Friday, August 28, 2020

On February 18, 1956, the then minister of health, Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, introduced a new bill in the Lok Sabha. She had no speech prepared. But she spoke from her heart. “It has been one of my cherished dreams that for post graduate study and for the maintenance of high standards of medical education in our country, we should have an institute of this nature which would enable our young men and women to have their post graduate education in their own country,” she said.

The creation of a major central institute for post-graduate medical education and research had been recommended by the Health survey of the government of India, a decade ago in 1946. Though the idea was highly appreciated, money was a concern. It took another 10 years for Kaur to collect adequate funds, and lay the foundation of India’s number one medical institute and hospital.

Kaur’s speech in the Lok Sabha sparked a vigorous debate in the house over the nature of the institute. But the bill moved fast, gaining the approval of members of both the houses, and by May that year, the motion was adopted.The All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) was born. “I want this to be something wonderful, of which India can be proud, and I want India to be proud of it,” said Kaur, as the bill was passed in the Rajya Sabha.

In the past few months, as India has been battling a global pandemic, the role of the country’s apex medical body has come under discussion on several occasions. Significantly, it is the first prime minister of the country, Jawaharlal Nehru, who is credited for the heights reached by AIIMS. It is true that AIIMS came to be under the Nehru government. However, the real driving force behind it was Kaur.

A princess of the Kapurthala princely state, a student at Oxford university, a devout follower of Mahatma Gandhi, and an important member of the Constituent Assembly, Kaur was all of this and much more. Members of her family like to remember her as someone who believed in simple living and high thinking. The pages of history, on the other hand, celebrates her determination to drive out the British, her feminist zeal, and also the many contributions she had made to the health infrastructure of the country.

The Kapurthala princess

As a member of the Kapurthala princely family, Kaur had an interesting history. Her father, Raja Sir Harnam Singh, had converted to Protestant Christianity after a chance meeting with a Bengali missionary named Golakhnath Chatterjee in Jalandhar. Singh went on to marry his daughter, Priscilla, and had ten children with her. Kaur, the youngest among them was born on February 2, 1889.Kaur, therefore, was brought up as a Protestant Christian. After spending her early years in India, she was sent off to England for her education. “Princess Amrit Kaur was as much a product of Edwardian England as she was of India,” suggested her obituary in the New York Times in 1964. She completed her schooling from the Sherborne School for Girls, in Dorset, and then went to study at Oxford University. Thereupon, she returned to India in 1908 at the age of 20, and embarked on a life of nationalism and social reform.

“It is important to note that though a devout Christian, she was very much against missionary activities,” says Siddhant Das (27), great grand nephew of Amrit Kaur, and an entrepreneur who is currently living in Chandigarh, but spends most of his time doing research on her life and career. “She was a zealous patriot who believed that missionaries were alienating Indians from their cultural roots,” he explains.

The Gandhian and social reformer

Upon her return from England, Kaur was immediately drawn towards the ideas of nationalism, as she interacted with leaders like Gopal Krishna Gokhale and Mahatma Gandhi. She was mesmerised by the teachings of Gandhi, and shared an enduring, special friendship with him, as is evident from the collection of letters shared between the two, that have been compiled in the book, ‘Letters to Rajkumari Amrit Kaur’.

“What drew me to Bapu was his desire to have women in his non-violent army and his faith in womankind. This was an irresistible appeal to a woman in a land where women were fit for producing children and serving their lords as masters,” she is quoted as having said by American philosopher Richard Gregg in his introductory note in ‘Letters to Amrit Kaur.’

Though she wanted to join the naionalist movement soon after she returned, her family was against her involvement in the struggle, and therefore she kept away till her father passed away in 1930. During this period though, she was actively involved in social reforms particularly those related to women. Consequently, she waged a battle against the purdah system, the devadasi system, and child marriage. In 1927, she helped in the founding of the All India Women’s Conference and later served as its president.

