News and views about the Education in India

Women in India do not seem to be getting the same career opportunities as their male counterparts. The knowledge commission has recommended the education of regulators while the number of unlettered children in India has reduced. Rajasthan mulls the opening of portable schools and Delhi aims at becoming the Knowledge Capital of South Asia.

- Chillibreeze Business Research Team

IIM alumni enhance graduate employability
Alumni of the six Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs), the country's premier business schools, came forward Sunday with a slew of customised courses here to enhance the graduates' prospects of employment.

The initiative of a group of 10 alumni, Elements Akademia, will offer high-quality job-oriented courses that are tailor-made to suit the human resource requirement of companies in outsourcing, retailing, insurance and banking fields.

The group earlier launched the initiative in Lucknow and Bhopal.

The six-month part-time courses broadly include modules on business communication, managerial effectiveness, grooming and IT. The students who complete the course would get a certificate from the Mumbai-based K.J. Somaiya Business School.

There is also a merit-cum-means scholarship, sponsored by the IIM alumni, for students with a monthly family income of less than Rs.6,000.

Source: www.indiaenews.com
January 20, 2008

PepsiCo starts contest for management students.
Cola giant PepsiCo has launched a contest to tap young talent from the country's top management schools.
'The contest is an attempt to bring out some fresh and out-of-the-box ideas from the best brains of the country,' Mrinall Dey, general manager, corporate communications, PepsiCo India, told IANS.

The 'Taste the Success - Become Indra's Advisor' competition requires participating teams to submit a case study of business strategies to unlock the latent demand for beverages in India.

The five Indian Institutes of Management at Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Kolkata, Lucknow, and Indore, Management Development Institute (MDI), Faculty of Management Studies (FMS) of the Delhi University, Xavier Labour Relations Institute (XLRI), Symbiosis Institute of Business Management (SIBM) and Jamnalal Bajaj Institute of Management Studies (JBIMS) have confirmed their participation in the contest.

The winners would get an opportunity to meet and present their case study to Indra Nooyi, the chairman and chief executive of PepsiCo, in New York. They may even get a chance to be advisors on an ongoing basis with PepsiCo to operationalise their ideas.

Source: www.indiaenews.com
January 20, 2008

'India's call-centre employees need to speak better English'
Indians working in call centres have a thick accent and need to strengthen their knowledge of English to be globally competitive, says a top official of the US-based Educational Testing Service (ETS) that designs tests like TOEFL. 'It's an interesting situation here. People may read and write good English but spoken English needs improvement,' said David L. Hunt, vice president of ETS, which is headquartered in Princeton.

'India is a global economy and people dealing with international clients need to speak better English. I think the BPO industry can do better in the country,' Hunt told IANS in an interview.

He was in the Indian capital to sign an agreement with IT training major NIIT to provide the TOEIC (Test of English for International Communication) test in India.

He said while working for an English speaking country, it was important to have at least a neutral accent.

Source: www.indiaenews.com
January 20, 2008

Reform educational regulators: knowledge commission
India should have an independent regulatory authority for higher education and non-performing educational regulators need reform, the National Knowledge Commission has said. No institution, including the education ministry, should have an 'overwhelming role' in the sector, it has added.

'It is not that we want any educational regulator to be closed. What we are looking at is these institutions adopting reforms and (their) modernisation. We cannot think of any sea change even if the government plans to pump in five times more budget for education in 11th plan,' Ashok Ganguly, member of the National Knowledge Commission (NKC), told IANS Saturday.

NKC chairman Sam Pitroda, who submitted the commission's 2007 report to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh Friday, told reporters here that there was resistance to new ideas in the field of education at various levels in the government.

'There is severe resistance in the government to new ideas, experiments, external interventions, transparency and accountability due to rigid organisational structures with territorial mindsets,' Pitroda said. 'We are looking at expansion, excellence and quality,' he added.

NKC members have strongly recommended an independent regulatory authority for higher education, like those existing in the telecom and power sectors. The commission feels this would bring in accountability and autonomy in institutions.

Source: www.indiaenews.com
January 19, 2008

IIT-Bombay develops smallest silicon cardiac locket
Just days after Tata's Nano rocked the auto world, another feat by India's prestigious Centre for Technology at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Bombay has demonstrated India's prowess in Biophysics Technology.

This time, scientists from IIT-Bombay have successfully developed the world's smallest toffee-sized cardiac silicon computer, which can be worn like a locket on the neck with its five electrodes. This nano-computer has the capacity to store the data of one week's Electrocardiogram (ECG).

Source: www.indiaedunews.com
January 19, 2008

Kerala computer literacy initiative marks new milestone
Close to 15,000 mostly underprivileged schoolchildren in the backwaters of Kalloopara in Kerala are learning what computers are all about right from primary school, at a time when computer education in the state starts from the eighth standard. Now they will do it in their mother tongue too.

This unique initiative entered a new phase Friday at the Kalloopara assembly constituency in Pathanamthitta district, some 100 km from state capital Thiruvananthapuram, when all government and government-aided schools get a full set of software in Malayalam developed by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing.

