Tuesday, September 29, 2020

Top Government E-learning Platform For Students

Government Online Learning Platforms: Students can avail courses as per their choice through the digital portal of the learning platforms. This e-learning platform provides both undergraduate and postgraduate courses to the students.

The e-learning initiatives of the central government is a digital platform through which students can approach the different-different course by sitting at their homes. E-learning has taken a peak due to the pandemic. Pandemic hit the education sector worst. But this platform emerges as a big opportunity for the students. It gives a new way of learning and knowledge. The students can learn under a common platform.

The coronavirus pandemic has shaken the entire nation as well as the world and education is one of the worst-hit during this impending crisis. College and university have been closed for more than 6 months to curb the spread of the pandemic. And it inversely impacted both the teachers and students. Those who completely depended on the traditional method of learning, suffering the most. In this concern, the government comes in front to save our future. E-learning is a major setback for students and teachers who can no longer access learning sources through the traditional model of learning.

To overcome this crisis, the government of India has taken several ICT information communication technology initiatives through the Ministry of Education and the UGC University Grant Commission to launch a free electronic learning or e-learning platform for students.

These online platforms offer many facilities to students, teachers, researchers, learners, tutors, where they can interconnect with each other under the same platform. These courses are available for both undergraduate and postgraduates students and conduct live online lectures; contain course content, quizzes, online test, and multimedia presentations to make them more interesting for students.

E-learning initiatives in India By Government

Here we are presenting the top e-learning platform launched by the Indian Government and the Ministry of HRD (Education Ministry).

1. The SWAYAM (Study Webs of Active Learning for Young Aspiring Minds)

SWAYAM was launched on 9 July 2017 by the Ministry of Education. It is an initiative under the Digital India campaign was undertaken by the GOI in 2015. The platform has been designed to give the best quality education to students, undergraduate, and postgraduate students in India.

The portal offers free printable and downloadable study materials, video lectures, discussion forums, and online tests from over 1600 courses. After successful completion of the course, students can get a certificate in exchange for a token fee.

Students can access the website at https://swayam.gov.in or download the mobile application from Google play store. You can register at the SWAYAM portal through a valid email ID or Facebook or Google plus accounts.

This portal accredited by:
AICTC
IGNOU
NCERT
UGC
CEC
NITTR
NIOS
IIMB

2. DIKSHA

This portal has been initiated by the Ministry of Education in September 2017 to facilitate advance digital learning for teachers from classes 1 to 12. The digital portal has been mainly designed for teacher education but is also available for students who want to connect to the teacher’s community. DIKSHA offers training courses, worksheets, lesson videos, curriculum, and assessment tests for teachers.

One of the unique features of this platform is the QR code which can be scanned to gain access to a platform of learning material and eBook. More than 80,000 eBooks are available for class 12th students in multiple languages. Android and iOS users can download the application from the Google Store or iOS app store. You can visit the official website for more details here disha.gov.in.

Also Read: IT Careers: Top IT Job In Demands For Future

3. Swayam Prabha

Swayam Prabha was conceptualized by the Ministry of Education the consists of a collection of 32 DTH channels that will telecast educational channel 24×7 for students across India. Each day, the channel will telecast a new content of 4 –hour duration

will be shown 5 times a day so that students can select the time and watch the programs according to their schedule. Contents are available for students of class 12, Undergraduate and postgraduate. Students can visit www.swayamprabha.gov.in for, more details.

4. Virtual Labs

Virtual Lab is a digital consortium founded by the Government of India in association with the Education Ministry under the NME-ICT initiation. The main idea is to provide remote access to virtual laboratories for students from science and engineering streams from both UG and PG level. This consortium is conducted by IIT Delhi and has around 12 participating institutes. The project consists of more than 700 web experiments and lab facilities under the supervision of experienced faculty.

5. E- ShodhSindhu

E-Shodhsindhu jointly planned by the Ministry of Education and the Government of India is a digital library offering access to e-resources like journals, eBooks, factual, bibliographies, citations, etc. for higher education.
This portal is offering services to all academic institutions like central and state universities and colleges.
For more details, students can visit the official site at https://ess.inflibnet.ac.in/oes.

6. e-PG Pathshala

e-PG Pathshala is an online portal for postgraduate courses started by the Ministry of Education under NME-ICT (National Mission on Education Through ICT) and the UGC. Under this drive, over 700 eBooks in over 68 PG courses will be available for free for students.

