EducationWorld April 14 Archives

Young Achievers

Taksheel Buddhadeo

THE LATEST HONOUR bestowed upon the seven-year-old music prodigy Taksheel Buddhadeo is an entry into the India Book of Records for participation in 200 on-air broadcast (radio, television) programmes — the highest number by any school student in India. Taksheel has been practicing Indian classical music and the harmonium from the time he was three. Continuous practice, training and devotion to music have endowed him with a deep understanding of sargam, taal, tarana and bandish in different ragas. Two years ago, he topped the Indian classical music (instrumental) exam conducted by the Prayag Sangeet Samiti, Allahabad. A regular vocalist on All India Radio, Taksheel has already made a film debut in a 30-minute documentary spotlighting his musical talent which was broadcast on Lok Sabha television last year. The older of two children of Prafullakumar Buddhadeo, an engineer employed with Bechtel Corporation, Gurgaon, and Bhavisha, a homemaker, Taksheel has inherited his passion for music from his mother, whom he closely observed while she prepared for her final-year sangeet visharad exam (equivalent to a bachelors degree in music). At age seven he already has a stage presence with nine shows on Doordarshan, AIR, FM Gold, Radio City, and 17 other stage and live events. “I believe Taksheel’s achievements are the outcome of a well-designed curriculum at Amity International School, Gurgaon where he is a class III student, and the support and encouragement of his class teachers,” says father Prafullakumar. Although learning and practicing music is this young maestro’s prime interest, it’s not his only focus. He has a sporty side too, with interest in roller skating, taekwondo, and chess. Furthermore, awareness of the need to care for the environment and ecology has dawned early upon this precocious pre-teen who makes it a point to weave these issues into his radio and television programmes. Wind beneath your wings! Garima Upadhyay (Delhi)

Already a subscriber

Click here to log in and continue reading by entering your registered email address or subscribe now

Join with us in our mission to build the pressure of public opinion to make education the #1 item on the national agenda

People

Rural Organisation for Social Establishment cutting: Pinaki Ganguly

Pinaki Ganguly is the incumbent secretary of Sri Sri Ramkrishna Vivekananda Vidyapith, a new K-II school established by the Rural Organisation for Social Establishment (ROSE) in Charida, a tiny village (pop. 2,500) in West Bengal’s most backward Purulia district. The school with an enrollment of 77 students (45 boys and 32 girls) instructed by four teachers, is the first academic initiative of ROSE. Promoted by Ganguly and 11 other local members in 2002, ROSE is an NGO working for community development in this tribals-dominated district. Hitherto it had been providing an ambulance service, facilitating Unicef’s total sanitation campaign, and spreading socially positive messages on education, health, and early marriage through chau and jhumur — traditional folk dances of Purulia. The NGO is primarily funded by local government organisations including zilla and gram panchayats and the panchayat samiti. Touch Mission, a Mumbai-based NGO provides education material to 200 underprivileged children identified and supported by ROSE. Newspeg. In the academic year beginning January the school began class II in a new one-storeyed building allocated by the state government in the contiguous village of Kanrihensa. History. As indicated in its name, the vidyapith (school) has been inspired by the teachings of educator-philosophers Swami Vivekananda and Sri Ramkrishna who preached the message of holistic learning “so that learning becomes entertaining to the blooming buds of the village”. However, to part-subsidise the cost of education provision and “also to impact the value of quality education,” a tuition fee of Rs.75 per month is levied on parents who also have to pay a one-time admission fee of Rs.300. But the costs of school uniforms, winter garments and school bags, exercise and text books, are all included in these fees. Direct talk. “Because government schools don’t levy any tuition fee, they are unable to provide quality education. Therefore people in Charida and its neighbourhood are ready to make great financial sacrifices to send children to our school. Nevertheless to 15 students from extremely poor households, we offer full scholarships,” says Pinaki Ganguly. “To retain children in school, we take great pains to make learning interesting and entertaining by celebrating cultural festivals, encouraging sports education and taking children on excursions to heritage sites to enable them to appreciate our culture and traditions,” he adds. Future plans. Although the principles and values of holistic education are well-known in urban India, they are novel to the community in this remote district of West Bengal. Therefore the ROSE-promoted vidyapith has aroused great enthusiasm within the region’s parent and student communities. “We are now working to provide vocational education, particularly in computer skills to our students. Once parents witness learning outcomes in their children, they will become champions of education,” says Pinaki Ganguly. Baishali Mukherjee (Kolkata)

Already a subscriber

Click here to log in and continue reading by entering your registered email address or subscribe now

Join with us in our mission to build the pressure of public opinion to make education the #1 item on the national agenda

People

Tree House rollout: Rajesh Bhatia

Rajesh Bhatia is the founder-managing director of Tree House Education & Accessories Ltd (estb. 2006), and promoter of one of India’s largest self-operated preschool chains with 444 (including 340 company-owned) centres. The publicly listed company employs 1,848 staff including 1,758 teachers in 55 cities and towns countrywide, and recorded a revenue of Rs.121 crore in 2012-13. Newspeg. Last June, Tree House launched Global Champs, an initiative for affordable, high quality English-medium pre-primary education to children in the 1.5-6 years age group, catering to the low-income and slum areas of suburban Mumbai with annual fees of Rs.10,000-12,000 per child. Three Global Champs preschools have already been established in the suburbs of Chembur, Malad and Kandivali, with the fourth recently launched in Dharavi — Asia’s largest slum cluster. Meanwhile, Tree House has also completed a Rs.5 crore acquisition of the Brainworks brand from Brainworks Learning Systems, a chain with 64 preschools across India. History. An engineering graduate of MS University, Baroda with an MBA from Pune University, Bhatia began his professional career in 20th Century Finance prior to promoting the first Tree House preschool in 2003 in Mumbai. As a young parent he became aware of the severe shortage of affordable preschools in the country’s commercial capital which prompted his first academic initiative. In 2008, Tree House attracted its first round of private equity funding of $7 million (Rs.42 crore) from Matrix Partners India. Since then, this ECCE (early childhood care and education) company has recorded a scorching pace of growth to emerge as a nationally recognised heavyweight in preschool education. Direct talk. “With the acquisition of Brainworks and launch of our Global Champs brand of preschools, we have realised our objective of offering high quality pre-primary education to children from all segments of society. Now our standard preschools are grouped and marketed under the Tree House brand; franchised preschools under the Brainworks brand and self-operated Global Champs preschools target children from low-income households. This ensures a complete 360 degree coverage of every section of society,” says Rajesh Bhatia. Future plans. “Our focus will be on well-structured curriculums, qualified teachers and strict adherence to quality wherever we go,” enthuses Bhatia. With Tree House having achieved its objective of offering high quality preschools to all segments of society, Bhatia is set to impact the company’s footprint nationwide. “Although infrastructure and facilities of Tree House, Brainworks and Global Champs schools will vary, the common thread binding all our preschools will be high quality curriculums, well-qualified teachers and quality content. This will ensure the success of all our brands,” says Rajesh Bhatia. Sunayana Nair (Mumbai)

Already a subscriber

Click here to log in and continue reading by entering your registered email address or subscribe now

Join with us in our mission to build the pressure of public opinion to make education the #1 item on the national agenda

People

Krishna Bhupathi’s new venture

FORMER INDIA tennis player and coach of many Davis Cup stars, and co-founder of Bangalore’s top-ranked The Magical Years (TMY) preschool, Krishna Bhupathi is all set to launch The Village School (TVS), a primary-secondary which in the fullness of time will roll out into a fully-fledged Cambridge Assessment International Examinations (CAIE), UK-affiliated class I-XII co-ed day school. Newspeg. TVS, which shares a two-acre campus in Kodigehalli, Bangalore with the Bhupathi Tennis Village and its feeder preschool TMY, is ready to admit its first batch of class I and II students in June. Admission interviews are on in full swing with 50 students expected to enroll for the academic year 2014-15. History. In 1995, Bhupathi forayed into sports education by launching the Nike Bhupathi Tennis Village, which transformed into Bhupathi Tennis Village after its collaboration with the US-based sports equipment, shoes and apparel major Nike ended in 2009. After revolutionising tennis coaching in India, Bhupathi ventured into academics in 2011 with the promotion of The Magical Years, a preschool for children in the age group two-six years in partnership with The Magic Years, Delhi’s consistently top-ranked preschool founded by Shirley Madhavan Kutty. In the EW India Preschool Rankings 2013, TMY was ranked #5 in Bangalore and #1 on the parameter of infrastructure provision. TVS is equipped with six tennis courts which double as multipurpose areas to teach basketball, football, hockey and cricket. Moreover, students are served by a fully-equipped gym and swimming pool. Direct talk. “In The Village School, we will continue the TMY tradition of offering excellent academics with high-quality sports education. Students will receive structured physical training and those exhibiting aptitude and promise in a particular sport will be trained by professionals under a special programme integrated with the academic time-table. Our aim is to offer holistic education with special focus on early and sustained sports training,” says Krishna Bhupathi. USP. To assuage fears of prospective parents about the academic curriculum of TVS, Bhupathi has roped in the expertise of Kiran Sethi, the celebrated promoter-chairperson of The Riverside School, Ahmedabad — ranked #3 all-India and #1 co-ed day school in Gujarat in the EW India School Rankings 2013. Under a collaboration agreement, Riverside will share its K-12 curriculum, pedagogies, processes and practices with TVS. Future plans. With the garden city’s informed public well aware of Bhupathi’s successful transformation of the Bhupathi Tennis Village into a nursery of champions, and Magical Years into a top-ranked preschool, the response to TVS’ admission drive has been enthusiastic. “We are receiving overwhelming response from parents for admission into our inaugural classes I-II. Subsequently we will be adding one class every year until class XII. With our affiliation application pending with the CAIE, I’m confident that TVS will evolve into a unique institution committed to imparting high-quality academic education combined with globally comparable sports training,” says Krishna Bhupathi. Summiya Yasmeen (Bangalore)

Already a subscriber

Click here to log in and continue reading by entering your registered email address or subscribe now

Join with us in our mission to build the pressure of public opinion to make education the #1 item on the national agenda

Cover Story

India’s belated skilling revolution

The great sin of sustained neglect of primary, secondary and higher education in post-independence India has been compounded by continuous neglect of vocational education and training. But a quiet skills revolution is gathering momentum countrywide TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY India’s dysfunctional education system, defined by crumbling infrastructure, multi-grade teaching, massive dropouts, truant teachers and abysmal learning outcomes, is the most damning indictment of Soviet-style central planning adopted as the official development dogma of free India, after political independence was wrested from imperial Britain by Mahatma Gandhi and leaders of the freedom movement in 1947. The essence of central planning is that the State commandeers, generates and canalises national resources into industry, agriculture and services — drawing up intelligent priorities — to ensure balanced and equitable national development. But curiously, even 66 years later, neither the political class, establishment, nor public has accorded sufficient weightage or priority to education — even primary education — unambiguously acknowledged as the essential precondition of national growth and progress (see special report p.74). It’s pertinent to note that while the education outlay to GDP ratio averages 5 percent globally, and most OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation & Development, a rich nations club) countries allocate 7-10 percent of their GDP to education, in post-independence India, it has averaged 3.5 percent per year. The consequences of this inexplicable blindspot of the Planning Commission and the self-serving Indian establishment (including the media) are patently visible. The vast majority of the 1.3 million government schools has conspicuous deficiencies of teaching staff and basic infrastructure. According to the manifesto of the recently promoted Children First Party of India, whose lib-lab-lav agenda is to equip all elementary schools countrywide with libraries, laboratories and lavatories within 12 months (expenditure: Rs.42,750 crore), 650,000 elementary schools across the country are without libraries/reading rooms; 410,000 lack drinking water; 500,000 are bereft of laboratories; 610,000 are denied toilets and 250,000 don’t provide separate toilets for girl children. Unsurprisingly, learning outcomes in India’s primary/elementary schools are abysmal. According to the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) published by Pratham, India most respected education NGO, learning outcomes in the country’s 700,000 rural primaries which school an estimated 159 million children in the age group 6-14, are declining continuously. ASER 2013 reports that 53 percent of children promoted to class V cannot read and/or comprehend class II texts written in their own vernacular languages. Moreover 74.8 percent of children in class V can’t do simple three-digit division sums. Learning achievements aren’t anything to boast about in secondary education either. In 2010, a Union government-selected batch of Indian class IX students wrote PISA (Progamme for International Student Assessment) — a global annual test which assesses English, science and maths learning of 15-year-olds — and was ranked 73rd among 74 countries. Since then, Indian participation in PISA has been discontinued. In higher education, according to a 2005 Nasscom-McKinsey World Institute study, 75 percent of India’s engineering and 85 percent of arts, science and commerce college graduates are unemployable in multinational companies. The great…

Already a subscriber

Click here to log in and continue reading by entering your registered email address or subscribe now

Join with us in our mission to build the pressure of public opinion to make education the #1 item on the national agenda