The software package includes English-Malayalam and Malayalam-English encyclopaedia, Malayalam keyboard driver, font manager and a host of software.

The initiative started in February 2005 when Kalloopara legislator Joseph M. Puthussery decided to bring computers closer to the underprivileged in his constituency. He supplied computers to all the 106 government and government-aided schools in the constituency.

Today every lower and upper primary school in the constituency has an average of two computers and printers and high schools have an average five computers. Now, every week, three hours of computer classes are held for classes 1 to 7.

If it were not for this scheme, schoolchildren would have had to wait till class 8 - when IT becomes part of the school curriculum - before using a computer.

Source: www.indiaenews.com
January 18, 2008

NIIT inks pact with ETS
IT training major NIIT Thursday inked a pact with global English skill testing body Educational Testing Service (ETS) to offer its TOEIC (Test of English for International Communication) test exclusively in India.

TOEIC has been accepted in more than 60 countries as a major communicative English ability test. The Princeton (the US) headquartered ETS has its offices in 60 countries.

NIIT Chief Executive Officer Vijay Thadani said that his organisation was in touch with leading retail companies, call centres, banks and other related offices for conducting the test.

NIIT will start conducting the test from April this year and charge Rs.1,000 from each applicant.

Source: www.indiaenews.com
January 17, 2008

Rajasthan mulls 'portable' schools to stem dropouts
You may have heard of mobile schools, but now Rajasthan is planning to have 'portable' schools.

Portable schools can be moved from one place to another. These schools will be similar to normal schools except that if the management does not get enough students, the school will be closed and moved to a place where there are adequate pupils, officials said.

These portable schools, to be opened in Kota district initially, are aimed at bringing back school dropouts to mainstream education.

Portable schools have few needs - all that they require is 50X50 square foot of space and a bamboo structure. They have a room, a toilet and some basic facilities. A portable school is estimated to cost nearly Rs.120,000.
Despite its efforts, Rajasthan still has a high school dropout rate, which according to current estimates stands at over 34 percent. The state government has taken various initiatives to improve the standard of education in the state, including the appointment of around 41,000 teachers.

Source: www.indiaenews.com
January 16, 2008

AMU to launch community radio, TV
Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) will soon have its own community radio and TV station.

Vice Chancellor Abdul Azis announced this after inaugurating a three-camera production studio, costing more than Rs.10 million, at the department of journalism and mass communication in the university.

Source: www.indiaenews.com
January 16, 2008

Less and less Indian children 'out of school': report
The number of unlettered children in rural areas of India has gone down by nearly 33 percent in a finding that is bound to have a positive effect on the country's overall literacy rate.

The Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) by the non-government body Pratham found that only 4.2 percent children in rural India in the six to 14 age group are out of school as against 6.6 percent in 2006.

Among the states, Orissa tops the list for most out-of-school children (eight percent) followed by Meghalaya (7.5 percent) and Kerala is at the bottom, according to the study released in the capital.

While only 0.4 percent of rural students in Kerala are not enrolled in schools, the figure is 0.5 percent in Goa, one percent in Himachal Pradesh, 1.1 percent in Puducherry and 1.2 percent in Tamil Nadu.

The report surveyed over 700,000 children and visited 13,000 schools across the country. Over 500 representatives of Pratham visited over 16,000 villages before compiling the final report.

Rural India accounts for nearly 70 percent of the school going children in the country.

Among the states Bihar and Rajasthan have made considerable progress. While 12.5 percent rural children from Bihar were out of school in 2006, the figure was 6.5 percent in 2007. Similarly, from Rajasthan's record of 10.8 percent children out of school in 2006, it was 6.5 percent by the end of 2007.

'Across the country, the proportion of children in standard one who could not even recognise alphabets has dropped from 38.4 percent in 2006 to 31.9 percent in 2007.

Source: www.indiaenews.com
January 16, 2008

A book on alternative schooling in India
Alternative schooling in India is 'more vibrant than it seems but less dynamic than it should be', says the co-editor of a just released book on the subject.

Mainstream education 'is too focused on securing a well-paying job, scoring high marks in examinations and outdoing the rest of the class...there is too little on nurturing the latent talent in each (unique) child', Neeraja Raghavan, a Bangalore-based writer and editorial consultant, told IANS.

She has edited 'Alternative Schooling in India' - that focuses on the innovative methods of learning in some schools - along with Sarojini Vittachi of Bangalore-based gender advocacy group Girls Education Plus, and technical writer Kiran Raj (Sage, 2007).

Schools like the Timbaktu Collective (Anantapur), Rishi Valley (Chittoor), Sloka, the Steiner School (Hyderabad), Shreyas (Ahmedabad), Bhavya (Bangalore) and the Valley School (Bangalore) have deviated from convention to educate children.

Source: www.indiaenews.com
January 15, 2008

IIT entry to be tougher this year
According to present facts and figures, the average number of students competing for a seat has gone up from 55 to as high as 77. The competition to get a seat into the prestigious IITs has just got tougher this year.

