Renowned Urdu poet Gulzar and Sanskrit scholar Jagadguru Rambhadracharya will receive the 58th Jnanpith Award. Gulzar is known for his works in Hindi cinema and is considered one of the finest Urdu poets of this era. Jagadguru Rambhadracharya is the founder and chief of Tulsi Peeth in Chitrakoot, and is a renowned Hindu spiritual leader, educator and writer of more than 240 books and texts. The recipients for the award were decided by a selection committee chaired by Jnanpith awardee Pratibha Rai. Established in 1944, the prestigious Jnanpith Award is given annually for outstanding contributions to Indian literature.
Tuesday, February 20, 2024
President Approves New Anti-Cheating Law for Public Exams
On February 15 2024, President Droupadi Murmu granted her assent to the Public Examinations (Prevention of Unfair Means) Bill, 2024, clearing the legislation for implementation after passage by both houses of Parliament in the recently concluded Budget session.
Public examinations refer to examinations conducted by the Union Public Service Commission, Staff Selection Commission, Railway Recruitment Board, National Testing Agency, and Departments of the central government.
Unfair means include, unauthorised access or leakage of question paper or answer key, assisting a candidate during a public examination, tampering with computer networks, conducting fake examination, issuing fake admit cards and offer letters.
Key Provisions
Punishment for Cheating
The new law stipulates a jail sentence ranging from six months up to two years along with fines between Rs 10,000 to Rs 5 lakh for students caught attempting to cheat in public exams conducted by designated testing bodies.
Ban from Taking Any Tests
Those found guilty of using unfair practices during examinations face a ban from appearing for any national or state level examination for six months to lifetime depending on severity of ethical misconduct. This includes professional course entrance tests too.
Applicability to Exam Officials & Coaches
In addition to students, chief invigilators, independent representatives, paper setters and solution providers also face up to two years prison time and fines for abetting cheating through leaks of question papers, answer keys or via other illegal collusions.
Authorized Test Conducting Entities
All examinations held in physical mode by the National Testing Agency and various other testing bodies operating state and national level eligibility tests fall under purview of the stringent legislation.
Current Realities
Addressing Digital Age Grey Areas
The anti-cheating regulatory framework aims to address ethical misconduct grey areas which emerged from proliferation of technologies like spy cameras, ear pieces and online remote assistance which enable large scale leaks discrediting academic credibility.
Curbing Coaching Mafia Menace
It also aims to deter the parallel cottage industry of coaching mafias specializing in facilitating cheating either through imposters, solvers or by compromising processes in connivance with corrupt insiders.
Challenges in Implementation
Monitoring Infrastructure Overhaul Needed
While the legislation sets strong deterrence, experiencing agencies have flagged need to exponentially upgrade monitoring infrastructure and protocols through surveillance analytics, data mining, biometrics and forensics for robust nationwide implementation.
Concerns Over Ambiguous Provisions
Educational experts contend some provisions like imprisonment for minors, applicability on teachers are somewhat ambiguous requiring clarifications while expressing concerns over possibilities of over-policing impacting student welfare.
What is ‘ANUVADINI’- AI Tool?
The Government of India has directed all school and higher education institutions across the country to make available digital study material in Indian languages for every academic course within 3 years. This policy aims to enable students to learn in their native tongues aligned to India’s linguistic diversity.
Background
The National Education Policy 2020 has prioritised education in native languages and has also recommended a three-language formula for school education till Class X. The National Curriculum Framework 2023 for school education stated that till Class X a student need to study three languages of which two should be native Indian language and in Classes XI and XII where study of two languages have been recommended, one of which should be native Indian language.
Coverage of Initiative
The digital study materials access mandate applies to both government and private institutions and covers all courses from school textbooks to specialized university texts spanning sciences, humanities, engineering, medicine, law etc.
Anuvadini- the AI Tool
‘Anuvadini’, an Artificial Intelligence-based multilingual translation application developed indigenously, will facilitate swift conversion of existing English materials into multiple languages through machine learning as the bedrock, followed by expert manual reviews for accuracy.