Special Report

General Election 2014: Education apathy

In the final leg of campaigning for the 16th General Election to be held from April 7-May 12, the issue of education provision and reform is conspicuously missing from the public discourse UNSURPRISINGLY AND IN keeping with post-independence India’s myopic political tradition, education of the world’s largest child and youth population — 600 million Indians are below 24 years of age — is a low-priority and hardly noticeable item for political parties donning battle gear for General Election 2014. In the final leg of campaigning for the country’s 16th general election to be held from April 7-May 12, the issue of education provision and reform is conspicuously missing from the public discourse. At election rallies, public meetings, in the print media, television and on the internet, leaders of the country’s major and minor political parties wax eloquent on the 2002 Gujarat and 1984 anti-Sikh riots, corruption, inflation, secularism, communalism, etc. But below-the-line issues of larger budgets for public education, upgrading the crumbling infrastructure of government schools, improving teacher-pupil ratios, contemporising curriculums, stemming the 53 percent dropouts from primary education and improving rock-bottom learning outcomes, are peripheral and will undoubtedly merit no more than mention in the manifestos of all political parties which are yet to be released as this issue of EducationWorld goes to press. Though political indifference to education and child welfare is not new, it’s particularly glaring in the run-up to Election 2014 because over the past decade, there’s been rising public awareness about the critical importance of elementary education and sustained pressure from civil society groups to push children’s rights to the forefront of the national development debate. For instance, last November Child Rights and You (CRY), the well-known Mumbai-based NGO, launched a six-month campaign titled ‘Vote for Child Rights’ and released its Child Rights Manifesto, urging political parties to commit to putting children at the centre of all policy, legislation and practice. “Despite children constituting over a third of India’s population, issues relating to their care, safety, protection, health and education are ignored by the political class. That’s the reason why CRY decided to launch its ‘Vote for Child Rights’ campaign to pressurise political parties to put children first, and commit to implementing our Child Rights Manifesto. In the past five months since we launched the campaign we have received over 1.4 million online votes, and have met leaders of all major political parties to persuade them to do more for children and guarantee their rights to education, protection and healthcare. Even though all political parties expressed their support for our manifesto, it remains to be seen whether they actually accept our demands. The only way to get the political class to act is by building the pressure of public opinion in favour of children and education,” says Suma Ravi, regional director (South) of CRY. The Child Rights Manifesto, based on CRY’s Status and Trends in Child Rights in India — An Overview of the Past Decade report, makes 10 demands including effective implementation of the…

Already a subscriber

Click here to log in and continue reading by entering your registered email address or subscribe now

Join with us in our mission to build the pressure of public opinion to make education the #1 item on the national agenda

Expert Comment

Critical mass in Indian education

– J.S. Rajput is a former director of NCERT and NCTE A NEW GOVERNMENT will be sworn into office in New Delhi by mid-May after an aggregate sum of Rs.30,000 crore will have been spent — according to a study of the Centre for Media Studies, Delhi — by an estimated 10,000 candidates in the electoral fray for 543 seats in the Lok Sabha. And with a general consensus having emerged that mending and upgrading the early childhood primary, secondary and higher education systems is a top national priority, one hopes the new government at the Centre will provide urgently needed additional resources in terms of teachers, money and materials to take India’s schools, colleges and universities to globally comparable levels. One of the root causes of the dysfunctionality of the K-12 education system in India is that teacher recruitment is a total mess, especially in government schools. Most state governments prefer to appoint ‘para teachers’, paying pittances as honoraria. This malady has spread to higher education where even Central government institutions suffer 40-60 percent faculty shortages and make do with guest lecturers paid on a per lecture basis. This is happening because the Sixth Pay Commission has decreed sky-high remuneration which is becoming increasingly unaffordable for government schools and higher education institutions. In my considered opinion, India’s cognitive capital could multiply four-fold if our schools attain globally comparable learning outcomes. It’s shocking how a nation of 1.27 billion continues to ignore the education of 75 percent of its youth and stoically suffers huge annual GDP losses. Clearly, this situation is untenable. The new government must urgently bring out a document like Challenges in Education prepared in 1985, and paint an honest picture of Indian education highlighting lacunae and deficiencies. It should be followed by a pragmatic, visionary and futuristic New Policy on Education (NPE) 2014. NPE 2014 must focus on meeting the manpower requirements of the industry, agriculture and service sectors in close collaboration with the corporate sector. However, such transformation of the economic profile of the nation necessitates a drastic change in the school education system. Its structure, content and processes will have to become flexible and skills education — vocational education and training (VET) — will need to be given equal priority with textbook learning. Academic education supplemented with skills acquisition could also be utilised for inculcating moral, ethical and humanistic values in school students — currently a grave lacuna. In China and Korea, rigorous academic education supplemented with VET on a massive scale, has ramped up their annual rates of GDP growth. It’s a myth that skills acquisition is inimical to intellectual growth. On the contrary, VET stimulates it. Against this background, the first challenge is to restore the credibility of the country’s 1.20 million government schools. This will relieve the pressure on private schools, which although number less than 10 percent, cater to around 33 percent of all K-12 students. Two significant policy initiatives are required in this context. First, the promise made by every…

Already a subscriber

Click here to log in and continue reading by entering your registered email address or subscribe now

Join with us in our mission to build the pressure of public opinion to make education the #1 item on the national agenda

Cover Story

Rubanomics gamechangers

A Bangalore-based social enterprise has developed a unique VET model which has the potential to transform hundreds of millions of rural youth into employable living-wage earners A modestly appointed four-bedroom house converted into an office in Jayanagar, a green and pleasant suburb of Bangalore, is the head office of Head Held High Services Pvt. Ltd (H3S, estb.2012). A company with 80 employees, it has rolled out a unique ‘rubanomics’ model for bridging the rural-urban jobs divide by skilling unemployed and under-employed rural youth for white collar jobs (IT enabled services, BPOs, hospitality and retail trades) in urban and small-town India. If the model works, it has the potential to transform hundreds of millions of uneducated and under-educated rural youth into employable living-wage earners who could deliver India’s much proclaimed demographic dividend. Since this ingeniously conceptualised enterprise began training rural youth for employability in 2007 under the aegis of a trust named Foundation for Life, teaching them English, computer programs, life skills (interview capabilities, public speaking etc), H3S has established 15 training centres in Karnataka and one in neighbouring (former) Andhra Pradesh. Together these centres have trained over 1,000 illiterates and school graduates of whom 90 percent are already employed in 15 corporates, firms and business enterprises in Karnataka at an average monthly wage of Rs. 7,500. Tried and tested in its first learning centre in Koppal (pop.72,000), a tier-3 town in North Karnataka, the company’s RubanShakti vocational education and training system “extracts relevancy” from the traditional school syllabus; provides “transformational IT training” and uses “conversational pedagogies” of peer-to-peer learning in non-hierarchical environments to quickly develop the employability skills and confidence of unschooled and backward rural youth. “According to several research studies it is possible to make a completely English-illiterate youth 80 percent proficient in the language by familiarising him with 500 words. Under our sprint-style RubanShakti learning programmes, we teach our students 2,500 words using word recognition, phonetic reading, vowel combination pedagogies, and electronic games and gadgets. We are now confident we can make a completely English illiterate youth 95 percent English proficient within six months, as opposed to 12-16 years taken by the conventional school system. During our six-month intensive training programmes (Rs.9,000) we also make them computer literate and confident by teaching them transactional life skills. Our target is to train 2 million youth in ten years,” says Rajesh Bhat, an engineering graduate of Mysore University and former product manager of OnMobile Apps, Bangalore who co-founded H3S. Moved by the hapless plight of unemployed rural youth while visiting his native village Sirsi, in arid North Karnataka, Bhat (together with Sunil Savara) registered Foundation for Life in 2007 to train them to work in a BPO (business process outsourcing) unit they proposed to establish in Koppal. To raise funding for the proposed BPO, Bhat and Savara approached the Bangalore-based entrepreneurs network The Indus Entrepreneurs where they were referred to Madan Padaki who was at the time riding high on the success of MeritTrac Services Pvt. Ltd, a company he…

Already a subscriber

Click here to log in and continue reading by entering your registered email address or subscribe now

Join with us in our mission to build the pressure of public opinion to make education the #1 item on the national agenda

Cover Story

Centurion’s 40,000 score card

Centurion University’s Gram Tarang initiative has provided employment-yielding vocational training to 40,000 rural youth in the insurgency-infected Red Corridor districts of Odisha In 2006, a team of professional educationists comprising professors Dr. Mukti Kanta Mishra, D.N. Rao and D. Nageshwara Rao took over the Jagannath Institute for Technology and Management, a failing engineering college in Parlakhemundi, Gajapati — the poorest and heavily Maoist insurgency-affected district of the eastern seaboard state of Odisha (formerly Orissa, pop.40 million). Inspired by the turnaround of the college, the team established another campus in Bhubaneswar. After the state government passed enabling legislation in 2010, the two enterprises were merged under the name and style of the Centurion University of Technology & Management (CUTM). The ambitious objective of CUTM is “building human resource capability, resulting in employability as well as entrepreneurship development across disadvantaged areas of the world”. Since then, the varsity’s management led by Dr. Mishra has quickly established eight faculties/schools (engineering and technology, agriculture sciences, basic sciences, business management, humanities, and vocational and distance education studies). Currently the university has an aggregate enrollment of 15,000 students (including 7,000 women) mentored by a faculty aggregating 324 and over 300 lab instructors. Although in essence, CUTM is a professional education degrees-awarding university with clear intent to prepare students for white collar jobs in industry, it also hosts a School of Vocation which offers certificate courses and diploma programmes for learning blue-collar industry-oriented skills (fitter, welder, electrician, CNC operator, auto service technician etc). All programmes are industry approved with the university guaranteeing job placements. Currently the school has seven learning/training centres in Odisha, four in neighbouring (former) Andhra Pradesh, one in Jharkhand and two in Assam. Moreover, to provide vocational education and training (VET ) to rural youth in the desperately poor and Maoist insurgency infected Red Corridor districts of Odisha, in 2010, CUTM promoted its Gram Tarang Employability Training Services initiative in collaboration with the National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC) and the Central and state governments. Since then, 30,000 rural youth — mostly school dropouts — have been trained and certified as machinists, fitters, welders, electricians, plumbers, mechanics and retail assistants in CUTM-Gram Tarang satellite training centres. CUTM has also trained and placed an additional 10,000 below poverty line rural youth under the Union ministry of rural development’s Swaranjayanti Gram Swarozgar Yojana (SGSY) programme. “I am pleased to inform readers of EducationWorld that of the 40,000 rural youth trained under Gram Tarang and the rural development ministry’s SGSY programmes during the past four years, 84 percent have been placed in jobs paying start-up salaries of Rs.6,500-8,500 per month. Among the companies which have readily accepted Gram Tarang certified youth are Café Coffee Day, Cotton Blossom Textiles (Bangalore), Samsung, Tata ASLAP (Pune), Ashok Leyland, Tata Motors and Graziano (Noida). Reports indicate their career progression is excellent and some Gram Tarang programme graduates are earning Rs.20,000 per month,” says Mishra. Despite the positive socio-economic outcomes of the CUTM-Gram Tarang rural youth skilling initiative, given the gigantic scale of…

Already a subscriber

Click here to log in and continue reading by entering your registered email address or subscribe now

Join with us in our mission to build the pressure of public opinion to make education the #1 item on the national agenda

Cover Story

Samarthanam shows the way

Over the past 17 years, this trust has provided free-of-charge vocational education including advanced computer training and English language learning to 18,000 children and youth with disabilities Although post-independence India’s record of providing globally comparable quality education to the world’s largest child population (480 million) is pathetic, its record of provisioning special education for the country’s 70 million citizens with physical disabilities and 10 million visually challenged, is worse. Education of the country’s huge population of children and people with disabilities has been — and remains — an area of darkness. However, official failure and ignorance about the inherent productive capabilities of challenged people has not deterred several private sector initiatives such as ADAPT (formerly Spastic Society of India), Mumbai, and National Association for the Blind among other NGOs across the country, from taking up the cause of challenged citizens — widely regarded as a societal burden. To the too-slowly lengthening list of NGOs aiding and abetting the development of children and people with disabilities, add the name of Bangalore-based Samarthanam Trust for the Disabled (estb. 1997). Over the past 17 years since it was registered with the mission to “create an inclusive society free from discrimination where persons with disabilities become contributing members, living with dignity and respect”, Samarthanam has provided free-of-charge residential primary and high school education as also advanced computer training, English language learning and personality development and enrichment programmes to 18,000 children and youth with disabilities in the southern state of Karnataka. Currently, Samarthanam (‘support’), promoted by G.K. Mahantesh, a visually impaired English literature postgraduate and former lecturer of Bangalore University, and childhood friends S.T. Nagesh, a (visually impaired) senior banker at the State Bank of India and Vasanti Savanur, a school teacher, runs two residential schools in Bangalore for 350 challenged and underserved children who are provided K-X education. The trust has also established and manages a hostel-cum-education centre for 1,000 youth and adults with disabilities, promoted a Livelihood Resource Centre which runs on a model that ensures persons with disabilities are skilled for IT/ITES/BPO, retail, hospitality, banking and insurance sectors, and has successfully placed 6,500 disabled youth in remunerative employment. Moreover it has established the country’s first two BPO training units for challenged children and youth in Dharwad and Bangalore, and runs a BPO unit with 150 employees providing voice and non-voice services to half a dozen companies. “Over the past 17 years, we have educated and trained more than 18,000 physically and visually challenged children and youth for employability. School dropouts are given intensive English learning and IT software language training, and simultaneously taught to develop soft life skills with most of them ready for employment after six months of training,” says Mahantesh, managing trustee of Samarthanam. Quite obviously, the education and skills training given to children and youth in the trust’s schools and learning centres is effective, because start-up remuneration of Samarthanam graduates averages Rs.8,000 per month and employers include respected corporates such as State Bank of India, Canara Bank, a number…

