AZIM PREMJI UNIVERSITY TO OFFER UG COURSES

For more information:

Call: 1800 266 2001  |  Email: ugadmissions@apu.edu.in

Website: www.azimpremjiuniversity.edu.in/ug

You stop growing when you stop learning: CTS Vice Chairman

In today’s competitive atmosphere students should come out with new thoughts and ideas; this can be generated only through constant learning. The student community should think big and have the confidence to accomplish their goals, speakers at “Techno Dhin” said on Friday.

Speaking at the programme organised by the Oxford Engineering College here, Lakshmi Narayanan, Vice Chairman, Cognizant Technology Solutions, laid emphasis on constant learning. “If you stop learning you stop growing and become obsolete”, he said addressing the engineering students of the institution. New thoughts and ideas would generate only through constant learning, he said adding that people who excelled had learnt every day. He exhorted the students to give their best and excel in their career path.

Ms.Hema Gopal, Vice President, Tata Consultancy Services, Chennai, said discipline was the key to success. Irrespective of the medium of instruction, students should think big and constantly upgrade themselves to excel in their career, she said. She called upon the students to be strong in their fundamentals, learn beyond their academics, and improve their analytical abilities. Chairman and managing trustee of the college M.Subramaniam, spoke.

Narendra Modi launches 'Saansad Adarsh Gram Yojana'

If nearly 800 MPs develop three villages each by 2019, around 2500 villages will be developed, he says

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Saturday launched the ‘Saansad Adarsh Gram Yojana’, an ambitious village development project under which each MP will take the responsibility of developing physical and institutional infrastructure in three villages by 2019.

Speaking at the launch in New Delhi Mr. Modi said, under the scheme it is envisaged that under the leadership and through the efforts of Members of Parliament, one village would be developed by each MP by 2016.

He said on the basis of the model created by this experience, it is envisaged that two more villages would be developed by each MP by 2019 and that one village will be developed every year.

“We are nearly 800 MPs. If before 2019 we develop three villages each, we reach nearly 2,500 villages. If in the light of this scheme, the states also create a similar scheme for MLAs, then 6-7000 more villages can be added,” Mr. Modi said.

The Prime Minister also said that if one village is developed in a block, it is also likely to have a “viral” effect and development would permeate other villages also.

Speaking about the scheme, Mr. Modi said that there is flexibility and an MP is free to choose any village. The only condition is that it should not be his own village or that of his in-laws.

“I also have to choose a village in Varanasi,” Mr. Modi said and added that he would go there, discuss and choose a village.

He said that till now the model of development being followed in the country has largely been supply driven.

“In Delhi, Lucknow or Gandhinagar, a scheme is prepared and then an attempt is made to inject it everywhere. Through this ‘Adarsh Gram’ (scheme), we want to shift from supply driven to demand driven model,” he said.

He also said that atmosphere should be created where every person is proud of his or her village.

Keywords: MP village scheme, Narendra Modi, Saansad Adarsh Gram Yojana

Oct 11 2014 : The Times of India (Delhi)