By 1930, as she joined the Gandhian movement, she was imprisoned for her participation in the Dandi march. She gave up all her princely comforts to join Gandhi at his ashram in Sabarmati. “I remember Rajkumari sitting at the spinning wheel and eating along with other ashramites, the simple fare prescribed by Gandhiji,” wrote political activist Aruna Asaf Ali about her fondest memory of Kaur. “Rajkumari Amrit Kaur belonged to a generation of pioneers. They belonged to well- to-do homes but gave up on their affluent and sheltered lives and flocked to Gandhiji’s banner when he called women to join the national liberation struggle,” she added.

In her battle for a free India, she became one of the few women members of the Constituent assembly. She along with Hansraj Jivraj Mehta were the only female members to be ardently in support of the uniform civil code in the constitution.

The passionate health minister who created AIIMS

Nihar Mahindar Singh, the 58-year-old grand niece of Kaur, recalls that as a child she would visit Kaur’s house in New Delhi frequently, as she was getting treated at AIIMS. “I never received any preferential treatment for being her family member. I remember spending hours at a stretch on the corridors of AIIMS. I didn’t even know back then that aunt B (as Kaur was referred to in her family), had created the hospital,” she says, adding that it was much later, and by word of mouth from her family members that she learned of her grand aunt’s contribution in building AIIMS.

As an institute of healthcare and medical research, AIIMS had to have some unique features. To begin with, it was the first of its kind in Asia to prohibit doctors from private practise of any kind. Secondly, the doctors at AIIMS were to devote their time not only to treating patients and teaching, but also to carry out research. “All the staff and students were to be housed in the campus of the Institute in the best traditions of the Guru-Sishya ideal to stay in close touch with each other,” writes V. Srinivas, the deputy director of administration at AIIMS in his article, ‘The making of AIIMS: The parliamentary debate’.

As health minister, Kaur was the pivotal force in ensuring the unique status enjoyed by AIIMS. Yet, it is worth noting, that she was in fact not the first choice of Nehru to be part of the cabinet. “In August 1947, for the woman member of the cabinet, Nehru thought of Hansa Mehta, but took Rajkumari Amrit Kaur at Gandhi’s insistence,” writes author Sankar Ghose, in his book, ‘Jawaharlal Nehru – A Biography’. Writing about why Kaur was not preferred, he explains, “she was sometimes indiscreet and intemperate in her criticism of Congressmen.”Nonetheless, Kaur went on to become India’s first health minister. When the issue of funds for AIIMS came up, it was she who was instrumental in acquiring a huge amount from the New Zealand government. Over the years, she rallied around and was successful in getting donations from international bodies like the Rockefeller foundation, and the Ford foundation, as well as from the government of Australia, West Germany, as well as from the Dutch government.

During its diamond jubilee celebrations at AIIMS, Srinivas wrote a feature on Kaur for the Press Information Bureau (PIB), wherein he emphasised that Kaur protected the autonomous nature of the institute and ensured that an international face was created for it. “Rajkumari Amrit Kaur’s vision envisaged selection of students for admission to the under-graduate MBBS course in AIIMS is made after an open advertisement, on the results of an open competitive test, strictly on merit with equal opportunities to students from any part of the country,” he writes. It was her efforts, therefore, that led to entrance examinations being conducted for admission at AIIMS from 1956.

By 1961 itself, AIIMS had attained global repute as it was placed alongside the best of institutes from America, Canada and Europe.

Kaur chaired her last governing body meeting of AIIMS on August 14, 1963, wherein she donated her residence at Shimla, Manorville, to AIIMS as a space meant for the relaxation and recreation of the doctors and nurses of the institute.

Apart from passionately laying the foundation of AIIMS, she also founded the Indian Council of Child Welfare and became its first president. She was president of the Indian Leprosy Association, the Tuberculosis Association, and vice-president of the International Red Cross Society. She led the Indian delegation to the World Health Organisation (WHO) for four years and was president of the WHO assembly in 1950.

