Jan 05 2015 : The Economic Times (Delhi)

Celebrating Ancient Indian Inventions

Divya Rajagopal

Mumbai:





Indian Science Congress hopes to revive knowledge in ancient texts

Egg shells, cow dung and juice of cactus were used as polymers to build houses, knives used by ancient Indian surgeons were so sharp they could slit a hair strand into two, and much before Wright brothers invented aeroplanes Maharishi Bharadwaj wrote about it.These were some of the key points of discussion at a session on 'Ancient Indian Sciences through Sanskrit' at the 102nd Indian Science Congress held in Mumbai on Sunday. According to the organisers, the topic was introduced in an attempt to revive the “vast knowledge of science“ contained in the Puranas and Vedas.
“The objective of this event is to have a pure secular and scientific session,“ said Prakash Javdekar, the Union environment minister, who inaugurated the session.“Ancient Indian scientific theory, without much tools and machines, was based on observation, logic and that wisdom has relevance today,“ tronomy, it was ancient India that discovered that earth moves around the sun,“ said Dr SB Nimse, vice chancellor, Lucknow University, and an organiser of the event.
The session also focused on topics like engineering applications of ancient Indian botany, scientific principles of ancient Indian architecture and civil engineering, ancient Indian aviation technology and advances in surgery in ancient India.
Dr AS Nene, retired professor of civil engineering from VNIT College Nagpur, spoke about how a herbal paste prepared by grinding eleven types of seeds or roots in cow's urine, when applied to a person's feet helps in locating underground water. He, however, cautioned that the experiment couldn't be proven because of lack of availability of certain ingredients.
Captain Anand J Bodas, who had created a stir a few days before with his theory on ancient aviation technology, was undeterred by criticism and urged young Indians to explore the writings of sage Maharishi Bhardwaja.“In 21st century, we all should study and spread achievements of sages,“ Bodos said.“In ancient times, exhaust wipes were made of clothes and animal skin, which made it easier to wipe, we all should study that technique and manufacture such equipments for airplanes“ he said.
Reacting to criticism about mixing of science and mythology , Dr Gauri Mahulikar, head of Mumbai University's Sanskrit department, who put together this event, said that one should not form opinions without analysing, debating and justifying truths. “Debate has been integral part of our education,“ Mahulikar said.
“Sanskritists and scientists should come together for such interdisciplinary innovative projects. I would propose to all government bodies to incorporate primary introductory process of ancient Indian sciences in their science syllabi,“ she suggested.
This session on ancient Indian Sciences had created much furore in the last couple of weeks, with over 100 scientists rubbishing the idea as pseudo science. NASA scientist Ram Prasad Gandhiraman started a petition which asked the ISC not to give a platform for such ideas.

Jan 05 2015 : The Times of India (Delhi)

Sense On Science





PM's call to put science and research at forefront welcome, now government must act on it

Speaking at the Indian Science Congress, Prime Minister Narendra S Modi hit all the right buttons by declaring that he will pay as much attention to ease of doing research and development in India as to ease of doing business, that China's emergence as the world's second biggest economy paralleled its rise to second place in science and technology and that India needs to focus on science and innovation as a top priority . At a time when he is also putting research-led initiatives at the centre of his foreign policy, the PM's call for greater flexibility in science funding and freeing the university system from excessive regulation and cumbersome procedures is welcome. Now his government must act on it.Unfortunately India's education sector remains an exemplar of exactly the reverse maxim of what Modi wishes to promote: maximum government, minimum governance. India's overly regulated education sector means that not one Indian university is currently ranked among the world's top 200. India is also the only Brics country with no representation among the top 100 global universities.
With only 0.88% of Indian GDP going to research and development investments, India also spends much less on science and technology than US (2.74%), South Korea (4.04%) or China (about 2%). With government aiming to increase R&D ex penditure to 2% in the current Plan period (2012-17), India needs a drastic overhaul of how it manages higher education.
Instead of focussing on greater autonomy and flexibility to universities, the HRD ministry has so far aimed for even greater centralisation. Delhi University was forced to scrap its experiment with four-year undergraduate degrees, Kendriya Vidyalaya students were put in an impossible situation with the row over German and Sanskrit, IIT Delhi's director resigned reportedly over an educational tie-up with Mauritius and a draft Bill has been circulated proposing greater uniformity in governance structures at central universities.
Universities need functional and financial autonomy for achieving excellence, not greater control from Delhi. We have seen great innovations in several Indian sectors after the state withdrew stifling controls.The time has come for government to get out of the way in higher education too. Government must provide only a broad framework, an enabling environment for innovation as it opens up the sector. The rest should be left to competition and a transparent performancebased system of funding without fear or favour.

