The final test: Will National Testing Agency see the light of the day?

 

Finance Minister Arun Jaitley in his budget speech on Wednesday announced setting up an autonomous and self-sustainable "National Testing Agency" for conducting entrance exams to higher education institutions in a "professional way".
The National Testing Service (NTS), a nodal agency, aims to free up institutions such as the CBSE, IITs, IIMs, and the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) that are currently tasked to conduct national-level exams for admission to medical, engineering and business schools.This would free the CBSE and the AICTE from administrative responsibility, so that they can focus more on academics," Jaitley said without mentioning the deadline to establish this body.
What Jaitely didn't share in his speech was that several governments in the past have proposed and, subsequently, shelved the NTS for reasons best known to them.
The Programme of Action, 1992 for implementation of the National Policy on Education (1986) first advocated the setting up of a national level body for entrance exams. Almost 15 years later, the National Knowledge Commission (2006-2009) also proposed National Talent Service for conducting independent test.
Most recently, the Ashok Misra Committee of Eminent Persons which was formed to review the JEE system (2015) also recommended constituting an independent body for conducting these exams.
"Nothing moved even when the CBSE had to conduct All India Pre Medical Test examination twice in 2015 because of paper leak," says a medical student.
More than 40 lakh students appear for seven tests — CAT, JEE (Main), JEE (Advanced), GATE, CMAT, NEET, NET — conducted by the CBSE, IITs, IIMs and AICTE every year.
However, it was part of the Central Advisory Board of Education agenda last year, following which the MHRD readied the Cabinet note on the National Testing Service (NTS) in December 2016.
"The NTS is expected to be on the lines of the Educational Testing Service (ETS) in the United States. It would be registered as a society under the Indian Societies Act by June 2017. It will conduct the UGC-NET exam by 2017 end followed by NEET and JEE from 2018," said an MHRD official.
Initially, the government will provide a corpus of Rs 50 crore to NTS. Thereafter, examination fee paid by 40 lakh students should make it fully self-reliant to meet all operational expenses, says the official.

Source: DNA, 2-02-2017

Spreading cheer: A new lesson in empowering youth

Empowering the youth through education and jobs will be the key focus

Reforms in Higher Education, regulation of the University Grants Commission (UGC) to provide more autonomy to education institutions and setting up of a body that conducts entrance tests, are some of the key highlights of this year's budget for the education sector, which was a part of the Finance Minister's 10-point agenda speech.
The Finance Minister Arun Jaitley while presenting the budget said that "empowering the youth through education and jobs" is one of the highlights of the government this year. However, the budget allocated for education is still among the lowest of all crucial ministries.
There has been an eight per cent increase in the overall allocation to Ministry of Human Resource Development for 2017-18 as compared to 2016-17, with major increase for IITs. The Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) have been allocated Rs. 7.8 thousand crore, around 2.5 thousand crore more than last year. According to sources in the ministry, the increased budget for support to IITs has been allotted for the project Vishwajeet, under which the government plans to develop seven old IITs and catapult them to world class institutions. A good amount of money has been allotted for autonomous institutions as well. Allocation for other major heads like Sarva Shikha Abhiyan and teacher's training has also seen an increase as compared to last year.
Reacting to the allocation for education sector, Human Resource Development Minister Prakash Javadekar said, "Government's thrust for improving the overall quality of education is reflected in the budget."There has been emphasis on science education by giving more importance to research and innovation and providing the right kinds of skills so that everyone becomes employable," he adds.
Talking about reforms in higher education, the minister said, "Regulation of UGC is something that has been long overdue and we are dutybound. By doing this, we will be able to give more autonomy to institutes that perform well. Institutes that perform good will be given complete autonomy, average performers will get fifty per cent autonomy and those not performing well will have a greater say by the government."
"It's good that the new budget has underlined reforming UGC. Improving quality of research and teaching in universities should be top priority. To improve quality of higher education, it's a good move that institutions will get autonomy based on accreditation and ranking," shared Vice Chancellor Jawaharlal Nehru University, M Jagadesh Kumar.
"The budget has some exciting proposals for the higher education sector. Hopefully the reforms of UGC will see it pass on some of its multiple responsibilities to the Higher Education Financing Agency and focus on regulation," says Rudra Sensarma, Professor of Economics, IIM Kozhikode.

