Quote of the Day November 5, 2020

 “In my friend, I find a second self.”

‐ Isabel Norton

“अपने मित्र में मुझे अपनी एक और अस्मिता दिखाई देती है।”

‐ इसाबेल नॉर्टन

Academia and the free will

 

India’s dismal score on the Academic Freedom Index reflects the issues plaguing the country’s education system

India announced its National Education Policy (NEP) on July 29 this year. The policy aims at overhauling the educational system in the country and making “India a global knowledge superpower”, with a new system that is aligned with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal-4 (SDG 4). It also emphasises universal access to schools for all children, raising the Gross Enrolment Ratio (GER), and ending the spiralling dropout rate in India.The academic community is still debating and weighing the pros and cons of the NEP. However, one of the key disappointments is that the real problem plaguing the educational system in the country and the higher education system, the erosion of academic freedom, is being discussed by nobody.India has scored considerably low in the international Academic Freedom Index (AFI) with a score of 0.352, which is closely followed by Saudi Arabia (0.278) and Libya (0.238). In the last five years, the AFI of India has dipped by 0.1 points. Surprisingly, countries like Malaysia (0.582), Pakistan (0.554), Brazil (0.466), Somalia (0.436) and Ukraine (0.422) have scored better than India. Uruguay and Portugal top the AFI, with scores of 0.971 each, followed closely by Latvia (0.964) and Germany (0.960).

The AFI and the accompanying report quantify the freedom of scholars to discuss politically and culturally controversial topics, without fearing for their life, studies or profession — an aspect where India is failing terribly. In such a scenario, it is important to look into what the NEP 2020 has to offer. The NEP 2020 claims that it is based on principles of creativity and critical thinking and envisions an education system that is free from political or external interference. For instance, the policy states that faculty will be given the “freedom to design their own curricular and pedagogical approaches within the approved framework, including textbook and reading material selections, assignments and assessments”. It also suggests constituting a National Research Foundation (NRF), a merit-based and peer-reviewed research funding, which “will be governed, independently of the government, by a rotating Board of Governors consisting of the very best researchers and innovators across fields”. However, the question is whether these promises and offers will be put into practice or remain just a rhetoric.

The AFI has cited the ‘Free to Think: Report of the Scholars at Risk Academic Freedom Monitoring Project’, to suggest that the political tensions in India may have something to do with declining ‘academic freedom’. The police brutality against students at Jamia Millia Islamia University and Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, and their being labelled as anti-nationals, has raised concerns about the state of academic freedom.

The AFI used eight components to evaluate the scores: freedom to research and teach, freedom of academic exchange and dissemination, institutional autonomy, campus integrity, freedom of academic and cultural expression, constitutional protection of academic freedom, international legal commitment to academic freedom under the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and existence of universities. India has not fared well in components like institutional autonomy, campus integrity, freedom of academic and cultural expression and constitutional protection of academic freedom. Most universities in the country are subjected to unsolicited interference from governments in both academic and non-academic issues. It is common knowledge by now that a majority of appointments, especially to top-ranking posts like that of vice-chancellors, pro vice-chancellors and registrars, have been highly politicised. Such political appointments not only choke academic and creative freedom, but also lead to corrupt practices, including those in licensing and accreditation, thus promoting unhealthy favouritism and nepotism in staff appointments and student admissions. This reflects a ‘rent-seeking culture’ within the academic community.

At present, many educational institutions and regulatory bodies, both at the Central and State levels, are headed by bureaucrats. However, the NEP 2020 aims to de-bureaucratise the education system by giving governance powers to academicians. It also talks about giving autonomy to higher education institutions by handing over their administration to a board comprising academicians. This may help de-bureaucratise the education system and reduce political interference to an extent.

Jos Chathukulam is the director of Centre for Rural Management (CRM), Kottayam.

Source: The Hindu, 4/11/20

Israel launches PhD sandwich programme with scholarship up to Rs 17 lakh

 

Selected students will get an annual scholarship of 80,000 NIS per year (Rs 17 lakh approx). Interested candidates must apply directly to the relevant Israeli university. Scholarship recipients will be notified by the university by February 15, 2021.

The Council for Higher Education, Israel launched a scholarship programme for international PhD students to study in Israel for a duration of up to one year as part of the doctoral studies – a ‘PhD sandwich program’. Under the initiative, international PhD candidates will get the opportunity to further their doctoral research through a unique academic experience in Israel, while collaborating with leading scholars and scientists.

Selected students will get an annual scholarship of 80,000 NIS per year (Rs 17 Lakhs approx). If a scholarship recipient is in Israel for less than one year, the scholarship amount will be determined based on the actual time the scholarship recipient studied in Israel. Scholarships will not be awarded to doctoral students who spend less than three months at the host university, as per the rules.