Satyarthi braved bullets to save kids

Swati Mathur

Lucknow





As an engineering student in Vidhisha, Kailash Satyarthi once came across a cobbler, whose son, who was less than 10 years' old, was helping him instead of going to school. Satyarthi asked why .The response was unassuming: “We're poor. Extra hands mean extra money .“Satyarthi, then 26, walked away unable to help, but convinced there was need for an initiative to rescue poor children being exploited for financial gains.Education, he thought, would be their road to emancipation. That led to the birth of Bachpan Bachao Andolan (BBA) in 1980.
Satyarthi started BBA to rescue children from bondage. In 34 years, the organization has conducted thousands of raids, reintegrating rescued children into society, ensuring they get an education. In states like Haryana, he led rescue missions for kids and families of bonded labourers in mining and manufacturing, braving murderous attacks.
He gave up a career in electrical engineering. For a while before launching BBA, he was a professor in Bhopal. Then he moved to Delhi and began his advocacy against child labour.
Scaling up BBA's work wasn't easy . Though the yearning for freedom existed in every family or child he rescued, Satyarthi -popularly known as bhai saab -faced resistance.
Some of those he wanted to rescue were scared to break free of their shackles, others like the cobbler Satyarthi was too poor to afford sacrificing an extra hand.
BBA continues to operate in Meerut and Lakhimpur districts, adopting nearly 130 villages, convert ing them into child-friendly zones. IPS officer Amitabh Thakur recalls: “I met Satyarthi in June 2004 at Karnailganj, Gonda. He had been beaten up by owners of the Great Roman Circus while attempting to rescue Nepalese girls. He was bleeding profusely . Police pulled him out from a rather precarious situation and helped rescue a dozen girls.“ Thakur was Gonda police chief then.
Satyarthi created the South Asian Coalition on Child Servitude (SACCS), a group of more than 750 civil society organizations.In 1994, he launched Goodweave, South Asia's first voluntary labelling and certification system for child labour-free rugs. In 1998, he organised the global march against child labour with more than 50 lakh people in attendance from across the globe. He is member of several other organizations.
For his endeavours in BBA and SACCS, Satyarthi has received global recognition and has been in the Peace Nobel reckoning for nearly five years. He won the US state department's Heroes Acting to End Mod ern Slavery Award, 2007, for creating child-friendly villages. The BBA network runs in nearly 350 villages across 11 states.
Last year, through Satyarthi's initiative in Meerut, 15-year-old Raziya Sultana, a child labourer BBA rescued and rehabilitated, won the UN Special Envoy for Global Education Award.

Oct 11 2014 : The Times of India (Delhi)

`India has hundreds of problems, but millions of solutions'

Avijit Ghosh, Surojit Gupta & Ambika Pandit

New Delhi: TNN





Noisy OB vans and an unending caravan of cars: on Friday afternoon, Kalkaji, a middle-class locality in south Delhi, is abuzz with activity and animation. It's barely an hour since the news flashed on TV screens. But everybody knows that L-6, a slim, unremarkable two-storey building, has become a very famous address. For word has gone around that it is the workstation of Kailash Satyarthi, who has been jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.“I know Malala personally and will definitely call to congratulate her. I will tell her that besides our fight for child rights, especially for girls, we must also work for peace in the sub-continent. It is very important that our children are born and live in peace,“ says the 60year-old activist, whose surname literally means seeker of truth. Dressed in a sand-coloured kurta, he stands barefoot and unfazed even as reporters jostle for his attention.
Satyarthi's association with child rights goes back to his first day in school in Vidisha, a small town in Madhya Pradesh, when as a five-year-old, he witnessed a child sitting outside school, working with his cobbler father.
“I asked my teachers and my headmaster and they said they are poor children, but it was not very convincing. One day I went to the boy's father and I asked, why didn't he send his son to school? He replied: `We are born to work.' I could not understand why some people were born to work and some others were born to enjoy life,“ he says. Seeing a child sitting out side a school working with his cobbler father became a permanent marker in the mind of Nobel laureate Kailash Satyarthi.
The activist says that even as a student, he wanted to work against child labour but didn't know how. “The notion of child rights came only in 1989 when the UN convention on the rights of the child was adopted,“ he says.
Later, Satyarthi quit his job as an engineer and started Bachpan Bachao Andolan.His first rescue happened in 1981 at a brick kiln in Sarhind, Punjab. “The father of a girl came to us. We were publishing a magazine, Sangharsh Jaari Rahega... He had come to publicize his plight but I realized it was not just a matter of writing something.I had to act because it was a matter involving a 13-14 year old girl who was about to be sold to a brothel. When I help a child and look into his or her eyes, I feel as if he or she is freeing me,“ he says.
It's been an eventful three decades since. Satyarthi was beaten up on several occasions and two of his colleagues killed. But he has kept his faith. Reacting to the award, he says, “Had the prize gone to Mahatma Gandhi before me, I would have been more honoured. I will continue my work. This is an honour for all my fellow Indians, as well as an honour for all those children in the world whose voices were never heard...“
He adds, “India has hundreds of problems, but millions of solutions. Watan ki ret mujhe aediyan ragadne de, mujhe yakeen hai ki paani yahin se niklega (Let me rub my feet on the sands of my motherland, I know the spring lies somewhere beneath).
How does he intend to celebrate? “Not with champagne,“ he quips. “I'm a teetotaller. I'm waiting for the children to arrive.“