Her largest campaign as health minister though, was against Malaria. “At the height of the campaign, in 1955, it was estimated that 400,000 Indians who otherwise would have died had been saved by mitigation of malaria in their districts,” says the NYT obituary.

Earlier this year, Kaur was listed by TIME magazine as the woman of the year 1947. In noting her achievements and contributions, the magazine writes, “In leaving her life of luxury, Kaur not only helped build lasting democratic institutions, she also inspired generations to fight for the marginalized.”

Written by Adrija Roychowdhury

Source: Indian Express, 27/08/20

Why global university rankings miss Indian educational institutions

Since universities are complex organisations with multiple objectives, comparing universities using a single numerical value is as ineffectual as comparing a civil engineer with a biologist or a linguist and a dancer.

The best indicators of a university’s performance are the learning outcomes and how its education has impacted the students and society. The hype surrounding the announcement of world university rankings by international ranking organisations is unfortunate. Regardless of whether the rankings are beneficial or not, more universities than ever before want to get into these rankings. The obsession to be within the top 100 universities in the world is exasperating. Since there is a potential danger of creating elitism among universities through this ranking, lower-ranked universities may lose out on many counts. Some top-ranked universities want to collaborate only with other top-ranked universities, impairing the less fortunate ones to further sink due to inescapable stigmatisation.

International ranking organisations also force universities to alter their core missions. This has happened with JNU. Although JNU ranks between 100 and 200 in certain disciplines, it does not find a place in world university rankings. The reason is JNU does not offer many undergraduate programmes. We were indirectly told to start more undergraduate programmes in order to scale the ranking order while our university is predominantly a research-oriented institution.

First, let me state the obvious. Indian institutions lose out on perception, which carries almost 50 per cent weightage in many world university ranking schemes. Psychologists know that perception is a result of different stimuli such as knowledge, memories, and expectancies of people. While one can quantitatively measure the correlation between stimuli and perception, perception cannot be a quantifiable standalone parameter. Therefore, perception as a major component in the ranking process can easily lead to inaccurate or unreasonable conclusions.

Rightly or wrongly, international ranking organisations use citations as a primary indicator of productivity and scientific impact a discipline makes. However, studies show that the number of citations per paper is highest in multidisciplinary sciences, general internal medicine, and biochemistry, and it is the lowest in subjects such as visual and performing arts, literature and architecture. It is nobody’s case that the latter subjects are of any less importance. By making citations of published papers from a university as a strong parameter for rankings, we seem to have developed an inexplicable blind spot when it comes to the differences among subject disciplines. It is no wonder that universities such as JNU, whose student intake in science research programmes is less as compared to the other disciplines, will loose out in world university rankings although it has been rated as the second-best university in India.

International ranking organisations are too rigid in their methodology and are not willing to add either additional parameters or change the weightage of current parameters. They are disinclined to employ meaningful and universally fair benchmarks of quality and performance. This is an absolute requisite to take into account the diversity that prevails among the universities. Some Indian higher education institutions even decided not to participate in the world university rankings alleging a lack of transparency in the parameters that are used in the ranking process.

Since universities are complex organisations with multiple objectives, comparing universities using a single numerical value is as ineffectual as comparing a civil engineer with a biologist or a linguist and a dancer. Hence, the danger that such skewed world rankings will downgrade the university education to a mere commodity is a realistic trepidation. This inelastic stance of ranking organisations has forced more than 70 countries to have their own national ranking systems for higher educational institutions.

I had argued in an editorial in IETE Technical Review (March 2015) for India to have its own national ranking system. The MHRD established the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) in 2016. The parameters used by NIRF for ranking Indian institutions are also most suited for many other countries — among the parameters are teaching, learning & resources, research and professional practice, graduation outcomes, outreach and inclusivity and peer perception. Unlike international ranking organisations, NIRF gives only 10 per cent weightage for perception.