Source: DNA, 2-02-2017

 

Drawing up a diet plan 

The welfare challenge lies in providing assistance to needy households to ensure adequate diets without creating conditions in which they opt for inferior diets that are too heavy on cereals

With the Kerala government’s decision to implement the National Food Security Act (NFSA) from April, the whole country will be covered by the legislation. However, if we expect the NFSA to improve India’s malnutrition statistics, we may well be disappointed. According to a study by Himanshu and Abhijit Sen, even before the NFSA is fully implemented, use of the public distribution system (PDS) expanded sharply with proportion of households getting PDS subsidy rising from about 25% in 2004-05 to 50% in 2011-12. However, decline in child malnutrition has been far more modest.

A patchy record

While we still do not have nationwide data on malnutrition, State-wise data from Annual Health Survey/District Level Health Surveys of 2012-14 as well as National Family Health Survey IV of 2015-16 suggest only modest improvement in child malnutrition since the National Family Health Survey III of 2005-06. Proportion of households receiving PDS subsidies in Rajasthan increased by about 15 percentage points, underweight declined by 3 percentage points; neighbouring Madhya Pradesh experienced similar increase in the PDS but a sharper decline underweight (17 percentage points); another neighbour Gujarat shows a drop in PDS use but records a modest improvement in underweight statistics (5 percentage points). The strangest case is that of Andhra Pradesh where 59% of the population received PDS subsidy in 2004-05 rising to 76 % in 2011-12 but underweight rate seems to be stuck around 32% with hardly any improvement. Why do we see this disconnect? Critiques of the PDS may point to leakages and suggest that perhaps these subsidies are not reaching the target beneficiaries. However, a large number of studies have recorded improving performance of the PDS and suggest this may be an overly cynical assumption. Other critiques may argue that with rising incomes, poverty has fallen in India and regardless of the PDS, individuals may get sufficient calories, making changes in PDS use irrelevant to caloric intake. This also seems somewhat of an overreach, given the entrenched poverty in some sections of the country and society.
A recently released report based on India Human Development Survey of 2004-05 and 2011-12 suggests that the relationship between the PDS and nutrition may be more complex. Jointly organised by researchers from National Council of Applied Economic Research and University of Maryland, this is the first nationwide survey to interview the same households at two points in time. By matching households with similar income, family size, land ownership and place of residence, but one group with Below Poverty Line (BPL) or Antyodaya Anna Yojana (AAY) card and the other without these cards, this study is able to compare apples to apples and examine the role of the PDS in a quasi-experimental design.
The results suggest that access to PDS subsidies changes the way people allocate their household resources. When rice, wheat and other cereals are available cheaply, households try to get more of their required calories from cereals and less from milk, fruits and vegetables. Results show that households with BPL/AAY cards consume a monthly per capita average of 11.87 kg of cereals, but only 2.77 litres of milk. In contrast, households without BPL/AAY cards but at the same income level, consume somewhat less cereals (11.22 kg) but more milk (3.21 litres). One would normally expect that the savings from cereal purchase due to price subsidies would be used to buy milk, fruit and nuts, but in an era where school and medical costs are rising and households face many other demands on their purse, these savings seem to be spent on non-food items. Food consumption forms 56% of household budget in BPL/AAY households compared to a slightly higher level (58%) in matched households without access to PDS subsidies.
A prior study using the same data and a similar matching procedure, published in a joint NCAER/Brookings journal, India Policy Forum, found that households with a BPL/AAY card were no better than households without PDS subsidies when it came to child nutrition. This may well be because access to cheap calories reduces consumption of different foods and dietary diversity is very important for balanced nutrition.
This does not mean that we should do away with food subsidies. The NCAER report mentioned earlier also found that for very poor households or householdsthat experience income declines of 20% or more between the two surveys, access to the PDS is very important for preserving food intake and dietary diversity. When faced with a sharp income decline, households with BPL/AAY cards reduce their cereal intake by 770 g per capita per month, and maintain their milk intake. In contrast, households who can’t avail of food subsidies reduced their monthly per capita cereal intake by 930 g and milk intake by 280 milliliters.