Already a subscriber

Click here to log in and continue reading by entering your registered email address or subscribe now

Join with us in our mission to build the pressure of public opinion to make education the #1 item on the national agenda

Cover Story

Women entrepreneurs initiative

Illiterate gatherers of forest produce transformed into businesswomen The evolutionary outcome of a 1992 World Bank Institute project to design microenterprise management curriculums and delivery methodology for poor, illiterate and semi-literate women producers in backward states of India, the Intel-Udyogini School of Entrepreneurship (I-USE) was established as a block-level training institution with a 2009 grant of $13,000 from the IT major Intel. The objective of I-USE is to build the capacity of poor women to become entrepreneurs, with the capability to own and operate Village Level Service Centres (VLSC) and connect women producers to modern markets. Earlier, its promoters had developed two flagship programmes viz, Training of Enterprise Support Teams (TEST) for training NGO personnel as teachers and trainers, and the Grassroots Management Training (GMT) programme for bottom-of-pyramid women producers. All these programmes have been strategically integrated into the operations of I-USE during the past decade. “During the past two decades since this women’s empowerment enterprise began its operations, we have trained over 3,000 NGO and government staff under TEST, and more than 200,000 women producers directly and indirectly through affiliated NGOs. Moreover, nearly 100 VLSCs are operational with each centre serving 80-100 families. The socio-economic impact of improving the productivity and business transaction skills of women producers is huge. For instance, in three districts of Jharkhand, we have trained 14,000 women traditionally engaged in selling lac resin — extensively used in the pharma, food, paints and varnishing industries — to improve their productivity through the use of new technologies,” says Vanita Viswanath, an alumna of Delhi and Jawaharlal Nehru universities with a Ph D from the University of Texas, Austin. A former World Bank consultant on microenterprise, in 1990 Viswanath returned to India and promoted and served as chief executive of I-USE until early this year. With these initiatives, women have dramatically increased their yields by 400-1,000 percent, with all of them earning at least Rs.20,000 and some earning above Rs.1 lakh for 15 days work. “Consequently many of them have signed up for our entrepreneurship programmes and have started wholesale and retail units to market urban goods in rural areas and vice versa,” adds Viswanath. Encouraged by the Jharkhand experiment which has transformed illiterate gatherers of forest produce into women entrepreneurs engaged in backward (reafforestation and revival of lost livelihoods) and forward (distribution, retail) market integration, the I-USE team of 30 is set to roll out schemes to train 30,000 women in Madhya Pradesh, Odisha and Chhattisgarh. “Instead of traditional primary education, if we provide livelihood and enterprise education, it’s possible to arouse interest in knowledge and learning on a massive scale. Our women entrepreneurs have impacted remote rural societies in very positive ways by demonstrating that through accelerated learning programmes, women can transform rural communities for the better,” says Viswanath.

Already a subscriber

Click here to log in and continue reading by entering your registered email address or subscribe now

Join with us in our mission to build the pressure of public opinion to make education the #1 item on the national agenda

Cover Story

Skilling unorganised sector workers

Founded in 2006, LabourNet has developed a sustainable end-to-end 4 E solution — empowerment through education, employability and employment — for the informal sector labour The low-profile Bangalore-based Movement for Alternatives for Youth Awareness (Maya, estb.1989) is a “development organisation working to address systemic issues of child labour through building empowered human institutions of the poor”. Over the years, this NGO has established four initiatives — Maya Organic to empower informal sector workers; Prajyatna to research and initiate reforms in elementary education; LabourNet which skills informal and unorganised sector workers, and Maya Health which endeavours to create socio-economic conditions to enable the provision of high quality, affordable primary healthcare to all. Maya’s LabourNet initiative was started in 2006 to “provide a one-stop platform for unorganised sector workers to obtain services which are currently available and accessible to formal sector workers”. Since then, it has developed a sustainable end-to-end 4E Solution — empowerment through education, employability and employment. “We are a social enterprise focused on increasing the real income of informal sector workers by improving their productivity through vocational education and training (VET), and what we define as ‘decent work’ with social protection,” says Gayathri Vasudevan, an economics and social work alumna of Delhi and Bombay universities with a Ph D in development studies awarded by the Institute for Social and Economic Change, Bangalore. She has led the LabourNet initiative ab initio and has scaled it into a countrywide enterprise. All LabourNet VET programmes are in sync with the qualifications framework of the National Skills Development Corporation (NSDC). Looking back over the past eight years since LabourNet was launched, Vasudevan is modestly satisfied that a scalable VET model for neglected labour in the unorganised sector — who constitute 90 percent of India’s 480 million workers in all sectors of the economy — has been developed. “In less than a decade of its launch, LabourNet has established 40 livelihood centres and over 90 worksite training units in 11 states countrywide which have trained and skilled over 100,000 workers who are earning wages between Rs.6,000-12,000 per month. We ensure all youth trained by us are placed, and receive counseling services until they can work independently. Another achievement of which we are proud is that we have developed capability assessment standards for long-neglected trades such as carpentry, plumbing, electricity maintenance, tile laying, masonry etc,” says Vasudevan. With LabourNet’s VET programmes in conformity with the stringent standards mandated by NSDC, and its graduates experiencing a surge in productivity and incomes, Vasudevan is set to roll out LabourNet nationally. “We have identified three sectors — services, construction and manufacturing — on which we will focus our training and skilling efforts. In addition, we are also developing VET programmes which will give a significant boost to agriculture productivity in the states of UP, MP, Bihar, and Chhattisgarh. We expect these skills development initiatives will give a huge boost to national economic growth rates,” says Vasudevan optimistically.

Already a subscriber

Click here to log in and continue reading by entering your registered email address or subscribe now

Join with us in our mission to build the pressure of public opinion to make education the #1 item on the national agenda

Special Report

CRY Child Rights Manifesto

In the run-up to General Election 2014, on November 13 last year Child Rights and You (CRY), the well-known Mumbai-based NGO, released a Child Rights Manifesto as part of its ‘Vote for Child Rights’ election advocacy campaign. The manifesto calls upon all political parties to accord top priority to child welfare and education in their election agendas. CRY’s ten major demands: Standardise age definition for all child-related legislation in line with the National Policy for Children 2013, in which a child is defined as any person below 18 years of age. Ensure that all children between the ages 6-14 are in school and learning as per the provisions of the Right to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, 2009. Expand the ambit of the RTE Act to bring children aged 0-6 years and 14-18 years under its purview. Strengthen implementation of the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) programme to ensure that six services viz. supplementary nutrition, health check-ups, immunization, nutrition and health education, preschool/non-formal education and referral services, are available in anganwadis. Also allocate adequate resources to ensure universal access for all children in the 0-6 age group to anganwadis with adequately staffed and trained personnel. Reduce child mortality by ensuring that no child remains malnourished through sustained efforts such as complete immunization, regular health check-ups, proper nutritional support and health counselling. Declare access to quality primary healthcare a fundamental right and strengthen the primary healthcare system with special focus on children. Ensure food security for all marginalised groups with proper implementation of the National Food Security Act, 2013. Amend the Act to (i) increase the protein/fat intake of pregnant women and children to 20-25 gm (ii) include services such as immunization, health check-ups etc available under ICDS as part of the Act (iii) make provision of supplementary nutrition for children aged 14-18 years. Amend the Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act, 2012 to abolish all forms of child labour by removing the distinction between hazardous and non-hazardous categories of work for all children up to 18 years of age. Invest adequately in ensuring protection for children by implementing policies and programmes that protect them from abuse, violence and exploitation. Ensure gender parity, social equity, and guarantee the rights of children with disabilities by providing equal opportunities for all children. Allocate sufficient budget for children by increasing the allocation for education and healthcare from 4.64 percent to 10 percent of GDP.

Already a subscriber

Click here to log in and continue reading by entering your registered email address or subscribe now

Join with us in our mission to build the pressure of public opinion to make education the #1 item on the national agenda

Special Report

Party manifesto gleanings

As this issue of EW goes to press, only the Congress, CPI-M and Trinamool Congress Party (TMC) have officially released their manifestos for General Election 2014. The BJP and Aam Aadmi Party manifestos are expected to be out only in the first week of this month. The promises and pledges made in relation to education by the Congress, CPI-M and TMC in their manifestos are summarised below. Trinamool Congress Party Massive emphasis on the entire verticals of primary and secondary schools, vocational institutes, colleges and Central universities with a commitment to spend a significantly higher proportion of GDP on education. A new experts committee to prepare an employment-oriented education policy. New Central universities of high quality to be promoted countrywide. New All India Medical Institutes to be established in all four regions of the country. Madrasas to be empowered and mainstreamed as per their own requirements. A nationwide programme of long-term educational loans for students. Indian National Congress Robust implementation of the Right to Education Act to ensure quality learning outcomes, adequate infrastructure and facilities in schools, regular teacher training and optimal pupil teacher ratio systemswide. Larger resources for implementation of the Rashtriya Madhyamik Shiksha Abhiyan, to improve the quality of secondary education and achieve near universal enrolment. Special emphasis to be given to reducing school drop-outs particularly from middle and secondary schools. An independent regulatory mechanism to be established to oversee State and private institutions to ensure standardisation and quality of education. Full support for regional and context-specific curricula as well as development of life skills including leadership building. Better facilities for children with special needs and disabilities. The Rashtriya Ucchatar Shiksha Abhiyan (RUSA) programme will promote 70 new universities, improve infrastructure in existing universities, upgrade autonomous colleges to universities, and create a new model of general degree colleges and professional institutions. A National Commission for Students will be established to protect and promote the interests of students. Interest-free education loans to students of all levels especially from weaker sections of society. New public-private-partnerships, appropriate regulatory systems, accreditation procedures, and policies will be developed, to enable private education providers to take on the challenge of expanding secondary education in particular. Communist Party of India-Marxist Public expenditure on education to be raised to 6 percent of GDP. Right to Education Act, 2009 will be strictly implemented; the RTE Act will be amended to institutionalise the concept of neighbourhood schooling, and extend it beyond the elementary level; free education for all dropped out and returning students; stringent action against private schools and elite institutions who fail to provide admission to children from economically weaker sections under s.12 (1) (c); improved quality of schools and teachers. Secondary education capacity to be expanded to reduce dropouts; quality of education and infrastructure in SSA schools to be improved; flexibility of rules, timings and other aspects to ensure retention of pupils in backward areas and otherwise marginalised groups. New legislation to regulate fees, admissions and curricula in private educational institutions. Ban on FDI in higher…

Already a subscriber

Click here to log in and continue reading by entering your registered email address or subscribe now

Join with us in our mission to build the pressure of public opinion to make education the #1 item on the national agenda

Letter from the Editor

One of the great conundrums of post-independence India’s national development effort is why for over six decades and counting, successive governments at the Centre and in the states have grossly neglected early childhood, primary, secondary and higher education right across the spectrum. Surely it’s always been self-evident that unless we have a well-educated population, the country will never develop into a healthy democracy or economy. True, Nehruvian India took a Soviet-inspired wrong turn which required massive deployment of resources into public sector heavy industry, starving the social sectors. But for all their faults which resulted in the global collapse of communism in 1989, neither the erstwhile Soviet Union nor communist China neglected education. Both these countries are almost wholly literate, while one-third of India’s population is illiterate and another 50 percent just about so. Could there be some substance in the charge made by India’s communist parties that the middle class establishment which rules the country, has deliberately neglected public education to retain the masses in ignorance and poverty to ensure ready availability of a huge pool of cheap labour? Regrettably, the original sin of neglecting school and higher education has been compounded by ignorance about the socio-economic value of vocational and skills education. Whereas China has 500,000 VET (vocational education and training) centres countrywide, India has 11,250. And while 60-80 percent of workers in all forms of employment in the industrial OECD countries have received formal VET education, in India barely 2 percent have. The upshot of neglect of VET is that the output and total factor productivity per factory worker in India is half of China’s, and perhaps one-tenth of German and European labour. Fortunately even if belatedly, perhaps spooked by the phenomenon of severe shortages of skilled workers in the midst of rising youth unemployment — the country needs to create 12 million new jobs per year — the Delhi establishment has finally awoken to the need to disseminate VET on a massive scale to make the country’s youth employable. In 2009, it promoted the National Skill Development Corporation, a public-private partnership to fund VET education providers countrywide. But while NSDC is making steady progress in its national mission, a more exciting and high-potential development is the rising number of technology professionals, trusts and philanthropists who have stepped forward to empower and enable India’s national skilling mission. In our cover story, we profile five promising NGOs which are scaling and racing to skill India’s short-changed children and youth. May their tribe increase. And with polling in the 16th General Election about to begin, in our second lead feature, managing editor Summiya Yasmeen reports that lip service and ritual promises is all that spokespersons of major political parties have to offer to education reforms and development. The communists may be right after all.

