IIT Guwahati ‘develops’ efficient catalysts for transforming industrial waste into valuable chemicals

 

According to the team, tiny amounts of these “pincer catalysts” repeatedly convert large amounts of industrial waste such as glycerol into lactic acid and hydrogen.

Researchers at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Guwahati, have formulated efficient “pincer” catalytic systems that transform industrial or biomass wastes into valuable chemicals.

According to the team, tiny amounts of these “pincer catalysts” repeatedly convert large amounts of industrial waste such as glycerol into lactic acid and hydrogen. Such catalysts also efficiently convert bioethanol, a low-energy density fuel, into high-energy density butanol.

“Pincer catalysts are complex molecules in which, an organic moiety holds on tightly to a metal core, much like the claws of a crab. Such an arrangement not only confers stability to the catalyst, but also selectivity to bring about the intended transformations,” said IIT Guwahati professor Akshai Kumar Alape Seetharam.

“(We) rationally designed and tested a large library of ‘pincer catalysts’ to be used for these transformations. The experiments were carried out under environmentally benign conditions without the use of hazardous reagents and solvents. “The most efficient pincer catalyst was found to be one that had least crowding around the metal centre. Such an arrangement enabled easy removal of hydrogen from the starting materials, glycerol and ethanol, and their selective conversion into lactic acid and butanol, respectively,” he added.

The findings of the time have also been featured in the Royal Society of Chemistry journals--Chemical Communications and Catalysis Science and Technology. “Our computational studies have attributed the unprecedented activity of the pincer catalysts to the minimal crowding present at the metal centre and have enabled good understanding of the electronic and steric (crowding) factors that control reactivity,” said Hemant Kumar Srivastava from National Institute of Pharmaceutical Education and Research (NIPER) Guwahati.

The team also included research scholars Kanu Das, Moumita Dutta, Siriyara Jagannatha Prathapa, Eileen Yasmin and Babulal Das.

Source: Hindustan Times, 16/11/20

Quote of the Day November 13, 2020

 “Friends are those rare people who ask how we are and then wait to hear the answer.”

‐ Ed Cunningham

“मित्र वे दुर्लभ लोग होते हैं जो हमारा हालचाल पूछते हैं और उत्तर सुनने को रुकते भी हैं।”

‐ एड कनिंघम

Break the traditional rhythms

 

The real question is not when colleges can reopen, but whether our educational structures and delivery formats can be more agile compared to the pre-pandemic period

With COVID-19 having pushed colleges and universities to new delivery modes since March, many of us have realised how humane and important it is to have direct face-to-face teaching and learning. While there is a debate over when we can re-open the institutions, another question is whether our educational structures and delivery formats can be more agile, compared to the pre-pandemic period?

New scenarios

Inevitably, the priority of coming days will be the health and safety of students, professors and staff. We cannot completely digitise the educational, social, and psychological support available on-campus. Many experts also do not see a complete return to full-capacity campus soon. So, apart from mere reopening with a protocol, each institution needs a strategic plan.

In their recent work, education futurists Maloney and Kim propose that university leaders will need to bring a framework of density, not location, in their planning for coming academic terms. Campus density refers to how many individuals can occupy the campus safely at a time for work, study and living. Between the continuum of back-to-normal (full density) and fully remote (no density), they suggest different scenarios. One way is to alter institutional timings by shifting semesters or providing a gap year. Another is to revisit the curriculum and schedule. In India, this includes opting for block plan, or modularising curriculum or devising a split curriculum.

Under the block plan method, students stay in the campus for four or five weeks to learn a single course, which is considered as a block. The institution can plan how many blocks it can afford to offer and can add blocks in a phased manner. This plan can be adapted to emergencies.

Modular courses are short, topical, and experiential and are largely online. Because of flexibility in length, topics, links across concepts, access and sequencing, students find modular courses more constructive. This method requires re-designing individual components of the course and sequence to suit the local context and may also require training of faculty.

Under the split approach, courses are delivered both in-person and online at the same time by the same faculty. The students can choose whether to attend the physical class or join online. However, this may need more investment in classroom technology.

A broad alternative for residential campuses is low residency courses that have already been adopted by many IITs, IISc and national institutions in their programmes for working executives. Its compressed and focused nature makes it more effective than the traditional pattern at times.

Institutions can weigh the risk factors and resources for different scenarios and opt for the best strategy by combining them in myriad ways.

We need more hybrid and highly flexible modes of working. Agile academic structures and administration are the determinants in the game.