The online portal is loaded with high-quality text contents, videos, tutorials, documents, PDFs file, etc. There are three quadrants under the e-PG Pathshala module namely:

e-Adhyayan consists of e-book and video materials.·
MOOC (MASSIVE OPEN ONLINE COURSES) UGC courses offered under the SWAYAM portal·
E-Pathya provides offline and distance-learning courses for PG students.·

The students who want to apply for the PG courses, this portal is a clear opportunity to avail of all
the PG programs.

Also Read: Best Websites For Free Online Education

7. National Digital Library of India (NDLI)

The National Digital Library NDLI developed under NME-ICT by the education ministry through NME-ICT is a virtual repository consisting of academic contents in multiple disciplines from school to post-graduation level. It is a multipurpose platform designed for the consideration of students of all ages. This platform is also beneficial for teachers, learners, researchers, librarians, professionals, and other users.

The students and other users can avail of this platform at any time 24×7 and it provides its services in more than 70 Indian languages. A wide variety of learning resources are available including E-book, video, thesis, documents, and manuscripts, etc. for the web version, users can visit https://ndl.iitkgp.ac.in.

8. National Program on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL)

NPTEL is another project funded by the Government of India in collaboration with the Education Ministry. It was a collective initiative taken by the Institute of Science, Bangalore, and 7 other IIT Institute (Delhi, Kanpur, Roorkee, Madras, Bombay, Kharagpur, Guwahati and Madras.)

The online repository offers various courses in the field of engineering, science, social science, and humanities. There are no course fees, however, certification exams will cost an INR 1000 per candidate. For more details, students can visit at http://nptel.ac.in

The online platforms have been designed for the purpose of providing a better education environment at the time of crisis. These platforms are playing a major role in today’s world of the pandemic. It will help millions of users to avail of their course and research work.

Malnutrition, the silent pandemic

COVID-19 has pushed back our efforts on ending malnutrition, which plagues India's children. Urgent efforts need to be made to address the shortfalls

India is home to about 30 per cent of the world’s stunted children and nearly 50 per cent of severely wasted children under the age of five. Malnutrition remains the predominant risk factor for child deaths, accounting for 68 per cent of total under-five deaths and 17 per cent of the total disability-adjusted life years. Nutrition is not a peripheral concern. It is central to our existence. Increased food and nutrition insecurity severely weakens our immune systems and contributes to poor growth, intellectual impairment, and lowers human capital and development prospects.

COVID-19 has posed serious threats to children and their health and nutritional rights. According to recent estimates, even in the best possible scenario and accounting for changes in the provision of essential health and nutrition services due to COVID-19, India could have around additional 60,000 child deaths (around 3,00,000 in the worst-case scenario) in the next six months. Based on evidence from the field, there is a need to explore possible solutions and putting forward key policy and programme proposals for the integrated management of acute malnutrition and mitigating the impact of COVID-19.

Inadequate dietary intake and disease are directly responsible for undernutrition, but multiple indirect determinants exacerbate these causes. These include food insecurity, inadequate childcare practices, low maternal education, poor access to health services, lack of access to clean water and sanitation, and poor hygiene practices.

The lockdown disrupted access to essential services, including mid-day meals, which are not only a nutritional measure to supplement some portion of a child’s calorie needs but is also a tool to access education. Through a concurrent rapid needs assessment in its programme areas, carried out in June 2020 across 14 states and 2 union territories, and covering 7235 respondents, Save the Children found that around 40 per cent of eligible children have not received mid-day meal during the lockdown.

There is a steady and silent revolution taking place in the field of nutrition, with an ever-increasing political will on the issue. This should be sustained throughout the year and in the coming years. Since the pandemic has pushed back our efforts on ending malnutrition by a few years, here are some immediate steps that need to be taken to address the issues.

First, core indicators across the lifecycle should be prioritised and reviewed at all levels (national, state, district, and block). Second, for easy and sustained access to nutritious food, we need to bring the spotlight back on locally-available, low-cost nutritious food. We also need to maximise maternal, infant and young child nutrition actions.

Third, we need to strengthen take-home ration and mid-day meal service delivery strategies to ensure the continuation of services and coverage of the most vulnerable communities, especially in urban areas. Fourth, child-sensitive social protection schemes, like PMMVY, need to be implemented in a way so that they reach the last child.

Fifth, strict measures are needed to ensure that the PDS is accessible to all, especially the vulnerable population. Sixth, efforts to ascertain allocation and distribution of additional food supply to the most vulnerable population and to ensure food security under the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Anna Yojna (PMGKAY) for next five months, need to be undertaken urgently. Finally, the use of newer technologies in service delivery, data management, evidence generation and real-time monitoring will help this process.