Already a subscriber

Click here to log in and continue reading by entering your registered email address or subscribe now

Join with us in our mission to build the pressure of public opinion to make education the #1 item on the national agenda

Editorial

Citizens need to vote proactively

BY THE TIME YOU READ this despairing editorial, polling in General Election 2014 will have commenced with the world’s largest electorate of 814 million citizens having begun the month-long process of voting away their future. For discerning observers of the political landscape despair is inevitable, because in mid-May a coalition government defined either by kleptocracy, communalism or anarchy will assume office in New Delhi. Whatever the election outcome, the citizenry is set to experience turbulent times. Although it’s normative and politically correct to praise the wisdom of the electorate, the plain truth is the citizenry and particularly the nation’s youth, have invited the forthcoming tsunami of troubles. Unfortunate but true, citizens insufficiently appreciate the right to vote and freedom to engage with the political process endowed upon them by the founding fathers of the Constitution. Casually they will vote in a Central government led either by Congress, BJP or AAP (Aam Aadmi Party) which will be steeped in the sins of reflexive kleptocracy, divisive communalism and irresponsible anarchy. Strangely, despite half the population of India being made up of children and youth, none of the major political parties have promised to implement the report of the Kothari Commission, which recommended an annual outlay (Centre plus states) of 6 percent of GDP for education way back in 1966. Neither is there a credible commitment from any party to increase public health expenditure from the pathetic 1.4 percent of GDP outlay (cf. 9-10 percent in OECD countries). Nor have issues such as shockingly adverse police and judges to people ratios, pervasive child malnutrition, public housing and sanitation which are debilitating the nation, received any emphasis in the declarations or manifestos of mainstream political parties. In this connection, the involvement of India’s estimated 400 million youth in the age group 18-34 with nation-building is especially disappointing. They seem unconcerned about making considered political choices despite the patent reality that politics — as it is being practiced currently by the mainstream and regional parties — is likely to impact them the most. It is submitted that it’s the citizen’s responsibility to proactively seek out and vote in political parties and formations with genuine and credible national development programmes, rather than passively choose the best of a proven bad lot. If citizens were to discharge their electoral obligation proactively, the newly registered Children First Party of India which promises to transform the nation into a child-centric society, would have received greater support. However, this new political party promoted with the most credible and comprehensive national revival agenda hasn’t attracted any support or encouragement from the media or the public. The fault is not of its committed promoters or programme, but of an indifferent electorate steeped in oriental inertia and despair. A second chance for india inc The imposition of a mandatory corporate social responsibility (CSR) expenditure obligation upon Indian industry by the new Companies Act, 2013 offers India Inc an opportunity to redeem itself for its inexplicable half-hearted engagement with Indian education over the past…

Already a subscriber

Click here to log in and continue reading by entering your registered email address or subscribe now

Join with us in our mission to build the pressure of public opinion to make education the #1 item on the national agenda

Mailbox

Common core curriculum

YOUR COVER STORY ‘India’s premier school boards league’ made interesting reading (EW March). India is perhaps the only country worldwide which has 34 school examination boards, each prescribing education of varying quality. Though college managements are required to give equal weightage to grades of all exam boards, it’s well known they accord greater premium to CBSE and CISCE school-leavers. Your suggestion that India should work towards a common school-leaving exam is not a workable idea as state governments will be unwilling to let go control over state board-affiliated schools. Instead, it’s better to work towards drawing up a restricted common curriculum for all schools in English, maths and science. This will ensure all school- leavers countrywide are equipped with similar competencies in core science and maths subjects. Rajesh Mathur Delhi No exceptions IT’S CONDEMNABLE THAT four years after the RTE Act came into force, 92 percent of schools are non-compliant with its provisions (EW March special report ‘RTE Act 2009: Ominous portents’). If governments are unable to provide basic infrastructure and facilities such as drinking water, toilets and boundary walls in its own schools, how will it address more difficult issues such as upgrading teacher quality and improving student learning outcomes? The RTE Forum must immediately demand that the Central government set a new deadline for meeting the infrastructure norms mandated in the Act, and that the punitive action applicable to private schools for not meeting with the Act’s provisions be made applicable to government schools. It’s up to civil society to ensure that the government is fully accountable for implementation of the RTE Act in all schools — public or private. Sarita Deshpande Mumbai Preschool rankings suggestion I AM A SUBSCRIBER AND read the special report on the Early Childhood Education Global Conference 2014 (EW February) with great interest. Congratulations for successfully organising this unique conference. It was an enriching experience to interact with so many pre-primary educators from across India. As was the consensus at the conference, there’s an urgent need to draw up common guidelines for preschools and day care centres. The Mongrace team, with a 50-year-old legacy, successfully nurtures tiny tots who are admitted into leading primary schools in Kolkata. Recently we have ventured into providing day care facilities at our new unit in Newtown. To EducationWorld, I put forth the suggestion that in the annual EW India Preschool Rankings, preschools with day care facilities should be rated and ranked separately (like boarding schools in your EW school rankings). A day care centre usually monitors and engages with a child for a minimum 10-12 hours per day in comparison with 3-4 hours daily that children spend at a preschool (without day care). Chandrika Ramakrishnan Principal, Mongrace Montessori House and Day Care Centre Newtown, Kolkata Words of appreciation THANK YOU FOR THE new-look EducationWorld (February). We greatly appreciate your relentless efforts to make the magazine attractive and comprehensively informative not only for educators but for parents and students as well. With the new format, EW definitely has…

Already a subscriber

Click here to log in and continue reading by entering your registered email address or subscribe now

Join with us in our mission to build the pressure of public opinion to make education the #1 item on the national agenda

Education News

Delhi: Court confounded confusion

CHAOS OVER NURSERY admissions in Delhi is becoming more confounded with parents resorting to fraud and trickery to get children admitted into the nurseries of the city’s estimated 6,600 composite schools, which ensures a smooth passage in school education for the next 12 years. After an investigation by the state government’s education ministry unearthed that, “out of 1,520 applications in which (points for) inter-state transfer had been claimed, 844 applications were not genuine,” on February 27 the Delhi high court passed an order scrapping the five points weighting given to the inter-state transfer category. Under the 100-point guideline issued by Delhi’s lieutenant governor, children who live in the neighbourhood (within 8 km) are awarded 70 points, 20 more points if they have a sibling already studying in the school of choice, and five points if a parent is an alum of the school. But given the huge number of applications with identical points surpassing the small number of available nursery seats, each school is obliged to conduct a draw of lots (aka lottery) to finalise admission eligibility. Yet following the abolition of the inter-state transfer criterion, on March 6 the Delhi high court ordered fresh draw of lots. Unsurprisingly these court orders didn’t go down well with parents who have already run the gauntlet and whose children have been admitted under the first draw of lots. Therefore they appealed the March 6 order mandating another lottery. Responding to the appeal, on March 12, a division bench of acting Chief Justice B.D. Ahmed and Justice Siddharth Mridul stayed the March 6 order postponing hearing to April 2. The genesis of problems concerning nursery admissions can be traced to a Delhi high court division bench order dated September 4, 2006 in Rakesh Goel vs. Montford School (LPA 196/2004), constituting an expert committee headed by Ashok Ganguly (then chairman of CBSE) to evolve a transparent system to govern nursery admissions and eliminate child interviews. In 2007, the Ganguly committee presented an admissions process based on a formula giving graded weighting to neighbourhood, alumni, sibling, single parent, inter-state transfer and management quota children. Despite this, nursery admissions have become a battleground for disputes between the Delhi state government and private unaided schools with parents rushing to court for alleged infractions of the Ganguly committee’s admission criteria, as also for allegedly charging exorbitant tuition fees. Curiously, the Delhi high court has repeatedly admitted such writs despite the apex court judgement in T.M.A. Pai Foundation Case (2002 8 SCC 481) clearly stating that “in the case of unaided private schools, maximum autonomy has to be with the management with regard to administration, including the rights of appointment, disciplinary powers, admission of students and the fees to be charged”. “Nowhere else in the country is the state government micro-managing admissions into private unaided schools. The T.M.A. Pai judgement clearly states that admissions into private schools can’t be regulated by government. Instead of appreciating the role they play in providing quality education to students, the Delhi state government…

Already a subscriber

Click here to log in and continue reading by entering your registered email address or subscribe now

Join with us in our mission to build the pressure of public opinion to make education the #1 item on the national agenda

Education News

Maharashtra: Curious paradox

IT’S A CURIOUS PARADOX of india’s most industrial — and arguably most corrupt — state that vacancies in the state’s engineering colleges have spiralled above 34 percent from less than 1 percent in 2009, while simultaneously 94 additional colleges with an intake capacity of 67,181 additional students have become operational. A 21-member committee led by G.D. Yadav, vice chancellor of Institute of Chemical Technology, Mumbai, which investigated this phenomenon blamed the Delhi-based All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), which approves and accredits all technical institutions countrywide, for the mess. “AICTE is primarily responsible for the huge unutilised capacity in engineering colleges. In 2010, it introduced an e-governance initiative under which new technical institutes including engineering colleges could apply for registration and accreditation online. As a result a large number of substandard colleges were registered without proper background and verification checks. This has resulted in excess capacity and severe shortages of faculty, and poor quality of graduates who are hard put to find employment,” says Yadav. However, Prof. S.S. Mantha, chairman of AICTE, is disinclined to accept the conclusions of the Yadav Committee. “AICTE’s fast-track college registrations and approval process is driven by the national interest. Currently the GER (gross enrollment ratio) in higher education is 18, which means of 100 eligible youth in the age group 18-23, higher education is accessible by only 18, of whom five opt for technical training education. Therefore our e-governance approvals policy is driven by the need to improve the GER. No education system in the world is devoid of vacancies and we believe quality will improve once institutions are up and running,” says Mantha. However, neither the Yadav Committee nor its predecessors have examined why despite the nationwide shortage of faculty and rising student vacancies, there’s no dearth of would-be edupreneurs anxious to promote professional education colleges in Maharashtra. This is a sensitive issue because the great majority of aspiring edupreneurs are politicians adept not only at negotiating the thicket of rules, regulations and permissions required from the state government to promote greenfield education institutions, but also have huge hoards of dubiously acquired cash to invest. “For politicians and businessmen with unaccounted cash to invest, promoting colleges is a low-risk enterprise because even if a college fails, campuses and infrastructure are appreciating assets. Moreover there’s always the possibility of a takeover, merger or conversion of a college into a tourist resort,” says a Mumbai-based realtor who preferred to remain anonymous. Loosely monitored capacity creation in technical education has raised concern about the quality of ill-trained engineers and technicians let loose upon industry and society for quite some time. In 2008, the Yashpal Committee, constituted to review the functions of AICTE/UGC in the wake of changes in higher, professional and technical education in India, warned that “mushrooming engineering and management colleges, with some notable exceptions have largely become mere business entities dispensing very poor quality education.” Earlier in 2006, the high-powered P. Rama Rao committee report for faculty development in technical institutions also commented…

Already a subscriber

Click here to log in and continue reading by entering your registered email address or subscribe now

Join with us in our mission to build the pressure of public opinion to make education the #1 item on the national agenda

Education News

Tamil Nadu: Nursing discrimination drama

THE MADRAS HIGH COURT witnessed high drama on March 7, when a batch of 41 students studying nursing in government colleges threatened to jump from the seventh floor of the additional law chambers in the high court premises unless given assurance of employment in the state’s government hospitals. After almost an hour of persuasion by advocates, police and fire service personnel, the students relented and gave up their agitation. They were later arrested by police and released on bail. The unwarranted commotion was orchestrated by student representatives of Tamil Nadu’s 23 government-run nursing schools and four nursing colleges affiliated with the Dr. MGR Medical University, Chennai, which have an aggregate enrolment of 2,180 students. Nursing students in government institutions statewide are up in arms against a government order of January 18, 2012 which was upheld on January 8 this year by the Madras high court, permitting degree and diploma holders of private nursing institutions to be appointed nurses in government hospitals, hitherto the monopoly of government nursing college graduates. On January 8, a two-judge bench of the high court permitted the appointment of both government and private college nursing students in government hospitals on the basis of their performance in examinations conducted by the Medical Services Recruitment Board (MSRB). The high court judgement has come as a great relief to the 8,000 students studying in Tamil Nadu’s 165 private nursing colleges and 204 private schools of nursing who have been fighting for their right to serve in government hospitals for nearly two decades. “We are very pleased with the GO and high court order upholding it. When doctors, teachers and other paramedical students who have graduated from private colleges are recruited through examinations conducted by the Tamil Nadu Public Services Commission and other agencies, why should graduates of private nursing colleges be the exception? This is violative of Article 14 of the Constitution of India,” says Chellamal Mariappan, secretary, Trained Nurses Association of India, Tamil Nadu. According to informed medical educationists in Chennai, reservation of jobs in government hospitals for government nursing college graduates has its basis in the provisions of the Madras Medical Code formulated in 1902. Even after independence only two institutions — the Madras Medical College School of Nursing and the Christian Medical College and Hospital School of Nursing — offered nursing education and certification. Since then, despite the promotion of 165 private nursing colleges and 204 private nursing schools in the state, this discriminatory practice continued with government college nursing graduates taking full advantage of it. However, infuriated by the unfair denial of jobs in government hospitals and primary health centres to private nursing graduates — a practice that prevails only in Tamil Nadu — since 2005, private college students and their associations have been filing a series of writ petitions in the Madras high court for an order outlawing this discrimination. Typically in the Indian tradition, this war is not over despite the January 8 high court order. A special leave petition (SLP) filed in…

