Jan 20 2015 : The Times of India (Delhi)

'World's 1% to be richer than rest by next year'

Kounteya Sinha

London





The wealthiest 1% people will own more than the rest of the world's population by 2016, according to anti-poverty charity Oxfam.The share of global wealth owned by this elite group increased from 44% in 2009 to 48% in 2014; its members have an av erage wealth of $2.7 million.
Oxfam's executive director Winnie Byanyima, who will cochair an event at the World Economic Forum in Davos, said she would use the forum to demand urgent action to narrow the gap between the rich and poor.
The international agency warned that an explosion in inequality was holding back the fight against global poverty at a time when one in nine people don't have enough to eat and more than one billion people still live on less than $1.25 a day.

Panel for upgradation of Fifth Schedule areas

AJIT PATOWARY
 GUWAHATI, Jan 16 – Contrary to the stand of several organisations in Assam against Sixth Schedule areas, the High Level Committee, constituted by the Central government with Prof Virginius Xaxa as its Chairman to examine the socio-economic, health and educational status of the tribal communities of the country, has recommended extension of the pattern of the Sixth Schedule in the form of Autonomous Councils in the Fifth Schedule areas.
The Fifth Schedule areas of the country are located in Andhra Pradesh, Jharkhand, Chattisgarh, Himachal Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Odissa and Rajasthan.
The Committee said that the extension of the Sixth Schedule areas should be done in accordance with the ‘Provisions of Panchayat (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act, 1996’. The specific provision notes that “the State Legislature shall endeavour to follow the pattern of the Sixth Schedule to the Constitution, while designing the administrative arrangements in the panchayats at district levels in the Scheduled Areas,” said the above legislation.
The Committee maintained that this pattern would provide tribal areas with an institutional structure that mediates between the State government and hamlet-level Gram Sabha. There are various forms of Autonomous Councils in the Sixth Schedule areas. These are represented by Meghalaya, Mizoram, Tripura and Assam, it said.
It recommended that the laws and policies enacted by the Parliament and State Legislatures should not be automatically applied in the Fifth Schedule areas (as was the case under colonial rule or as is presently the case in the Sixth Schedule areas). Its applicability should be made contingent on the discretion of the Governor who would determine its applicability or non-applicability or applicability with modifications/amendments on the advice of Tribes Advisory Council, it said.

In case the above is untenable, the Committee said the Governor should be mandated to take the advice of the Tribes Advisory Council and examine legislations and policies (particularly, though not exclusively, those pertaining to issues such as forests, land acquisition, conservation, mines and minerals, health and education) passed by the Parliament or State Legislatures and the implications of the same on tribal welfare. A mechanism for such examination and action should be clearly stated and established, the Committee said.

School system fails students

Considering Nobel laureate Amartya Sen’s caution regarding the insecurity that people face over a lifetime due to the deprivation of basic education, the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2014 calls for a hard look at the situation. Its findings amount to a distressing catalogue of the failures inherent in the pedagogic methods of instruction in vogue. The foremost among them is the overemphasis on a curriculum that is geared to outcomes in the form of examination results, at the expense of a process of learning that is oriented to a mastery of concepts. These shortcomings underlie the original assumption that students of a particular grade would not measure up to commensurate standards; and that any such evaluation would hence be an exercise in futility. That is the apparent rationale behind the ASER assessment of actual student performance based on a lower set of metrics. The report points out that just a small proportion of third-graders are able to read even a text from a lower grade, let alone their own. Any improvement in later years is at best marginal, says the report. The fact is that reading skills are not imparted as part of classroom activity.

ASER also shows that pupils from the higher classes are unable to perform even simple tasks of division or subtraction. This may have to do with the inadequate reinforcement of concepts over the years owing to the structure of the syllabus. For instance, the use of logarithms that were once taught from Class 9 has been dropped from the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) curriculum. Students are hence denied the opportunity to learn complex mathematical computations. Besides, the mathematics knowledge that people need in daily life is mostly arithmetic-based. Yet, the latter has been omitted from the Class 9 and 10 syllabus. Time was when students could opt between a basic and advanced level of math from Class 8 or 9 under some State boards. The current CBSE paper, tailored to the requirement of engineering aspirants, may be imposing an undue burden on students inclined to pursue different academic streams. A healthy pupil-teacher ratio could also help overcome many of these shortcomings. The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act stipulates a 30:1 ratio. ASER notes that the country has come consistently close to universal enrolment in the 6-14 age group for six consecutive years. That may have afforded some consolation in an age where the prevailing wisdom held that poor families are disinclined to send children to school. In today’s competitive environment, the ability of students to read, write, count and measure is a bare minimum. The country cannot continue to fail its children.

