News and Views About the Education in India

Weekly news updates on trends and happenings in the Indian Education scene

Local business schools are working with corporates to design and deliver courses that make students job-ready. Meanwhile there is a ray of hope for students who didn’t make it to a medical college. Chinese medical colleges have opened their doors to Indian students.

- Chillibreeze Business Research Team

Making students job ready
Graduation, from any college or business school, is definitely not the end of story. For hundreds of thousands who emerge out of these institutions, it is just the beginning of a life-changing process called “job search.”

To help their students tide over this tricky phase and land good placements in reputed firms, colleges often arrange campus recruitments. But are these events impressive enough to please the industry’s demands for quality, job-ready graduates?

Faced with a “talent crunch,” the companies are not happy about the products of our institutions. Their solution: Hire and train. The industry spends a fortune on training freshers. But then, what about the colleges that are supposed, at least theoretically, to take on that role? “There is a disconnect between the B-schools and industry. Of the 1.23 lakh MBA graduates who come out of the B-schools in this country, only 23 per cent are ready to be employed,” says T.R. Venkatesh, director of the Bangalore-based ICFAI Business School.

But N. Ganapathy Subramaniam, Vice-President and Head-Banking Industry Practice, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), disagrees about the industry’s talent crunch. “We don’t have a talent crunch in raw talent. What we need to do is to improve productivity. The crunch is faced by those firms, which rely on everything from outside. But there is a great demand for people with five to nine years’ experience. There is a talent crunch there,” he explains. Talent crunch is directly related to the attrition rate in companies.

But does he absolve the educational institutions of all responsibility? Hardly that. Deliberates Mr. Subramaniam: “Collaborating with the industry and sustaining a relationship is important for the academia. I find people coming from polytechnics to be better application engineers. More real-life case studies are required from B-schools.”

June 5, 2007
Source: The Hindu

Lectures by top scientists are now a click away

National Centre for Biological Sciences will host a website of seminars by leading biologists.

To keep pace with the newest developments across the globe, any scientist will tell you, is the key to their work. Unfortunately, many scientific institutions have limited information to ongoing research in leading laboratories and little access to the work of top scientists. Now, lectures by some of the world’s leading scientists will be at your fingertips.

iBioSeminars, a free online "library of seminars (akin to iTunes) from the world leaders in biological research" will be launched in June, and Bangalore’s National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS) will act as a host site. iBioSeminars is the brainchild of Ron Vale, Professor at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), and is sponsored by the American Society of Cell Biology and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

NCBS will act as a test site and local gateway for India to disseminate the material and to monitor the success of these seminars. The seminars, held by eminent scientists from around the world, will cover a range of areas in modern biology, from behavioural neuroscience to systems biology and stem-cell biology. The scientists have agreed to be available to students and to answer questions by email.

By June, 15 to 20 lectures will be up and running, and funding forthcoming, 50 lectures is the goal, with a "lifetime" of two years after which they will be archived and replaced by new sessions. The sessions can be downloaded onto a computer in lower and higher resolution formats, or onto a video iPOD, and lecturers can then project the sessions in their classrooms.

June 05, 2007
Source: The Hindu

China beckons medical aspirants

A ray of hope is available for those who miss out on an MBBS seat with Chinese medical schools opening the doors to welcome Indian students. Already, 200 Indian students are said to have started studying at various medical institutions in China.

Parents’ worry knows no limits once it is out that their wards cannot get a good rank to secure admission into MBBS. This leads to insecurity and it is increasingly felt with regard to the medical stream of the entrance examination - the Engineering, Agricultural and Medical Common Entrance Test (EAMCET).

These medical aspirants are caught in a situation where there seems no alternative locally. The private medical education has become too costly with each seat costing in the range of Rs. 30 to Rs. 60 lakh.

Ashok K. Sethi, Chairman of Manav’s Consultants, a consultancy that deals with Chinese educational institutions, says that parents need not have any hesitation about their children’s medical education. He has visited various institutions in China. With that experience, he says that the Chinese system is very much sensitive to the needs of Indian students and it is more so with regard to medical education. Mr. Sethi is bringing a team of representatives and teaching faculty from Chinese medical schools to enable them to study facilities here soon.

To protect the interests of students, the Indian Government has relaxed some rules. Earlier, students on return from China could appear for screening examination only thrice. This has been changed and a student can appear for the examination till he or she gets qualified. The screening test is a must for permitting China-educated medical students to start their private practice in India.

Jun 4, 2007
Source: The Hindu

Not Bihar, it's UP all the way in civil services

Popular perception is that Biharis dominate the civil services. However, it is Bihar's neighbour, Uttar Pradesh that dominates the civil services year after year. On an average, over 16% of the selected candidates for the civil services each year are from UP. In the latest 2006 civil services examination results, UP maintains its 16% share.

In comparison, Bihar's contribution is an average 2%, though this year it has gone up to 5%. Delhi's contribution to the civil services is an average 26%, but this would include not only those from Delhi but also from Bihar, Orissa, the North East, West Bengal and even UP. Even if we were to concede half of Delhi’s contribution to Bihar, it would still not match UP.

Over 11 universities of UP have candidates appearing for the examination with at least a few making it each year. But the university that records the greatest success in UP is the University of Allahabad that is the fifth largest contributing university to the civil services. Allahabad University also tops the list in terms of the number of students appearing for the civil services exam. The other big contributors to the civil services from UP are IIT Kanpur, University of Lucknow and Benaras Hindu University, in that order.

Quite predictably, the highest number of successful candidates in civil services exam are from DU followed by JNU. University of Rajasthan is third, followed by Punjab University. The top eight contributing universities are all from north, followed by University of Pune and University of Bangalore in ninth and tenth respectively. On the basis of the number of candidates appearing for the civil services mains, the top 15 universities are all from the north again, except Osmania University in Andhra Pradesh that figures in the 11th place.

Liberalisation and better job prospects in the corporate sector could have something to do with it. While northern universities might dominate top spots, when it comes to states, following Delhi and UP, the states that send the maximum number of candidates are Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu, followed by Andhra Pradesh. These states have a larger number of universities from where students appear for the exam, and even if the number of candidates appearing may not be as large a number as in Delhi or UP, the success rate seems better. The states with the least contribution seem to be Goa and Assam, if we are to discount the North Eastern states, as many students from there appear for the examination as Delhi candidates.

While Tamils may have retained their sway over the civil services, the Bengali babus, the original brown sahibs, seem to have lost out. Bengal's contribution to the civil services is just a little over 2%, with the bulk from University of Calcutta and IIT Kharagpur. Even Jadhavpur University has little or no contribution. Interestingly, Delhi and UP’s share in the all India civil services is declining as states like Tamil Nadu, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Punjab and Haryana gradually improve their share.

June 4, 2007
Source: The Times of India