Given the range of drivers of nutrition — spanning multiple sectors of agriculture, social protection, health, WASH, and education — tackling undernutrition demands a multi-sectorial response. Political, cultural, social, and economic factors also play a role. Nutrition interventions are not sufficient to tackle the problem of undernutrition: Even at 90 per cent coverage, the core set of proven nutrition-specific interventions would only decrease stunting by 20 per cent. Reducing under-nutrition requires effective implementation of both nutrition-specific and complementary nutrition-sensitive interventions, addressing the underlying and basic causes of undernutrition.

Antaryami Dash

The writer is head of nutrition at Save the Children.

Source: Indian Express, 25/09/20

Tuesday, September 15, 2020

Quote of the Day September 15, 2020

“Rivers know this: there is no hurry. We shall get there some day.”

‐ A. A. Milne, author (1882-1956)

“नदियों को पता है: कोई जल्दी नहीं है। हम सब एक दिन गंतव्य तक पहुंच ही जाएंगे।”
‐ ए ए मिलने, लेखक (1882-1956)

Economic & Political Weekly: Table of Contents

Vol. 55, Issue No. 37, 12 Sep, 2020

Editorials

Action on Prison Data

From the Editor's Desk

An Idea of a Prison

Gopal Guru

Comment

Limited Imagination on Reservation

Commentary

H T Parekh Finance Column

A Faulty Response to the COVID-19-induced Crisis

C P Chandrasekhar

Insight

Impact of Natural Background Radiation on Health - Understanding the Debate

T S Krishnan, Annapureddy Rama Papi Reddy, M V Ramana

Book Reviews

Not by Prosperity Alone - Lessons from the Devapur Project

Satish B Agnihotri

Not Going beyond the Orientalist History of Indian Railways

Vineet Abhishek

Special Articles

Invest More in Public Healthcare Facilities - What Do NSSO 71st and 75th Rounds Say?

V R Muraleedharan, Girija Vaidyanathan, Sundararaman T, Umakant Dash, Alok Ranjan, Rajesh M

Financing the Right to Education - Role of Fifteenth Finance Commission

Sukanya Bose, Priyanta Ghosh, Arvind Sardana

Notes

Estimates of Health Insurance Coverage in India - Expectations and Reality

Binod Bihari Jena, Manoj Kumar Roul

Postscript

The Social Status of Safety

Aparna Vyas

Tales from a First-time Picture Book Author

Meghaa

The Borrowed Gaze in Street Photography

Rahulnath

Last Lines

From 50 Years Ago

From 50 Years Ago: Two Acres for Vinoba

Letters

Land Acquisition—A Response

Gaurang R Sahay

Reservation for In-service Doctors

Adithyan G S, T Sundararaman

The New Body Politics

K Rajasekharan Nayar, Shabana Roze Chowdhury, Arati P Rao, Anant Kumar, Lekha Bhat

Current Statistics

Appointments/Programmes/Announcements

Cannabis in India: A rather long story, with its highs and lows

Cannabis is illegal in India. But still its prevalence is remarkable across the social and spiritual landscape of India. It is in fact particularly popular among ascetics and mendicants, and a variant called ‘bhang’ is frequently consumed and offered as part of festivities. So deeply intertwined is cannabis with religion in India, that one of the principal deities of Hinduism, Shiva, is given the sobriquet: ‘Lord of Bhang’. And this stems from the rather long history of the plant in the subcontinent.

Social and spiritual acceptance of cannabis in India through the ages

A sun-loving plant, cannabis is known to have originated in the steppes of Central Asia, from where it was brought to India through human migration between 2000 and 1000 BCE. Geographer Barney Warf, in his research paper ‘High Points: An Historical Geography of Cannabis’, maintained that the plant was most likely introduced to India through the series of Aryan invasions.

However, unlike many other countries to which it was transported, “India developed a continuing tradition of psychoactive cannabis cultivation, often with medicinal and religious overtones”. Marijuana growing and consumption is known to have reached its “greatest efflorescence” in India… “local farmers often consulted with specialist poddar or parakdar, known as ‘ganja doctors’,” wrote Warf.

Reference to cannabis along with its medicinal and spiritual properties is made extensively in Vedic literature. In the Atharva Veda, for instance, cannabis is lauded for being a cure to illnesses, and also for fighting away demons. One section of a hymn in the scripture, as translated by professor Mark S. Ferrara in his book ‘Sacred bliss: A spiritual history of cannabis’, read:

“May cannabis and Jangida (herbs) preserve me from Vishkandha (illness),- that brought to us from the forest, this sprung from the saps of husbandry.”

