EducationWorld November 15

The 16th anniversary of EducationWorld, launched in 1999 with the mission statement “to build the pressure of public opinion to make education the #1 item on the national agenda”, is a good time to do some honest stocktaking. Although we somewhat naively expected a national consensus on the subject, there’s a long road ahead before this mission is realised. An analysis of why this objective — so self-evidently in the national interest — is nowhere in sight points to lack of enthusiasm within the country’s influential middle class which dominates Parliament, the judiciary, the academy, industry and media, for greater investment in public education, as the root cause. It’s regrettable but true, that over four decades of Nehruvian socialism that engineered an economy of chronic shortages, only partially ameliorated by the liberalisation and deregulation initiative of 1991 introduced by the late unsung prime minister Narasimha Rao (see book review), created a selfish and insular middle class preoccupied with primitive capital accumulation. Therefore, the middle class — which itself has had to suffer a poorly designed and managed education system, including a conspicuous lack of public libraries — lacked the spirit of enlightened self-interest which reformed and universalised public education in the Western world. On the contrary, post-independence India’s middle class wholly seceded from the country’s public K-12 education system in favour of 200,000 private schools which currently educate over 40 percent of school-going children. Curiously, middle class India – the intelligentsia included – seems unable to grasp the elementary proposition that clean air, water, crime-free cities and high industry and agriculture productivity are impossible without good quality public early childhood and primary-secondary education. Foolishly, the middle class left it to politicians to reform and improve the country’s collapsed government school and higher education systems. But this delegation of responsibility has proved to be a disaster because India’s self-serving political class, which has successfully gamed the electoral system, has a vested interest in the status quo. It knows fully well that a well-educated electorate will never elect the low-calibre politicians who bestride the stage in national and state level politics. Against this dismal backdrop, in our bumper 16th Anniversary issue — in a once-more-unto-the-breach spirit — we present 10 quickly doable solutions to get the country’s derailed education system across the board, back on track. But please note, there won’t be much traction without your active support by way of debate, advocacy and dissemination of these solutions. Contemporary India has to generate 12 million jobs per year and educate and train youth to fill them. On our 16th anniversary, we reaffirm our intent to do all we can to attain these objectives in the short term. Make common cause with us in the national — and your own — interest. 

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Within the short span of 18 months after despairing about the open, uninterrupted and continuous corruption of the Congress-led UPA II government (2004-14) at the Centre, the nation’s silent majority is gradually discovering that by conferring the BJP led by prime minister Narendra Modi with the largest majority in the Lok Sabha since 1985, they have also voted in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) — the ideological parent of the BJP committed to transforming India into a Hindu nation — and its affiliates known as the sangh parivar. Although during his presidential style election campaign, Modi promised sabka saath, sabka vikas (unity and progress for all), one-third of the way into the term of the BJP/NDA government it’s becoming increasingly clear that for all his chest-thumping and bluster, prime minister Modi is either unable or unwilling to rein in spokespersons of the RSS and its sangh parivar affiliates. They seem hell-bent upon transforming the liberal and secular Indian State envisioned by the authors of the Constitution, into a Hindu majoritarian nation. During the past few months, not a day has gone by without some leading light of the sangh parivar, including members of Parliament elected on the BJP ticket, making inflammatory statements to consolidate the Hindu vote by demonising religious minorities, particularly Muslims. Several sangh parivar sages have denounced sundry imaginary Muslim/Christian conspiracies against the nation or its majority Hindu community. The latest explosive issue that sangh parivar strategists have hit upon is that of cow slaughter and beef bans across the country, knowing fully well that for Muslims and Christians (and Dalits) beef is a cheap dietary protein. With sangh parivar saints and savants including members of Parliament proclaiming their love for the cow which they insist is accorded maternal status in Hindu scriptures, an inflamed mob of Hindu vigilantes ransacked the home and murdered Mohammed Akhlaque in Dadri, a small town in Uttar Pradesh, on suspicion that he had stored beef in his refrigerator. A few days later, another mob attacked and injured a group of Muslims in UP while they were skinning a dead bovine for leather. Through all this regression and polarisation of the country’s major religious communities, prime minister Modi has maintained a deafening silence which sangh parivar extremists interpret as tacit approval. Only after President Pranab Mukherjee made a public plea on October 7 for maintaining the nation’s “plurality”, “diversity” and “core civilizational values”, did Modi make a weak endorsement calling for national harmony. A dangerous electoral game is being played out countrywide by neo-literates lacking the foresight and imagination to weigh the impact of their irresponsible utterances upon the vast majority of deliberately under-educated people. If unchecked, these petty players who strut and fret upon the national stage could plunge the country into anarchy and civil war. Collegium better for judicial freedom The supreme court’s majority 4-1 judgement of October 15, striking down the 99th Constitution Amendment through which Parliament had established a six-strong National Judicial Accountability Commission (NJAC) to appoint Supreme and…

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I was pleasantly surprised to read that teachers are finally getting their due in India (EW October cover story ‘Big paydays ahead for India’s teachers’). For far too long, teachers have been under-appreciated and under-paid in Indian society. But I think the big paydays you are talking about is limited to teachers in government schools and high-end private international schools. The majority of mid-rung private unaided and aided schools completely disregard the Sixth Pay Commission recommended pay scales for teachers. Since there is no strict monitoring of teachers’ pay in private schools by state-level ministries of education, most of them get away with paying their teachers a measly Rs.5,000 per month. In fact you need to do an investigative feature exposing how private school managements exploit teachers. Sumana Thakur Delhi Correction please In the pictorial essay on the EW India School Rankings 2015 Awards Nite, on page 91 you have misprinted the rank of Vidya Sanskar International as #10 instead of #9 on the photo. Our school was ranked #9 all-India in the international day-cum-boarding schools category. Vasudha Neel Mani Principal, Vidya Sanskar International School, Faridabad We regret the error — Editor Qualified thanks I want to congratulate you for your laudable initiative of ranking schools across the country (EW September). It’s wonderful that EducationWorld has recognised deserving schools in different categories. In particular, I want to thank you for ranking Amar Jyoti, Delhi in the special needs category. Amar Jyoti is a unique institution, especially for its inclusivity. The school provides a holistic education programme to children with and without disabilities. Once again thanks for including Amar Jyoti, even though it’s ranked as a special needs school instead of a school for inclusive education.  Dr. Uma Tuli Founder & managing secretary Amar Jyoti, Delhi Nominal correction Please note the name of our school has been misprinted in the September issue of EducationWorld. On page 72, under the Noida section, our name has been published as ‘Khaitan Public School’ and on page 82 under Delhi NCR (Rank 54), it has been printed as ‘The Khaitan Public School’. Kindly note our name is The Khaitan School effective from June 2015. Vedant Khaitan Noida Doubtful credibility I am a regular subscriber of EducationWorld. It’s a good resource for educators and school administrators. But the recent September issue has created doubts in my mind about your process of ranking schools. I was surprised to see a school in a small town of Rajasthan being ranked among the Top 20 in the state. I have been heading a school in the same town for the past 20 years. The school in question is running with part-time teachers who are paid meagre salaries. There are other schools in small towns with great alumni, infrastructure, faculty, etc. I don’t know from whom or where opinions have been taken for this survey. Such inaccurate rankings harm the credibility of your survey. M.S. Wig on email Updation process query Re your system of ranking and rating schools (EW…

