the spending watchdog identified 2,963 students – 20% of the total studying HNDs – who accessed student funding in 2012-13 without ever being registered to sit exams. This figure excluded students who dropped out that year. In total those students could therefore have accessed over £50m.

Margaret Hodge, the chair of the Commons public accounts committee, said the report exposed the “misuse” of public money, adding that the business department “went ahead with its reforms to expand the role of private colleges without ensuring there were controls in place”.

“This extraordinary rate of expansion, high dropout rates, and warnings from within the sector ought to have set alarm bells ringing,” she added.

For two of the largest of these new institutions – London School of Business and Finance, and London School of Science and Technology – the dropout rate rose to about five times the average. Part of the problem stemmed from the rapid recruiting of foreign students, the NAO found. The auditor found that another group of 5,500 undergraduates from the EU have been unable to prove they were either living in the UK or entitled to public funding.

A separate internal government inquiry found that 1,000 of these students, most of whom come from Bulgaria and Romania, were definitely fraudulent and had already claimed £5.4m in student loans before being found out. The government has been able to recover just 7% of that money so far, the NAO said.

In 2012 Willetts said he wanted to see alternative providers take on established universities and offer students even more choice. These colleges were allowed to charge £6,000 a year in fees, which their students could draw from the government-backed Student Loans Company.

But though they were in receipt of public money, Willetts was unable to get new parliamentary powers he needed to hold private colleges to proper account with inspection regimes or demands to see their books, after Lib Dems backed out of supporting a new education bill.

Tuesday’s report was prompted by a Guardian investigation into the sector which found that lectures were teaching to empty or near-empty classrooms. Students and staff alleged that bogus students who were barely literate were using colleges as a “cash point” to access loans they believed they would never pay back.

The NAO findings highlighted that the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) lacked basic powers to monitor publicly funded students’ attendance and their progress, even as it relaxed the purse strings to fund private sector growth. It said the department had not defined “an expectation of what might constitute an acceptable dropout rate” for the sector, let alone scrutinised whether the rates were too high.

Sally Hunt, the general secretary of the University College Union, which represents academic and other college staff, said the government failed to police the system it had created. “While we are pleased the misuse of public funds is finally being brought to light, we remain angry that it took so long to happen. We raised the issues of for-profit colleges’ access to taxpayers’ money time and again with ministers, but we were ignored at every turn.”

A spokesperson for the Department of Business said private colleges still offered “a wider choice of higher education” to students and that they would take robust action to correct failing standards. “We will continue to investigate and take robust action against any provider failing to meet the high standards expected of them. The dropout rates at a small number of alternative providers have been higher than the average among alternative providers. The NAO have made a helpful recommendation on dropout rates which we will consider as part of our ongoing strengthening of the regulation of the network.”

Thousands of students enrolled with a new breed of private higher education colleges are not registered to take recognised exams, the government’s spending watchdog revealed on Tuesday, raising fears that huge numbers of undergraduates have been benefiting from taxpayer subsidy without undertaking meaningful study.

The National Audit Office also warned that the dropout rate among students at nine of the “alternative higher education providers” set up following reforms introduced by the former higher education minister David Willetts in 2012 was in excess of 20%. That is five times the dropout rate seen in traditional universities, with which the new colleges were designed to compete.

The NAO warns that the private institutions, which can charge students £6,000 a year in fees, have not been properly monitored and pointed out that students attending them were eligible for cheap loans and in some cases grants.

Students at “alternative providers” – organisations which the government was hoping would lead ground-breaking market reforms in the higher education sector – received £425m through the Student Loans Company in the academic year 2012-13. Most study higher national diplomas (HNDs) or certificates (HNCs).

By comparing data on those claiming student fees with those registered with exam board Pearson/Edexcel, the spending watchdog identified 2,963 students – 20% of the total studying HNDs – who accessed student funding in 2012-13 without ever being registered to sit exams. This figure excluded students who dropped out that year. In total those students could therefore have accessed over £50m.

Margaret Hodge, the chair of the Commons public accounts committee, said the report exposed the “misuse” of public money, adding that the business department “went ahead with its reforms to expand the role of private colleges without ensuring there were controls in place”.

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“This extraordinary rate of expansion, high dropout rates, and warnings from within the sector ought to have set alarm bells ringing,” she added.

For two of the largest of these new institutions – London School of Business and Finance, and London School of Science and Technology – the dropout rate rose to about five times the average. Part of the problem stemmed from the rapid recruiting of foreign students, the NAO found. The auditor found that another group of 5,500 undergraduates from the EU have been unable to prove they were either living in the UK or entitled to public funding.

A separate internal government inquiry found that 1,000 of these students, most of whom come from Bulgaria and Romania, were definitely fraudulent and had already claimed £5.4m in student loans before being found out. The government has been able to recover just 7% of that money so far, the NAO said.

In 2012 Willetts said he wanted to see alternative providers take on established universities and offer students even more choice. These colleges were allowed to charge £6,000 a year in fees, which their students could draw from the government-backed Student Loans Company.