Already a subscriber

Click here to log in and continue reading by entering your registered email address or subscribe now

Join with us in our mission to build the pressure of public opinion to make education the #1 item on the national agenda

Education News

West Bengal: Cold-storaged CET

THREE YEARS ON AFTER IT ended 34 years of rule of the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM) led-Left Front government in West Bengal (pop. 91 million) with a landslide majority in the state legislative election of 2011, the Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress government has yet to redeem its promise to restore West Bengal’s universities — widely acclaimed as the country’s best until the mid-1970s — to their pristine glory. One of the promises was to discontinue the practice of routine reservation by top-ranked elite universities of postgraduate seats for their own graduates. Shortly after she was sworn-in as chief minister, Banerjee proposed a common entrance test (CET) for admission into postgrad programmes of all colleges and state-funded universities. But three years hence, the much-hyped CET is still in cold storage with little prospect of it being conducted this year either. The West Bengal Council for Higher Education (WBCHE), the nodal authority for conducting the examination is dragging its feet, citing inadequate manpower. “We will continue with last year’s process and ask universities to take 60 percent of postgrad students from affiliated colleges and fill the remaining seats from other varsities,” says Malayendu Saha, vice chairman of the council. This despite his predecessor Sugato Marjit’s promise to conduct CET for postgraduate admissions this year. Sukanta Bhattacharya, associate professor of economics at the University of Calcutta, is persuaded that CET for postgrad admissions is a dead letter. “Universities are autonomous institutions with differing and distinctive undergraduate and postgrad syllabuses and curriculums. It’s natural for them to admit students who they believe can cope with their curriculums and organisational culture,” he comments. Moreover, a major cause of antipathy to the proposed CET is that students who have made it into the undergrad programmes of elite standalone Presidency and Jadavpur universities, far from welcome the prospect of writing CET to be re-admitted into these preferred institutions. Even proponents of the proposed CET are beginning to entertain doubts. Prithwis Mukherjee, programme director of business analytics at the Praxis Business School, who was in favour of “a well-designed CET conducted by an independent third party”, is disheartened by the delay in actioning the proposal which could have given students from outside the establishment a chance to enter the state’s best (and highly subsidised) universities on merit. “Even if we can get going with a state-level CET in West Bengal, I am now sure that it will be so full of holes and incompetencies that it won’t be worth the effort. A single admission test is likely to be the target of all evil forces,” he says. Vested interests can — and will — always oppose poriborton (change). Baishali Mukherjee (Kolkata)

Already a subscriber

Click here to log in and continue reading by entering your registered email address or subscribe now

Join with us in our mission to build the pressure of public opinion to make education the #1 item on the national agenda

Education News

Uttar Pradesh: Cricketing sedition

THE FRAMING OF SEDITION charges against 67 Kashmiri students of the private Swami Vivekananda Subharti University (SVSU), Meerut, following an Indo-Pak Asia Cup cricket match played in Dhaka last month, has raised political temperatures in Lucknow and Uttar Pradesh on the eve of General Election 2014. While witnessing a live telecast of the match on campus on March 6, the Kashmiri students reportedly cheered Pakistani’s wafer-thin victory over India, allegedly committing the heinous sin of cheering the Pakistan team and reportedly raising anti-India slogans. Next morning, a notice was pasted on the doors of the Dhingra hostel suspending the 67 students for “misdemeanours”. A little later, the police arrived at the hostel, asking them to pack their bags, and subsequently dropped them off at the Old Delhi railway station with instructions to head home and not return until the situation cooled off. According to SVSU vice chancellor Manzoor Ahmed, it was the police and not university authorities who filed sedition charges against the students. “The action we took was to suspend them for three days. But when the atmosphere on the campus took a communal turn, I was compelled to ask them to go home. As their guardian, I am responsible for their safety. Once they return, I will arrange for extra classes so that they don’t lag behind in academics,” says Ahmed. Ironically the students from Kashmir are enrolled at SVSU under a Central government scholarship scheme designed to integrate Kashmiri students into the national mainstream. Currently, the university has 74 students enrolled in various courses under the prime minister’s scholarship scheme. Countrywide 250,000 students from Kashmir are studying in institutions of higher education under this scheme. With the police upping the ante by filing sedition charges — punishable with a life term — Jammu & Kashmir chief minister Omar Abdullah intervened and persuaded his UP counterpart Akhilesh Yadav to withdraw the charge. “Sedition charges against the students is unacceptably harsh punishment. It will ruin their futures and will further alienate them,” he said in Srinagar. Clearly, the Samajwadi Party-led state government, which has been severely criticised for failure to take prompt action when communal riots broke out in 22 villages of Muzzafarnagar district last August resulting in 60 deaths and 43,000 people being rendered homeless following rioting and arson, over-reacted by slapping sedition charges on the students. And minority opinion countrywide was quick to condemn the state government. “Such knee-jerk reactions will only send them back to Kashmir where real anti-nationals may exploit their sentiments,” commented Maulana Rashid Firangi Maheli, naib imam of Lucknow’s main idgah, to The Times of India’s Lucknow edition (March 6). Predictably, political parties and formations discerned an opportunity to derive political mileage. The BJP’s Uttar Pradesh unit protested that the students had “insulted the nation” and complained to the Election Commission that withdrawal of sedition charges was against the model code of conduct. On the other hand, across the border, Hafiz Saeed, head of the terrorist organisation Jama’at-ud-Da’wah, announced scholarships for the students…

Already a subscriber

Click here to log in and continue reading by entering your registered email address or subscribe now

Join with us in our mission to build the pressure of public opinion to make education the #1 item on the national agenda

Education News

Karnataka: Battle lines

EVER SINCE THE LANDMARK right to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, 2009, which devolved part of the constitutional obligation of the State (Central, state and local governments) to provide free-of-charge elementary education to all children in the 6-14 age group onto private schools, became law on April 1, 2010, relations between the Karnataka government and the state’s private unaided schools have deteriorated. Under s.12 (1) (c) of the Act, private schools are obliged to reserve 25 percent capacity in class I for children from poor households in their neighbourhood, the cost of which is to be reimbursed by the state government. Typically, instead of interpreting this legislative onus liberally, education officials have interpreted s.12 (1) (c) — which came into force in Karnataka in June 2012 — to increase controls over private unaided schools. First they defined reimbursement as covering only tuition fees (the RTE Act stipulates that the ‘reimbursement’ shall be equivalent to the government’s per capita expenditure on students in its own schools). Next, they assumed the right to determine ‘poor’, ‘neighbourhood’ and the right to nominate students for admission under s.12 (1) (c). Further when in Society for Unaided Private Schools of Rajasthan vs. Union of India & Anr (2012), the Supreme Court controversially upheld s.12 (1) (c) but exempted minority schools, state government officials insisted on certifying minority schools. Moreover, the state government has been taking its own sweet time to reimburse the modest tuition fee — calculated at Rs.11,848 per RTE student per year — payable (regardless of their actual fees structure) to private schools. Obviously irritated by the state government’s illiberal interpretation of the RTE Act and implementation of s.12 (1) (c), in end February, Karnataka’s 12,254 unaided private schools provoked a major showdown with the Congress state government. On February 22, the Karnataka Unaided Schools Management Association (KUSMA), which has a membership of 1,800 schools statewide, passed a resolution stating that member schools will not admit RTE quota students in the academic year 2014-15, beginning June. KUSMA has demanded that these children be accommodated first in neighbourhood schools run by the state government, local authority (municipal corporation) and private aided schools. Only such students denied admission into government/municipal/private aided schools, will be admitted into private unaided schools under s.12 (1) (c). “Private unaided schools cannot be asked to enroll children under the 25 percent reservation if seats in government, municipal and private aided schools are going vacant… It is only if there is no physical availability in these schools can the government enroll those children in private unaided schools and even then, not what the parents prefer, but in a randomly selected private unaided school in the neighbourhood (sic)… For the forthcoming academic year 2014-15, members of KUSMA will refuse to admit children under the 25 percent reservation quota,” says the resolution, a copy of which was sent to primary education minister Kimmane Rathnakar and the commissioner for public instruction. The resolution is a departure from past practice. During the two years…

Already a subscriber

Click here to log in and continue reading by entering your registered email address or subscribe now

Join with us in our mission to build the pressure of public opinion to make education the #1 item on the national agenda

Education News

They said it in March

“It doesn’t escape me for one moment that so much joy in my life is thanks to so much pain in someone else’s.” Lupita Nyong’O, accepting the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for playing Patsey, a real-life slave girl in 12 Years a Slave (Time, March 17) “We never want to run a government for the rich. We know that we need industries, manufacturing centres but we will not forget our poor people.” Rahul Gandhi, Congress vice-president at a rally in Sonitpur, Assam (March 27) “What the people of India want, just as the angry middle classes in Ukraine, Bosnia, Thailand and Venezuela do, is a government that is accountable, responsible, and effective in moving their country further into the modern world.” Jack Gladstone, professor George Mason University, USA (The Hindu, March 29) “There is every danger that a Modi-led India will be an India marked by soft fascism. At its core, fascism stands for state authoritarianism, intimidation by conservative-minded extra-legal groups, national chauvinism, submission of individuals and groups to a larger-than-life leader, and a Darwinian view of social life (the strong must prevail).” Kanti Bajpai, international affairs expert, on India’s future under the leadership of Narendra Modi (Times of India, March 29) “He (M.J. Akbar) has too much pride to survive in that nasty place. I give him six months.” Aakar Patel, columnist, on noted journalist M.J. Akbar joining the BJP (Mint Lounge, March 29) “In end 2012, againt the sanctioned strength of 924 in the Directorate of Civil Aviation, 528 posts were vacant — unsurprisingly, India’s air safety was downgraded to category II by the United States Federal Aviation Administration.” Editorial in Business Standard (March 29)

Already a subscriber

Click here to log in and continue reading by entering your registered email address or subscribe now

Join with us in our mission to build the pressure of public opinion to make education the #1 item on the national agenda

Education Notes

Jammu & Kashmir Fake appointments fraud THE STATE Vigilance Organisation (SVO) of the Jammu & Kashmir government has filed charges against several persons including four senior officials of the education ministry for faking appointments in Budgam district. “A case was registered against six persons after an inquiry revealed that they hatched a criminal conspiracy to make ghost entries in class IV government musters and withdrew salaries,” an SVO spokesman informed newsmen in Srinagar on March 10. Among those booked are chief education officers Ahmadullah Owesey and Nissar Hussain; headmaster Zagoo-Beerwah Gazala Jabeen of the government high school, Chrar-e-Sharioef Haseena Firdous, principal of a government higher secondary school, and two private beneficiaries. Uttar Pradesh Digital literacy initiative GOOGLE HAS launched a two-month internet education campaign to make 500,000 women and girls across Uttar Pradesh digitally literate. The company made this commitment in Lucknow on March 12 in the presence of Sampat Pal Devi, leader of the Gulabi Gang, a women’s empowerment movement started in UP’s Banda district in 2006. “The two-month Helping Women Get Online campaign in Uttar Pradesh aims to create awareness about the benefits of the internet for women, and assist them to go online through basic knowledge on how to use the internet,” Google marketing director (India) Sandeep Menon informed media personnel. “We strongly believe the internet can benefit and transform the lives of women in Uttar Pradesh and India,” he added. The campaign was launched last November with the objective of empowering women with the help of technology. In the next two months, Google will cover 20 cities statewide and help women go online through road shows in residential areas and internet training modules for girl students in educational institutions. To this end, Google has already launched a specially designed website (www.hwgo.com) which hosts content covering the basics of internet usage and curated content relevant for women in India. Meghalaya Scholarships enhancement demand THE MRGHALAYA state government has sought enhancement of scholarship grants from the Union ministries of tribal affairs and social justice and empowerment, to support students in education. “The proposals were submitted to the Centre in August last year and the state government is expecting a positive response on the matter,” education minister R.C. Laloo told the state legislative assembly in Shillong on March 12. According to Laloo, enhancements demanded for Group-I including Ph D degree students is from Rs.13,000 per year currently to Rs.42,000. For graduate and postgraduates, the enhancement demanded is from Rs.8,600 to Rs.30,300, and for Plus Two (class XI-XII) students from Rs.4,500-18,800. The state government supports the education of tribals from matriculation onwards by way of scholarships and book grants. Madhya Pradesh Widespread malnutrition RESEARCH DATA presented in Indore by the National Family Health Survey (NFHS) for the year 2004-05 presents a gloomy picture of health and nutrition in the state. According to the survey unveiled on March 12, malnutrition among children under age five is very high. Sixty percent of them are underweight and 50 percent suffer stunted growth. Moreover,…