In 2016, the NIRF rankings were given in four categories — University, Engineering, Management and Pharmacy. College, Medical, Law, Architecture and Dental were added in 2020. This shows how NIRF is refining its ranking methodology by taking inputs from the stakeholders, which the international ranking organisations seldom do. No right-minded person can plausibly argue against such a ranking system, which recognises and promotes the diversity and intrinsic strengths of Indian educational institutes.

International ranking organisations are often sightless about what it takes to build a world-class educational system as compared to a world-class university. If a country has a world-class educational system with a focus on innovation, best teaching-learning processes, research-oriented towards social good, affirmative action plans for inclusive and accessible education, it will have a more visible social and economic impact.

Indian higher educational institutes need to ask themselves: What positive role can they play in improving the quality of higher education? What can we do to adopt innovative approaches to become future ready? And they need to act on those questions to make a change and plan beyond what is obvious.

NIRF will stimulate healthy competition among Indian educational institutes, which should eventually lead to a world-class Indian educational system. This system will act as a catalyst for the transformation of local universities to world-class institutions.

This article first appeared in the print edition on August 28, 2020 under the title ‘Home and the world’. The writer is Vice-chancellor, JNU.

Source: Indian Express, 28/08/20

Thursday, August 27, 2020

Quote of the Day August 27, 2020

“The trouble with not having a goal is that you can spend your life running up and down the field and never score.”

‐ Bill Copeland

“लक्ष्य न होने के साथ समस्या यह है कि आप अपना समस्त जीवन मैदान में ऊपर नीचे दौड़ते रहने के बाद भी कोई जीत हासिल नहीं कर पाते।”
‐ बिल कोपलेंड

Income tax reform: What is Faceless Assessment scheme?

The Faceless Assessment is being rolled out to remove the human interface between the taxpayer and the Income Tax (I-T) Department.

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said that the faceless tax scrutiny assessment and appeal would help in easing compliance burden of taxpayers and increase fairness and objectivity in the tax system. “It eases compliance burden, it brings in a fair objective and a just system, there shall not be any physical interface between the department and the taxpayer and to an extent, it shall bring in the certainty of information,” she added.

Take a look at the features of the Faceless Assessment Scheme:

Selection of a tax payer only through system using data analytics and AI
Abolition of territorial jurisdiction
Automated random allocation of cases
Central issuance of notices with Document Identification No. (DIN)
No physical interface, no need to visit the income tax office
Team-based assessments and team-based review
Draft assessment order in one city, review in another city and finalisation in third city.

So what are the exceptions to this?

Cases relating to:

Serious frauds, major tax evasion, sensitive & search matters
International tax
Black Money Act and Benami Property

Students should understand that their future is bogged down by a scientific bureaucracy which is structurally flawed

It is time for the states to create a system which opens up professional opportunities, standards and training for our youth to serve their community, of achieving excellence through relevance.

The University Grants Commission (UGC) and the State of Maharashtra with other parties are engaged in a vicious legal battle. It has put the spotlight, once again, on the fraught nature of Centre-state relations in the area of higher education. The case is simple: Given the epidemic and concerns of safety, Maharashtra and some other states have cancelled the final year exams for college students and wish to award grades and degrees based on in-semester performance.

The UGC has said that this “dilutes standards” and has passed a diktat that universities must hold exams — online, off-line or blended — before September 30. It has claimed that the actions of the states have “encroached on the legislative field of coordinating and determining the standards of higher education which is exclusively reserved for the Parliament under Entry 66 of List I of Schedule VII of the Constitution.” It has also claimed that its directives are to “protect the academic future of students”.

These broad claims must be examined carefully. Right now, fresh graduates are losing job appointments simply because they cannot furnish a final degree certificate. And yet, the MHRD has not bothered to inform employers and institutions to defer this requirement.

Entry 66 does indeed spell out the Centre’s role as “Coordination and determination of standards in institutions for higher education or research and scientific and technical institutions”. It has been repeatedly used by the Centre to shape the contours of policy and governance. In fact, it is the basis of the UGC Act of 1956. That led to the UGC-NET, a qualifying examination for college teachers. The IIT Act of 1961 led to the JEE and eventually GATE, and the 2016 amendment to the Indian Medical Council Act of 1956 gave us NEET. Thus, a single provision in the Constitution and a few key Acts have entangled India’s higher education in a web of qualifying and competitive exams, regulatory agencies and professional bodies. All this is in the name of upholding standards.