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Despite some of India’s modern multi-disciplinary universities having been established 170 years ago, for several decades until this year when the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore and IIT-Delhi were ranked #147 and #179 in the QS World University Rankings 2015, not a single one among them had figured in the Top 200 annual league tables published by QS (Quacquarelli Symonds) and Times Higher Education (THE). And the consensus of informed opinion is that the abysmal rankings awarded to Indian institutions of higher education is because of their neglect of research and new knowledge creation. In a belated response to sustained criticism, on October 28 the Union ministry of human resource development (HRD) announced the appointment of a five-member review committee to “review ways to encourage and expand quality research in diverse fields”. A ministry press release says that it will examine a proposal to “issue fellowships for research students”, even to those who have not cleared the National Eligibility Test or NET — the qualifying exam for entry level appointment as assistant professor in Central universities. The review committee has been asked to submit its report to the HRD ministry by the end of this year. The formation of the review committee is the HRD ministry’s response to strident protests organised by research (M.Phil, Ph D) students against an October 7 notice issued by the Delhi-based University Grants Commission (UGC) scrapping fellowship grants to research students without NET clearance. In 2006, in an initiative to stimulate research activity in universities, UGC had sanctioned modest fellowship grants of Rs.5,000-8,000 per month to all research students enrolled in Central universities. Those who cleared NET are entitled to larger monthly grants of Rs.25,000-35,000. On October 19, 700 doctoral students from several Central varsities including Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi University, and Jamia Millia Islamia camped all night before the UGC headquarters in Delhi in an ‘Occupy UGC’ protest, for which they were detained by the Delhi police. This evoked an informal assurance from HRD minister Smriti Irani who tweeted “non-NET fellowships will not be discontinued,” on October 26. However, research scholars, who receive a pittance compared to counterparts abroad, are far from satisfied with the promissory tweet of the minister and are continuing their agitation. “These are just tricks to deflect our protest and we won’t budge until all our demands are met. We want the UGC notice discontinuing fellowships to non-NET scholars to be unequivocally scrapped and assurance that no financial or merit-related criterion will be introduced as students are admitted into research programmes after a thorough screening procedure. On the contrary, we demand that stipends be hiked and linked to inflation with the fellowship programme being expanded to all state universities,” says Sucheta De, president of the All India Students’ Association, and a doctoral student of Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. Currently, 44,000 students are enrolled as researchers in 50 Central government varsities categorised as institutions with potential for excellence, of whom only 9,000 have cleared NET. “Successive governments at the Centre have…

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The BJP-Shiv Sena coalition government of Maharashtra is under strain following the embarrassment caused to the administration by Sena cadres running amok in Mumbai, forcing the BCCI to withdraw Pakistani commentators and umpires from the on-going India-South Africa cricket series, and blackening the face of writer-journalist Sudheendra Kulkarni. Uddhav Thackeray, the Shiv Sena supremo, has publicly dared Maharashtra chief minister Devendra Fadnavis to break off the BJP-Sena alliance, forcing the latter to issue a media statement on October 12 to reaffirm his commitment to the alliance which swept the Maharashtra (pop.112 million) legislative assembly polls exactly a year ago. Moreover, in a move to smooth the ruffled feathers of the parochial Shiv Sena, which regards all non-Marathi speaking citizens as ‘outsiders’, the state government has proposed to extend the teaching of Marathi in the state’s 800 private unaided schools affiliated with the pan-India CBSE, CISCE and international exam boards. On October 16, education minister Vinod Tawde, informed the media that the state government intends to make it mandatory for CBSE, CISCE, CIE (UK) and IBO (Geneva)-affiliated schools in Maharashtra to teach Marathi in classes I-VIII, and Maharashtra’s history and geography up to class V. He announced the setting up of a 13-member coordination committee comprising ten representatives from these exam boards and three from the state government to draw up a detailed implementation plan. Currently, while the state’s 85,000 government and aided private schools affiliated with the Maharashtra State Board of Secondary and Higher Secondary Education teach Marathi from classes I-X, schools affiliated with the CBSE/CISCE and offshore IBO (Geneva) and CIE (UK) boards are obliged to teach Marathi from classes I-IV. All non-state board-affiliated greenfield schools in Maharashtra are awarded the all-important ‘no-objection certificate’ from the state government only if they agree to teach Marathi for at least four years. The populist language card played by Fadnavis out of political desperation is likely to complicate school curriculums and impose additional strain on primary students already struggling with weighty syllabuses and shoddily written textbooks. However it’s pertinent to note that this proposal is in consonance with the three language formula proposed way back in 1966 by the Kothari Commission which recommended that children learn each state’s official language, Hindi (the national language) and English (the link language). Therefore, the extension of Marathi learning till the end of elementary education (class VIII) for all children studying in the state has been welcomed by informed educationists despite its populist motivation. “The local language, history and geography should be part of the school curriculum. I have studied the curriculums of other countries and most of them prescribe this combination in primary education. A child is likely to be well-grounded if she is acquainted with her local environment and culture,” says Swati Popat Vats, the Mumbai-based director of Podar Institute of Education and president of the Early Childhood Association of India. The state government’s proposal to extend compulsory learning of Marathi to class VIII has also drawn positive response from CBSE/CISCE-affiliated school managements. “I…

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A survey conducted by the district inspector of schools in Lucknow (pop. 3.5 million), the administrative capital of Uttar Pradesh — India’s sprawling and most populous (200 million) state — indicates that one of every six children in government primaries is absent from class for over 49 days per year. Lucknow district has 12 blocks in which the total number of primaries aggregate 1,369. The number of upper primaries (class VI-VIII) total 427 with the number of students on their muster rolls shown as 134,749 and 42,885 respectively. In the district’s primary schools, 17.85 percent are consistently absent because of family problems such as parents’ illness, responsibility for younger siblings and work on family farms. Thus, 14,933 or 62 percent of chronic absenteeism is attributed to family pressures. In the district’s 427 upper primaries too, family problems are the main cause of average absenteeism of 45 days per year. On the other hand, health problems, popularly believed to be the major cause of poor school attendance, account for only 22 percent (primary) and 19.42 percent (upper primary) of student absenteeism. The tiny number of academics and monitors of the education scene in Uttar Pradesh, better known for its caste-ridden politics and pervasive lawlessness, who pay attention to such surveys, are alarmed that these dismal statistics pertain to UP’s admin capital which the state’s young chief minister Akhilesh Yadav showcases as a model city and district. Quite obviously little has changed since a pre-millennium (1998-99) National Family Health Survey II indicated that against the national average of 5.5 years of schooling in India, in Uttar Pradesh it was 4.8 years. Comments Sarvendra Vikram Singh, director of the State Commission for Educational Research and Training (SCERT): “These statistics show that there’s widespread skepticism about the quality of education dispensed in government schools. No amount of free uniforms, free books and free meals will make up for this basic lack of trust.” Perhaps more worrying is that “family issues” which keep children away from classes, fall most heavily upon girl children who are routinely entrusted with household chores and made to mind siblings rather than encouraged to attend school. Typically, instead of addressing the core issues of pathetic infrastructure, slapdash curriculums and mass teacher absenteeism in UP’s 221,653 government schools, the state government has opted for a quick-fix technical solution. It plans to introduce an interactive voice response digital system to monitor the attendance of teachers and students. But IT experts believe this measure is likely to prove ineffective as attendance through voice recognition needs to be recorded by a school staff member who could doctor the recordings. “Recording attendance through a software-driven system is an example of education ministry officials addressing the symptoms rather than root causes of absenteeism. The question that needs to be urgently addressed is why children and parents shun government schools, and how their attitudes can be changed,” says Rajesh Kumar, chief executive of Lokmitra, an NGO focused on pedagogical improvements in government schools. The answers to these…