Ferrara noted that “practitioners of this ancient religious tradition utilised cannabis as a medicinal herb, and because of its centrality to charms and spells, cannabis was regarded a ‘sacred grass’ for its power to vanquish sickness, despair, and calamity”.

One of the most important treatises on medicine from the ancient Indian world, ‘Sushruta Samhita’ written between the third and eighth centuries BCE, recommended cannabis for phlegm, catarrh and diarrhoea.

At the same time, the Vedas also narrate a strong association between the deity Shiva and cannabis. Sociologist Theodore M. Godlaski, in his article, ‘Shiva, Lord of Bhang’, published in 2012, recounted a popular myth around the deity’s fascination with cannabis. “When the Gods stirred the heavenly ocean with the peak of mount Mandara, a drop of amrita (sacred nectar) fell from the sky. Where it landed, the first cannabis plant sprouted. Lord Shiva brought the plant down from Mount Mandara for the benefit of mankind,” noted Godlaski.

Given its religious significance, weed is also ritually consumed by ascetics or sadhus. More often they smoke the highly resinous buds of the female plant or the resin itself (hashish) in small clay pipes, which are locally referred to as chillum. Godlaski described in great detail the ritual of chillum smoking: “Chillum smoking is not done alone but in a smoking circle. The first person fills the bowl and passes it on to the second. The second person raises the bowl to his forehead and utters a short formula, often ‘Bum Shankar!’ This dedicates the act to Shiva.”

But the religious consumption of weed is not limited to ascetics. During festivals like ‘shivratri’ and the ‘kumbha mela’, bhang is consumed in copious amounts and ganja is burned and exhaled as offerings to Shiva. It is important to note that the spiritual consumption of cannabis is not limited to Shiva worshippers, nor does it only take place in the Indian subcontinent. “Cannabis serves not only as an important sacrament for Hindu mendicants, but also for Islamic Sufis, Chinese Daoists, members of African Dagga cults, and Jamaican Rastafarians,” wrote Ferrara.

The criminalisation of cannabis consumption

Cannabis consumption in India caught the attention of Europeans soon after they landed. European sailors and explorers frequently sent back reports of the extensive consumption of ‘bhang’. The 16th century Portuguese chronicler Garcia da Orta had this observation on bhang drinking: “I believe it is so generally used and by such a number of people that there is no mystery about it.”

The British too were astonished by the popularity of cannabis in India. In 1798, the British Parliament passed a law to tax bhang, ganja and charas. The rationale behind the tax as they put it was to curtail the use of cannabis “for the sake of the natives’ good health and sanity”.

In the course of the 19th century, several attempts were made by the British at criminalising cannabis in India. In 1894, the government commissioned a most wide-ranging study of cannabis consumption in India, its cultivation, trade, as well as health and societal impact. The Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1894-1895, concluded:

“Viewing the subject generally, it may be added that the moderate use of these drugs is the rule, and that the excessive use is comparatively exceptional. The moderate use practically produces no ill effects… The injury done by the excessive use is, however, confined almost exclusively to the consumer himself; the effect on society is rarely appreciable.”

The first real push to criminalise cannabis consumption in the country came in 1961, at the Convention on Narcotic Drugs, which later facilitated the enactment of the NDPS act. At this point, it was the United States that was instrumental in driving the world towards a prohibitionist approach to drug use. In August this year, a report written by the legal think tank Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy noted that while India succumbed to international pressure, it disregarded the racist origins of the US war on drugs. “The US war on drugs started off as a patently racist propaganda against the African-American and the Hispanic population,” noted the report. “This racial bias in drug regulation has resulted in a disproportionate number of arrests of African Americans for cannabis consumption, which has become central to major policy reform in the US,” it added.

In the 1961 convention, the Indian delegation had opposed its intolerance to the social and religious consumption of cannabis. Consequently, when the NDPS Act was enacted in 1985, bhang was excluded from the definition of cannabis drugs on social grounds. The handling of charas, ganja, and the mixture of the forms, however, was criminalised.

Despite being unlawful, the popularity of weed can hardly be said to have diminished. A 2019 report by the National Drug Dependent Treatment Centre under AIIMS noted that about 7.2 million people in India are addicted to cannabis. Moreover, in recent years, non-profit organisations and activist groups have been actively campaigning for the legalisation of cannabis in the country.

It is also to be noted that the impact of the legislation against cannabis is most strongly felt by the poor and marginalised in the country. The report by Vidhi elaborated, “Our forthcoming research shows that nearly every person arrested and convicted for cannabis consumption in Mumbai was a daily wage worker and a slum or street dweller.” It added: “This demonstrates how the law, though meant to be applied uniformly across social and economic strata, disproportionately targets the poor and further marginalises the already vulnerable.”