And yet, there have been few efforts to evolve standards and link them with concrete societal goals. There is the excessively bureaucratic national system of accreditation and rankings for institutions. This led to thousands of research papers in worthless journals and hundreds of crores spent on exotic research areas.

The new National Education Policy (NEP) claims that the purpose of higher education is to “enable personal accomplishment and enlightenment, constructive public engagement, and productive contribution to society”. But what is this in concrete terms, for students, institutions, the state and the nation? Should a “good” student be able to write a newspaper article on a local issue, or conduct a study? Should IIT Bombay or Shivaji University analyse the Kolhapur floods or measure the parameters of the epidemic in their cities? Can the state rely on its colleges for research on drinking water? Should the nation expect that elite institutions will work to improve the railways and devise timetables for shramik services? These questions have never been answered.

Instead, national competitive exams such as the JEE, NEET and GATE have become the de facto standards for education. The folly of this is well known. They adversely impact the overall development of our youth. They encourage coaching and intervene in the state’s ability to provide doctors and engineers from the local population. They distort the meaning and practice of science. And yet their impThe most exceptionable is the UGC-NET, the qualifying exam for college teachers. Their curricula are, of course, “national” or for that matter “global”. In Economics, it is the last chapter (of 10 chapters), where the Indian Economy is finally introduced. Missing is the District Economic Plan, a document which is regularly prepared by state governments, or the economics of the city. Sociology wends its way through Marx and Weber, ignores key development programmes such as MGNREGA and forbids any regional content. In Engineering too, the national curriculum for civil engineering is the same for Himachal Pradesh and Maharashtra. The national governing body for engineering has now determined that Virtual Reality and Quantum Computing are important emerging areas! Thus, the Centre decides the curricula, the teachers and their salaries. The states pay.

This standardisation is merely “world-class” wool pulled over our eyes and not based on any study of what the states need. In fact, the disconnect of curricula and teachers with the real world is the real dilution of standards. It is perhaps the principal reason for poor student employability and the reluctance of the states to invest in higher education.

Pedagogically too, it is known that students learn better when presented with real-life problems in a familiar context. And yet the case study on local problems has been absent in the curricula. When states innovate, the MHRD is more likely to steam-roll it. This was witnessed in Maharashtra, where its innovative programme, Unnat Maharashtra Abhiyan, linking colleges with district administration was refused support by the MHRD.

Finally, about elite central institutions such as the IITs or IISERs, the less said the better. Most regulations of the UGC or MHRD do not apply to them. They soak up most of the funds and prestige and yet their output is not commensurate.

Setting standards in higher education requires us to connect societal needs and professions with training and research. The MHRD or UGC have failed to do this. Nor have they considered the harmful impact of the de facto standards on students and society. The new NEP continues to live in the same exalted evidence-free world of national curricula and nationalised testing.

So what is to be done?

The courts should point out that a constitutional right comes with duties. The UGC has failed to appreciate this. They should set aside the issue of encroachment and judge the case on concrete questions. Can the states really hold exams during a pandemic? Are they really that important? Can transport or access to computers be managed? Did the central committee consider all this? Does it have the data?

Secondly, students should understand that their future is bogged down by a higher education system and a scientific bureaucracy which is structurally flawed. It is an elite centralised system which is not accountable to meaningful jobs or welfare within the states. It is time for the states to create a system which opens up professional opportunities, standards and training for our youth to serve their community, of achieving excellence through relevance.