Digital equity

Education inequalities at the global level are accelerating, especially where these differences were high before the pandemic, points out a study by Vegas and Winthrop published by Brookings. In many places in India, communities have shown the potential to solve digital inequality. However, Despite the best efforts from governments, the last eight months have seen different levels of digital inequity at play. The disparity in income levels reinforces physical access to digital technologies. It further permeates to skill difference or the ability to use the technology.

The emergency remote teaching that we have been doing was unplanned. Therefore, many inefficiencies and gaps can be excused. However, while reopening institutions, we need to use strategic tools that are adaptable. To aid this, we suggest a template for a digitally-equitable institution based on 20 parameters grouped into five broad dimensions for each student:

Device: Availability, Quality, Usage, Power

Connectivity: Infrastructure, Reliability, Power

Affordability: Price, Choice, Payment terms, Financial assistance

Relevance: Content form, Content level, Context, Language, Universal design

Support: Educator support, Technical support, Maintenance load, Digital leadership

The learner data on these parameters will act as a baseline to develop strategies for digital equity in each institution. This can also guide the revamp of IT policies, develop course protocols, and ensure sustained digital leadership in the institution.

Future disruptions

As climate change and depleting resources are daily realities, ensuring that the learning process is not affected by emergencies requires a shift from the current institutional practices. We need to develop differentiated plans for probable uncertainties, plan and build for varying scenarios, and accommodate meaningful flexibility in institutional practices.

We will soon find ourselves implementing many changes in academic logistics such as dynamic timetables, alternate shifts, modular low-residency courses, hybrid and hyflex programmes along with the efforts to be more digitally equitable. Such efforts free us from the current black-and-white thinking of online versus offline.

Amid the changes, designing a core curriculum around student experience will remain the key to emerge stronger. To provide safe and reliable ways of retaining the best of the campus experience, many prevailing structures and hierarchies will have to take a back seat to ensure sensible and sustainable learning.

G. Srinivas is the Additional Secretary and Salil S. is the Education Officer with University Grants Commission.

Source: The Hindu, 7/11/20

Can the right to work be made real in India?

 

It can be made workable if there is political will and fiscal resources

As economies around the world struggle to recover from the double whammy of a pandemic and a lockdown, unemployment is soaring. In India, the land of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), the promise of jobs and the politics of unemployment have a long history. Can a citizen demand work as a right, and is it the state’s responsibility to provide employment? Reetika Khera and Amit Basole discuss the possible policy approaches to the right to work, in a conversation moderated by G. Sampath. Edited excerpts:

What is the legal status of the right to work internationally and in India?

Reetika Khera: The right to work was a big topic of discussion after World War II, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights includes the right to work in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. In India, we don’t have a constitutional right to work. But what we do have is MGNREGA. This is a step in the direction of a right to work, but it is a statutory right. Under MGNREGA, a person can hold the state accountable for not fulfilling the right by demanding an unemployment allowance. But if the law is amended or withdrawn, the right vanishes.

Comment | Equal freedom and forced labour

Is the right to work relevant as a concept any more given that most countries have embraced the market economy? India has been seeing a declining jobs-to-GDP ratio, and mostly jobless growth, with labour also subject to the laws of the market.

Amit Basole: It is precisely under these circumstances that this right becomes important. The term ‘right to work’ is often used in the context of unemployment or lack of availability of work. But there is also another sense of it, which is the right to earn my livelihood without any obstruction. In both these senses, what we have seen in the past few decades is that the path of development not only does not create adequate employment opportunities, it also actively dispossesses or displaces people from their means of livelihood. So, on the one hand, displacement and dispossession, and on the other, failure to create new jobs make it all the more important to imagine the right to work in a creative way and make it legally enforceable.

Reetika Khera: These are basic questions for policymakers that don’t get enough attention. For instance, GDP growth can come from both an increase in the manufacture of weapons of mass destruction as well as from the manufacture of medicines. Similarly, we rarely discuss per capita GDP growth; most discussion centres on overall growth even though from the vantage point of people’s welfare, the former matters more. Distribution issues are buried in subtle ways. For a labour-abundant country like India, I’m not sure how much policy sense it makes to encourage capital-intensive methods of production. It made sense in the countries in which these techniques of production evolved since they were labour-scarce. But more and more automation in a country like India is likely to lead to jobless growth. Such fundamental questions about our growth strategy need further deliberation.

How exactly do we make the right to work, work?

Reetika Khera: One approach is Decentralised Urban Employment and Training, or DUET, which has been around for some time. The idea here, like with MGNREGA, is to create new employment opportunities so that those who are unemployed may be gainfully employed and earn a dignified living. This dignity is supposed to come from work conditions, such as being paid a fair wage and having regulated work hours, and also from the social value of the work that people do — useful things such as repairing school buildings, cleaning parks, and so on.