NEP 2020 ignores crisis in education among the marginalised majority in rural India

In its orientation and strategies, the National Education policy 2020 (NEP) is a layered document that recommends significant structural changes to the education system, dips into the constructed imaginaries of a past glorious India that can be retrieved via education, co-opts some progressive ideas for elementary education, and overall acts as a guiding star for the aspirations of the urban middle-classes. But either deliberately or by the limited understanding of the committee members, the NEP overlooks the complexity of contemporary rural India, which is marked by a sharp deceleration of its economy, extant forms of distress, and pauperisation of a majority of its citizens.

Although the NEP claims to “bridge gaps in access, participation and learning outcomes’’, it overlooks the fact that poor quality education marks and mars the lives of rural citizens. Neglecting to engage with any idea of fostering equality of educational opportunity with equality in quality education, the NEP fails to address the growing school differentiation in which government schools are now primarily attended by children of disadvantaged castes and Adivasi groups, while a mushrooming of private schools caters to the aspirations of the more advantaged castes and classes. That such school differentiation defies the idea of education as a leveller and the possibility of schooling acting as a shared experience that forges social coherence is an issue that the NEP committee seems to be oblivious of.

Growing privatisation of education along with no assurance of quality is placing a huge burden on citizens and the report takes no cognisance of such trends. The fact that rural candidates are finding it increasingly difficult to gain entry into professional education and the lack of fit between their degrees and the job market means that several lakhs of them find themselves both “unemployable” and unemployed. These are issues that find no mention in the report.

Overlooking the general adverse integration of the rural into the larger macroeconomy and into poor quality mass higher education, the report calls for the “establishment of large, multi-discipline universities and colleges” and places emphasis on online and distance learning (ODL), without paying attention to the fact that correspondence courses and distance education degrees have become a source of revenue generation for universities and institutions and are run without guarantees of quality. The report fails to take into account the impact of poor-quality higher education on rural youth who, in many ways, are manifesting signs of alienation from their roots, are disaffected and amenable to being recruited into violent anti-social activities.

Recent reports of increasing suicides among youth are another indicator of the deep distress that they are experiencing. The NEP calls for higher education institutes to promote and support the teaching of “lok vidya” and it highlights the importance of yoga, AYUSH, and Sanskrit, which can be taught along with Artificial Intelligence, machine learning and digital learning, so that youth can be prepared for a global economy. In this narrow perspective, there is no scope for considering the establishment of smaller regional learning centres in which the youth can be taught a range of revamped older knowledge systems along with newer skills and knowledge.

The possibility of forging and promoting environmental studies for local ecological restoration and conservation, agro-ecologies that can draw on the varied sophisticated regional agricultural knowledge and practices, reviving local health and healing traditions from the vast repertoire of medical knowledge, or recognising vernacular architectural traditions and skills, and a range of artisan and craftsmanship to use local resources and thereby generate both employment and revive regional economies finds no mention at all in the NEP.

Such measures can create a pool of skilled and employable youth who may make meaningful lives in the rural itself rather than become part of the tide of migrant labour whose insecure and precarious lives were all too evident during the lockdown return migration. The NEP draws on its neoliberal economic ideas and moots the possibility of establishing “Special Education Zones” in disadvantaged areas and in “aspirational districts”. But the report provides no details as to how such SEZs will function and who will be the beneficiaries of such institutions. Will such institutions be based on the models of Kota’s entrance exam coaching industry or will it be like the way in which Challakere, a pastoral region 120 km from Bengaluru, was carved out by displacing local pastoralists and fauna, and establishing a “Science City” that combines a solar energy field, a nuclear processing site, and a campus for undergraduates of the Indian Institute of Science?

Although the report claims that the purpose of education is to achieve “full human potential, develop an equitable and just society and promote national development”, it fails to cater to the needs of rural India’s marginalised majority, who in so many ways are rendered into being subjects rather than citizens.

This article first appeared in the print edition on September 15, 2020 under the title ‘Missing in NEP: Rural youth’. The writer, a social anthropologist, is based in Karnataka

Source: Indian Express, 15/09/20

Friday, September 11, 2020

Quote of the Day September 11, 2020

“Before we set our hearts too much on anything, let us examine how happy are those who already possess it.”

‐ Francois, duc de La Rochefoucauld, moralist (1613-1680)

“हम किसी चीज़ की बहुत आस करें, उससे पहले देख लें कि जिनके पास वह पहले ही से है वे कितने सुखी हैं।”
‐ फ्रेंकोइस डे ला रोचेफ़ौकौल्ड

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