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The annual world university Rankings (WURs) league tables of the London-based rating agencies QS (Quacquarelli Symonds), THE (Times Higher Education), and the Shanghai Jia Tong University, usually released in August-September, are eagerly anticipated the world over not just by university managements but also media, politicians, government, academia, students, and the general public. With national prestige and reputation attached to institutional positions in these international ranking league tables, several countries including China and Russia, have launched national missions to push their best universities higher in the Top 200 league tables. On the other hand, the response of India’s Central and state governments, whose universities have consistently failed to be ranked in the Top 200, is to dismiss the well-reputed WURs as irrelevant and inapplicable to our universities, and launch their own rating and ranking systems. On September 29, Union human resource development (HRD) minister Smriti Irani released a National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) to rank universities countrywide with the objective of providing “an Indian context to educational aspirations and needs”. According to the minister, the rankings exercise will be conducted by an autonomous body constituted by the ministry and “will follow an Indian approach”, giving weightage to India-centric parameters such as diversity and inclusiveness apart from excellence in teaching and research. Evidently inspired by the HRD ministry’s initiative, the Karnataka State Higher Education Council (KSHEC), an advisory body set up by the state government under the Karnataka State Higher Education Council Act, 2010 to promote excellence in higher education, has gone one better and announced an initiative to rank universities within Karnataka inter se. In an e-tender notification dated September 30, KSHEC has invited proposals from “experts” and “agencies” for “rating universities in Karnataka on year-on-year basis for a period of five years”. The proposed KSHEC rankings exercise will cover 45 universities including 25 state government-funded, 11 deemed and nine private universities with all institutions rated and ranked on six parameters — research output, academic excellence, employability, innovation, infrastructure, inclusiveness and social impact. However, unlike the HRD ministry’s NIRF which proposes a permanent autonomous body to rank higher ed institutions, KSHEC has chosen to outsource the evaluation and assessment exercise to market research agencies. According to S.A. Kori, executive secretary of KSHEC, the parameters, methodology and objectives of the KSHEC rankings are very different from those of the (also Bangalore-based) National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC), an autonomous body established by the Union HRD ministry to assess and accredit colleges and universities countrywide. “NAAC accredits higher ed institutions based on an elaborate evaluation process whereas we will be merely rating and ranking universities. Through the rankings exercise, we hope to also prepare and familiarise the state’s 45 universities including private and deemed varsities with the rating and ranking methodologies of international agencies,” says Kori. Since NAAC accreditation is entirely voluntary and the evaluation process is quite elaborate, only five universities — Bangalore, Gulbarga, Kannada, KLE and JSS universities — in Karnataka have been accredited by it. Once reputed for delivering high-quality…

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Within 21st century India’s under-developed academic establishment, there’s a curious and inexplicable reluctance to treat college and university students as adults. Although most tertiary students have been endowed with the right to vote and elect national and state governments, on campuses across the country, constitutionally illiterate academics with rigid control-and-command mindsets deny adult students the most elementary freedoms taken for granted in democracies around the world. This is particularly true of Tamil Nadu’s 552 engineering and 420 arts and science college administrators who regularly impose elaborate dress and “moral conduct” codes on adult students. In keeping with this tradition, on September 20 the management of the Sri Sai Ram Engineering College (SSREC, estb.1995), Chennai, a reputed private college affiliated with Anna University, issued a dress and deportment circular which has aroused widespread indignation within the students’ community. The circular proscribes wearing of jeans, leggings, tight pants and tops, patialas, dangling earrings and “fancy slippers” by women students who are also advised on how to drape salwar-kurta-dupatta and do their hair modestly. Moreover the management also banned all students from using cell phones and pen drives; hosting facebook and other accounts on social media; birthday celebrations on campus; using two-wheelers and cars; interaction with the opposite sex or students of other departments, and use of rest-rooms during class hours. This “talibanisation” of SSREC has outraged the college’s students’ community which organised a massive protest at the parent Anna University on September 30. A specific demand of the students was immediate termination of the services of SSREC’s superintendent and campus-in-charge P. Balu, who reportedly patrols college corridors on “moral policing rounds” and imposes heavy fines for violations of dress codes and interaction between male and women students. When the police detained some protesting students, hundreds of SSREC students petitioned the police commissioner’s office and demanded legal action against Balu and other college officials for assault and sexual harassment. SSREC alumni also joined the protest and generated a storm on social media posting tweets and videos deploring the institute’s authoritarian rules, and recounting their unpleasant experiences with Balu, also a trustee of the college. Embarrassed by the accusation of students, the college management blatantly denied that its “advisory” circular mandates a dress code and other conduct rules. The SSREC students’ spirited protest and agitation for elementary freedoms has thrown light upon the tendency of college and university managements to over-regulate the lives of students. Quite obviously professorial mind-sets haven’t changed since 2006 when Anna University vice chancellor D. Viswanathan also decreed a detailed code for students in all affiliated engineering colleges and banned cell-phones and film-based cultural events. Again, in 2012, the Central government promoted and globally-renowned Indian Institute of Technology, Madras prescribed a moral code of conduct for students, banning women from venturing out on campus after 11 p.m — a rule reportedly prescribed for their safety. In both cases, student protests were supported by the national media and managements had to withdraw the edicts. Liberal academics are perplexed that academics in…

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“Here come the Modi Toadies. FYI (for your information), Toadies: I support no Indian political party and oppose all attacks on free speech. Liberty is my only party.” Salman Rushdie, acclaimed author, responding to hate messages following his tweet in support of Indian writers who returned their awards (October 13) “The way to characterise policies of the government is — Congress plus cow. Policies are the same.” Arun Shourie, former Union minister, on the BJP-led NDA government (Indian Express, October 27) “It came as something of a shock that Modi was willing to sacrifice the ministry of education — overseeing the entire field, from the primary level to the highest institutes — to please the RSS and appoint as its head a school-leaver to show his contempt for the entire intellectual community.” S. Nihal Sigh, former editor, author and columnist, in his newly released book The Modi Myth (Outlook, October 26) “Almost all those who become or want to become teachers do so to join public schools. The teacher labour market is entirely driven by the public school system.” Anurag Behar, CEO of Azim Premji Foundation, in an essay ‘Market no fix for education’ (Mint, October 29) … Perhaps a start can be made towards tackling pervasive mediocrity in Indian higher education by inducting talent at the head of the human resources ministry itself. Smriti Irani has strong political instincts; she can be moved to a political role. Editorial in Times of India on the increasing interference of the HRD ministry in the IITs (October 30) “With the spectre of fascism hanging low… it is better that judges continue to appoint judges howsoever imperfect the system may be, rather than leaving it to the tender mercies of Narendra Modi and his not very merry men.” Manish Tewari, Congress spokesperson, in support of the Supreme Court judgement striking down the NJAC Act (Deccan Chronicle, October 31)

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Uttarakhand Conditional land grants The state government will provide land on lease to reputed private educational institutions to promote schools in the state’s hilly areas which lack educational facilities. This government resolution was confirmed by an official communique issued by chief minister Harish Rawat in Dehradun on October 20. However, educational institutions willing to start campuses in hilly areas are required to fulfill several conditions to become eligible for land lease grants. First, new campuses will be obliged to reserve 30 percent seats for children of state government employees and local residents. Secondly, the state government will determine the tuition fees payable for children admitted under the reserved category. Moreover, the schools must hire local residents for clerical and class IV jobs. Haryana Great LEP forward A learning enhancement programme (LEP) specially developed to improve education quality in government-run schools, is set to become operational in the state’s 3,222 primary schools. Under this state government initiative designed in collaboration with the Boston Consulting Group (USA), 18,000 primary school teachers have been trained over the past month. The programme will be gradually rolled out to all 3,222 government schools statewide and will benefit more than 600,000 students, a Haryana government spokesperson informed media personnel in Chandigarh on October 11. Under the programme, the first school hour of all 3,222 schools will be observed as ‘LEP hour’ during which teachers, assisted by specially trained NGO volunteers, will use textbooks specially curated by the State Council of Educational Research and Training for the programme. “The goal of this programme is to ensure all students acquire the competence levels of previous classes. This is an urgent need,” says Haryana’s secretary of school education, T.C. Gupta. Rajasthan Caste discrimination arrest In a shocking reminder that caste-based discrimination is pervasive across large swathes of rural India, Hemaram, a government secondary school teacher in a village near Jodhpur, was arrested for allegedly beating an 11-year-old Dalit student for “touching the plates kept for non-Dalit students”. According to the boy’s father Malaram, who filed a police complaint, the incident came to light when the child was found crying after returning from school. When Malaram personally met the teacher to protest, he was subjected to casteist abuse. “We visited the spot and recorded the statements of students and teachers after which we arrested Hemaram,” a senior police official informed media personnel in Jodhpur on October 4. Meanwhile, the state’s education ministry has suspended the accused teacher and ordered a departmental enquiry. Nutan Bala, deputy director (secondary education), confirmed Hemaram’s suspension, and said he has been ordered to report to the Jodhpur office of the ministry. Gujarat GFSU-CIT concordat The Gujarat Forensic Science University (GFSU) and Canberra Institute of Technology (CIT) have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for a students, teachers and technology exchange programme. The MoU was signed by GFSU representatives and Australia’s education minister Joy Burch and trade commissioner Tom Calder. “The two institutions have agreed to establish a friendly inter-college relationship and promote personnel exchanges, mutual…