A return to social science

The social sciences have declined as part of the imagination of the university. The subject has been appropriated by security agencies, think tanks and marketing outfits which substitute their current interests for democracy

There are moments in history where talent clusters in little pockets to produce a new excitement around knowledge. One senses a wonderful sparkle about scholarship, a sense of excitement and gossip which spreads all over. All one needs is a few books, a café, a lawn and a few scholars committed to chewing on an idea. One’s sense of the world changes as we watch them play with an idea. What then grows is not just an idea, but a group of friends, a community, and a commons of insights which attracts people from all over. I remember one such place used to be the wonderful group Rajni Kothari built in Delhi in the 1970s and the 1980s. Rajni is now almost forgotten but his ideas are still relevant to the problems of today.

This is an era which has seen the literal death of the Congress, the end of the Planning Commission, the rise of new majoritarianism, the decline of the great social moments; yet, one cannot think of one article or one book which captures this world adequately. Adding insult to intellectual injury, we have a whole array of diasporic intellectuals whose ideas of India are literally embarrassing. Their pastiche of nostalgia, didacticism and post-modernity adds little to the study of everyday issues. There have been a few exceptions to this dismal scene. One thinks of Ashis Nandy or U.R. Ananthamurthy. Both realised that the worlds they were critiquing and celebrating were disappearing before them. It is at these moments that one misses the magic of Rajni and his conversations on politics.

Studying democracy

The house that Rajni built was a bungalow with a few lawns. At lunch every day, the lawns housed an array of chairs, and scholars came, ate and talked. They discussed politics but what they celebrated was democracy, and democracy in all its variants was something all its scholars were committed to. Studying democracy became a ritual game, where experiment followed experiment. Rajni led the group, coming in largely at lunch time, clutching scraps of paper; many were old envelopes on which he jotted notes. Others would walk in. What one ate for lunch was incidental. What one talked about at lunchtime shaped the ideas of a generation.

Rajni brought his sense of Gujarati entrepreneurship to ideas. He triggered election studies inviting political scientists like Myron Wiener, Robert Dahl and Karl Deutsch to India. But politics was more than elections. Rajni and his colleagues realised that social science needed new experiments, new ways of thinking. He created the China Group so that China could be studied as the relevant other. He encouraged Future studies which was the one place where dissenting intellectuals from Eastern Europe could gather safely. The future was treated as a different country that Stalinist regimes of that time need not be paranoid about. He introduced a voluntary group called Lokayan which became a site for a range of grass-root imaginations. Lokayan went beyond the logic of expertise, the arrogance of intellectuals to listen to the experiences of ordinary people. In many ways, the creativity of the network lay not in its originality but in its ability to listen, adopt, mix and rework points of insight.

Rajni helped seed the People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) to create a tradition of on-the-spot investigations to investigate the violence of the state. PUCL-PUDR (People’s Union for Democratic Rights) produced the classic report on the 1984 riots “Who are the guilty?” PUCL — which was civil society’s presence in every major moment of violence, investigating, chronicling the fate of the victim — has sadly almost disappeared today. One of the ironies we face is the vulnerability of civil society institutions as generations change. His search for different ways of thinking about governance created the journal Alternatives, which he founded along with Dick Falk and Saul Mendlovitz. The scholarship on security demystified security as something constructed by experts. It transformed the discourse into an open-ended demand for people’s security, where peace was something demanded by a people than as a consequence of security. Behind the technicality of all this scholarship, Rajni chaired an oral tradition, a classic adda of politics at lunch time, which made politics come alive.