Already a subscriber

Click here to log in and continue reading by entering your registered email address or subscribe now

Join with us in our mission to build the pressure of public opinion to make education the #1 item on the national agenda

Education Briefs

Pearson launches GlobalEnglish

PEAESON INDIA has launched GlobalEnglish, a cloud-based, on-demand English language learning programme of ETEN, the test preparation education venture of the company. Hitherto GlobalEnglish was available only to subscriber education institutions. With this development, any student keen on signing up for the study programme can visit the nearest Pearson ETEN centre and purchase an individual subscription. GlobalEnglish gives students the flexibility to learn English anytime, anywhere. The learning material is accessible 24/7, on any internet-connected device including mobile phones, tablets and computers. “In today’s multicultural work environment, command of English brings a competitive edge in every profession. GlobalEnglish helps students gain proficiency in the language by giving them a personalised and customised learning experience. Now the learning programme is available to all our retail customers,” said Deepak Mehrotra, managing director of Pearson India, addressing a press conference in Delhi on March 3. Education summer school THE PHILOSOPHY OF education (POE) unit of Azim Premji University (APU) and the Manipal Centre for philosophy and humanities (MCPH) of Manipal University will conduct a Summer School of Indian Philosophy and Education in Bangalore from May 5-9. The objective of the joint venture is to “strengthen the philosophical discourse and thinking on education in India”. “The school will examine perception, cognition and education, reason and education, language and education, and comparative philosophy and education from the perspective of Indian philosophical traditions,” says an APU spokesperson. This full-time residential programme has been designed for doctoral and postgraduate students, practitioners of education, teacher educators, and young faculty members in the areas of education, philosophy, social sciences, humanities and natural sciences. Venue: Azim Premji University, Bangalore. KIIT University upgraded A UNION MINISTRY OF human resource development-constituted high-level committee under the chairmanship of Dr. P.N. Tandon and comprising eminent academicians Dr. Goverdhan Mehta, Prof. M. Anandakrishnan and Prof. Mrinal Miri, has upgraded KIIT University (estb. 1997) to a category ‘A’ deemed university. The committee evaluated all study programmes offered by the university including engineering, biotechnology, medicine, management, rural management, and law on nine quality parameters. In 2009, KIIT U was placed in the ‘B’ category. Category ‘A’ deemed universities enjoy special status in all respects before the HRD ministry and all other statutory bodies including the University Grants Commission. READ innovation challenge THE UNITED STATES and Indian governments have launched a reading initiative to improve the reading skills of millions of primary school children in India. The READ (read-engage-achieve-dream) Alliance is a $3.2 million (Rs.19 crore) partnership between the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Indian Center for Knowledge Societies (CKS). Announcing the first call for proposals under READ’s innovation challenge to discover and test reading solutions on March 13 in New Delhi, US charge d’affaires Michael Pelletier said: “The moment a child learns to read is the moment she or he has obtained the single most important skill that one needs to have the best possible chances in life. I am confident the READ Alliance will help put millions of Indian children on a path…

Already a subscriber

Click here to log in and continue reading by entering your registered email address or subscribe now

Join with us in our mission to build the pressure of public opinion to make education the #1 item on the national agenda

Institution Profile

All Saints High School Hyderabad

In the EducationWorld India School Rankings 2013, All Saints High School, Hyderabad is ranked among the country’s Top 100 (#90) co-ed day schools One of the oldest educational institutions in Hyderabad (pop. 7 million), the coveted and disputed joint capital of the recently promulgated states of Telangana and Seemandhra, All Saints High School (ASHS, estb. 1855) was promoted by the Rt. Rev. Daniel Murphy, vicar apostolic of the city with the purpose of providing K-X English-medium education to children of poor and marginalised households. In 1932, management of the school was entrusted to the order of the Montfort Brothers of St. Gabriel (motto: ‘virtue alone ennobles’). Since then over the past sesquicentenary, this 159-year-old vintage school spread over eight acres in Gunfoundry, once the heart of the city, and affiliated with the Andhra Pradesh Secondary School Certificate Board, has increased its enrollment to 2,290 boys and 654 girls. In the EducationWorld India School Rankings 2013, All Saints High is ranked among the country’s Top 100 (#90) co-ed day schools, and #16 in former Andhra Pradesh and Hyderabad. In keeping with the missionary tradition and philosophy of the low-profile, France-based Montfort Brothers of St. Gabriel — who have established and run 180 education institutions in India with an aggregate enrollment of 200,000 students (and 400 education institutions worldwide) — to empower poor youth and the physically challenged, in 1991 All Saints High School, Hyderabad inaugurated a special Telugu-medium school for children of tribal and backward communities. Therefore All Saints High now has 3,000 students in the English-medium wing and 500 in the Telugu-medium section. The Telugu medium students gradually switch to English medium after completion of class VII. Unsurprisingly, the All Saints High School, Hyderabad curriculum includes a special values education programme which sensitises all students to issues such as income inequality, communalism, and caste and gender discrimination. “We accord high importance to values education in All Saints High School, Hyderabad to inculcate religious tolerance, patriotism, emotional quotient, and healthy competition. Of course we aspire to achieve academic excellence, but our prime focus is on developing every child into a holistic human being, who will focus not just on personal growth and advancement but on the egalitarian development of society,” says Bro. Shajan Anthony, principal of ASHS. An English literature postgrad of Osmania University, Hyderabad with an MBA from Christ University, Bangalore, Anthony served as principal of the Montfort School, Jabalpur (2002-06) and vice principal of the Little Flower Degree College, Hyderabad (2006-08) prior to taking charge at ASHS in 2009. Inevitably, given its long history and steady expansion, ASHS offers excellent infrastructure and facilities to its 3,000 students mentored by 149 teachers. The school is defined by its long corridors and classrooms clustered around a central quandrangle which is the venue of its morning assembly. Moreover, its well-equipped library stocked with 9,400 volumes, 20 journal subscriptions and subject-related videos and compact discs, is a centre of co-curricular activities featuring regular quiz, elocution and essay writing competitions. Yet in former Andhra…

Already a subscriber

Click here to log in and continue reading by entering your registered email address or subscribe now

Join with us in our mission to build the pressure of public opinion to make education the #1 item on the national agenda

Institution Profile

University of Stirling, UK

University of Stirling, UK, Scotland’s first university in over four centuries has quickly established itself a national and international reputation Founded by Royal Charter in 1967, the University of Stirling is Scotland’s first new varsity in over four centuries — after the University of Edinburgh (estb. 1582). During the past 47 years it has quickly built itself a national, even international, reputation. The Times Higher Education rates Stirling #1 in Scotland and #9 in the UK in its ‘Top 100 Under 50’ league table, which ranks the world’s best 100 universities of less than 50 years vintage. Stirling is also placed among Top 12 varsities in the UK for graduate employability with 94 percent of alums in employment (or further study) within six months of graduation. Moreover, in the UK’s most recent Research Assessment Exercise (2008), 10 percent of Stirling’s research output was judged ‘world leading’ and another 75 percent as ‘internationally excellent’ and ‘internationally recognised’. “Students are at the heart of what we do and we provide one of the best all-round student experiences in the UK. In learning and teaching, we work with our student community to deliver high quality programmes that produce intellectually able graduates who are highly sought after by employers. We are ambitious for our students, and our flexible learning opportunities enable them to explore and discover new subjects and interests,” says Prof. Gerry McCormac, principal and vice chancellor of the university. Set in the eponymous town in Scotland, Stirling U’s seven academic schools — arts and humanities, applied social science, education, management, natural sciences, sports, nursing, midwifery and health, and the graduate school — offer over 200 degree combinations to 11,000 students. Stirling. Sited in the heart of Scotland, Stirling (pop. 40,000) hosts a fascinating mix of the old and new with historic monuments and castles coexisting with shops, pubs, and cafes. Ten minutes walking distance from campus is the Wallace Monument, erected in memory of the life and achievements of one of Scotland’s most venerated heroes, William (‘Braveheart’) Wallace. Other attractions include the Stirling Castle, built high on a crag guarding the lowest crossing point on the River Forth, and now a popular venue for concerts, and the Bannockburn Heritage Centre, which commemorates the victory of Robert the Bruce over the English forces led by King Edward II in 1314. Nestled where the Scottish highlands and lowlands meet, Stirling has scenic mountains, lochs and shores, perfect for outdoor activities — walking, canoeing, mountain biking and sailing. Moreover, the bright lights of Edinburgh and Glasgow are less than an hour away by train or bus. Edinburgh is Scotland’s capital and has a number of famous tourist attractions, including Edinburgh Castle, Holyrood Palace, the Royal Mile and the Royal Botanic Gardens. Glasgow (pop. 590,000) is Scotland’s next largest city with an abundance of art galleries, shops, restaurants and cafes. The weather in Scotland changes quickly — there can be rain and sunshine within an hour. Summer temperatures range from 18-25o C. But in winter, temperatures can…

Already a subscriber

Click here to log in and continue reading by entering your registered email address or subscribe now

Join with us in our mission to build the pressure of public opinion to make education the #1 item on the national agenda

Young Achievers

Nikshep BR

WITH HIS FLUENT groundstrokes and sharp volleys, Nikshep BR (16) is the newest sensation on Bangalore’s jumping tennis scene. Last October, this early teen was crowned Under-16 national tennis champion at the Fenesta Open National Tennis Championships 2013 of the Delhi Lawn Tennis Association. Nor is this the only trophy on his family’s mantelpiece. Thus far, this promising teenager has bagged 80 titles. The elder of two siblings of B.K. Ravikumar, a self-employed civil engineer, and homemaker B.G. Shobha, Nikshep is a class XI commerce student at Bangalore’s Surana College. “As I train in Delhi and also travel to play tournaments across the country, the college management has considerately waived my attendance and allowed me to write exams. Class notes and updates are routinely mailed to me while I am on tour,” he acknowledges. Nikshep’s interest in tennis was aroused at age six when he watched the men’s final of the televised French Open in 2004. Under the discerning eye of coaches Joseph and Subhash Das of the Bangalore-based Subhash’s Tennis Academy, he played his first state tournament at age nine in 2007 and won his maiden Karnataka Under-10 title. Subsequently, he won the national Under-10 (2008), Under-12 (2010) and Under-14 (2012) titles. Since 2012, Nikshep has been training under coach Aditya Sachdeva at the top-ranked Team Tennis Academy, New Delhi. However spiraling costs of coaching and training — which often rise to as high as Rs.50,000 per month — are a cloud on this young ace’s horizon. “I am very grateful to GoSports Foundation which covers some of my expenses and the Austria-based sportswear company Head which pays for my equipment and apparel,” says Nikshep. This year he is determined to break into the International Tennis Federation (ITF)-100 junior rankings. “I am already in the Indian Junior Davis Cup team and hope to raise my game in preparation for several junior Grand Slams in 2015-16,” he enthuses. Sock it to ’em, Bro! Paromita Sengupta (Bangalore)

Already a subscriber

Click here to log in and continue reading by entering your registered email address or subscribe now

Join with us in our mission to build the pressure of public opinion to make education the #1 item on the national agenda

Career Focus

Rising demand for art curators

With the coming of age of Indian art, a new vocation of art curator has emerged as a career option for artistically inclined youth With the rapid expansion of post-liberalisation India’s middle class, art galleries and exhibitions are mushrooming across the country, prompting huge and rising demand for works of art (paintings, sculpture, objets d’art). Contemporary Indian art is also gaining ground on the international art scene, with a strong presence in art galleries, art fests and auction houses abroad. The canvases of Indian masters such as Tyeb Mehta, M.F. Husain, F.N. Souza, Akbar Padamsee among others are being valued and traded for record millions at Christie’s and international exhibitions. With the coming of age of Indian art, a new vocation of art curator has emerged as a career option for artistically inclined youth. Contemporary works of art and their creators aren’t easily understood by the general public and require interpretation. Usually, this duty is discharged by the curator who describes the artist and his work, to aid and enhance its appreciation. In sum, the curator’s vocation is to interpret, evaluate, select and present the works of promising artists. Curators tend to be highly educated with undergrad degrees in the liberal arts and Ph Ds in subjects such as history, art history, archaeology, or the classics. The ideal qualification is a Masters in art history which is offered by several institutions. Of them, the Royal College of Art, London has a global reputation. Back home in India, several curatorial courses are offered by museums and colleges. Although art curating as a career is still nascent, opportunities for employment are multiplying. As a curator, one could start as a staff member at a museum in a specialised department, at an art gallery which offers opportunity to become involved in every exhibition or work as an independent curator, which would involve staging exhibitions in galleries and museums. Freelance art curators have to devise specific themes, persuade artists to exhibit, prepare promotional material and negotiate artists’ contracts and payments to galleries. For a curator working full-time in a gallery or museum, the remuneration structure varies and could range from Rs.15,000-40,000 per month. Although not assured of monthly pay cheques, freelance curators however, could average Rs.100,000 per month depending on their network of contacts within the community of creative artists, gallery owners and art critics. “Art curating has a young history in India but the demand for curating services is definitely on the rise. Every gallery has a curator and the number of curated exhibitions is several multiples of shows a decade ago. This is a profession still in its development stages,” says Mumbai-based curator Veerangana Solanki, who has quickly established a reputation for curating contemporary art exhibitions. An English literature graduate of Mumbai’s premier St. Xavier’s College with a diploma in Indian aesthetics from Mumbai University (2007) and a Masters in art history from SNDT University (2009), Solanki also completed the first Gwangju (Korea) Biennale international curators course in 2009. “It’s a great…