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A collaborative Dialogues Workshop was organised by the Bangalore-based Children’s Movement for Civic Awareness (CMCA), Amnesty International India, Centre for Corporate Governance and Citizenship of the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore (IIM-B) co-sponsored by EducationWorld on October 7, at the IIM-B campus in suburban Bengaluru. The day-long workshop attracted the participation of over 100 academics, principals of schools, students, members from civil society organisations and officials of the Karnataka state government’s education ministry. Following publication of the ‘Yuva Nagarik Meter’ (YNM) study conducted in 11 state government capitals in January which exposed an alarmingly low score (21 percent) of school and college-going youth on democratic citizenship, Dr. Manjunath Sadashiva, managing director of CMCA, conceptualised the Dialogues Workshop to understand, analyse and advance policy recommendations to revitalise and transform the abysmal attitudes and values of youth relating to democratic citizenship. At the end of the full-day workshop, the participants signed a Charter for Democratising of Education Spaces which received overwhelming support and endorsement from all participants. HELP disaster management course The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI), Indian Red Cross Society (IRCS), World Health Organisation (WHO) and National Institute of Disaster Management (NIDM) have jointly introduced a HELP (Health Emergencies in Large Populations) study course in India. The focus of the programme is to equip disaster management professionals with essential skills to respond effectively in disaster situations. The emphasis is on a public health approach, disaster preparedness and response, recovery and humanitarian action when calamities strike. The first HELP programme for disaster relief personnel began in Delhi on October 29 and will run for two weeks.  “The course contributes to setting high technical and ethical standards in the practice of humanitarian action, and develops collaborations between the academic and humanitarian sectors,” said Mary Werntz, head of the regional delegation of the ICRC, speaking on the occasion. Khushwant Singh literary festival Twelve schools participated in competitive general knowledge quiz and art contests sponsored by EducationWorld at the Khushwant Singh Literary Festival convened in Kasauli, Himachal Pradesh between October 9-11 to celebrate the late writer, author, journalist’s centennial birth anniversary. The teams representing Auckland House, Shimla (Shambvi Rao, Ishani Kanwar and Somya Sharma) and St. Lukes, Solan (Parth Bali, Aditya Aggarwal and Neerav Ganart) were adjudged joint winners of the quiz competition. In the individual art competition, Keshav Kond (Pinegrove School, Dharampur), Suman Sahoo (Kendriya Vidyalaya, AF Station, Kasauli) and Yeshey Dorji (Durga Public School, Solan) were declared winners. The prizes were awarded by actor-columnist Kabir Bedi. La Trobe leadership award The Victoria (Australia)-based La Trobe University announced a new ‘Thought Leadership Award’ for students of ten schools in Delhi NCR. The award has been conceptualised by La Trobe University to identify students who demonstrate outstanding potential to become thought leaders of the future. This competition requires students to submit an essay showcasing their understanding of the most pressing challenges facing the global community. Announcing the La Trobe Thought Leadership Award in Delhi on October 29,…

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Digital India, Make in India, Clean India, Smart Cities… these are slogans supporters of embattled prime minister Narendra Modi chorus to emphasise the primacy of his “development and growth” agenda. On the other hand, ghar wapsi, love jihad, Hindu rashtra, bans on beef, books and broadcasts… these are slogans supporters of empowered prime minister Narendra Modi raise to assert the primacy of hindutva. Numerous commentators have remarked on the lack of progress of the modernist charter while lamenting the spread of the primordial agenda. Supporters say the prime minister’s development plans are being held hostage by “fringe elements”. Opponents challenge this, saying the hindutva project is Mr. Modi’s main plank. And thus the political debate goes on, nightly on television and in the newspapers every morning. What’s indisputable is that India is caught in a bind, with the whole world watching. There are two reasons why the world is watching: one, the prime minister is an avid traveller who basks in the company of the world’s who’s who. He is adept at showcasing his forays in the Indian media and before large and adulatory NRI audiences. The other reason why all eyes are on India is because of reports that primordial formations are threatening to derail India’s democracy. While Modi’s global tours go unreported in the mainstream world media, the killings, bans, and bigotry are prominently displayed in pixels and print the world over. Given such alarming reports in global media, who will take the prime minister’s invitation to build modern India seriously? Even as Mr. Modi tries to assure the world of his commitment to diversity and democracy, his partners in the saffron brotherhood blacken faces of dissenters, commit hate crimes against minorities, and talk menacingly about regulating the media. In Mumbai, the brazen threats of the Shiv Sena, an ally of the BJP led by Mr. Modi, forced the cricket authorities to withdraw all Pakistani umpires and commentators from the remainder of the India-South Africa series. It’s the same with utterances and speeches of senior saffron sages about the need to regulate the media. How this stand-off between economic modernisation and the authoritarian and revivalist agenda will be resolved is difficult to say. In a nation with a burgeoning middle class, the tendency would be to favour the former. This assumes that the middle class is the repository of enlightened liberal values and as such a bulwark against what the Indian press used to call “fissiparous tendencies”. I don’t think the assumption can stand scrutiny. Here’s why. Historically, Indian policymakers have ignored elementary education and vocational training in favour of higher education and professional development. The result is an educated elite listing in the storm-tossed sea of a poorly educated majority. Even within the elite class, the emphasis is on engineering and medicine, management and accountancy. Middle class children, especially male, are encouraged, forced and nudged into the study of these streams to land steady jobs. Liberal arts disciplines such as literature, history, language and philosophy are dismissed…

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The University of Virginia’s provost, Tom Katsouleas, once told me that by his estimates, less than 1 percent of basic research is commercialised and that there may be as few as one near-term commercialisation for every $10 million (Rs.65 crore) invested in fundamental research. This is an awful waste, especially when America is undergoing a reinvention in which entire industries are being wiped out and new ones created. A broad range of technologies is now advancing at exponential rates and converging, impacting entire industries. When computing, telecommunications and consumer electronics converge for example, we get smartphones, smart TVs, and augmented-reality systems. Computing, medicine, and sensors join to produce wearable medical devices such as the Apple Watch which will transform healthcare and Apple Research Kit, which will revolutionalise clinical trials. Uber has already disrupted the transportation industry with its GPS-based cellphone apps; Netflix has made mail-order DVD rentals obsolete with its use of storage and networks; and WhatsApp has decimated the SMS revenues of telecom providers with its mobile-data technologies. Few, if any, corporate executives have any idea of what to do to survive this tsunami of technology convergence. Even the innovation models they were trained on, such as Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma, have become defunct. The competition no longer comes from within an industry; it comes from elsewhere, and not having domain experts in fields such as synthetic biology, nanotechnology and robotics, most companies have no idea how to respond to these new threats. Universities, though, do have experts. As a result of decades of government investment in basic research — in fields such as computing, medicine, sensors, artificial intelligence, digital manufacturing, robotics, nanomaterials, and synthetic biology — they have an abundance of talent and intellectual property. This is a gold mine for industry. Businesses that are under siege or are trying to expand into new markets usually look to buy start-ups or form partnerships with research universities. And some simply take what they need. After all what better place to acquire intellectual property and talent than the universities? Uber wanted to urgently build self-driving cars, so it lured away more than 40 researchers from Carnegie Mellon University in January this year. Being nice or ethical didn’t matter to Uber; it took what it wanted and then came back to the university with a relatively small consolation prize: $5.5 million (Rs.36 crore) for a robotics faculty chair and three fellowships. Apple was found guilty of incorporating unlicensed microchip technology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison into its iPhones and iPads — and was ordered to pay more than $234 million (Rs.1,530 crore) in damages. We will see much more of this in the next few years. If universities don’t cooperate, businesses will take whatever they can get — because they are desperate. In order to retain its researchers, academia will need to put aside its historical aversion to working with industry. Universities are better off forming industry partnerships to jointly develop technology, as Stanford and MIT have done by accepting…