But though they were in receipt of public money, Willetts was unable to get new parliamentary powers he needed to hold private colleges to proper account with inspection regimes or demands to see their books, after Lib Dems backed out of supporting a new education bill.

Tuesday’s report was prompted by a Guardian investigation into the sector which found that lectures were teaching to empty or near-empty classrooms. Students and staff alleged that bogus students who were barely literate were using colleges as a “cash point” to access loans they believed they would never pay back.

The NAO findings highlighted that the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) lacked basic powers to monitor publicly funded students’ attendance and their progress, even as it relaxed the purse strings to fund private sector growth. It said the department had not defined “an expectation of what might constitute an acceptable dropout rate” for the sector, let alone scrutinised whether the rates were too high.

Sally Hunt, the general secretary of the University College Union, which represents academic and other college staff, said the government failed to police the system it had created. “While we are pleased the misuse of public funds is finally being brought to light, we remain angry that it took so long to happen. We raised the issues of for-profit colleges’ access to taxpayers’ money time and again with ministers, but we were ignored at every turn.”

A spokesperson for the Department of Business said private colleges still offered “a wider choice of higher education” to students and that they would take robust action to correct failing standards. “We will continue to investigate and take robust action against any provider failing to meet the high standards expected of them. The dropout rates at a small number of alternative providers have been higher than the average among alternative providers. The NAO have made a helpful recommendation on dropout rates which we will consider as part of our ongoing strengthening of the regulation of the network.”

After the death of their drummer Jon Brookes, the Charlatans thought their gig at the Royal Albert Hall last year could be their last, but their new album, Modern Nature, finds them in surprisingly euphoric form

Last year, the Charlatans played a charity gig at the Royal Albert Hall in London in memory of their drummer Jon Brookes. Brookes had died a couple of months previously from a brain tumour that was first diagnosed when he had a seizure onstage in 2010. The show was, by all accounts, a huge success, one of those occasions on which the Charlatans are called on to display their famous resilience in the face of tragedy: perhaps not quite on the same scale as their appearance in front of 150,000 people at Oasis’s 1996 Knebworth concert shortly after keyboard player Rob Collins was killed in a car crash, but still a potent demonstration of the indomitable spirit that has seen the band through death, imprisonment and drug addiction.

Or at least that’s what it looked like. The reality was, apparently, slightly different. Even before Brookes’s death, the band had been struggling to come up with new songs: they were trying to make an album, because Brookes had insisted he wanted to be involved in their next record, but “he was obviously very poorly and we were all a bit distracted,” says frontman Tim Burgess. At least one member of the band thought the Royal Albert Hall show might represent the Charlatans bowing out. “It wasn’t happening in the studio, it was a mess,” says guitarist Mark Collins. “And I thought, ‘That could be the last gig we ever do.’ My daughter took a picture of me coming off stage, I’ve got my head in my hands, and, Jesus, that’s what I was thinking about.”

A year on, the three members of the Charlatans sitting in an east London cafe – Burgess, Collins and bassist Martin Blunt – do not look much like men contemplating their band’s imminent demise. Contrary to Collins’s fears, the Charlatans’ 12th album, Modern Nature, ended up being finished, with the help of three guest drummers: the Verve’s Peter Salisbury, who was Brookes’s own choice as his replacement, Factory Floor’s Gabriel Gurnsey and New Order’s Stephen Morris, the latter happy to contribute despite the prospect of being confronted with the collection of homemade New Order scrapbooks that Burgess keeps at the Charlatans’ studio. “I think he was a bit freaked out by that,” nods the singer, “but I was only 14 years old when I made them.”

Moreover, Modern Nature sounds suspiciously like a triumph, packed with great songs, occasionally flecked with disco and soul influences, and is surprisingly euphoric despite the circumstances that informed it. Although it includes a song written by Brookes called Walk With Me – the lyrics dictated to his wife three weeks before he died, the vocals from the choir of the school at which he occasionally taught – it’s not an album overshadowed by his death. The one thing it never sounds like is the umpteenth album ground out by a band 25 years into their career.

After some years working outside the traditional music industry – they gave their 2008 album You Cross My Path away for free on the internet, and Burgess set up his own label, O Genesis, in 2011 – they unexpectedly find themselves with a major label deal: “We self-funded the recording, and then our manager sent out some tracks,” says Blunt, “and, lo and behold, several labels went: ‘We just weren’t expecting this, but we want to talk to the band.’”

Perhaps understandably, the Charlatans have come to imbue the album and its making with a certain mystical significance. Gabriel Gurnsey claims to have felt someone slap him across the head while he was using Brookes’s drumkit in the studio. The title, meanwhile, comes from film-maker Derek Jarman’s journals, a title that struck Burgess in the most literal manner imaginable: “We didn’t just go round like stealing a name or anything. I’d never read the book, but a copy of Modern Nature actually fell from a bookshelf and landed on my head before it hit the floor.”

