Uttar Pradesh
Super 30’s UP debut
Super 30 Patna, a voluntary organisation which provides free-of-charge tuition to 30 students annually from poor households to write the highly competitive IIT-JEE every year and has an 86 percent admissions record, has undertaken to coach bottom-of-the-pyramid students in Uttar Pradesh as well.
“At the invitation of UP chief minister Akhilesh Yadav, we will coach 30 poor students in UP for IIT-JEE this year,” Super 30 founder Anand Kumar said in Lucknow on June 9. The exam for selecting 30 candidates from UP will be held in 11 venues statewide on June 19, he added.
On the occasion, Kumar lauded several new schemes of the UP government, particularly kanya vidyadhan (scholarship programme for girl children).
Gujarat
Rainwater harvesting programme
With several parts of Gujarat hit by severe water scarcity this summer, chief minister Anandiben Patel initiated a rainwater harvesting programme and directed government officials to construct underground tanks to store rainwater in all government primary schools. The programme will be monitored by ministers and bureaucrats who will visit schools across the state.
This programme was announced by the chief minister while addressing top officials and ministers at a review meeting in Gandhinagar on June 3, ahead of the state’s shala praveshotsav (school enrolment) and kanya kelavani (education for girls) campaigns.
The chief minister also underlined the importance of educating primary school children about the country’s freedom fighters through information booklets printed by the government.
Madhya Pradesh
Successful tribal students programme
Twenty-one students from tribal districts, schooled under the state government’s chhoo lo aasman (reach for the sky) school education programme targeted at children from remote areas, have cracked the IIT-JEE (Advanced) examination — reputedly the toughest public entrance exam countrywide. Therefore they are eligible for admission into the country’s 23 Indian Institutes of Technology and 31 National Institutes of Technology.
“Using state government funds, we monitored everyone from teachers to lab assistants and ensured proper training was given to them. Infrastructure and laboratory facilities were also upgraded and improved,” Madhya Pradesh higher education commissioner Umakant Umrao informed the media in Bhopal on June 19. The programme provides tribal students free-of-charge education in Smart classrooms with access to supplementary video lectures of subject experts in city schools.
Adds B. Gyaneshwar Patil, collector of Baitul district: “We used technology to effectively monitor attendance and quality of classroom teaching.”
Jharkhand
First women’s engineering college
Chief minister Raghubar Das laid the foundation of the state’s first engineering college for women in the Gola block of Jharkhand’s backward Ramgarh district, on June 14. Das also inaugurated a state-run polytechnic college in Ramgarh.
Speaking on the occasion, he said women’s empowerment is one of his government’s focus areas and the engineering college for women will boost their chances of employment within India and beyond.
According to the state government’s higher and technical education secretary A.K. Das, the Delhi-based National Building Construction Corporation Ltd has already started constructing the college campus on a 16.8-acre plot at an estimated cost of Rs.104.37 crore. The campus will offer women students state-of-the-art academic resources and equipment apart from modern residential facilities.
The first batch of 300 women students will be admitted into the varsity’s civil engineering, electronics and computer science programmes in 2018, added Das.
Arunachal Pradesh
CM’s day in school
Chief minister Kalikho Pul turned teacher for a day on June 13 and conducted a class for students of the government middle school in Itanagar under the Union human resource development (HRD) ministry’s vidyanjali (igniting education) programme.
In the 30-minute class, Pul taught the students a lesson titled ‘Love for your country’, according to an official communique issued in Itanagar.
Together with education minister Wanglin Lowangdong and several government officials, the chief minister inspected the school after the programme. Dismayed by the dilapidated condition of the school building in the heart of the state’s administrative capital, Pul asked the headmaster to submit a proposal for renovation of the school building together with details of infrastructure deficiencies and manpower requirements.
Paromita Sengupta with bureau inputs