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It’s standard practice for India’s educational establishment to ensure that the truth about the education system remains concealed so the public can continue to believe that India is one of the world’s most educated countries as evidenced by the success of Indian professionals in the US and other Western countries. Yet the plain truth is that 21st century India’s education system is threadbare and broken. The evidence is routinely covered up, and those who disagree are persecuted and vilified. The true picture is that in high school and higher secondary board exams, the pass rate in many of India’s 29 states would be pitiably low if routine mass cheating and copying is strictly curtailed. For instance, when the government of Uttar Pradesh stationed police personnel in all high school exam centres in 1992 to prevent mass cheating that is normative, the pass percentage which had averaged 45 percent since 1989 plunged to 14.7 percent. This is proof that without cheating, only about 15 percent of teenagers in the state can achieve the low average (33 percent) required to pass the school-leaving class X exam of the UP state board. Against this, the proportion of students who pass the high school (class X) exam countrywide is over 80 percent. For example in UP of 2015, the pass proportion is a heart-warming 88 percent. Another standard practice to maintain pass rates in board exams at deceptively high levels and keep everyone happy in the make-believe world of Indian education, is ‘moderation of marks’ by exam boards. According to a member of the UP secondary education board, moderation of marks can be up to 100 percent over marks awarded on exam answer scripts. Such generous moderation explains how the pass percentages in UP can yo-yo between 45 and 80 percent depending on whether a stern or liberal government is in power in Lucknow. The outcome of such irresponsible liberalism and generosity is that learning outcomes in primary/elementary levels are plumbing new depths. The Annual Status of Education Report (ASER), published by the Mumbai-based NGO Pratham since 2005, which tests the learning attainments of 700,000 primary school children across rural India every year, reports pitifully low literacy and numeracy skills among children in classes I-VIII. For example, ASER 2015 indicates that in rural government primaries, only 21 percent of class V children can do simple division sums (a class II competency), and only 42 percent can read and comprehend class II texts. But the painstakingly produced ASER report is routinely ignored by Central and state education officials only interested in feel-good stories. Another example of shutting out sources of bad news is India’s decision not to participate in future international PISA tests, after results embarrassingly showed India being ranked 73rd of 74 participating countries in the PISA numeracy and literacy test of 15-year-olds (and that’s when in 2009 India put forward students from its two most educationally advanced states — Himachal Pradesh and Tamil Nadu). This kind of decision-making — of burying ostrich-like one’s…

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The National Policy on Education (NPE) 1986/92 is likely to be updated shortly. Nationwide consultations are reportedly being held with people from every section of society on the shape and contours of NPE 2016. These consultations are being held at a time when the nation is confronted with unprecedented complexities and challenges. According to one estimate, 300 million Indian youth will enter the job market by 2025. The BJP-led NDA government at the Centre has the tough task of drawing up an NPE at a time when of the 230 million children enrolled in schools at the start of each academic year, only 25 million make it into institutions of higher education. Moreover, the quality of infrastructure and learning outcomes in most publicly-funded schools and institutions of higher education are rock-bottom, causing considerable loss of cognitive capital and creative competence. Therefore, NPE 2016 has to push greater interaction between higher ed institutions and India Inc through the creation of substantive synergy. Indian youth must be educated and trained to not only improve the productivity of Indian industry and agriculture but also to avail employment opportunities in ageing societies of the Western world and OECD countries. All this requires comprehensive upgradation of school education and also development of vocational and life skills at every stage of the education continuum. These challenges demand a complete break from entrenched structures and practices of the past, and the country’s 47,000 colleges and 800 universities must accept responsibility for producing confident, competent and committed teachers and academics for every stage of education. Teacher education cannot continue with century-old practices and must be revitalised. The time has now come in the history of Indian education when consolidation must be given primacy over expansion, as the quality of education at all levels has plunged precipitously. In this new national endeavour, the major role must be played by institutions of higher education which should be “the driving force of economic development and the focal point of learning in society”. India’s complacent higher education institutions need to urgently address their weaknesses and, simultaneously, discharge their responsibilities towards the upstream primary-secondary sector by contributing contemporary syllabuses and well-trained teachers. The traditional functions of tertiary institutions such as knowledge transfer, innovation, training and skills development won’t diminish, but the research and new knowledge creation activities of India’s moribund universities urgently need to be stepped up. Over the past three decades, faculty recruitment procedures in higher education have created enormous confusion and some mandated processes, such as the current API (Academic Performance Index), have accelerated quality decline instead of checking it. In this connection, it’s apposite to recall the words of scholar-statesman Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, who remarked that: “intellectual work is not for all; it is only for the intellectually competent”. A professor at Oxford University and vice chancellor of Benaras Hindu University before he was elevated to the office of President of India (1962-1967), Dr. Radhakrishnan had presciently discerned signs of decline in Indian universities half a century ago. “If our…

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There’s great excitement, satisfaction and learning opportunities in this high-value IT profession. It’s also a great training ground for start-up entrepreneurs –  Indra Gidwani India’s IT (information technology) industry has been on a consistently high growth trajectory for the past quarter century, driven largely by software services and back office projects executed by leading IT companies such as TCS, Infosys and Wipro, among others, for large western multinationals (Microsoft, Intel, Citibank etc). Indeed, in the new millennium, India has emerged as the world’s largest outsourcing destination of the global IT industry, and accounts for approximately 67 percent of the $124-130 billion (Rs.806-846,000 crore) global BPO (business process outsourcing) pie, earning 14 percent of India’s annual exports revenue. With its annual revenue likely to grow from $86 billion in 2014-15 to $100 billion in 2015-16, the booming IT industry employs 3.5 million engineers in IT services, engineering and R&D, IT-enabled business process outsourcing and development of branded software packages. However, the latter business, which is highest in the value chain, accounts for a modest 15.3 percent of the IT industry’s annual revenue. But the number of software product firms, which have designed branded software packages such as Tally, Flexcube, Infosys’ Finacle, etc — and have aided and enabled multinationals such as Microsoft, Adobe and SAP among others to design multi-million dollar software suites (MS Office, Photoshop etc) — has risen from 100 in 2001 to 2,400 in 2013. NASSCOM expects the annual revenue from the software product development segment to rise from $2.2 billion (Rs.14,275 crore) currently to reach $10 billion in 2020. The newly-promoted software products think-tank iSPIRT (the Indian Software Product Industry Roundtable) is more upbeat about the prospects of India developing as a software products tech hub, which it forecasts will grow into a $100 billion (Rs.648,850 crore) industry in its own right by 2025. Pay & progression To qualify as a software product engineer, a BE/B.Tech in computer science, IT, electronics and communication engineering is the minimum qualification. These days, IT companies also recruit science graduates (computer science/maths/physics/statistics) and provide them the option of doing a Masters while in employment. For duly qualified software product techies with a few years hands-on experience of software package design and development, career advancement opportunities are excellent. The demand is pressing with the number of software product start-ups having multiplied seven-fold during the past decade. Starting salaries range from Rs.4-7 lakh per year and career progression is fast. “A career in software engineering in general and software product development in particular, has huge potential and provides a wonderful platform for creative software product conceptualisers and designers for career advancement. Typically, the more creative software engineers acquire product development expertise working with product companies and rapidly multiplying start-ups to design and develop branded software programmes and killer apps,” explains Dinesh Kumaran T.K, director of human resources at Aspire Systems (India) Pvt. Ltd, a Chennai-based company working with some of the world’s most innovative IT firms and independent software vendors, helping them leverage technology…