Nudged towards better choices

The challenge lies in providing assistance to needy households to ensure adequate diets without creating conditions in which they opt for inferior diets that are heavy on cereals. This is a particular challenge for modern India where rates of diabetes, high blood pressure and heart conditions are on the rise. Indian immigrants in the U.S. and U.K. also suffer from higher prevalence of these conditions than the native-born. So it may be that Indians have greater genetic predisposition for these so-called “lifestyle” diseases, but it is also well recognised that these diseases are exacerbated by excessive consumption of carbohydrates, amply available in cereals.
Cash transfers may be one way of dealing with this challenge. They would allow households to invest in better diets without circumscribing what they consume. However, their success would depend on the ability to effectively administer transfers and reduce leakages. Moreover, how this may affect grain markets remains unknown. International research on cash versus in-kind food subsidies presents mixed results, with the effectiveness of cash transfers depending on the institutional framework. Current debates on Universal Basic Income tend to see it as an additional component of social safety nets. But if the mechanisms for effective administration of the UBI are in place, it is possible to make a case for replacing PDS by cash transfers on nutritional grounds and this is well within the framework laid down by the NFSA.

Sonalde Desai is Professor of Sociology at University of Maryland and Senior Fellow at National Council of Applied Economic Research. Views are personal.

Source: The Hindu, 1-02-2017

 

Budget 2017: Students to be free of ‘burden’ of preparing for multiple exams 

Budget 2017 has been promising for education stakeholders. ‘Exciting’ proposals have been made for the higher education sector, students will not have to appear for multiple entrance examinations. Innovation and creativity will be given a push in schools. Autonomy for colleges and institutes will enable them to improve their performance without government interference.
Reforms in UGC will allow the education regulator to intensify focus on academic matters and promote excellence in education. “Hopefully, this (proposal) will see (UGC) pass on some of its multiple responsibilities to the Higher Education Financing Agency and focus on regulation,” says Dr Rudra Sensarma, professor of economics, IIM Kozhikode.
Similarly, the proposed national testing agency will free up educational institutions and boards and councils like CBSE and AICTE from the job of conducting admission tests and “students will be relieved that they have to now write fewer exams for admissions,” says Sensarma.
Learning level assessments and autonomy for boards like CBSE are a “reassurance of commitment to improve quality,” says Shailender Sharma, vice president, education and skill development, IPE Global, an international development consulting group.
Rohin Kapoor, director, Deloitte Haskins & Sells LLP, says greater autonomy in higher education will address longstanding demands of the industry and “hopefully facilitate India’s entry into the global Ivy League.”
The proposal to allow reputed hospitals to start courses should provide a boost to medical education. Sensarma also feels it will fill the resource gap in the health sector.
The bright spots in the budget, according to Narayanan Ramaswamy, partner and head of education and skill development, KPMG in India, are the announcement of an innovation fund for local innovation in schools, and autonomous status for more colleges and institutes.
Kapoor is optimistic that the focus on monitoring and improving learning outcomes through investment in ICT-(information and communication technology) enabled transformation will have a far reaching impact on improving quality, equity and access of education in the country.
Provision of funds towards education offers the opportunity to usher changes in the sector. It also talks about strengthening education quality. Creation of an innovation fund is the need of the hour, particularly for a diverse country like India. Ths fund “will help in narrowing of gap through critical gap filling and extending ICT- enabled learning particularly in Educationally Backward Blocks,” says Sharma.
The drawbacks? Kapoor said the Budget failed to adequately address ambiguity around foreign investment, demand for increasing public sector investment and incentivising private participation in the sector.
Ramaswamy felt the Budget did not do enough by way of support and encouragement for skill development and vocational education.

