Wednesday, March 08, 2017

The stakes in Manipur

nipur will vote in 38 of its 60 Assembly constituencies on Saturday in the first of two phases. This election is shaping up into something new for Manipur’s polity, a direct contest between two national parties, the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party. The Congress is seeking to defend its 15-year record in power, while the BJP fancies its chances in a State that has generally voted favourably for the party ruling at the Centre. The four-month-long blockade by the United Naga Council of highways leading up to the valley has dominated the discourse in the run-up to the elections. The Manipur elections are important for both national parties. The Congress is seeking to retain its hold as the only party that has electoral support across various ethnic and geographic regions in the State, while the BJP is keen to get power in another northeastern State, after its victory last year in Assam. A contest between the Congress and the BJP in Manipur is welcome, as both parties do not represent any specific ethnic groups, unlike other parties in the fray in previous elections. But the BJP lacks a grassroots base in Manipur and largely comprises leaders who have defected from the Congress. This has resulted in a political campaign largely made up of accusations and counter-accusations of corruption, besides the blame game on the ongoing blockade.

The decision in early December 2016 by the Okram Ibobi Singh government to notify the formation of seven new districts, creating 16 districts in the State, was momentous. It allowed the Congress to seek support from the hill areas for this decision, as the new districts in the hills made for better administrative access in areas far from the valley. However, it resulted in the intensification of the blockade sponsored by the UNC, severely hitting normal life in Manipur. The persistence of the blockade has led to some degree of disaffection owing to the inability of the Congress government to bring it to an end, even if the government’s defence that any punitive measures against the UNC would have led to violence cannot be summarily dismissed. The Congress blames the Centre for not prevailing upon the UNC and other Naga groups to end the blockade, while the BJP blames the Congress for precipitating the crisis. In a State where insurgent groups remain active and that is still dependent on Central transfer of resources to shore up its economy, the electorate would have welcomed a genuine discourse on such issues in the run-up to the elections. Sadly, this did not happen.

Source: The Hindu, 3-03-2017

As a teacher, the learning never stops

Teaching happened to me by accident. It was never my first choice. I was at a point in my life where it was the best option available to me. But after 20 years in the profession, I’m glad I pursued it. Over the course of my career, I’ve had the privilege to teach children of different age groups. I’ve guided pre-schoolers as they developed their early perceptions of the world we live in, taught middle-schoolers hell-bent on being mischievous and helped moody high-school teenagers navigate the challenges of adolescence. For all that I’ve taught my young kids, however, they’ve given me back so much more. While I have hopefully played a role in helping shape their lives, what I’ve learnt from them most certainly continues to shape mine.

Acceptance: Pre-schoolers have no biases or preconceived notions. They are able to accept every classmate for who they are or what they are. As a teacher, I too learned to accept the kids as they were - no prejudices and no biases. With my acceptance came calm and peace in my classroom. Nobody was better and nobody was worse than the other.

Patience: This has never been one of my virtues. But the pre-schoolers forced me to develop an abundance of it. You can’t help but be patient when teaching a pre-schooler. A child of four years can only move so fast. There is so much to see, so much to explore. I learned to enjoy those precious moments with the babies. I learned to appreciate the effort and sincerity that they put into every little thing they did.

Each child learns differently: While this fact is drummed into our heads in training, it is truly surprising when you actually encounter different learning styles in the classroom. I learned very quickly to teach the same lesson in different ways, especially for the preschoolers. Sometimes I have had colleagues wonder if I was going batty because I would insist on repeating a lesson several times in different ways.

Sense of wonder: My little ones taught me to wonder – something I had forgotten in the rush of life — at little everyday things like raindrops caught in a spider’s web, the aircraft flying overhead, the resident cat of the school moving her kittens to a new hiding place one at a time, watching a bulbul build its nest day-by-day, twig-by-twig while we waited for the buses to pick up the kids… the list is endless. The learning that took place during such unplanned sessions was remarkable and never forgotten.

Technology: The students of my secondary and higher-secondary classes have been largely responsible for the upgradation of my technology skills. They taught me to make the best possible use of my laptop and iPad. The outcome of these sessions was the students appreciated my candour and were much more receptive of the syllabus I had to teach. A rapport was established that enabled me to use my newly-learned skills to teach them my subject more effectively.

Humility: In my years of teaching I have come across more than a few students that were extremely intelligent. Accepting the fact that the child probably knew more than me was a humbling experience at first, but I knew accepting it would help me better guide the child to fully realise his potential. This spurred me on to update my body of knowledge which then allowed me to engage my students in healthy discussions and debates in class.

After all, we teachers are only facilitators and not omniscient beings.

What’s most rewarding about teaching is what you get back. The learning never stops.