Collins and Blunt wear their years in the Charlatans a little more obviously than Burgess, who beneath a fairly majestic bottle-blond bowl-cut still looks about 24. That seems faintly unfair, given that he spent a significant proportion of his 47 years taking vast quantities o

Perhaps understandably, the Charlatans have come to imbue the album and its making with a certain mystical significance. Gabriel Gurnsey claims to have felt someone slap him across the head while he was using Brookes’s drumkit in the studio. The title, meanwhile, comes from film-maker Derek Jarman’s journals, a title that struck Burgess in the most literal manner imaginable: “We didn’t just go round like stealing a name or anything. I’d never read the book, but a copy of Modern Nature actually fell from a bookshelf and landed on my head before it hit the floor.”

Collins and Blunt wear their years in the Charlatans a little more obviously than Burgess, who beneath a fairly majestic bottle-blond bowl-cut still looks about 24. That seems faintly unfair, given that he spent a significant proportion of his 47 years taking vast quantities of drugs: as his autobiography, Telling Stories, cheerfully details, at one stage he moved in with his drug dealer and also took to encouraging people to blow cocaine up his bum. And yet, here he is, sober since 2006, now resident in rural Norfolk, a veritable ball of youthful eagerness – he enthuses about everything from his love of the American musician Arthur Russell to his forthcoming second book. He is considerably more bright-eyed than the father of an 18-month-old has any right to be.

Perhaps it’s all down to the rejuvenating powers of transcendental meditation, of which Burgess has been a devotee for several years. “It’s kind of revitalised me. It’s definitely had an effect on my day-to-day enthusiasm for things. It just gives you consistency more than anything, consistency and like … maybe a fire.” Not that his loud advocacy for the practice, including fundraising for David Lynch’s Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace, has had much impact on his bandmates. “I have a couple of beers,” nods Collins, gruffly. “That seems to have the same effect.”

Nor have the other Charlatans followed their frontman’s lead and taken to Twitter, on which Burgess is an indefatigable presence: he’s on the social network so often, recommending music, posting videos and enthusing about record shops it seems a miracle he has any time left over to actually be in a band. “That’s another thing that re-energised me,” he enthuses. “I can go to people directly, it feels a bit more real. It took me a while to work it out, how to do it and then one morning I just said: ‘Anyone fancy a coffee?’ and I got more responses to that than having posted any kind of video or information about the band. Hundreds of people saying ‘I’ll have a flat white’ or ‘Americano with cream’, and it just became a thing.” It certainly did: his virtual coffee shop begat a real coffee shop – the Tim Peaks pop-up cafe regularly turns up at festivals – and his own brand of Fairtrade charity fundraising coffee.

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More importantly, Burgess’s presence on Twitter seemed to shift perceptions of the Charlatans slightly: the music he posted and enthused about was of substantially more leftfield bent than you might have expected from the frontman of a band perennially labelled as either baggy or Britpop survivors. Perhaps a slightly avant-garde edge was always in the Charlatans’ music – Burgess claims that the instrumental 109 Pt 2 from their debut album, Some Friendly, was influenced by Throbbing Gristle – but it tended to get overlooked.

Either way, their links to the leftfield seem noticeably more pronounced these days: remixes come courtesy of Chris & Cosey and Grumbling Fur, the first single from Modern Nature, So Oh, was released on the record label owned by the Quietus, not a website usually known for its love of doughty Britpop survivors. “Avant garde?” frowns Collins, when the term is mentioned. “That’s a very big word.”

“I like it,” Burgess offers, quietly.

“I think between us we cross over, but there’s a lot of stuff individually. We don’t really ask ‘Where’s that from?’ when someone brings an idea in, it just sort of knits and it comes out sounding like us,” Blunt says.

They have, says Burgess with admirable understatement, “been on a bit of a journey over the past five years, and yet here we all are.” No one thinks about the band they’ve spent their entire adult lives in ending any time soon. “That’s what I was doing that night at the Albert Hall: imagining life without the Charlatans,” says Collins. “Yeah. And it’s not a nice place to be.”

• The single So Oh is out now and Modern Nature will be released on 26 January, both on BMG.

New Delhi: The government today said there is no specific tax exemption on expenses incurred by companies under the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activities.

The new companies law, which came into force from April   1, requires certain class of profitable corporate to shell   out at least 2 per cent of their three-year annual average net   profit towards CSR works. “…no specific tax exemption has been extended to expenditure incurred on CSR,” Corporate Affairs Minister, Arun Jaitley said in the Lok Sabha today.

However, he said that several activities that are part of   Schedule VII of the Companies Act, 2013, already enjoy exemptions under the Income Tax Act, 1961.   These activities include contribution to Prime Minister’s  Relief Fund, scientific research, rural development and skill   development projects. Schedule VII of the Act pertains to CSR.

“As regards contribution made by companies under CSR   towards Swachh Bharat and Clean Ganga, no specific tax   exemption has so far been made,” Jaitley said in a written   reply.   Responding to a query on whether the government has taken   note of private sector companies trying to evade CSR on one pretext or the other, the minister said that information with   regard to compliance would be available only after September   2015.

“This is the first year of implementation of CSR by companies under the Act. Information on compliance by companies in this regard will be available only after   statutory annual returns on CSR are filed by companies, including private sector companies, which are due after  September 2015,”