“Through this initiative, Israel seeks to attract top young recent PhD graduates to take on a postdoctoral position with leading scientists and scholars in Israel on cutting-edge research in all fields of science, social science, and humanities,” the official statement read.

Each of the eight universities that offer doctoral programs: Ben-Gurion University, Bar Ilan University, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Technion, Tel Aviv University, Weizmann Institute of Science, University of Haifa, and Ariel University will offer the course.

Any student enrolled in a doctoral degree program at an accredited institution of higher education having completed their first year of doctoral studies successfully can apply for the scholarship. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the current call for applications is open for candidates who plan to arrive in Israel beginning of Spring 2021. Interested candidates must apply directly to the relevant Israeli university. Scholarship recipients will be notified by the university by February 15, 2021.

Source: Indian Express, 17/10/20

Marriage equality is a constitutional right, do not deny it to same-sex couples

 

India has finally joined the democracies that have decriminalised same-sex relationships. It is now time to join the many democracies which recognise the right of a citizen to marry anyone she chooses.

Recently, three couples (two male, one female) have filed petitions, two in the Delhi High Court, and one in the Kerala High Court, arguing that the state’s refusal to recognise their marriages violates their constitutional rights. The first couple that I know of who tried to register their marriage were Vinoda Adkewar and Rekha Chaudhary in Maharashtra in 1993. Still earlier, in 1987, Leela Namdeo and Urmila Srivastava, married by religious rites in Bhopal. Even earlier, in 1980, Lalithambika and Mallika in Kerala, tried to drown themselves, with their hands tied together.

In my book, Love’s Rite: Same-Sex Marriages in Modern India (2005), I examined hundreds of cases of such young women (and a few men), almost all from non-English speaking, lower-income backgrounds, who got married by religious rituals or committed joint suicide or both. They are from all over India and include Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Dalits, tribals, fisherwomen, agricultural workers, students, construction workers. Most of them had never heard words like “lesbian” or “gay”. Such weddings and suicides continue today. Those who commit suicide often write notes, asking to be buried or cremated together and saying that they will be married in the next life.

The solicitor-general of India was recently quoted as saying that same-sex marriage is against “Indian values.” TIn many cases, families violently separated the couples, often driving them to suicide. But several families, after initial disapproval, accepted the partnerships and celebrated the weddings. In 2001, two nurses, Jaya and Tanuja, got married in Bihar. At the same Hindu ceremony, Jaya’s sister married a man, and Jaya’s family participated, along with 200 guests. But the registrar of marriages refused to register the marriage. In 2006, Bodo tribals of Simlaguri, Assam, asked MLA candidates to provide legal rights to Thingring and Roinathi, a daily-wage labourer and a domestic help, who got married in a temple in 1999. Are these families and communities not Indians?

Male-female couples whose families disapprove of their relationships also marry by religious rites and some commit suicide. It is precisely because Indians disagree about values that the Special Marriage Act exists. It allows couples whose marriage may be disapproved of for any reason (inter-religion, inter-caste, different income groups) to obtain the legal rights of marriage.

I have interviewed Hindu priests and swamis, who performed same-sex weddings (one as early as 1993). They told me that the spirit (atma) has no gender and marriage is a union of spirits; and that when people get inexplicably attached despite social disapproval, this is due to a bond from a former birth. The 11th-century Sanskrit text, the Kathasaritsagara, provides the same explanation for cross-class and cross-caste couples who want to marry.

In most countries, the demand for marriage equality has come not from LGBT movement leaders but ordinary people. In the US, the first couple who got their marriage registered were Jack Baker and Michael McConnell in 1971. They have now been together for 50 years. When lawsuits were filed in the US to obtain marriage rights, many LGBT movement activists disapproved. The demand came from ordinary couples.

Most male-female married couples take for granted that the day after they marry, they can open a joint account, make health and funeral-related decisions for each other, and inherit each other’s property. Two women or two men who are married by religious rites or in a foreign country cannot do these things. When an Indian man marries a foreign woman, she immediately gets the right to apply for a PIO card, which allows her to permanently live and work in India. But when he legally marries a foreign man in another country, say, Taiwan, his husband remains a legal stranger to him and can only get a tourist visa to stay a maximum of six months.

India has finally joined the democracies that have decriminalised same-sex relationships. It is now time to join the many democracies which recognise the right of a citizen to marry anyone she chooses. Until this happens, we have a strange situation where a couple is legally married in, say, England, but when they come to India, they are single. What should they state about themselves in a visa form — single or married? If they write “single” they are being forced to lie.