Politics, for Rajni, represented the most open of systems. Education was elitist, the bureaucracy a club; only politics introduced new forces and new ideas with exciting regularity. It was only in the political domain that the elite, our second-hand elite with its first-hand pretensions, could not remain knowledge-proof about the changes modern democracy was creating.

Pluralism of social science

The Emergency destroyed many of the old hegemonies as a generation of social movements challenged planned development, interrogated the accepted categories of science and questioned the validity of economics as a form of expertise. Rajni and his group were at the forefront of this bandwagon of ideas which dulled the economist’s halo and returned a sense of everydayness and complexity to democracy. I must point out that this was not easy to achieve. Economics was the dominant social science and the aura around planning added a mystique to economists like Sukhamoy Chakraborty, Sen and K.N. Raj. Delhi School was the Mecca and Marxism or some variant of socialism, the dominant ideology of most intellectuals. I remember Rajni handling overbearing Marxists with aplomb. But more than that, what Rajni and his group tried to show was that the categories of each discipline created a captive mind. More than ideology, dominant classifications became the iron cages of the era.

For a reinvention

This thinking added to the pluralism of social science in many ways. It challenged the hegemony of economics and the dominance of Marxism as a dominant intellectual perception. It showed that the university, ironically, was not always the source of original theory. People resisting the regime or the social movements helped invent more understandings of the political than our sedate universities still living off old textbooks on political theory. One was like a collection of heresies, the other a catechism, a collection of orthodoxies that the church or the party could be fond of. Yet, there was something human about the process, where alcohol and laughter often added to the celebration of social science. What gave power to the group was that it behaved like a commons and yet tolerated individuality and difference. Rajni’s was the one institute which openly resisted the Emergency. Everyone, from the gardener and the chowkidar to the academic fellow, was party to the decision-making. It became the benchmark for a later era. As the community aged, it became a dull imitation of itself, idiosyncratic in parts but without realising it was banalising itself. What I will do is to summarise the insights it offers as a fable.

This exploration of the social sciences re-examined a whole glossary of concepts like development, the non-party process, voluntarism, human security, decolonising knowledge and sustainability. Whatever the temporary excitement of a concept, all were validated by the democratic impetus and democracy in turn was interrogated and fine-tuned according to fresh redefinitions; as policy gets confused with politics and think tanks pretend they are democratic instruments. The social sciences have declined as part of the imagination of the university. The subject has been appropriated by security agencies, think tanks and marketing outfits which substitute their current interests for democracy. What we need today is a Futures unit among non-government organisations to challenge the think tanks as a technocratic imagination. We need to rip through the sanitised picturesqueness of the Human Development Reportand unravel the nature of violence today. We need to show the creative power of the informal economy rather than treat it as a space to be colonised. Our critique of science needs to be extended to a full-fledged critique of science in relation to a non-Promethean world. We need to collaborate with the ideas of scholars like Gustavo Esteva or Boas Santos who have emphasised the move from liberation to emancipation; where the victim confronts his roots in future oppression. All this would have been done in a non-Utopian way where everydayness, irony and laughter add a touch of scepticism to this work. All this would have been done without nostalgia.

We need a new heuristics for social science, a new attempt to invent a sociological imagination. As a society, we need new mindsets to create a new style of social science, a thinking which can revive the dullness of public policy and the hysterical triteness of social change. Only such a heuristics can reinvent democracy from cliché to a new sense of community.

(Shiv Visvanathan is a professor at Jindal School of Government and Public Policy.)

Keywords: social sciences, Rajni Kothari, Ashis Nandy, study of humanities, pluralism, voluntarism, marginalisation of social sciences, Lokayan, People’s Union for Civil Liberties, PUCL human rights

US Government confirms first case of Ebola

The first case of Ebola diagnosed in the U.S. was confirmed on Tuesday in a patient who recently travelled from Liberia to Dallas — a sign of the far-reaching impact of the out-of-control epidemic in West Africa.