Significant headway has already been achieved over past 2 years with thousands of textbooks translated across domains and curated on the online portal Ekumbh under the initiative. 12 regional languages textual options also exist for national entrance examinations now.
UGC Guidelines
The University Grants Commission (UGC) also issued rules for higher education institutions to provide courses in Indian languages. The UGC said that the Commission for Scientific and Technical Terminology has made standard glossaries that can be used to translate. These glossaries cover a wide range of topics. According to the rules, technical terms that are hard for students to understand may be given in English between quotes after their Indian language counterparts.
Intended Benefits
Removing language barriers in accessing high quality pedagogical resources would democratize quality education for the masses while preventing drop outs. It would also promote usage of native tongues in higher academia and professional domains instead of English.
Uses in other arena
More than five thousand judgments of the Kerala High Court and District Courts have been recently translated into Malayalam with the help of Artificial Intelligence (AI). The judgments are translated using the AI tool ‘Anuvadini’ prepared by AICTE under the Union Ministry of Education.
Digital Ecosystem
In school education, study material is being made available in multiple Indian languages including over 30 languages on DIKSHA portal and competitive exams like JEE, NEET, CUET are being delivered in 12 Indian languages and English.
For the past two years, the translation of engineering, medical, law, UG, PG and skill books are also being done.
In a decision aimed at providing students with the opportunity to study in their own language, Centre has decided that study material for all courses under school and higher education will be made available digitally in Indian languages included in the 8th Schedule of the Constitution.
The Great Gender Divide: Globally, young women are becoming more liberal than men, but what about India?
There is evidence globally of a growing gender divide on ideological lines. In the past decade, young women are becoming more liberal. What about India?Not so long ago, we’d look at generations as a whole. Millennials think this about that, or this is what Gen Z believes. Now it turns out that around the world, men and women under the age of 30 have increasingly divergent views. Women have become more liberal in the past decade; men of the same age, more conservative. “Gen Z is two generations, not one,” writes John Burn-Murdoch in the Financial Times [gift link]. “In countries on every continent, an ideological gap has opened up between young men and women.” American women have become more liberal since the 1990s, finds a new Gallup poll and the shift is more evident among young women and senior women—up by 11 points.
When it comes to comparisons with men, women aged 18-30 are 30 percentage points more liberal than men of the same age.
There’s a similar gap to be found in Germany. In the UK, the gap is around 25 percentage points.
Using data from the Gallup poll, analysis of general social surveys of Korea and the British Election Study, FT reports even starker divisions outside the west – in China, for instance and South Korea.
“As long as Korean men continue to dominate management and socialise with other men, they are immersed in cultures of self-righteous sexism,” writes Alice Evans, a visiting fellow at Stanford who is working on her book, The Great Gender Divergence. South Korean women, on the other hand, are increasingly feminist. “Inspired and emboldened, they have shared stories of abuse and publicly supported each other.”
The India story
“The first signs of a challenge to the status quo are now visible,” write Rahul Verma and Ankita Barthwal of the Centre for Policy Research (CPR) in this 2020 article published in Mint, Is India on the Cusp of a Gender Revolution? The change is being driven largely by young, educated women. Looking the 2020 You-Guv-Mint-CPR Millennial survey, Verma and Barthwal examine gender preferences across marriage, parenting, professional space, friendship and politics.
The similarities in career aspiration, they say, are “driven at least in part by the greater equality of opportunities between men and women.” It signals the “weakening of gendered norms in dictating career choices of women.” For instance, when it comes to dream careers, men and women with the same educational qualifications have strikingly similar aspirations.
But differences are emerging as well.