The writer works as Mumbai coordinator for Kids for Tigers, The Sanctuary Tiger Programme and is a freelance trainer for teacher trainin

Source: DNA, 8-03-2017

Ragging alert: Engg students can be expelled for mocking caste, gender, religion

Engineering students can be expelled for mocking the caste, ethnicity or sexual orientation of college mates, as the regulator has expanded the definition of ragging ahead of the new academic session.

Ragging is rampant in such colleges where freshers are often humiliated by senior students and even abused physically. There have been instances when students have died or ended their lives unable to bear the pressure.

The All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) has identified a set of pejorative words in a notification released on February 22, a copy of which is with HT.

The notification defines ragging as “any act of physical or mental abuse (including bullying and exclusion) targeted at another student (fresher or otherwise) on the ground of colour, race, religion, caste, ethnicity, gender (including transgender), sexual orientation, appearance, nationality, regional origins, linguistic identity, place of birth, place of residence or economic background”.

The guilty could be barred from classes for a certain period, thrown out of the college or in extreme cases, lose admission, which will make the student ineligible to study engineering anywhere in the country.

Read | Kerala: Two students in hospital after ragging, accused on the run

Over the last few years, universities and colleges reported a sharp rise in discrimination on grounds of region or caste, AICTE sources said.

More than two million students are enrolled in AICTE-approved 10,000 institutes in the country.

The notification would act as a deterrent, Delhi joint commissioner of police (operations) Robin Hibu said, adding students often complained to him about name-calling and taunting.

“Such cases happen because of the lack of awareness and concern about other communities,” said Hibu, also the nodal officer for Northeast residents who often face harassment in the Capital.

The notification holds for all engineering and technical colleges -- government, government-aided and private -- across the country.

This is the first expansive definition of ragging by AICTE after it came out with a set of rules in 2009 to check the widespread menace.

Colleges offering technical education, engineering technology, including MCA, architecture, town planning, management, pharmacy, hotel management and catering, and such programmes will have to follow the directive.

Last year, the University Grants Commission, the higher education regulator, barred use of such words in central universities.

“It is a good move. It is necessary to make students aware and conscious about how they behave with other students and do not indulge in any act of harassing or bullying,” an official from Delhi’s Netaji Subhas Institute of Technology said on condition of anonymity.

The city’s Indian Institute of Information Technology director Pankaj Jalote said it was necessary to sensitise students on issues of gender, ethnicity and sexual orientation.

“While rules can be made and should be made, sensitising and educating students should be a priority,” Jalote said.

Source: Hindustan Times, 8-03-2017

Women’s Day: Please don’t promise CCTVs for their safety

Imagine a city with a camera at every street corner to record your move. You step out on a breezy March evening to enjoy the cold with your partner but there’s not a moment of anonymous pleasure to be had.

An app on your phone buzzes to locate areas declared unsafe for women, and it includes every place you used to frequent – the “unsupervised” Jahapanah forest, the “dark” bylanes of Mehrauli and the low-income parts of Jamia Nagar he lives in. The safety that was supposed to set you free has locked you in. The makings of this dystopia are swirling around us – in recent years, every incident of crimes against women in Indian cities has been followed by a torrent of discussion on bolstering safety mechanisms for women.

But as a string of crimes in Bengaluru showed earlier this year, the imagination of safety for women in public spaces always ends up focusing on monitoring their moves – by dotting the cityscape with closed-circuit television cameras. The Karnataka government responded to the allegations of rape and molestation by announcing the purchase of 550 more CCTVs, never mind that the thousand-odd such devices had failed to stop the assaults in the first place.

When AAP came to power in Delhi in 2015 on the back of a pledge make the national capital more safe for women, the first thing it promised was more CCTVs and marshals on buses. Two years on, rapes are as rampant as ever and few women take night buses, despite the token marshals.

The focus on CCTVs is a dangerous trend because it erases the socio-economic history of women’s safety and reduces it to a question of State surveillance, in the process prioritising resources to purchase of cameras and cementing existing biases.

“The core philosophy behind the proliferation of CCTVs is an unsubstantiated claim – that people are likely to be deterred from exploiting their historically accumulated power to harass women if they know cameras are watching them,” says Jasmine George, a women’s rights activist whose organisation Hidden Pockets maps cities.

Remember, she adds, that no such deterrence was effected by tough laws or policing but it is assumed that CCTVs – which at best are crime solving and not crime deterring tools – will be the magic bullet. In London, in spite of having more security cameras than any other country in Europe, only 3% of street robberies in London were solved using CCTV images in 2015.

Additionally, this bolsters the notion that crimes against women are always inflicted by unknown persons -- the ubiquitous stranger rape – and erases that most such violence happens within the home, by family members, where there are no CCTVs.

The diversion from a movement seeking a social power structure change to one that stresses on monitoring hurts those who need the narrative to change the most – women locked inside the family. Ten cases of cruelty by husband and relatives are reported every hour across the country as per the National Crime Report Bureau.