The unidentified man was critically ill and has been in isolation at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital since Sunday, federal health officials said. They would not reveal his nationality or age.

Authorities have begun tracking down family and friends who may have had close contact with him and could be at risk for becoming ill. But officials said there are no other suspected cases in Texas.

At the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Director Tom Frieden said the man left Liberia on September 19, arrived the next day to visit relatives and started feeling ill four or five days later. He said it was not clear how the patient became infected.

There was no risk to any fellow airline passengers because the man had no symptoms when he was travelling, Mr. Frieden said. Ebola symptoms can include fever, muscle pain, vomiting and bleeding, and can appear as long as 21 days after exposure to the virus. The disease is not contagious until symptoms begin, and it takes close contact with bodily fluids to spread.

“The bottom line here is that I have no doubt we will control this importation, or this case of Ebola, so that it does not spread widely in this country,” Mr. Frieden told reporters. “It is certainly possible that someone who had contact with this individual, a family member or other individual, could develop Ebola in the coming weeks,” he added. “But there is no doubt in my mind that we will stop it here.”

In Washington, U.S. President Barack Obama was briefed about the diagnosis in a call from Mr. Frieden, the White House said.

Four American aid workers who became infected in West Africa have been flown back to the U.S. for treatment after they became sick. They were cared for in special isolation facilities at hospitals in Atlanta and Nebraska. Three have recovered.

Also, a U.S. doctor exposed to the virus in Sierra Leone is under observation in a similar facility at the National Institutes of Health. The U.S. has only four such isolation units. Asked whether the Texas patient would be moved to one of those specialty facilities, Mr. Frieden said there was no need and virtually any hospital can provide the proper care and infection control.

Dr. Edward Goodman, an epidemiologist at the hospital, said the U.S. was much better prepared to handle the disease than African hospitals, which are often short of doctors, gloves, gowns and masks. “We don’t have those problems. So we’re perfectly capable of taking care of this patient with no risk to other people,” Dr. Goodman said.

After arriving in the U.S. on September 20, the man began to develop symptoms last Wednesday and initially sought care two days later. But he was released. At the time, hospital officials did not know he had been in West Africa. He returned later as his condition worsened.

Blood tests by Texas health officials and the CDC separately confirmed an Ebola diagnosis on Tuesday.

State health officials described the patient as seriously ill. Dr. Goodman said he was able to communicate and was hungry.

The hospital is discussing if experimental treatments would be appropriate, Mr. Frieden said. Since the summer months, U.S. health officials have been preparing for the possibility that an individual traveller could unknowingly arrive with the infection. Health authorities have advised hospitals on how to prevent the virus from spreading within their facilities.

People boarding planes in the outbreak zone are checked for fever, but that does not guarantee that an infected person won’t get through. Liberia is one of the three hardest-hit countries in the epidemic, along with Sierra Leone and Guinea.

Ebola is believed to have sickened more than 6,500 people in West Africa, and more than 3,000 deaths have been linked to the disease, according to the World Health Organization. But even those tolls are probably underestimates, partially because there are not enough labs to test people for Ebola.

Two mobile Ebola labs staffed by American naval researchers arrived this weekend and will be operational this week, according to the U.S. Embassy in Monrovia. The labs will reduce the amount of time it takes to learn if a patient has Ebola from several days to a few hours. The U.S. military also delivered equipment to build a field hospital, originally designed to treat troops in combat zones. The 25-bed clinic will be staffed by American health workers and will treat doctors and nurses who have become infected.

The U.S. is planning to build 17 other clinics in Liberia and will help train more health workers to staff them. Britain has promised to help set up 700 treatment beds in Sierra Leone, and its military will build and staff a hospital in that country. France is sending a field hospital and doctors to Guinea.

Keywords: Ebola, Ebola virus, Ebola in the US, West African countries, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea, Ebola outbreak