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I’m a second year B.Com student aspiring for admission into IIM-Ahmedabad (IIM-A). Will it help if I specialise in accounts and finance in my final year? Deepak Sule, Pune Admission into IIM-A is dependent upon your score in the Common Admission Test (CAT) of the IIMs which is followed by a group discussion and personal interview. Final selection takes into account your undergraduate academic record, work experience (if any) and extra-curricular activities. It does not require specialisation in accounts/finance. Please note that B.Com with accounts and finance provides you a grounding in these disciplines but doesn’t qualify you for a professional career in accountancy (CA or CWA qualifications are more appropriate). I’m keen on a career in mass media. What are my study options? Nalini Rao, Bangalore To start with, sign up for a bachelor’s degree programme in mass media and follow it up with a postgrad course in mass communication/mass media. Coterminously, hone your skills by attending workshops/lectures delivered by media gurus, update yourself through media forums, social networking sites and showcase your talent when possible. I’m a final year BA (psychology) student interested in a career in sports psychology. Which institutions offer postgraduate programmes in this field? Arun Bajaj, New Delhi Among the well-reputed institutes offering postgrad programmes are the Lakshmibai National Institute of Physical Education, Gwalior (a NAAC-accredited deemed university under the Union ministry of youth affairs and sports) which offers a Masters in physical education (sports psychology); Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar (M.Sc in sports psychology), and Amity Institute of Behavioural & Allied Sciences, Noida (diploma in sports psychology). Sports psychologists play a major role in helping players to remain focused on their goals and manage anxiety, fear of failure and setbacks. Career prospects are good with the opportunity to work with top-ranked players, sports clubs and promotion bodies. What are career prospects in instructional design (ID) like? Suresh Iyengar, Chennai The global demand for customised e-learning packages has opened up a host of exciting career opportunities for instructional designers. With ID services being outsourced to India by British and American corporates, it is emerging as a high-potential career. Instructional designers draft blueprints of multimedia projects — from determining the educational design and content of the project to suggesting ways and means to present it to target audiences. They also work closely with subject matter experts to organise information in learner-friendly formats. After completing my B.Com degree, would it be more rewarding to enroll in an M.Com or MBA study programme? Shobha Chatterjee, Kolkata MBA is a job-oriented study programme whereas M.Com is academic and theoretical in its approach and content. The main employment options for M.Com postgrads are in teaching, accounts, finance and banking. By adding a B.Ed degree to your qualifications, you become eligible to teach at the Plus Two level, and if you clear the National Eligibility Test (NET) you qualify for teaching jobs in colleges and universities. Moreover, M.Com postgrads are often employed in financial research and analysis, taxation, stock market, insurance,…

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At a Cabinet meeting convened in Delhi on June 22 to review the progress of the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA, primary education for all) programme, prime minister Narendra Modi recommended aptitude testing for school children, an overdue initiative. Educationists and educators the world over acknowledge that identification of students’ abilities and potential is the starting point of career guidance and choice. Nationwide implementation of an aptitude testing system will benefit an estimated 20 million higher secondary students in the very first year. Making career choices is not easy even for adults. Therefore it’s an essential institutional responsibility to provide guidance to students to enable them to make vitally important career decisions. Unlike the great American poet Robert Frost who wrote, “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I chose the one less travelled by, and that has made all the difference,” even to this day the great majority of school-leavers tread traditional paths into engineering, medicine and the professions regardless of their aptitude and suitability for these vocations. The country, the economy and students themselves, pay a high price as square pegs struggle to fit into round holes. Choosing the appropriate higher education stream is a critically important decision for school-leavers and it’s natural for late teens to experience anxiety and confusion. But if this decision is made after aptitude, personality and other related tests, the chances of school-leavers entering unsuitable higher ed streams and career paths are likely to diminish substantially. Within the educators’ and career counselors’ fraternities, there’s a consensus that aptitude testing enables students to make informed higher education and career decisions that will stand them in good stead through their lives. High-quality career counseling invests students with the confidence to make informed streaming choices that will set them on a career path matching their innate abilities and potential. Aptitude tests provide children with an objective measure of their mechanical, spatial, logical, clerical, numerical, and verbal intelligences. Fortunately a growing number of the Top 1,000 schools rated and ranked by EducationWorld (see EW September) are beginning to dispense professionally administered career counseling services to their students, some as early as class IX. Although the official tendency is to dismiss such institutions as elitist (a bad word in the socialist lexicon), the service they render to students, society and the economy by guiding them into suitable vocations is inestimable and needs to be widely emulated. However contemporary career counseling practice goes beyond mere aptitudinal testing and combines it with personality, and interest tests. The benefit of combining multiple tests is to make assurance provided by aptitude tests doubly sure and guide maturing students into choosing higher education streams and career paths which are most satisfying, fulfilling and therefore productive. Personality tests are designed to measure specific personality traits of students. It’s a self-evident proposition that students’ career paths and progression will be smoothed if the vocations they choose are compatible with their dominant personality traits. For instance, an impatient and brusque manner is obviously incompatible with a career…

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According to Father Joseph Corpora of the University of Notre Dame’s Alliance for Catholic Education, the Pope’s visit on September 25 to the Our Lady Queen of Angels, a Catholic primary in Harlem, New York has drawn attention to the paradox of Catholic schools: they are highly successful, but starved of pupils. Children at Catholic schools do better than neighbourhood public schools in standardised tests despite spending thousands of dollars less per student. Almost all their pupils graduate from high school and 86 percent go on to attend a four-year college. They are especially good at teaching minority children: Catholic-educated black and Latino pupils are more likely to graduate from high school and college. Yet despite their academic success, the number of Catholic primary schools has fallen by half since 1965, when Catholic schools had 6.5 million pupils. Today the total is less than 2 million, which means a lot of empty desks. The main reason for the closures is financial. Catholic schools used to be financed by tuition fees, with help from the parish and archdiocese to fill gaps. But demography has undermined this model. In 1950, 76 percent of all Catholics lived in the north-east and the Midwest, which is where most Catholic schools are concentrated. Today, just under half do. In the south-west, Catholics are more plentiful, but they aren’t sending their children to Catholic schools as European immigrants once did, because those schools don’t yet exist. Schools in the north-east and Midwest have been hit by both declining revenue and rising costs. Many parishes operate at a loss. Paedophilia scandals have added to the financial stress. Twelve dioceses and archdioceses have filed for bankruptcy since 2004. Legal fees and settlements have cost the American Catholic church billions. For the past decade, desperate dioceses have been experimenting. Some schools, like Harlem’s Queen of Angels, are no longer part of a parish. Its church closed in 2007 and it’s now part of a network of six schools which retains ties with the New York archdiocese but does not receive any money from the church. Kathleen Porter-Magee, the partnership’s superintendent, calls it a 100-year startup. Its purpose hasn’t changed, though about 70 percent of pupils receive financial assistance and 89 percent qualify for free or cheap lunches. Nearly 70 percent of the pupils are Latino and 22 percent are black. This increased distance between Catholic schools and individual parishes is part of a wider pattern. Some schools have merged, so that multiple parishes support one school. Others have formed groups, sharing administration and finances. Others have sponsors. On September 21, Stephen Schwarzman, boss of Blackstone, a private-equity firm, donated $40 million (Rs.261 crore) to pay for scholarships to New York’s Catholic schools. In Philadelphia, an independent foundation set up by the archbishop to run schools, has instituted scholarships, cut a $6 million deficit and centralised administrative functions. Innovation will not reverse the closures, says Sister John Mary Fleming, who heads Catholic education at the US Conference of Catholic Bishops;…