Jan 05 2015 : The Times of India (Delhi)

Pollution Solution





Swachh Bharat also means Swachh Vatavaran, start discouraging diesel

Showing up the continuing constraints on deregulation in India, S government has raised excise duty on fuel three times since November ­ violating the spirit of deregulation to meet its budgetary challenges, instead of wholly passing through the drop in global prices. This kind of interference also undermined both UPA and the previous NDA government's commitments to price deregulation. Meanwhile, nothing much is being done about a truly foul distortion in the fuel price market ­ higher excise duties on petrol make diesel look more attractive, even though diesel is much the worse polluter as it is easier to adulterate.Helped along by this differential diesel passenger vehicles reportedly accounted for 49% of all new cars sold last year across India ­ up from 20% just a few years ago, even as data about their polluting impact is piling up. An Environment Pollution (Prevention and Control) Authority report linked a spurt in diesel cars to the premature death of thousands of children in Delhi. In winter, signs of a growing crisis are palpable in the capital and other north Indian cities. A low-hanging shroud of smog impairs visibility , chokes lungs; children are particularly traumatised by asthma, respiratory illnesses and hospitalisations.
Votaries of low diesel prices call it the poor person's fuel. But there is nothing stopping the wealthy from taking advantage of India's fuel pricing anomaly . After all private cars use a lot more diesel than buses or agriculture ­ an overwhelming majority of SUVs are running on diesel. In India's growing car market, every day's delay in discouraging diesel noxiously expands how long the country will be captive to its pollution. Swachh Bharat ought to include Swachh Vatavaran, clean air, in its definition. It's imperative to level excise duties across petrol and diesel.

Jan 05 2015 : The Times of India (Delhi)

IIT-M TO POWER IDEAS of entrepreneurial success

Sindhu Hariharan





Centre for Innovation (CFI), a student-run innovation lab at IIT-Madras, is run ning an initiative called Nirmaan, a mock incubator to support students with entrepreneurial interests by providing them a riskfree environment to develop their ideas and shielding them from financial pressures through seed funding. Mahesh Panchagnula, adviser of co-curricular at IIT Madras, said that though CFI's motto is `Walk in with an idea, walk out with a product', right now the students build a prototype and leave it at that. Through Nirmaan, they aim to make students work on improving their prototype so that at the end of their college stint they are ready with a marketable product.Twenty-nine teams and projects are now part of Nirmaan after a registration and selection process in September.The seed funding of `2 lakh per team is being provided as per requirement and the progress of ideas is being reviewed by a faculty team. The funds come from alumni grants, corporate sponsors and institute funds.
Sai Gole, a student manager at CFI and also a member of Nirmaan, said the idea is to make it easier for student ventures to enter the startup ecosystem outside the college by reducing a few steps in the process.“With a relatively mature product and a network of mentors already with them, it is easier for the student entrepreneurs to approach incubators and investors,“ Gole said. She added that almost six startup teams that were part of CFI were able to get incubation at IIT Madras' incubation cell.
The 29 teams which are part of Nirmaan are working on a variety of in novative products ranging from a lightbased wearable that is an alternative to alarm clocks to portable paper strip tests to detect milk adulteration. Student managers of CFI are also planning to approach the faculty and students of other colleges to explain the concept of Nirmaan and two institutions have already expressed interest in the idea.
IIT Madras started CFI in 2008 with funds donated by the 1981 batch during their silver jubilee reunion. While CFI's clubs had around 500 student members in 2008, it now boasts of almost 1,300 student members showing the increase in a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship among the institute's students.