Source: Hindustan Times, 1-02-2017

 

Right Thought, The Fulcrum Of Happiness





As humans we have an instinct for curiosity and complex behaviour. The urge to achieve more is unending; there is no satiation. Making more money , achieving high positions, fame and name ­ all these goal-oriented pursuits are not significant in themselves. The more you achieve, the more you crave for.Any experience of happiness or joy is short-lived. What makes a life significant or insignificant? Why does one pursue those goals? What makes one happy? If only we knew the answers to these questions, we would be able to come up with ways to tune up our consciousness.
From Krishna and Buddha to Socrates and Gandhi, evolved individuals were more than willing to advise us on how to live a happy life. Theirs were all simple traditions, and pertinent ideas, an attempt to deepen human understanding of living well and happy . Krishna in the Bhagwad Gita taught all about karma and selfless action. Gautama Buddha gave us the eightfold path. Socrates believed the best way to live was to focus on the pursuit of virtues rather than the pursuit of material wealth. Gandhiji gave the message of non-violence, truth, simplicity and sacrifice as the path to happy living.
Happy living means thinking right without hankering for more material gains, the acquisition of which may cause behavioural problems like anger, impatience, intolerance and dejection that subtract from our happiness. Stress due to outstanding debts may cause anger, impatience and intolerance and your behaviour might get out of control. If you're not choosing correct responses, but merely reacting emotionally, you become a victim of your own circumstances. Then mental illnesses such as depres sion and schizophrenia may overpower you and push you to take extreme measures like taking your own life.
The drama of life and human reactions and consequent behaviours are strange indeed. Your near and dear ones might get closer to you when the going is good but may distance themselves from you in the hour of need and grief. How does one deal with the ups and downs of life and face challenges with strength and equanimity? We need to first come to terms with the fact that pleasure is derived from something outside whereas joy arises from within. The cause of unhappiness is never the situation, but it is all about the thought. Therefore, separate the thought from the situation and let the thought find its balance in the equanimity of stillness. Right living comes from right thinking, for it is thoughts that ultimately get translated into action.
Contentment is something that engenders right living and helps one find joy within. When one feels satisfied, a calmness is experienced and there is no urge to acquire more even at the cost of compromising one's health or relationships.
Craving for more and more is attributed to lack of resistance against material allurements. The Gita defines suffering caused by faulty thinking, perspectives, beliefs and attitudes which are taxing our emotional state.The solution for all problems lies in resolving them through transformation of our understanding of them.
People can train themselves to be happier by changing the way they think and perceive the world. People are happier who live simple and think right. They feel less stressed and less depressed because they have figured a way to balance their lives with their living environments.

Guestview Dark days for children 

The year 2016 will probably be remembered for military and political events, but it should also go down in history as one of the worst years for children since World War II.
Images of dead, injured, and distraught young children filled the media on an almost daily basis: a small boy sitting stunned and bleeding after his home was bombed; small bodies being lifted out of rubble; and small graves on the Mediterranean shoreline that mark the deaths of unknown children.
These images are powerful and uncomfortable. And yet they cannot capture the magnitude of children’s suffering. More than 240 million children are living in conflict zones—from the killing fields of Syria, Yemen, Iraq and northern Nigeria, to less well-documented but horrorstricken areas of Somalia, South Sudan and Afghanistan. And of the 50 million children who live outside their own countries or have been internally displaced, more than half have been forcibly uprooted, and are facing new threats to their lives and well-being.
Millions of children are undernourished and out of school; millions have witnessed unspeakable brutality; and millions are threatened with exploitation, abuse, and worse. This is not rhetoric; it is reality.
The UN—with support from countries such as Sweden, and by working through a coordinated humanitarian-response system that includes Unicef—is alleviating suffering whenever and wherever it can. But the quantity and complexity of cascading crises are testing that system as never before. New challenges, such as extremism, are increasing the risks to children, and making it more difficult and dangerous to reach them. Meanwhile, armed groups are increasingly targeting schools, hospitals and homes, and compounding innocent people’s suffering.
Political solutions to these conflicts are the surest way to stop the suffering and bring an end to such savage violations of human rights. But, barring that ideal outcome, we need to strengthen the current humanitarian system’s capacity to reach the children at greatest risk.
More than 70 years ago, world leaders addressed the unprecedented humaniand tarian crisis following World War II by creating new institutions to bring immediate assistance to those in need. These new global entities laid the foundation for a future based on cooperation, dialogue and results, rather than conflict, disaster and ruin.