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The “largest gathering ever of world leaders”; a “step-change” in aid; a “massive step forward for humanity”: the UN meeting held on September 25 had politicians, donors and aid workers reaching for superlatives (as well as jargon). Prime ministers, presidents and the Pope in New York unveiled the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that are supposed to shape aid and development for the next 15 years. Is the hoopla justified? Most of SDGs’ predecessor, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), have been met, largely because of progress in China and India. But there were just eight of them, focused on cutting extreme poverty and improving healthcare and education, all clearly defined. By contrast, there are 17 SDGs and a whopping 169 “associated targets”, covering world peace, the environment, gender equality and much, much more. Many are impossible to measure. They are “higgledy-piggledy”, agrees Lord (Mark) Malloch-Brown, who helped write the MDGs. A tighter focus and more precise definitions might have been wise. Even so, the SDGs are part of an important shift in thinking about development that is making it both more ambitious and more realistic. Poor-country governments and rich-world aid lobbies have become less hostile in recent years to the idea that free markets and big business can help cut poverty. Multinationals were wary when the MDGs were unveiled, says Malloch-Brown; now many are on board. And some rich-as-Croesus philanthropists, together with a bevy of market-friendly think-tanks, have started to monitor and measure the results of aid spending, and to search for ways to make it more effective. “The MDGs got everyone to face the same direction,” says Andrew Mitchell, who ran Britain’s aid-giving department from 2010-2012. Pre-eminent among the big spenders is Bill Gates, the Microsoft magnate, whose foundation has dished out more than $31 billion (Rs.201,500 crore) since 2000. George Soros, a Hungarian-born American financier, and his Open Society Foundations argue for transparency in aid, budgets and contracts. The Gatsby Charitable Foundation, started by Lord (David) Sainsbury, a British retailer, advises African governments and business on improving supply chains. Another Briton, Sir Christopher Hohn, a financier, has spent more than $1.5 billion (Rs.9,783 crore) since 2006 via his Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF) on spreading the crucial message that improving young children’s health leads to big benefits later in life. Soros has sought to make governments and firms open about their philanthropy dealings. In 2002, his foundation helped set up Publish What You Pay, now a global coalition of 800-plus independent watchdogs, and in 2013 it launched a Transparency Champions Challenge. Another monitor with clout is the Open Budget Index, launched in 2006 by the Centre on Budget and Policy Priorities, a Washington think-tank. The Berlin-based scrutineer, Transparency International, founded in 1993 by Peter Eigen, a former World Banker disgusted by the corruption he saw in east Africa, has become a strong force for uncovering corruption, including in the aid world. Leading the fight against graft in mining, oil and gas is the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative. Under Clare…

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Shortly before 10 p.m, BMWs and school buses line the streets of Daechi-dong, a neighbourhood in the stylish district of Gangnam in Seoul. Soon, secondary-school pupils will spill out of its hagwon, or private cram schools; around 1,000 of these night schools are packed into the area, including the most prestigious in the city. After five hours of English, maths or science tuitions following a full day at school, the teens will be whisked home — to more study, past midnight. Such is the ordeal of education in South Korea. From a tender age, all pupils (and their parents) are fixated on the eight-hour multiple-choice entrance exam for university, to which three-quarters of school-leavers go. Because competition is fierce, parents plough money into private tuition — over 18 trillion won (Rs.102 lakh crore) last year, or more than a tenth of household spending — to improve their children’s chances of admission into the best secondary schools. This has led to intense competition even for places in crammers. The most desirable hagwon set their own entrance exams and refuse applicants with low scores. Some of the rejected reapply several times. Hence a new breed of cram schools has emerged that mostly coach students to get into more illustrious ones. They are called sekki (“cub”) hagwon. They do not advertise (and indeed resent the sekki label). Nor do parents admit to sending their children to them, says Kim Hyun-jung, who runs DSchool, an online forum where parents share tips on private schooling in Daechi-dong (it gets 10,000 views daily). Going to a sekki hagwon is “a bit embarrassing”, she says. Even after a student gains entry into an elite hagwon, the sekki sort can remain useful. Crammers often use textbooks that their pupils would not begin studying at day schools until up to five years later. So some students go to a sekki hagwon for two nights a week simply to keep up with classes in their main hagwon (where they are streamed by ability and tested frequently). The government has tried to level the playing field by banning hagwon from teaching after 10 p.m and requiring them to tell the government how much they charge. Last year, hagwon were prohibited from advertising that they teach ahead of the school curriculum. Yet enforcement is lax. Like many other bright students, Choi Ye-eun, a 13-year-old studying maths for 17-year-olds, says that she does much of her hagwon homework during school hours.

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The world dominance of US universities has waned further in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2015-2016, despite the fact that the country boasts almost a fifth of institutions in the table. A total of 147 US universities feature in the top 800 — the largest THE rankings to date — including the California Institute of Technology, which claims pole position for the fifth consecutive year. However, there are signs of decline for the traditional Western powerhouse lower down in the table. The US now has 63 universities in the Top 200, down from 74 last year, and 77 the year before. Six of them make the Top 10, compared with seven last year. After Caltech, they are: Stanford (third), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (fifth), Harvard (sixth — its first time outside the top four in the rankings’ 12-year history), Princeton (seventh) and the University of Chicago (10th). The UK’s universities of Oxford (second), Cambridge (fourth) and Imperial College London (eighth), and Switzerland’s ETH Zurich — Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ninth) fill the rest of the Top 10. According to Phil Baty, THE rankings editor, the US’ leading status as the world’s top magnet for academic and student talent “cannot be taken for granted”, citing figures that show that 47 states in the US have implemented higher education funding cuts since the global recession of 2008. Soft power benefits Asked to identify something associated with Manchester, most people would probably mention its football clubs, Coronation Street or one of its numerous indie bands. But the city should perhaps be recognised for a lesser-known export in recent times: world leaders, suggests a study that highlights where international statesmen and women were educated in the UK. Eight current prime ministers and presidents attended the University of Manchester, according to research by the Higher Education Policy Institute (Hepi) published on October 1. Only Oxford University has produced more overseas leaders, boasting a total of nine, including five monarchs. Among those who studied at Manchester are Michael D. Higgins, president of the Republic of Ireland; Iceland’s president Olafur Ragnar Grimsson and Iraq’s prime minister Haider Al-Abadi, as well as elected leaders from Palestine, Mozambique, Somaliland and two Caribbean countries. Those counting Oxford as their alma mater are arguably better known. They include Australia’s new prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, Hungary’s premier Viktor Orban, and the kings of Belgium, Bhutan, Jordan, Norway and Malaysia. Other leaders educated at British universities include Iran’s president Hassan Rouhani, who studied prehistoric archaeology at Glasgow Caledonian University; Colombia’s president Juan Manuel Santos, who studied at the London School of Economics, and Tuvalu’s prime minister Enele Sopoaga, who studied at Oxford and Sussex universities. Overall, 55 world leaders from 51 countries have studied in the UK, including three at Cambridge University and three at Bristol University, says Hepi. “We punch above our weight internationally partly because of the soft power benefits that arise from educating the world’s leaders,” says Nick Hillman, director of Hepi. Efforts by the Home…

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“Egypt’s ability to create a new generation of young leaders is dependent upon how well we can educate our youth,” says Ahmed Heikal, founder of Qalaa Holdings, one of Egypt’s largest investment holding companies. “We believe education is a key component of our ongoing reform process as a country.” Heikal was speaking at a ceremony for the company’s university scholarship programme staged earlier this year. Launched in 2007, the scholarship awards Egyptian students with full funding to pursue Masters level studies at top institutions in the US and Europe. There’s just one condition: the students must return to Egypt to work in their chosen field for a minimum of two years after completion of their degree. The programme has to date awarded scholarships to 138 students, 17 of whom began their Masters degree programme last month (October). It is open to students undertaking a full-time degree in any field; previous recipients have studied disciplines such as film-making, anthropology, business, medicine and political and economic development. Students must also have at least two years of work experience after graduation and “genuine financial need”. One of these recipients is Randa Fahmy, who completed a Masters in engineering at Cambridge University in 2013. She applied for the scholarship after launching her own solar energy company, KarmSolar. “My main target was to better learn how to sustainably manage the three resources of agriculture, groundwater and energy, and how policies can govern the interactions between the sectors,” she says. However she admits that implementing in Egypt what she learned at Cambridge had been a challenge — partly because of the “technological advancement” of the UK and partly because of “bureaucracy” in Egypt.