About one lakh more students have applied for this year's Joint Entrance Exam (JEE), up from the 2.43 lakh who appeared for the test last year.

Interestingly, the height of competition to enter into the IIT is tougher than the other well known global universities like Harvard and the Masachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where the average number of students' competing for a seat is only eight.

Source: www.indiaedunews.com
January 15, 2008

A Kerala village achieves total primary education
Seventeen years ago, Kerala was declared a fully literate state. And now the state's Nilambur village panchayat has achieved total primary education - possibly a first in India.

Everyone in the village is now qualified as having passed the Class 4 examination's equivalent. Nilambur in Malappuram district is located around 450 km north of state capital Thiruvananthapuram.

The drive for universal primary education, named Jyotirgamaya, began in Nilambur two years ago. The project was initiated by panchayat (village council) president Aryadan Shoukat with the support of the State Literacy Mission (SLM).

Source: www.indiaenews.com
January 15, 2008

Forbes calls for IITs, IIMs to work towards building research culture
Industrialist Naushad Forbes today appealed to the prominent centers of learning s such as the Indian Institute of Technology (IITs) and Indian Institute of Management (IIMs) to learn from the "US experience" in the 1950s and 60s of building a research culture and using competition throughout the system. "It will be difficult and painful but we can create a better scenario by implementing it," Forbes, Managing Director of Forbes Marshall said while inaugurating a vice-chancellors' conference at the IIT-Bombay today.

"You must have flexibility that is used to reward people moving in the right direction and leaving behind people who do not comply. All promotions must require research success," he further added.

Earlier in the day, Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission Anil Kakodakar inaugurated the three-day conference being held as part of the golden jubilee celebrations of the IIT-Bombay attended by many vice- chancellors of prestigious varsities all across the globe.

Forbes, the global business giant also strongly laid emphasized on the importance of full liberty to institutions such as IITs in charging as much fees as they wish to keep up the academic standards. It also said the watchdogs should also ensure "need-blind admissions" for them.

Source: www.indiaedunews.com
January 15, 2008

Delhi will become South Asia's knowledge capital: chief minister
All higher educational institutions in the capital city will be interlinked and there will be a regular exchange of the faculty and curricula among them to make Delhi as the 'knowledge capital' of South Asia, Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit said Monday.

The National Knowledge Commission (NKC) headed by Sam Pitroda has prepared the blueprint of a plan to link these institutions.

'Delhi is on its way to become the knowledge capital. All higher education institutions would be interlinked,' Dikshit said after a meeting with Pitroda.

She reiterated her commitment to make Delhi the 'best knowledge destination for all'.

'All possible measures would be taken to implement recommendations of the NKC.'

The University of Delhi, Jawaharlal Nehru University, All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), Jamia Milia Islamia, Jamia Hamdard University, Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi (IIT-Delhi) and other capital-based educational institutions would be interlinked.

Source: www.indiaenews.com
January 14, 2008

Building as a learning aid
After the success of Taare Zameen Par, which showed how a school’s infrastructure can serve as an effective learning aid, Delhi’s education department is all set to launch a project called BaLA.

Building as Learning Aid (BaLA), also an acronym for a girl, is an innovative way of looking at a student's relation with the school. The project, to be launched by the Delhi government on January 23, focuses on using the existing school infrastructure as a part of the learning process and in making education indispensable to everyday life. The project also addresses inclusive education in mainstream schools.

Source: www.educationtimes.com
January 14, 2008

Canadian school moots student exchange
Indian students can now experience a Canadian lifestyle as Saskatoon Public School Division, Saskatchewan is all set to organise summer camps and exchange programmes with Indian schools.

John Lingard, director, programme for international students from Saskatoon Public Schools, was recently in the Capital meeting with schools in Delhi to set up summer camps and student exchanges between schools in India and Saskatchewan. He also visited Bangalore and Chennai for similar partnerships.

Source: www.educationtimes.com
January 14, 2008

Women get lesser opportunities
Despite scoring over their male counterparts, the Indian corporate culture remains averse to the idea of rewarding women worthy career opportunities. As a result, educated women from various metros and towns are opting for self-employment, states the latest findings of the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India (Assocham).

The findings in 'Women top in education: why miss top positions?' was jointly released by Kiran Bedi, former director general, Bureau of Police Research and Development and D S Rawat, secretary general, ASSOCHAM.

Highlighting why women are lagging behind despite excelling in almost every field, Bedi felt that a major reason was the weakening of family support. "Any mother will rush home if she knows her child is waiting for her. If she leaves the workplace early, she loses on networking and lobbying and thus, loses being on top." She added that an adequate social support system, crèche facilities at workplaces and the resident welfare associations ensuring day boarding facilities are possibilities worth exploring.

Of the 575 randomly surveyed women, 47% are working in the private sector, 25% with government departments, 15% with PSUs and 13% with NGOs. It was found that only 3% women are employed in on top positions in their respective organisations.

Source: www.educationtimes.com
January 14, 2008