For instance, an equal number of men and women want to get married, but more women than men—70% to 62% of the 10,005 respondents across 184 towns and cities interviewed online--said they’d prefer love marriages. Women also want to marry later; 19% said after the age of 31, only 14% of men said they’d rather marry after that age. Women also want fewer children than men: 65% of men wanted two children, among women, 58%.In terms of friendships, it’s women who are more likely than men to have friends outside of identity circles like caste, religion or gender. Just 13% of women said they had no friends outside their caste (20% for men); 15% of women said they had no friends outside their religion (21% for men), and 18% had no friends outside their gender (25% for men). This actually is remarkable when you consider the restrictions and policing of women’s mobility and movements.
It’s too early yet to see a trend, cautions Verma. “We might have green shoots but I’m not yet seeing a trend,” he said. “Certainly, young women are becoming more politically inclined but women are still behind on a lot of parameters.” Two possible reasons are being offered for this gendered divergence. The first is the impact and fallout of the #MeToo movement. As women came forward to share their experiences of workplace sexual harassment, they found an online movement that gave them a democratic, open space. It helped create virtual networks around the world. And it primed women to speak up and create resistance on a range of issues. In Iran, for instance, the movement against enforced head scarves. But the movement also created a solidarity of women who found they could connect very quickly around the world and organise at least virtual sisterhood networks.
The second could be the roll back of hard-won rights with the most obvious being the back pedalling in the US in June 2022 on Roe v Wade, which ended the Constitutional right to abortion.
But, for me, there’s a third crucial reason. When it comes to challenging the status quo of patriarchal societies, where men are literally served hand and foot by an army of mothers, sisters, wives and daughters, those to gain the most are women. Men have everything to lose and women have everything to gain.
“There is a huge rise in aspiration among young women,” says Shrayana Bhattacharya, the author of Desperately Seeking Shahrukh Khan. But, “young men are not being able to adapt to these new aspiration. They are not being raised to cope with this new generation of aspirational women.”
So, while we might not yet be at a Venus/Mars divide, women are increasingly questioning the roles into which they have been slotted. Change is coming.
The following article is an excerpt from Namita Bhandare’s Mind the Gap. Read the rest of the newsletter here
Source: Hindustan Times, 18/02/24
Monday, February 19, 2024
Quote of the Day February 19, 2024
“The world hates change yet it is the only thing that has brought progress.”
Charles Kettering
“दुनिया परिवर्तन से नफरत करती है, लेकिन यही एकमात्र वस्तु है जिससे प्रगति का जन्म हुआ है।”
चार्ल्स कैट्टरिंग
SWATI (Science for Women- A Technology & Innovation) Portal
In February 2024, the government has launched the SWATI (Science for Women- A Technology & Innovation) portal, a database highlighting accomplishments of Indian women in STEMM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics & Medicine) fields. The interactive portal was developed by the National Institute of Plant Genome Research (NIPGR) to address the gender gap in sciences.
Need for the Portal
Women comprise only 13-15% of researchers in STEMM in India, lower than most G20 nations. They are disproportionately clustered in junior roles indicating barriers to advancement. Lack of visibility further marginalizes women’s scientific contributions. Diversity in leadership and problem-solving suffers, hampering innovation ecosystems. The SWATI portal tackles this visibility gap.
Salient Features
The portal allows self-registration of profiles of women students, faculty and scientists across levels capturing expertise, qualifications, publications etc. The dashboard provides dynamic analytics on distribution of women in STEMM roles across states and institutions. It enables collaborations through expert outreach, forums and open access in English and Hindi.
Addressing Inclusion Challenges
Analysis of portal data can guide counseling programs and returnship policies tailored to states. Domain-specific polls enable targeted opportunity initiatives. Automated scholarship alerts empower women scientists. By highlighting challenges, SWATI can trigger interventions to maximize women’s potential.
Realizing the Vision
With women crossing 25% threshold in STEMM by 2030, increased visibility from the portal is expected to attract more girls to science careers. Connecting investors and corporates can boost commercialization. By lifting the veil of invisibility, SWATI could catalyze a watershed movement for gender parity in Indian science.
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