Keywords: ASER 2014, Education report, Amartya Sen, Indian education system, Central Board of Secondary Education curriculum, mode of learning

New online education venture launched

First generation entrepreneur Ronnie Screwvala is launching U Education, an online company focused on higher education. The new venture involves an outlay of Rs 100 crore in the first phase mainly into content, interactivity, platform, technology, assessments, adaptive learning, marketing and building a national footprint.

“India has the largest college going age cohort in the world, yet only one out five of them enroll into higher education, resulting in one of the lowest higher education enrollment ratios, even among most developing nations. If we have to meet our GDP growth targets, we need to at least double the participation rate immediately, otherwise we will miss out on our demographic dividend,” Screwvala said in a statement.

The Indian education sector is a little over $ 70 billion, with higher Education – undergrad / post grad and doctorate accounting for nearly $ 11 billion. The bulk – $ 40 billion comes from pre – school and K-12, $ 4 billion from vocational education and the rest from the ancillary and support services (tutoring, uniforms, books and others).

The sector, the statement says, needs over $ 200 billion in investment between 2015 – 2020 to bridge some of the gap and get to a strong level of quality. Mayank Kumar comes on board as Co-Founder and Managing Director of U Education with a decade of experience in the education sector across India, China, Latin America, S E Asia, Middle East and Africa. “Our goal will be to foster the next level of degree education / learning and train the next generation Indian workforce to take on the industries of the future,” says Mayank.

NEW JOURNAL: EJOURNAL ON ENVIRONMENTAL LAW, POLICY AND DEVELOPMENT [JELPD]

eISSN: 2348-7046
INAUGURAL ISSUE: No.1, 2014.

FREQUENCY: Annual
PUBLISHER: National Law School of India University, Bangalore (Karnataka) 
 
ABOUT: JELPD is a peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary journal, jointly published online, by the Commons Cell and the Centre for Environmental Law Education, Research and Advocacy (CEERA), a research wing on Human Rights and Environment, at the National Law School of India University, Bangalore, on its website www.nlsenlaw.org.

JELPD aims to be a forum that involves, promotes and engage s students, scholars and anyone interested in environmental law,to express and share their ideas and opinions. The Journal also plans to feature guest articles by eminent scholars as well as articles by students, thereby providin g an interface for the two communities to interact.

Current Issue (Read Online)

1. Patron-in-Chief: Prof. (Dr) R Venkata Rao

2. Patron: Prof. (Dr) M K Ramesh

3. Chief Editor: Dr. Sairam Bhat

4. Assistant Editors: Mr. Manjeri Subin Sunder Raj and Mr. Chiradeep Basak

Jan 19 2015 : The Times of India (Delhi)

Why do zebras have stripes? To keep them cool

New York





Zebras’ thick, black stripes may have evolved to help them stay cool in the midday African heat, a new study has found.Researchers have long struggled to explain the purpose of the zebra’s unique black-and-white coat. It has been suggested that the stripes may help zebras camouflage themselves and escape from lions and other predators; avoid nasty bites from disease-carrying flies; or control body heat by generating small-scale breezes over the zebra's body when light and dark stripes heat up at different rates.
Researchers at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) examined how 29 different environmental variables influence stripe styles of plains zebras at 16 different sites from south to central Africa. The scientists found that the definition of stripes along a zebra’s back most closely correlated with temperature and precipitation in a zebra’s environment, and did not correlate with the prevalence of li ons or tsetse flies in the region.
These findings suggest that torso stripes may do more to help zebras regulate their body temperature than to avoid predators and tsetse flies, ‘Live Science’ reported.
Other animals also need to regulate body temperature, or thermoregulate, said co-author Ren Larison, a researcher at UCLA, but zebras may especially benefit from an extra cooling system as they digest food less efficiently than other grazers in Africa.

Jan 19 2015 : The Times of India (Delhi)

FOR FREE SPEECH - Reading of Tamil writer's banned book held at JNU

New Delhi: TIMES NEWS NETWORK





Students, academics and authors tried to resuscitate free expression and the penmanship of Perumal Murugan who announced his death as a writer early last week. Several scholars, including a Tamil filmmaker, held a reading of his contentious book, and read extracts from a few other banned books.Murugan had to tender an unconditional apology for his book Mathorubagan and later announced renouncement of his literary pursuit which was reportedly under pressure as the district administration and the police did not stand by the author. A few community lead ers had said they were hurt by his book, in which the author dealt with practice of consensual free sex.
At an event organized by the Student Federation of India (SFI), hundreds of scholars met outside the administrative block and read parts from his book and held a discussion on his work. Among the participants were professors from Delhi University and Jawaharlal Nehru University, and Leena Manimekalai, a Tamil filmmaker and poet.
“The gathering read extracts from Murugan’s book, AK Ramanujan’s ‘300 Ramayanas’, BR Ambedkar’s ‘Riddles in Hinduism’ and other works that have been banned in universities and libraries in our country,” said Shruti, a second year English MA student at JNU, and a member of SFI.