At least two generations of Indian students have grown up reading textbooks published by the English Language Book Society (ELBS) of UK, and the Mir Publishers of USSR. In my youth, when it was impossible to buy costly textbooks from the houses of McGraw Hill, Prentice Hall, or the Oxford University Press, equivalent books on subjects in science and engineering from ELBS and Mir came to our rescue.
In the eighties, and certainly in the years before that, nearly everybody was poor. The tag of middle-class was a misnomer for subsistence-level life. Of course, education was ultra cheap and that was some relief. My tuition fees in IIT was a mere twenty-five rupees a month, charged only for ten months, not for the summer vacation. The hostel fees was half of that, and the mess bill would peak at a hundred and sixty rupees - a total of two hundred. But more about low-cost education later.
Coming back to text-books - we didn’t have the heart to ask our parents to send two hundred and fifty rupees for a single book on calculus or mechanics. But may God bless the souls of the people, who thought of ELBS and Mir. They had decided that students from poor countries should get the best of text books at prices they could afford. There was neither an ideological underplay, nor a hidden scheme to indoctrinate young minds, just the highest level of academic philanthropy, never to appear again. After all how do you indoctrinate an impressionable mind in science, medicine, or engineering except in the positive ways. A fat three-to-four-hundred-page textbook could be bought for twenty rupees or less. There was nothing cheap about these low-priced books. They were written by the finest British authors for the ELBS in English and the equally great Soviet authors for the Mir, who also competently translated them into English and many other languages. They were printed on fine paper and came well-bound to last long. Often the costly textbooks would be republished by the ELBS as special low-priced editions.
These were publishers, who wanted to spread knowledge. Their countries and societies were comparatively wealthy, and they had decided to use some of their wealth to enlighten the young minds and eager souls of poorer societies. This was no UNDP, Health for All, no World Food Program for Africa and Asia, and no widely advertised dole to the starving masses. There were others doing all of that. ELBS and Mir were feeding the hungry minds, a benevolence that went a long way in educating generations of Indian students in science, medicine, and engineering.
I often wonder, several decades later, what motivated them to provide such low-cost yet high-quality books to foreign students. Indians have now become wealthier and even lower-middle-class parents can afford to buy expensive books for their children today. But the contribution of ELBS and Mir should not go unsung. Mir is gone - it lasted a few years after the fall of the USSR, then breathed its last. The ELBS could not be funded any more by the British government and had to eventually shut down.
One can now only buy a collector’s copy from these publishing houses for the sake of nostalgia. But the Sun has set on affordable knowledge, never to rise again. Governments across the globe do not do that for their own students what ELBS and Mir did for unknown foreign ones - publish low-cost textbooks. Maybe the Internet fills that space, but there is no better satisfaction than reading a textbook in print.
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