DOCTORAL SCHOLARSHIPS 2014

GRADUATE SCHOLARSHIPS FOR STUDENTS WISHING TO PURSUE DPHIL STUDIES

Department of Social Policy and Intervention, University of Oxford, United Kingdom.
Applications Last Date: January 23, 2015.

ABOUT: The Department of Social Policy and Intervention, University of Oxford is offering graduate scholarships for students wishing to pursue doctoral – DPhil – studies in an international and interdisciplinary centre of excellence in (comparative) social policy as well as social intervention and evaluation research. 
We are conducting cutting-edge research in a wide range of areas. Our research portfolio is organised in three clusters: Oxford Institute of Social Policy (OISP), Centre for Evidence-Based Intervention (CEBI)and Oxford Centre for Population Research (OXPOP).
OISP is inviting DPhil proposals in the following areas: family and family policies; educational inequalities and educational policies; labour market policies; poverty, social inequalities and social mobility; social policy in developing countries; policies of social protection; welfare state change in comparative perspective as well as politics of social policy in rich democracies.
CEBI is inviting DPhil proposals in the following areas: evaluation methodology in social intervention; alcohol and drug misuse; child mental health; antisocial behaviour in children and youth; parenting and family interventions; HIV prevention; AIDS affected children; HIV positive children; sleep problems and cross-cultural adaptation of interventions.  
OXPOP is inviting DPhil proposals in demography and social policy (with a special focus on Asia).
We offer doctoral students a unique graduate programme tailored to their individual needs. Our doctoral students are supervised and supported by internationally renowned academics. In addition, we offer a large and diverse range of seminars, workshops and advanced training opportunities in order to further enhance postgraduate research experience. Most of our doctoral students find jobs in leading research universities, international organisations or government departments.
We invite applications from outstanding graduates in Demography, Economics, Political Science, Psychology, Social Policy and Social Work and Sociology, or closely related fields. We are interested in candidates with proposals in the areas of our research expertise and interest. You can learn more about our supervisory expertise here: 
We have the following scholarships available for entry in October 2015:

• The Barnett Scholarship
• The Centenary Scholarship
• Two ESRC scholarships

All applicants that apply by 23 January 2015 will also be considered for the University’s flagshipClarendon Scholarship Fund. The department also has access to additional pooled ESRC scholarships.
For information about the various scholarships and details of how to apply, visit our Funding pages.
The deadline for scholarship applications is 23 January 2015 (12 noon UK time).
For enquiries, please contact: scholarships@spi.ox.ac.uk.

Jan 02 2015 : The Economic Times (Delhi)

Hindustan's 80% Minority

Abheek Barman





FOLK THEOREM There's no surprise in Indian politics' latest lurch towards communalism