This article first appeared in the print edition on November 4, 2020 under the title ‘Let law not do them part’. Vanita is a novelist and scholar.

Indian Express: 4/11/20

A financial model for higher education

 

Tuition fees, research grants, and endowment funds should contribute a third each to income

India’s gross enrollment ratio (GER) in higher education is 28%. It lags behind the global average of 38% and behind China’s 51%. If India wants to become a knowledge economy, our higher education institutions (HEIs) will have to play a leading role in boosting the innovation ecosystem while, at the same time, increasing GER to 50%. This calls for the scaling up of existing institutions as well as the creation of new premier ones. To put things in perspective, 23 Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) will admit as many as 15,000 undergraduates this year, while just one state university in the United States (US), Arizona State University, admits 13,500 undergraduates each year.

While the scaling-up of existing institutions and the creation of new institutions require additional budgetary allocations, running them well calls for money on a recurring basis. As a percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the nation’s expenditure on higher education remains low. This lower investment per student also has a strong correlation with global rankings.

The new National Education Policy (NEP) is trying to address this issue by allocating a fixed percentage of GDP for higher education.

It also talks about granting administrative autonomy to higher education institutions. Currently, these institutions receive upwards of 80% of funds from the government. They must explore 21st-century financial models to secure financial and administrative autonomy.

What is needed is a structural overhaul and creation of a diversified financial model for our institutions. Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) have been able to achieve autonomy by charging a higher tuition fee, contributing up to 85% of their funds. Is charging high fees the only viable financial model? It need not be if we follow the best practices of various countries and use a combination of these models.

Tuition fees contribute up to a quarter of the income for the most universities in the US, Australia and Asia. In the IITs, it contributes to only 6-7%, since only a fraction (approximately one-third) of students pay the upper limit of tuition fees. Others pay a much lower amount, based on their social category and economic status. This contribution can be increased not only by charging market competitive tuition fees, but also by bringing all students into the fee-paying category. This can be achieved by decoupling students and their families from the upfront financial barriers by offering them collateral-free and interest-free Income Contingency Loans (ICLs) through a centralised financial structure. Australia’s Higher Education Loan Program (HELP) is a widely-praised ICL model that is managed by the Australian taxation office. The repayments are linked to the debtor’s income level and are collected directly by the Australian tax authorities. ICLs are different from the education loans offered in the US that have caused massive student debt problems. A scheme can be piloted in India with IITs, which could also offer professional, executive and online programmes that do not require the infrastructure conventional degree programmes do.A third of the income could come from the research activities. Though research is primarily government-sponsored, universities such as UC Berkeley, Harvard and Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne raise up to a third of their research funds from non-government sources. Research at IITs is predominantly government-sponsored. A critical challenge has been managing and operating research facilities with insufficient overheads (ranging 5-10%) from these government grants. Alongside the expected increase in overheads, IITs could tap funds from the private sector, invest in and incubate research start-ups, and strengthen technology transfer and intellectual property licensing mechanisms. Mechanisms such as Foundation of Innovative Technology Transfer (FITT) at IIT Delhi and Society for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (SINE) at IIT Bombay may facilitate institutional equity investment in deep-tech start-ups. The recent launch of the world’s most affordable Covid-19 testing kit by IIT Delhi and the supply of over 4.5 million export-quality personal protective equipment by IIT Delhi start-ups are small demonstrations of the potential such investments by HEIs can generate. For boosting industry participation in research, IIT Madras has shown a way through the creation of technology parks. IIT Delhi is currently developing three technology parks for various industry sectors.

Harvard, Stanford and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have pioneered the concept of endowments, now adopted by public universities across the world. Endowment investment returns can easily contribute up to a third of the university’s income. Endowments are raised not only from the alumni but also from industry, philanthropists and governments. Last year, IIT Delhi launched an endowment fund with a target of raising $1 billion, that will provide a conservative investment income of ₹700 crore every year. A successful endowment model will require the creation of fund-raising teams and investment policy changes to overcome bureaucratic hurdles.

The new financial model for HEIs will be fuelled by the income from, one, deferred tuition payments; two, research grants/equity investments in startups/technology transfer fees; and, three, endowment donations. The transition is imminent, and it is up to us whether to lead or follow.

 Ramgopal Rao is director, IIT-Delhi, and Anurag Sachan is executive, IIT-Delhi

Source: Hindustan Times, 3/11/20

In Bihar, is class transcending caste?