Already a subscriber

Click here to log in and continue reading by entering your registered email address or subscribe now

Join with us in our mission to build the pressure of public opinion to make education the #1 item on the national agenda

Career Focus

Your counselor replies

After completing my BCA (bachelor of computer applications) degree, what would you recommend for postgraduation — MCA, MBA or M.Sc (IT)? Srinivas Murthy, Chennai MCA, MBA, and M.Sc (IT) are all excellent qualifications for employment. But your choice should be based on your aptitude and interests. MCA is an excellent programme if you aspire to make a career in the computer software development industry. An M.Sc (IT) degree is best suited for work in the IT department of corporates, whereas an MBA is more broad-based and qualifies you to specialise in marketing, finance and human resources etc. I’m keen on signing up for a Masters in industrial microbiology or industrial biotechnology after graduating in microbiology next year. What are my job prospects? Suresh Kulkarni, Pune Industrial microbiology and industrial biotechnology offer excellent employment prospects. After completing your Masters, you could work in a pharmaceutical or food company, hospital or opt for research. I’m keen on a career in physiotherapy after completing class XII next year. What’s the difference between B.Sc (physiotherapy) and bachelor of physiotherapy (BPT)? What’s the scope for physiotherapists in India and the US? Meher Irani, Mumbai Both are undergraduate degrees and offer broadly similar curriculums. Physiotherapists enjoy good career prospects in India. However it’s not possible to apply for a physiotherapist’s job in the US on the strength of an Indian degree. All states in the US require physiotherapists to pass a licentiate examination after graduating from an accredited physical therapy educational programme before they can practice. I am a first year B.Sc student and would like to know the procedure for admission into the Indian Military Academy, Dehradun. Rajinder Singh, Chandigarh For admission into IMA, you need to write and pass the Combined Defence Services exam (see www.upsc.gov.in). You could write this exam in the final year of your B.Sc degree programme. Under the technical graduates entry scheme, only engineering graduates are eligible to apply. Visit www.joinindianarmy.nic.in for more details. I will complete my BE (mechanical) degree programme next year. I am interested in the certification of the Institute of Cost and Works Accountants of India (ICWA). Will this qualification be beneficial? Dilip Bose, Kolkata If you plan a career in cost and works accountancy, the ICWA (www.icwai.com) study programme is beneficial. The institute is the only statutory organisation in India authorised to certify professionals in cost and management accountancy. ICWAI operates through four regional councils in Kolkata, Chennai, Delhi and Mumbai as well as through chapters sited elsewhere in India and abroad. Every student has to undergo mandatory coaching for a specified period either in a chain of coaching centres established countrywide or by way of postal coaching. This is followed by a training scheme to equip students with practical skills. I’m in my final year BA degree and am interested in the B.Ed course in early childhood care and education (ECCE). After graduation I want to work part-time. Please advise. Sudha Mehta, Ahmedabad B.Ed is a postgrad qualification and equips you to teach secondary…

Already a subscriber

Click here to log in and continue reading by entering your registered email address or subscribe now

Join with us in our mission to build the pressure of public opinion to make education the #1 item on the national agenda

Teacher-to-Teacher

Summer learning enrichment programmes

FOR THE country’s 228 million school-going children, the imminent summer vacation offers numerous opportunities to explore, learn, read and absorb supplementary and experiential education, which is at best sporadic during school terms. It’s a good time for children to enrich their school curriculums by learning important life skills such as leadership, public speaking, conflict resolution, team work, creative writing or learning new languages, in addition to getting into shape by playing sports and trekking. For children from the country’s growing number of ambitious, upwardly mobile households, vacations are becoming too important to waste. Research studies conducted in the last few decades clearly indicate that learning outcomes from programmes delivered in informal learning spaces stimulate the specialised interests of children and improve classroom grades in regular school. Consequently there is a virtual consensus among educationists that life skills (listening,writing, debating), co-curricular (music, theatre, art and dance) and extra-curricular (sports and physical activity) education are — and should be — integral components of the education experience of nexgen children. In the US and OECD countries, several creative experiential learning programmes have been conceptualised, professionally designed and implemented. For instance, the US-based Envision EMI offers summer camps for elementary, middle, high school and college students in multiple locations across the country priced between $2,500-3,000 per programme. One of Envision EMI’s best known programmes is the annual Global Young Leaders Conference (GYLC). Currently in its 28th year, GYLC is a premier leadership development course for high school students who can choose to attend any one of six sessions from June through August. Each session lasting 10 days is attended by 200-250 students from 145 countries. Through a highly intensive out-of-classroom learning experience and a rigorous curriculum, participants learn leadership skills, experience cultural diversity, group dynamics (competing and bonding with peers from different nationalities) and global competitiveness. The programme culminates with a two-day session at the United Nations headquarters in New York where students simulate live sessions of the UN General Assembly. Thus far nearly 1,500 Indian students have participated in GYLC programmes ($2,825, excluding air fare). Besides the leadership programme, Envision also offers a range of career programmes in collaboration with some of America’s top universities under which students visit their campuses to get a feel of their academic culture, facilities and ambience. For 12 days, students of medicine reside at the Johns Hopkins University, engineering students at UC Berkeley or Georgia Tech, law students may sojourn at Stanford Law School and business management students at Babson College or Stanford University. These summer programmes are particularly recommended for high school students aspiring for undergraduate education in the US. Envision’s summer programmes are priced at Rs.2-3 lakh (inclusive of airfare). The New York-based Summer Discovery programmes run by Musiker Discovery Programs Inc provide month-long internship opportunities in 25 career choices for high school students chosen through telephonic interviews. In New York, they stay in the vacant dorms of New York University interning with a range of companies through the week. On weekends, they work on…

Already a subscriber

Click here to log in and continue reading by entering your registered email address or subscribe now

Join with us in our mission to build the pressure of public opinion to make education the #1 item on the national agenda

People

Robotics evangelist: Sudhir Reddy

Sudhir Reddy is managing director of the Hyderabad-based Jay Robotix Pvt. Ltd, a company engaged in manufacturing customised robots for the defence services and Indian industry. Newspeg. Jay Robotix is all set to launch Robox, an experiential STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) learning package mapped with the curriculums of major exam boards, to enable learning of science and maths through robotics. Although Robox is its latest integrated offering for class VI-XII school students, over 2,500 students in 90 schools in Andhra Pradesh and 11,000 students in engineering colleges across the state have subscribed to, and are enriching their STEM subjects education by following Jay Robotix compact disc learning modules. Moreover, the company has established its Robolabs in two Hyderabad-based engineering colleges and one in Indore. And in June this year, Jay Robotix will roll out version 2.0 of ROBOKID-2014, a national competition based on the theme of environmental awareness for class VI-X school children. Teams from over 250 schools across the country are expected to participate in the event. History. An alumnus of SASTRA University, Tamil Nadu, with a Masters in mechatronics from Florida University, Reddy closely studied the robotics-driven productivity revolution while studying in the US. Therefore on his return to India in March 2010, he promoted Jay Robotix to manufacture task-specific industrial robots, before venturing into education in 2011. Direct talk. “On my return from the US, I felt that in school and higher education, there is need for a process or pedagogy which facilitates conceptual understanding of textbook theory through engaging experiential learning. Our objective of venturing into education is to bridge this gap between theory and practice and facilitate a thorough understanding of STEM concepts through robotics education,” says Sudhir Reddy. Future plans. Having established an excellent reputation in Indian industry and academia within less than four years, Jay Robotix is looking for investor-partners to diversify and roll out its education packages. “Indian children have an inherited science and maths learning tradition. Unfortunately, this has been suppressed by boring, textbooks-based learning. By providing enjoyable experiential learning opportunities to supplement classroom learning through robotics, this tradition can be revived. That’s our objective,” says Sudhir Reddy. Aruna Ravikumar (Hyderabad)

Already a subscriber

Click here to log in and continue reading by entering your registered email address or subscribe now

Join with us in our mission to build the pressure of public opinion to make education the #1 item on the national agenda

International News

United States: Growing cloud over charters

OF THE 658 schools in Chicago, only 126 are charter schools — publicly funded but independently run and largely free of union rules. Fifteen more are due to open this year. More notable, though, is that four of the most recently approved charters are in areas where the city recently decided to close 49 public schools — the largest round of such closures in America’s history. Most of the closed schools served poor black children, and were in parts of the city with a shrinking population. The city government argued that these schools were under-used, and that closing them would save $233 million (Rs.1,422 crore) that could be reinvested. So it has been: in new science labs, computers, wireless, libraries, art rooms and air conditioning in the charters that admitted children from the closed schools. Charters have worked well in Chicago. Most parents like them, and Mayor Rahm Emanuel and the Board of Education are behind them. A 2013 study by Stanford University found that the typical Illinois charter pupil (most of them in Chicago) gained two weeks of additional learning in reading, and a month in maths, over their counterparts in traditional public schools. One city network of charters, Youth Connection, is credited with reducing Chicago’s dropout rate by 7 percent in a decade. Some argue that charters cream off the brighter children and leave sink schools, deprived of resources, behind. The teachers’ unions hate charter schools because they are non-unionised. So they remain a rarity nationwide, with only 5 percent of children enrolled in them. But a PDK/Gallup poll last year found that 70 percent of Americans support them. Small wonder, a study of charter high schools in Florida found that they boosted pupils’ earning power in later life by more than 10 percent. But New York’s new mayor, Bill de Blasio, a teachers union-backed Democrat, wants to hobble charters. First, he intends to curb their growth. On January 31 Carmen Fariña, his schools chancellor, announced a plan to divert $210 million earmarked for charter schools to help pay for pre-kindergarten teaching. She also announced that in future, every expansion plan will be reviewed — even those that are long settled, such as the plan of Success Academies, which has the largest charters network in the city, to open ten more public schools in August. De Blasio wants to charge charters rent if they are sharing space with the 1.1 million pupils in district schools. Because charters receive no state funding for facility costs, and rents in the Big Apple are so high, Michael Bloomberg, de Blasio’s predecessor, allowed them free use of under-utilised space in traditional public schools. Of the 183 charters in New York City, 115 are “co-located”, sharing canteens, libraries and gyms. If they were suddenly charged rent, many would struggle. These new policies are likely to be unpopular. New York City’s charter schools generally outperform neighbouring district schools. In some cases, charters have not merely closed the racial achievement gap, but actually reversed it.…

Already a subscriber

Click here to log in and continue reading by entering your registered email address or subscribe now

Join with us in our mission to build the pressure of public opinion to make education the #1 item on the national agenda

International News

United Kingdom: Soft power impact report

ALMOST ONE IN five of the world’s central bankers has been educated at a UK university, according to a report that stresses the “soft power” that Britain gains from educating the world’s elite. It calls on the government to commission research on how British education affects the UK’s influence globally. It would like to see the results used to inform immigration policy — which many in higher education have claimed is deterring international students from attending UK universities. Education and British Soft Power — The Unexplored Connection was commissioned by ExEdUK, a group of businesses and organisations that export education. It looked at non-British Nobel prizewinners, central bankers and people with entries in Who’s Who to see how many had been educated in the UK. The most surprising finding was that 32 of the world’s 177 central bankers had attended UK universities, says Graham Able, chairman of ExEdUK. These include Haruhiko Kuroda, the governor of the Bank of Japan, who studied for an M.Phil in economics at the University of Oxford, and Stanley Fischer, who until June 2013 was governor of the Bank of Israel and who acquired a B.Sc and M.Sc in economics from the London School of Economics. “I think an element of UK education can make you preferably disposed towards the UK,” says Able. The head of a corporation in China, for example, would be more inclined to think favourably of and to strike a deal with a British firm if he had studied in the UK, he adds. Likewise with foreign politicians, “There’s a better chance that someone who understands the UK (having been educated there)… will appreciate us better.” The report found 407 non-Britons listed in Who’s Who who had been educated in the UK, the vast majority as undergraduates. Forty-two percent of them were listed for their role in scholarly work, research or medicine, while 22 percent were involved in government, politics or international relations. Most hailed from countries with close ties to the UK: 25 percent were from Australia; 19 percent from the US; 9 percent from Canada and 6 percent from New Zealand. Able says it would be good if in 30 to 40 years, this list included people from countries that are now developing, although he noted that leaders in African Commonwealth countries did already feature. Moreover 13 percent of non-British Nobel prizewinners had been educated in the UK or had held a position at a British university, the ExEdUK research reveals. When it came to analysing soft power, the report has only “scratched the surface”, stresses Able. It was intended, he said, to spur the government to undertake much more detailed research in the area in order to inform its policy on international students — rather than having immigration policy driven by the “gut reaction” of some in the media. In January it emerged that the number of non-European Union students studying at British universities in 2012-13 had fallen for the first time on record. Some have blamed the drop…