In the 2001 census returns, people who called themselves `Hindus' were a little more than 80% of the population of India.Yet, since May when the BJP came to power, the only thing its parent, the RSS, wants is to convert Muslims, Christians, Jews -and anyone else in the 20% -to Hinduism.
So now, we have mass conversion campaigns, turning Indian politics into a pressure cooker of communal rhetoric. Parliament is paralysed.Reforms are stalled. Those who imagined that Narendra Modi would push development, not sectarianism, are pulling their hair out.
Spare your scalp. This chronicle was foretold more than 85 years ago when the bizarre theories that fuel the RSS and its allies took shape.Many assumptions based on prejudice and a warped telling of history underlie this.
One is about how Muslim `invaders' came to India and converted Hindus to Islam at the point of the sword.If true, this would imply parts of the subcontinent ruled by the sultanates and the Mughal empire, based largely out of Delhi, would have the maximum number of converts to Islam.
In an influential paper published in 1985, the American historian Richard M Eaton showed that exactly the opposite was true. Looking at data from 1200 to pre-Partition India, he found that the areas of the subcontinent that had the maximum number of Muslims were places beyond the pale of Delhi's `Islamic' administration; and where Delhi had maximum control, the number of Muslims was the least.
The most Islamised places were Balochistan, the northwest areas, western Punjab, greater Bengal, and coastal areas on the western peninsula from Gujarat to Kerala. The heart of Sultanate and Mughal administration, from Rajasthan in the west to Gangetic Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Madhya Pradesh, were the least Islamised areas.
Currency Converter
The northwest, western Punjab and greater Bengal were never `Hinduised' in any meaningful way . They took easily to Islam when, in the west, Iranian and Turkic folks brought farm innovations like the Persian wheel to convert the kinetic energy of water for other uses, vastly boosting yields and incomes. In the east, as the course of the Ganga shifted from western to eastern Bengal, fertility improved, and local Sufi saints guided folks to better methods of cultivation and incomes. Indeed, even today , farm productivity in Bangladesh is better than in West Bengal.
But the biggest integrator with Islam was commerce. The landlocked west and parts of east Bengal got connected with land trade routes that stretched from China to Europe.
Many of these traders spoke Arabic or Persian, and we imbibed much from them. The peninsular region absorbed Islam through maritime trade across the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean. You didn't need a sword to convert. The plough and profits were enough. So, how did plough and profit yield to toxic Hindutva? Sometime in the 1920s, an upper caste, English-educa ted Maharashtrian decided that Hin dus had had enough of `foreign' rule.
His solution: get rid of the Muslims, Christians and all non-Hindus and expand ` Aryan' supremacy globally .
He had tried to kill a Briton in En gland, was captured, spent time in jail and wrote the Bible of the RSS.
He argued that long ago, every race in the world was inferior to Hindus, who were originally Aryan super men from a land of seven rivers and invented everything worth knowing, presumably with the exception of in stant coffee and Google.
This knowledge they exported to the West, and forgot all about it. So, they were unprepared when the West turned everything back on us.
Turning Full Circle
Now, it was payback time. Kick all infidels out or turn them into Hindus, if necessary , at the point of a trishul.This book, published in 1923, was Hindutva. Its author was Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, or as the RSS calls him, `Veer' -brave -Savarkar. One of the few people who took him seriously was a Greek-French woman called Maximiani Portas, or Savitri Devi, as she called herself.She exported Savarkar's ideas to Bengal and to Adolf Hitler, no less. But Savarkar couldn't live up to his lofty ideals or his `Veer' epithet. He crawled before his captors to get out of jail and never took part in the Independence movement.
To get out of the slammer, he wrote, “If the government in their manifold beneficence and mercy release me, I for one cannot but be the staunchest advocate of constitutional progress and loyalty to the English government.... My conversion to the constitutional line would bring back all those misled young men in India and abroad who were once looking up to me as their guide.... The Mighty alone can afford to be merciful and, therefore, where else can the prodigal son return but to the parental doors of the government.“
Savarkar, the fountainhead of Hindu supremacism, bartered his beliefs for personal freedom. Today , his followers indulge in doublespeak about development and demagoguery .

Jan 02 2015 : The Times of India (Delhi)

Cancer best way to die: Ex-editor of med journal

Kounteya Sinha

London:





The former editor of the world's best known medical journal -The British Medical Journal (BMJ) -has caused a storm by saying that cancer is the best way to die. Richard Smith says “stay away from overambitious oncologists, and let's stop wasting billions trying to cure cancer, potentially leaving us to die a more horrible death“.He added “death from cancer is the best. You can say goodbye, reflect on your life, leave last messages, perhaps visit special places for a last time, listen to favourite pieces of music, read loved poems, and prepare, according to your beliefs, to meet your maker or enjoy eternal oblivion“. “This is, I recognise, a romantic view of dying, but it is achievable with love, morphine, and whisky . But stay away from overambitious oncologists, and let's stop wasting billions trying to cure cancer, potentially leaving us to die a much more horrible death,“ he added. Richard was the editor of BMJ till 2004 and is now chairman of the board of directors of medical smartphone app Patients Know Best. He said that most people wish for a sudden death, “but it may be very tough on those around you, particularly if you leave an important relationship wounded and unhealed.