 

The issues are centred on poverty and suffering, of the need for local opportunities, and of the failures of the state to stand by its poor in their hour of need

For students of political change, the Bihar assembly elections are of great significance. The world’s poorest go to vote in the world’s largest democracy, in the first direct elections of this scale after the Covid-19 pandemic has engulfed the world. Under the formal veneer of campaigning, marked by political rallies and speeches, is a truly substantive and deep political deliberation in Bihar’s villages and towns, with labour primarily re-centering the electoral discourse towards aspects of life and livelihood in unanticipated ways. Labour and its desire for voice and visibility in Bihar signals a shift in the base, and indicates a reshaping of the political arena, following a long period of political continuity and bureaucratic-charismatic leadership in the name of development and welfare.

The change has been truly unanticipated and sudden for a polity hitherto characterised by the caste-based politics of agada-pichada (forward-backward), where Lalu Prasad’s Mandalisation engulfed even the sharpest tenors of Left politics rooted among agrarian labour; and where Chief Minister (CM) Nitish Kumar’s plank of good governance was firmly rooted in a social base of the ati-pichada — the extremely backward classes conglomerate referred to as a cluster of panch-phorana jatis. This contextual rootedness, Kumar’s background as being one among the Jayaprakash Narayan-Karpoori Thakur-inspired socialists, and his personal clean image was embedded in his governance model — it is this that is the central object of questioning in these state elections.

The pursuit of good governance earned Kumar the sobriquet of sushaasan babu and dominated the administrative directions of many states after liberalisation. But he was not alone.

Since the late 1990s, many CMs began to be seen as leading the agenda of vikas (development), and emerging as the chehra (face) associated with delivery of public services and welfare. Chandrababu Naidu was among the earliest such leaders. A favourite of the World Bank and global business, he was referred to as the CEO in the arena of democracy. In northern India — more rural and agrarian — Shivraj Singh Chauhan’s pro-women welfare schemes such as Laadli Lakshmi earned him the title of Mama.

It was Kumar, however, who transformed the landscape north of the Vindhyas in Bihar by merging Mandalised electoral politics with the provision of universal basic services — roads, law and order and schools in his first term, and electricity in his second. Pro-poor and clean management of floods in large areas of Purnea and Saharsa, bordering Nepal and honest efforts at flood-relief earned him the trust of the most vulnerable.

Both the extreme backwards and the Mahadalits put their trust in the Nitish Kumar-led political regime for close to two decades. But they are, today, at the forefront of the silent-but-deep questioning on the ground — this is particularly true of labour, which is seeking to find its voice after having had to flee urban centres during the lockdown.

During conversations in Saran district’s oldest nagar panchayat of Riwilganj, many stories emerged of the hardships faced by labourers as they struggled to return home, many from those who belong to social groups traditionally considered loyal to Nitish Kumar.

There is a high density of population in the region, and no source of local work, leading to palaayan, exodus/migration, said Bhagwan Ji Sharma, a badhai by caste. “We left our soch (thinking) based on jaat-paat and organised round-the-clock meal services for labourers walking back. There was one who was returning from Tamil Nadu who had walked hundreds of kilometres and taken rides on trucks. His feet were in tatters.”

But the resentment is not merely that labourers had to struggle, but that there was political apathy. “Nitishji did not speak up for us, even a Yogi Adityanath organised buses for travel of labour from Uttar Pradesh”, said Dhurinder Manjhi. Ranju, a young Sahni woman from Darbhanga district, was stuck with three children at a Delhi construction site, and barely survived the threats of the building contractor. A labour contractor from Barauni helped her survive and get back, not the administration. Back in her village, Ranju can only rely on her skills of makhana farming in water puddles owned by landlords — she does not own any land.

The refrain is similar in Begusarai. Labourers want to go back to the opportunities available in flourishing sites of neoliberal economic development. But trains are limited. The bus operators charge ₹3,000 for a road journey to Delhi. “At least Nitish Kumar could have helped labour go back by train. There is no fear of the coronavirus in holding election rallies, but when it comes to us, our freedom is curtailed,” argued a group of young men from the Kushwaha community who have studied in public universities in Patna.

In each field site, the discussions transcend caste identities, and even partisan affiliations. The issues are centred on poverty and suffering, of the need for local opportunities, and of the failures of the state to stand by its poor in their hour of need. Unfortunately, generating economic opportunities locally was just not a priority of the sushaasan agenda.

Manisha Priyam is associate professor, National University for Educational

Planning and Administration

The views expressed are personal

Source: Hindustan Times, 5/11/20

Quote of the Day November 3, 2020

 “When nobody around you seems to measure up, it's time to check your yardstick.”

‐ Bill Lemley

“आपके आसपास के लोगों में से कोई भी जब आपके मानदंडों पर खरा न उतरे तो मान लीजिए कि अपने मानदंडों को फिर से परख लेने का समय आ गया है।”

‐ बिल लेमली