That was a turning point in world history; we have now arrived at another one. We need to summon the same spirit of solidarity and creativity today that inspired previous generations, not by founding new institutions, but by finding new ways of responding to the hard realities of our own time.
For starters, we urgently need to harness innovation to expand our capacity to reach children who are cut off from assistance in besieged areas or communities controlled by extremists. We should be exploring every option, such as using drones to airdrop food and medical supplies, and developing mobile apps to monitor needs and track supplies on the ground, and to keep aid workers safer. While there will never be a substitute for safe, unimpeded humanitarian access, we need to explore every avenue to reach children in danger.
More broadly, we must do a better job of coordinating among governments and organizations to provide short-term and long-term relief more efficiently, and to make every dollar count. With chronic crises proliferating, we should be maximizing synergies between humanitarian development initiatives, because the two go hand in hand. How we respond in emergencies lays a foundation for future growth and stability, and how we invest in development can help build resilience against future emergencies.
Lastly, we need to change how governments calibrate the critical aid that they provide to meet fluctuating needs. In recent years, as appeals for aid have escalated, countries undergoing domestic austerity have increasingly had to justify their foreign-aid outlays. Many donors have earmarked their aid funds for specific purposes. To be sure, such funds will always be an indispensable tool in both humanitarian and development efforts; but in today’s unpredictable environment, more flexible, long-term funding is critical.
“Core” funding, as it is known, enables the UN and non-governmental organizations both to react more quickly in emergencies and to plan more strategically. Such funding allows us to provide lifesaving help when people need it most, rather than having to wait for countries to respond to specific humanitarian appeals. This is especially important for addressing the “forgotten” crises that the media may have missed.
Sweden has long been a proponent of such flexible support for UN organizations, because it improves results. For this reason, Sweden’s government recently decided to double its 2016 contribution to Unicef’s core funds. Now that the world is working together on a new global development agenda, we hope this practice will spread and inspire other governments to move more towards high-quality funding for humanitarian relief and sustainable development.
We must protect the rights, lives and futures of the world’s most vulnerable children. To the extent that we do that, we will help to determine our common future as well.
Anthony Lake is executive director of Unicef, and Isabella Lövin is minister for international development cooperation and deputy prime minister of Sweden. Comments are welcome at views@livemint.com

 

Source: Mint epaper, 1-02-2017

 

This land is their land 

Despite the new land acquisition law, questions of resettlement and rehabilitation persist

The Bhangar violence in West Bengal recalls yet again the intensity of conflicts over the acquisition of land for infrastructure projects. These conflicts continue despite the new and ostensibly improved land acquisition law, with its higher terms of compensation, social impact assessments, and prior informed consent for projects involving the private sector. But if the 2013 law was enacted to comprehensively address opposition to land acquisition, why do governments still get land acquisition wrong?
Infrastructure projects are initiated for the “greater common good”, but the people dispossessed by them of their land, livelihood, and environment rarely benefit from all their goodness. The scale of the projects keeps growing. The information regarding them is little or often not accessible at all, and those affected discover the project’s full implications either by accident or by doggedly exercising their right to information. Prior informed consent remains a farce. There are no clear procedures for establishing consent in the case of private sector involvement and there is complete exemption for state-led projects. Compensation is often the proverbial fish bone — the inadequateness of compensating security of land, livelihoods, socio-cultural lifeworlds, not to mention the loss of environment and biodiversity, have been discussed ad nauseam. The impoverishment of large numbers of small and marginal farmers and the landless is inevitable, but the insecurity faced by large farmers once compensation money dries up in conspicuous consumption has also been documented widely.