Already a subscriber

Click here to log in and continue reading by entering your registered email address or subscribe now

Join with us in our mission to build the pressure of public opinion to make education the #1 item on the national agenda

International News

Germany: Thanksgiving centenary

GOETHE UNIVERSITY Frankfurt, established in 1914 as Frankfurt University, was the creation of a Jewish philanthropist and owed much of its growth to Jewish support and academics. But under the Nazis, a third of its staff and students were forced out. The infamous Nazi scientist Dr. Josef Mengele, known as the ‘Angel of Death’ for his notorious experiments at Auschwitz, was among its students. Now the university is re-evaluating that history as it marks its centenary while also undertaking an ambitious agenda for change. In a country where universities are closely linked to the state, it has opted for greater autonomy. Other German universities may be older — such as Leipzig University (600 years) or Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich (more than 500 years) — but Frankfurt, celebrating its centenary this year, has a unique history. Renamed in 1932 in honour of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Frankfurt’s most famous son, who died a century earlier, the university has grand plans for the future. “We aim to become ‘Harvard-on-Main’,” says Werner Muller-Esterl, who has been university president since 2009. “That’s our task for the next century.” Over the past 15 years, the university has gradually relocated in large part to Campus Westend, a modern, light, glass complex in Frankfurt’s stylish west end. It’s Germany’s “finest university campus”, says Muller-Esterl. Together with the renovation of other outlying complexes, the president feels his university is geared to cope with the steady increase in student enrolments predicted at German universities. Yet not everyone shares his enthusiasm. “A lot of seminars and lectures are overcrowded,” says Daniel Katzenmaier, chairman of AStA-Uni FFM, the Goethe University Frankfurt students union. Nor is he totally enthusiastic that the varsity switched its funding structure in 2001, becoming Germany’s first major university to transform into a foundation university under public law. It’s now only 60 percent funded by regional taxpayers, with the rest coming from external fundraising and private grants. Yet in becoming a foundation university again, Frankfurt has returned to its origins. In 1914 it was founded and financed as a private enterprise. It was the brainchild of Franz Adickes, then lord mayor of Frankfurt, and Wilhelm Merton, a Jewish industrialist and philanthropist. Together, they created a university for the people that was largely founded and financed by prominent Jewish benefactors in the city of Frankfurt. “The Jewish benefactors had a liberal approach,” says Pascal Ballow, part of a group of Frankfurt history students researching the university’s origins. “This project has been an eye-opener for me,” says Erika Wagner, another member of the group. “I didn’t realise Frankfurt University owed so much to Jewish generosity and philanthropy. It’s time to say thank you,” she acknowledges. In 1933, the Nazis seized power in Germany. The university was a thorn in their side, infested as it was, from their point of view, with Jewish academics and Marxist revolutionaries. A third of university students and staff were expelled once Hitler came to power. In a final, horrible twist, Dr. Josef Mengele, the German…

Already a subscriber

Click here to log in and continue reading by entering your registered email address or subscribe now

Join with us in our mission to build the pressure of public opinion to make education the #1 item on the national agenda

International News

CANADA: Overseas recruitment drive

THE GOVERNMENT OF CANADA has a message for people in other countries who might consider coming to its universities to study: “It’s not all snow and ice here!” At least, that’s one of the messages Canada is sending out on websites and social media networks and in other types of marketing in a relentless bid to capture a bigger share of the increasingly competitive international student market. Later to the game than other countries, Canada is a case study illustrating the reasons and the means by which governments are working to lure foreign students — especially from high-growth countries such as China, India and Brazil — and the obstacles to succeeding. Now, more than a year after a report by Ipsos Reid, the Canadian arm of the international polling company, found that a five-year, multimillion-dollar campaign called ‘Imagine Education au/in Canada’ had failed to make inroads in those countries, the government has significantly expanded its efforts. “It’s almost becoming a cliche to say it, but the world is getting smaller, so the competition is growing,” says Sean Simpson, vice president in Ipsos Reid’s Toronto office. The number of post-secondary students enrolled abroad worldwide has doubled since 2000, to about 4.5 million, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and is projected to grow to 6.4 million by 2025. Now under a new international education strategy, announced in January, Ottawa will spend C$5 million (Rs. 27.5 crore) a year to brand and market Canada as an education destination for prospective students in Brazil, China, India, Mexico, Turkey and Vietnam, plus C$13 million over two years to promote research and training links. There are also domestic considerations. Canada’s birth rate has declined below the level needed to replace the population without immigration, the Institute of Marriage and Family Canada reports. And the 265,400 international students in Canada in 2012, the most recent year for which figures are available, spent C$8.4 billion (Rs.46,317 crore), helping to sustain 86,570 Canadian jobs and generate C$455 million in federal and provincial tax revenues, according to the Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development. Those are among the reasons why many governments globally are trying to increase their international student enrolments — in Canada’s case, to 450,000 by 2022. According to the OECD’s Education Indicators in Focus report in July 2013, Canada is the sixth most popular destination for international students. “We don’t have a school that’s a Harvard or Yale or a Berkeley or Stanford, or one that’s as recognisable as those big names,” Simpson says. And being cheaper may not equate to extra appeal, he continues. “There are a lot of wealthy families out there in developing countries that say, ‘I want my child to go abroad and have the best education possible’, and they perhaps equate spending more money with a great education.” (Excerpted and adapted from Times Higher Education)

Already a subscriber

Click here to log in and continue reading by entering your registered email address or subscribe now

Join with us in our mission to build the pressure of public opinion to make education the #1 item on the national agenda

International News

BRAZIL: Massive varsity expansion project

ACROSS THE RIVER from the congested metropolis of Manaus, nothing but dense green forest lines the banks of the River Negro in the Brazilian Amazon. Manaus, the capital of the state of Amazonas and host city to England’s opening match against Italy in the forthcoming Fifa World Cup, is an urban oasis surrounded by more than 5 million sq. km of rainforest, the largest expanse of jungle in the world. But later this year, the Manaus-Iranduba bridge will lead to a new university city across the river in the middle of the forest. An ambitious project now under way, supported by R300 million (Rs.775.8 crore) in initial funding, will provide a new central campus for the University of the State of Amazonas (UEA), testimony to seemingly unstoppable growth in the region. Following its creation in 2001 from the vocationally focused University of Technology of Amazonas, the publicly funded university expanded to 57 of the 62 municipalities across the state, reaching some of the remotest parts of the country. In less than 15 years, it has outgrown its outdated buildings and now requires greater infrastructure for its burgeoning student population. The new Cidade Universitaria (university city) will offer a base for the biggest multi-campus university in Brazil, uniting the current five sites in Manaus. The project will also involve increasing the university’s satellite campuses from a current tally of nine. But creating a nucleus in the middle of the rainforest brings with it some unique challenges. “The biggest question is the environmental impact and, above all, the preservation of biodiversity, which is a characteristic of our university,” says Cleimaldo de Almeida Costa, rector of the university. “It’s very delicate from a planning point of view and logistics are very complicated.” The massive 13 million sq. m site in the city of Iranduba, across the river from Manaus, is within an environmental protection area on the River Negro. The area is home to 52 species of fish, three species of crocodiles and 80 bird species. According to an environmental impact study conducted by the Institute of Environmental Protection of Amazonas, “almost all” native fauna will be affected with “irreversible fragmentation” of habitats. The lecturers’ union at the neighbouring Federal University of Amazonas has criticised plans for the new UEA campus on the grounds of its environmental impact. But the Amazonas state government says the master plan has taken account of environmental and geographical concerns, and that the new university city will address problems posed by the region’s challenging geography. (Excerpted and adapted from Times Higher Education)

Already a subscriber

Click here to log in and continue reading by entering your registered email address or subscribe now

Join with us in our mission to build the pressure of public opinion to make education the #1 item on the national agenda

International News

CHINA: Campus crackdown drive

A MOTTO OF PEKING University, one of China’s leading academic institutions, is “freedom of thought and an all-embracing attitude”. But in recent months it was not all-embracing enough to allow Xia Yeliang, an outspoken economics professor, to keep his job. Economics was not the subject on which Xia was most forthright. He was a signatory of Charter 08, a petition drawn up in 2008 that called for sweeping political change, and he was known for his liberal political views. (Another signatory of the charter was Liu Xiaobo, who won the Nobel peace prize in 2010 and is now serving an 11-year jail term for subversion). Xia was dismissed in October, accused of being a poor teacher. Unable to find another job in China, this month he took up a position as a visiting fellow at the Cato Institute, a think-tank in Washington, DC. Xia’s case is part of a wider clampdown on free-thinking intellectuals. In December, Zhang Xuezhong, a legal scholar, was dismissed from the East China University of Political Science and Law in Shanghai after he published a series of articles defending provisions of China’s constitution. State media called such views a Western plot to overthrow the party. Also in December, Chen Hongguo, an academic at the Northwest University of Politics and Law in Xi’an, resigned. The university had objected, among other things, to his holding salons that discussed texts by Western philosophers such as John Stuart Mill. China’s continued modernisation has meant that students are more open to Western influences and have more social and economic freedoms than ever before. They tweet, blog and talk freely about all but the most sensitive topics. This has made the clampdown on their teachers even more jarring. The ruling Communist Party, worried that it is losing control, has issued a number of political directives banning liberal topics in the classroom. “Since Xi Jinping came into power (as party chief), he has tried to control everything, learning the means from Mao Zedong,” says Xia. “It is a great regression.” The crackdown has also been aimed at activists among ethnic minorities. Ilham Tohti, an economist at the Central University for Nationalities in Beijing, was detained on January 15. Tohti is a member of the ethnic Uighur minority, a Muslim group in China’s north-west, many of whom believe their land has been occupied by the Chinese. He is accused of spreading separatist thought and inciting ethnic hatred. He says he had only advocated human and legal rights and equality for Uighurs. Zhang, the legal scholar, sees his own dismissal as a scare tactic that will fail in the long term as the dissonance between politics and everyday life grows. “When there are many people who are… waiting to stand up, crackdown measures will only make people angry,” he says. That may be so, but for now, on the surface at least, the party appears to be in control (Excerpted and adapted from The Economist)

Already a subscriber

Click here to log in and continue reading by entering your registered email address or subscribe now

Join with us in our mission to build the pressure of public opinion to make education the #1 item on the national agenda

Sports Education

Service coaches should provide

THE WORLD OF SPORT and games provides a treasure trove of true stories of courage, endurance, compassion and camaraderie. The recent Winter Olympics in Sochi which concluded on February 23 has done just that. Anton Gafarov. In the men’s final cross country skiing event, Russia’s Anton Gafarov crashed halfway down a hill, badly damaging his ski. However, he managed to lift himself up and continue, but fell again, this time breaking the ski. Canadian coach Justin Wadsworth ran onto the course to support him. He provided a new ski — putting it on for him — which enabled Anton to finish the race. Although he finished a full three minutes behind the leaders, the crowd gave Anton a standing ovation as he crossed the finishing line, creating a memorable Olympics moment. “I wanted him to have dignity as he crossed the finish line,” said Wadsworth in an interview to Toronto Star. Wow! That’s the magic of sport and why millions of people worldwide love sports of all types. It’s not just competition, it’s the goodwill it generates while reaching out to others. This anecdote reminded me of another story of caring and service. William Waldorf Astor. On a stormy night several decades ago, an elderly man and his wife entered the lobby of a small hotel in Philadelphia. Scrambling out of the rain, the couple approached the front desk, hoping to get shelter for the night. “We’d like a room, please,” the husband requested. The clerk, a friendly man with a winning smile, looked at them and explained that there were three conventions in town. “All our rooms are taken,” he said. “But I can’t send a nice couple like you out in the rain at one o’clock in the morning. Would you, perhaps, be willing to sleep in my room? It’s not exactly a suite, but it’s good enough to make you folks comfortable for the night.” When the couple declined, the clerk insisted. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll make out just fine,” he told them. As he paid his bill the next morning, the elderly man said to the clerk, “You’re really exceptional. Finding people who are friendly and helpful is rare these days. You are the kind of manager who should be the boss of the best hotel in the United States. Maybe someday I’ll build one for you.” Together, these two stories remind us about what the most friendly, helpful and exceptional coaches know and understand. The kids they coach are not their kids. Too many coaches talk about “our kids” and the trouble they have with their parents. The fact is, unless the coach is paying for the child’s housing, food, insurance, school, medical care, and so forth, they are not their kids. Coaches are gifted children by parents to spend short spells with their kids on a field or in a gym, and need to give their children the coach’s best in that precious time. Great coaches don’t have to be jerks. When a…

Already a subscriber

Click here to log in and continue reading by entering your registered email address or subscribe now

Join with us in our mission to build the pressure of public opinion to make education the #1 item on the national agenda