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Central planning, the failed public sector enterprises model and pervasive bureaucratic corruption are not the only imports of post-independence India from erstwhile Soviet Union. Another deadly import is academic fraud, still common in Russia. According to a new study, the extraordinary scale of Ph D fraud in Russia can be attributed to the reproduction of near-identical doctoral dissertations within universities. With more than 3,500 falsified theses identified by the anti-plagiarism group Dissernet in the past two years, Ph D forgery is now an “integral part of Russia’s statehood”, rather than a “fringe phenomenon”, according to the analysis published in Higher Education in Russia and Beyond, a quarterly newsletter published by the country’s National Research University Higher School of Economics. But its author and Dissernet’s founder Andrei Rostovtsev says it’s wrong to think about plagiarism in Russia in the same way as in Western Europe or the US. “Most of the authors under scrutiny by Dissernet have… most probably never written a single page of their dissertations and might have never read them or even seen them at all,” says Prof. Rostovtsev, a physicist based at the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute for Information Transmission Problems. This type of fraud can be achieved when dissertations defended at one university department (for instance, sociology) are passed to another Ph D candidate in another department (economics) and defended after a few words are changed, he explains. “One notorious ‘scholar’ transformed a dissertation about the confectionery industry into a dissertation about the beef-and-dairy industry by substituting ‘dark chocolate’ with ‘imported beef’ and ‘nut chocolate’ with ‘bone-in beef’,” he says. “All the data, spelling, tables and pictures remained unchanged”, although some authors alter their dating of statistics to make them seem more up-to-date, he adds. However, Ph D fraud in physics, chemistry and biology is relatively uncommon, according to Rostovtsev’s analysis of cheating authors identified by Dissernet. “Most of the fake dissertations (40 percent) accrue to economics”, with education, law, politics and other social sciences in which Russia is traditionally weak in international journal citation scores, also popular with cheats. “Scallywags prosper in the academic areas where Russia is still lagging behind,” he says, with fraud much smaller in the sciences in which the country’s academy has some international standing. Dissernet has now built a unique database of plagiarised dissertations and developed a semi-automatic algorithm to detect when editors of pay-to-publish journals — in which unoriginal Ph Ds are routinely published — have been connected with dissertation fraud.

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To The Brink and Back India’s 1991 story by Jairam Ramesh; Rupa; Price: Rs.395; Pages: 216 Arguably, no prime minister of independent India was more grievously wronged by his peers and the country’s acquiescent public than the late P.V. Narasimha Rao (1921-2004). A politician who spent almost his entire life in the shadow of lesser leaders, when Rao was fortuitously elected to the highest office — unlike all his predecessors without exception — he seized the opportunity to launch the long-languishing Indian economy into a higher orbit of sustained growth. Rao served as India’s prime minister for only one term of five years, but in that period (1991-96), he substantially freed the Indian economy bound for over four decades in the sticky red tape of the neta-babu licence-permit-quota regimen, ill-advisedly designed by free India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru and perpetuated by his real and ideological heirs. Until Rao assumed office as prime minister on June 21, 1991, India’s GDP growth had averaged 3.5 percent (or 1.3 percent per capita) for over four decades. In the last three years of Rao’s term in office, it doubled to 7 percent plus for the first time in the history of post-independence India. For this signal service of unshackling the economy, Rao was neither rewarded nor eulogised. On the contrary after the Congress party lost the General Election 1996 and members of the Nehru dynasty reasserted their hold on the party, he was cast out in the cold, denied a Lok Sabha ticket, and finally when he died a disillusioned man in 2004 shortly after the Congress under Sonia Gandhi was unexpectedly voted to power at the Centre, also denied a funeral in the Delhi imperium. Jairam Ramesh worked in the PMO during the tumultuous first 90 days when Rao and Dr. Manmohan Singh, handpicked as the finance minister, rescued India from the brink of bankruptcy and default of international payment obligations, and simultaneously initiated the historic liberalisation and deregulation initiative of June-August 1991. A decade after Rao’s death, Ramesh has written an insider’s account giving P.V. Narasimha Rao (PVNR) the encomiums he never received in his lifetime. This narrative begins on June 3, 1991 when PVNR, who had been elected Congress president and prime minister-designate on May 29 after the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi in Sriperumbudur (Tamil Nadu) on May 21, co-opted the author as an aide in the PMO. As Ramesh, who was transferred much to his chagrin to the Planning Commission three months later observes, this book is “one ‘participant-observer’s’ narrative of the action-packed days of June, July and August 1991 during which time dramatic steps to liberalise and globalise the Indian economy were taken”. Thus, To the Brink and Back does not provide any explanation as to what happened in the interregnum between 1989 when the Rajiv Gandhi-led Congress government was ousted from power and June 2, 1991 when PVNR was sworn in as prime minister. A true party — and therefore Nehru-Gandhi — loyalist, Ramesh has nothing to say…

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The multi-million dollar productions of Bollywood in which most of the mysteriously raised budget is expended on elaborate song and dance sequences featuring the choreographed efforts of lead actors who may well be portraying learned professors and nuclear scientists, are studiously avoided by your editor as theatre of the absurd. Nevertheless, once in a blue moon Bollywood’s cinema factory churns out a feature with a purpose. The 132-minute feature film Talvar directed by Meghna Gulzar and produced by Vishal Bhardwaj, both big names in mainstream Bollywood, is a refreshing departure from the staple fare of Indian cinema. Talvar re-investigates the famous Aarushi murder case that hit media headlines seven years ago and resulted in the conviction by a sessions court of her parents, Noida-based Dr. Rajesh and Nupur Talwar for the honour killing of their daughter and manservant Hemraj. By detailing sloppy investigation of the crime committed in the Talwars’ home and numerous acts of commission and omission of policemen who first arrived on the crime scene, the movie raises suspicion of a grave miscarriage of justice. The director does a competent job of highlighting the failure of the Delhi police to prevent the crime scene being overrun by media personnel and the public. The sub-text of the movie is the poor calibre of the police, with senior officers anxious to manipulate the evidence to suit their surmises and premature conclusions. In this connection it’s also pertinent to note that the Talwars have appealed the sessions court verdict in the Allahabad high court where at the current pace of case disposal, their appeal will be heard 25 years hence. Although Talvar doesn’t prove the Talwars’ innocence, it certainly raises enough doubts about the verdict to fast-track their appeal. Despite the director glossing over the hysteria generated by television news channels in influencing the court’s decision and condoning third degree interrogation, Talvar is an intelligent film which indicates that all is not lost in Bollywood. Debonair  prescience The decision taken by the editors of the path-breaking American magazine Playboy, which was famously launched with a nude centrefold of Hollywood icon Marilyn Monroe in 1953, to stop publishing nude photos of women, marks the end of an era in print magazine publishing. The monthly was conceptualised by Hugh Hefner, and in typical American style Playboy mag enabled Hefner, who is still alive and kicking, to establish the Playboy empire, spanning nightclubs, garments, perfumes and holiday resorts which have earned him a personal net worth of $43 million (Rs.281 crore). Inevitably, the Playboy success story inspired clones around the world, including in this beggared socialist republic. In 1971, the first issue of Debonair was published and intermittently thereafter until the late Vinod Mehta took over as editor in 1975. Debonair which in Playboy style began publishing nude photos of foreign and indigenous women, found a ready market among repressed males in urban India where patriarchy and social mores prohibited pre-marital social — let alone sexual — interaction between young men and women. Although…

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