Source: Hindustan Times, 8-03-2017

`Men in India Earn 67% More Than Women'

Rica Bhattacharyya

Mumbai

Men in India earn 67% more on average than women, according to a survey conducted by Accenture which shows that disparity in the country is much higher than the global average of 40% across industries.The `Getting to Equal 2017' survey is based on the average pay gap between men and women in employment over a 12-month period excluding bonuses across levels in 31 industries. It took into consideration more than 28,000 women and men, including undergraduates, across industries in 29 countries.
“The gender pay gap is due to a combination of factors, one of the major reasons being cultural and social issues,“ said Rekha Menon, chairman, Accenture in India. “Culturally, women are still meant to be prime care-givers at home. It is culturally acceptable for women to take breaks. Even otherwise, women don't negotiate for better pay and are more accepting of what they are offered.“
On current trends, the pay gap won't close until 2080 in developed markets, and 2168 in developing markets, as per research based on the survey.
Digital fluency, career strategy and tech immersion could together reduce pay gap in India 19% by 2030, the research shows. This will lead to an addition of 2.2 crore women to the paid workforce and add $39 billion to women's income by 2030.
Globally, companies could bridge the pay gap 35% and add $3.9 trillion to women's income by 2030 by adopting these three equalising measures, as per the research.
“Digital fluency gives more flexibility to women and results in more women staying back in the workforce. At the same time women have to learn new skills and adopt new technology . Tech immersion helps in getting STEM (science, technology , engineering and mathematics) skills in coding and computing,“ said Menon.
Adding to this imbalance is the fact that women (50%) are much less likely than men (76%) to have paid work. In India 80% of the pay gap in India is attributed to a lack of female participation in the workforce, with 93% men compared to 31% women in paid employment.
This contributes to a `hidden pay gap' that increases the economic inequities between men and women, as per the research. On this metric, globally for every $100 a woman earns a man earns $258.
Working fewer hours than men (4%), working in a lower paying industry (3%), and lacking a tertiary education (2%) contribute only slightly to the hidden pay gap in India, according to the research, which says cultural and social issues account for 62% of the reason for the pay gap among employed men and women.

Source: Economic Times, 8-03-2017

Women Must Reclaim Their Spiritual Eminence

Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

As we celebrate International Women's Day , we find that there is more awareness and commitment in society towards women's empowerment. Along with the need for economic and political empowerment, we must also give the spiritual aspect due consideration.Often there is a perception that women are mandated by nature to live a less spiritual life and they need less access to spirituality . I am often asked to comment on why women are barred from performing certain spiritual practices like Gayatri japa! This notion that women have less spiritual rights than men is totally erroneous. No scripture sanctions it. Instead, ancient scriptures place tremendous amount of power in women.Shakti is the primordial energy , the life force behind the whole creation.
In Indian mythology , female energy is depicted as the slayer of injustice. The trinity of Durga, goddess of valour and vitality, Lakshmi, goddess of wealth and well-being, and Saraswati, goddess of knowledge and art have always been worshipped. It means that energy (of women) is entrusted with the important portfolios of defence, finance and education.
We also need to emphasise that real empowerment is from within. Women must empower themselves to believe in themselves and stop doubting their place in society .
Women are innately powerful, multi-talented and multi-faceted. They have the right blend of strength with grace, courage with compassion, affluence with values, and wisdom with vision.
Women possess the ability to create as well as make a difference. They give birth to us and teach us to live. Our mother is our first guru, first teacher, giving us the very first lessons in good conduct. She leads the whole family in many ways. So, every woman is already a leader.
In her, lies the seed for profound social transformation. She can be a strong peacemaker; at home, in the community , in society and in the world. Women can overcome differences and bring people of diverse natures together she does it in her home all the time! You have equal rights. You don't have to go and ask somebody! Do not wait for the power to be given.
Just assume it.
The biggest challenge women face today is to maintain a balance between feminism and dominance in any field. Women sometimes forget the innate power they possess. Freedom and empowerment should not take away from their motherhood and their maternal or feminine s. Fine feminine qualities like qualities. Fine feminine qualities like softness, gentleness, compassion, nurturing instincts should not be lost while becoming powerful. A truly empowered woman is one who is confident, creative and brings people together rather than create disharmony . She is truly empowered when she has inner strength, peace of mind and self-confidence. Spirituality nurtures these qualities which are the greatest forces of transformation.
We need women to come to the forefront and take more responsibility for spreading values. In building character and integrity , women can do a better job.
In this fast-paced life, we need to balance our inner peace, and ethical values with the external challenges we face. And women make this happen without getting stressed as these qualities are inherent in them.
The biggest strength that a woman has are her emotions, feelings, motivation and inspiration. Men can inspire to fight but women inspire to unite. She has the potential to bring prosperity , happiness and joy to this world!

Monday, March 06, 2017

Economic and Political Weekly: Table of Contents

Vol. 52, Issue No. 9, 04 Mar, 2017

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