This article first appeared in the print edition on August 27, 2020 under the title ‘UGC versus States’. Sohoni teaches IIT Bombay and IIT Goa. Dharap is a researcher at IIT Bombay

Source: Indian Express, 27/08/20

The 2020 Global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI)

The 2020 Global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) data and publication "Charting pathways out of multidimensional poverty: Achieving the SDGs" released on 16 July 2020 by the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative at the University of Oxford and the Human Development Report Office of the United Nations Development Programme. The global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) measures the complexities of poor people’s lives, individually and collectively, each year. This report focuses on how multidimensional poverty has declined. It provides a comprehensive picture of global trends in multidimensional poverty, covering 5 billion people. It probes patterns between and within countries and by indicator, showcasing different ways of making progress. Together with data on the $1.90 a day poverty rate, the trends monitor global poverty in different forms.

The COVID-19 pandemic unfolded in the midst of this analysis. While data are not yet available to measure the rise of global poverty after the pandemic, simulations based on different scenarios suggest that, if unaddressed, progress across 70 developing countries could be set back 3–10 years.

It is 10 years before 2030, the due date of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), whose first goal is to end poverty in all its forms everywhere. The MPI provides a comprehensive and in-depth picture of global poverty – in all its dimensions – and monitors progress towards Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 1 – to end poverty in all its forms. It also provides policymakers with the data to respond to the call of Target 1.2, which is to ‘reduce at least by half the proportion of men, women, and children of all ages living in poverty in all its dimensions according to national definition'. By detailing the connections between the MPI and other poverty-related SDGs, the report highlights how the lives of multidimensionally poor people are precarious in ways that extend beyond the MPI’s 10 component indicators.

Sustain the Naga peace talks

The Indian State has a novel way of dealing with what seem to be intractable armed conflicts. Engage (with stakeholders, including rebels); assert (the State’s authority) and coerce; divide (especially rebel groups which are often prone to fragmentation); concede (but only partially, without compromising on core principles); and repeat the cycle. The template has been applied, with varying degrees of success, in different contexts. But broadly, it helps ensure peace without concessions, maintains the centrality of the State, and either weakens rebel groups or creates incentives for them to stay within the framework of a peace agreement.

The Naga peace talks between the Centre and the National Socialist Council of Nagaland (I-M), which started in 1997, have followed a similar trajectory. Asia’s oldest insurgency, when talks began, appeared intractable — Naga groups were insistent on their distinct identity; they wanted a Greater Nagaland, which included Naga-speaking parts of other Indian states and Myanmar; they saw Nagaland as sovereign, with its own symbols. New Delhi was clear that neither would a Greater Nagaland be possible, nor would these groups be allowed to claim absolute sovereignty. But to keep the peace, the State often, rhetorically, accepted the distinct identity of Nagas; it informally allowed NSCN (I-M) to operate (including allowing it to function as a de facto parallel regime which had its own armed militia and collected tax); it also bridged differences and accepted the idea of “shared sovereignty”, a form of asymmetric federalism.

But there was no pact, and the perils of prolonged talks are now visible. RN Ravi, the key interlocutor for the Naga talks and now Nagaland’s governor, expressed the State’s exasperation at the operation of a parallel regime when he criticised “armed gangs”. NSCN(I-M), exasperated by the lack of a tangible solution despite a framework agreement signed in 2015, and annoyed at what it perceives as lack of respect, wants a new interlocutor and structure for talks. The geopolitical churn makes the situation more challenging — remember China has historically encouraged many armed insurgents in the Northeast, and given the current state of India-China ties, renewed Chinese support for those against the Indian State is quite possible. The Naga peace process is an achievement. It has kept the peace in a region troubled almost since Independence. New Delhi must sustain it and break the stalemate, by reviving talks and institutionalising an agreement. The old template must be tweaked to accommodate new realities.

Source: Hindustan Times, 26/08/20

Tuesday, August 25, 2020

Quote of the Day:August 25, 2020

“He who has health has hope, and he who has hope has everything.”
‐ Arabian Proverb

“जिसके पास स्वास्थ्य है, उसके पास आशा है तथा जिसके पास आशा है, उसके पास सब कुछ है।”
‐ अरबी कहावत

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