The insider and the outsider

Agitators are portrayed by ruling governments as being under the influence of “outsiders” when, in fact, infrastructure paradigms, investors and beneficiaries are always the outsiders. The state asserts its sovereignty as the sole authentic “insider” and moves in police troops to protect its sovereign right from agitating locals. The outsider trope is particularly irrelevant when it applies to citizens of this country, but remains salient in state attempts to delegitimise agitations against land acquisition.
Dating from the struggles of the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) in the 1980s against the Sardar Sarovar Project (SSP), the quality of state intervention and discourse outlined above remains uncannily familiar. This is despite the 2013 land acquisition law, and extends across parties.
Thousands affected by the SSP were in fact on dharna during the monsoon of 2016, marking 31 years of the NBA’s struggle for justice for those dispossessed bythe project. At a height of 138.68 m now, only the reservoir gates of the SSP dam remain pending before full submergence of the upstream areas. The 2016 agitations saw relay fasts by those already dispossessed and woefully short of promised rehabilitation, and satyagraha by thousands more facing submergence — some without promised resettlement and others not even recognised as adversely affected. The year passed with yet another assurance of just rehabilitation, and the 2017 monsoon already looms ahead.In bitter irony further downstream, residents from 22 villages affected by the Dholera Smart City project protested against the ‘denotification’ of agrarian lands from the SSP’s promised irrigation canals in Ahmedabad district, Gujarat. The water that was promised to peasants in Gujarat by the construction of the SSP is now to be officially diverted to supply real estate and infrastructure projects for a city that, if developed, will destroy the existing agrarian infrastructure and socio-cultural and ecological lifeworld of the area.
The official endorsement of what constitutes ‘infrastructure’ is rooted in ideas of infrastructure aiding capitalist circuits, increasingly created in direct partnership with capitalist investors. Existing agrarian and local infrastructure is devalued, rendered backward, and considered in need of improvement for greater economic growth to accrue. Who benefits from these projects? The thousands agitating in the Narmada valley at the end of three decades bear witness to this trajectory of economic growth and development. So do the residents of the Dholera villages who stand to lose not just the promise of irrigation, but the very land they survive on.The agitations over Special Economic Zones (SEZs) are other recent reminders. POSCO’s inability to set up a plant in Jagatsinghpur, Odisha, as it had not yet obtained forest and other clearances is a case in point. This came after 11 years of tenacious struggle by local residents against the project. Similar agitations have unfolded in Nandigram, Mangaluru, Maharashtra and Goa, stalling projects or eventually pushing out SEZS developed by corporate giants and backed by state forces.

The Bhangar story

In the violence in Bhangar, the Trinamool Congress that agitated against the high-handedness of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) in Nandigram and Singur claims the people first agreed to part with 14 acres of land and then outsiders created unrest. The local residents, reportedly organised under the Jomi, Jibika, Paribesh O Bastutantra Raksha Committee, claim that they had no knowledge of the full extent of the project. In negotiations with the government and the Power Grid Corporation of India Limited, they were informed only of a power sub-station that would improve the power supply of the area. They discovered belatedly that on completion, the Bhangar sub-station would receive power from the Sagardighi thermal power plant and the Farakka unit that would then be transmitted via high-tension wires to Kolkata, the northeastern States and Purnea in Bihar. They demand an environmental impact assessment to ascertain the adverse impacts of the high-transmission lines on the local population, agriculture and ecology. Agitations have left two dead, several arrested and many injured since November 2016. The story unfolds in painfully familiar tedium as state representatives claim that land was acquired with consent, compensation was negotiated with the residents, and outsiders are instigating violent agitations.

Who pays for the losses of life, livelihood, peace and well-being of the local residents during months and years, sometimes decades, of agitation? What of the loss to the exchequer, and ultimately the Indian public, for all the effort made to suppress agitations and democratic principles by the state’s sovereign assertions over the greater common good? Where does the state source its sovereign power over citizens in a democracy? Eminent domain is a colonial doctrine imported by the colonial government to India and retained by the independent Indian state to institute capitalist development — the sine qua non of pre- and post-Independence development in India. Who is the ‘insider’ occupying the sovereign powers of the state over citizens?

Preeti Sampat teaches Sociology at Ambedkar University, Delhi.

Source: The Hindu, 31-01-2017