For DUET, urban local bodies can issue job vouchers to certified public institutions such as schools and universities for pre-approved tasks. These institutions can only use the vouchers to hire labour for pre-defined tasks — e.g. painting school buildings, repairing broken furniture, and so on. A whole range of skills can be accommodated. So this is a workable agenda, but to make it workable, we need not only political will, but also fiscal resources.

Amit Basole: The right to work is not only about lack of adequate work but also the profound lack of public goods and assets, in urban India generally. It is the state’s responsibility to provide these public goods, and this imperative can be combined with an employment creation programme just like MGNREGA does in rural areas. In MGNREGA too, the asset creation part is often under-emphasised, and it would be good to bring both these things together through an urban employment guarantee. Interestingly, three States — Odisha, Jharkhand and Himachal Pradesh — have launched something along these lines in the wake of COVID-19. There are bits of these policies that could be used if we wanted to try it out on a national scale. Together with MGNREGA, an Urban Employment Guarantee can be a very important piece of the puzzle, on the way to ensuring the right to work.

So, is the right to work the same as an employment guarantee?

Amit Basole: No, I won’t reduce it to an employment guarantee. With the idea of right to work, the question is: what is the responsibility of the state in a capitalist economy where welfare and employment are not a guaranteed by-product of private economic activity? So, if private economic activity cannot generate an adequate number of decent livelihoods, or if it displaces livelihoods, then what is incumbent on the state to do? That is the question. I view this as a holistic thing. So we’re talking not only about the state generating its own work — for public goods, education, healthcare, administration, etc.

To be sure, for all these things which the state is supposed to do, it should generate its own employment. But at the same time, it’s also supposed to safeguard people’s employment. That includes everything, from ensuring that street vendors have vending zones, and fish workers are protected, to ensuring that farmers have viable incomes — all of this comes broadly under the right to livelihood or right to work. One small part of this can be an employment guarantee, but by no means is it the only thing.

Speaking of the state’s responsibilities, the Rashtriya Janata Dal in its Bihar poll manifesto promised 10 lakh government jobs. As a measure towards the right to work, how feasible is this approach where the state is the major employer?

Reetika Khera: The RJD manifesto, so far as jobs are concerned, has appealing elements. It picks up on the issue of vacant posts in government jobs. These are posts that are sanctioned but not yet filled. Many of these are essential services — teachers, nurses, ASHA workers, anganwadi workers, doctors, etc. So, not only will it create employment, it will also hopefully fill the void in essential public services.

In this context, people often cite the example of Thailand, which has a universal basic healthcare system that is labour-intensive. It solves two problems at the same time: it builds social infrastructure, and creates jobs. Is this something India can adopt?

Amit Basole: Absolutely. It is incumbent on the state to provide basic services such as health, education and housing, and in providing them, employment is generated. There may be some disagreement on whether it is the state itself that should provide, or if there should be room for private provisioning. But I don’t think people disagree that we need to expand spending on these things. We are nowhere near countries that are comparable in GDP per capita, such as Vietnam, and countries that spend much more on public goods as a percentage of their GDP. We should do that. That will create jobs.

The government has whittled down 44 labour laws into four labour codes that labour organisations have criticised as a dilution of workers’ rights. Where there is a dilution of rights ‘in work’, as it were, how does it matter whether or not there is a right ‘to work’?

Amit Basole: You are right to ask if it is at all worth raising the right to work question when very fundamental rights ‘in work’ are being violated, and violated not only for lack of legislation, but also because of labour legislation being diluted. In terms of the labour code changes, one thing to remember is that India is a labour surplus economy. In the capital-labour bargaining process, labour is structurally weak in India, which means it is incumbent on the state to provide that support to labour. But the state has been doing the opposite; it has abdicated a fundamental responsibility in that sense.

From a philosophical perspective, as human beings, isn’t a demand for the right to work setting the bar too low? We were speaking of dignity earlier — shouldn’t the demand really be for right to leisure rather than right to work?

Reetika Khera: A poster from the World War II period says ‘eight hours of work, eight hours of leisure, and eight hours of rest’. That was the original demand. Perhaps the correct way to view this is that if you guarantee a good eight hours of work, then automatically you are guaranteed that the rest is for you to enjoy your life, or the fruits of your labour.

Amit Basole: There is this 19th century book by Paul Lafargue called The Right to be Lazy, which was a response to the right to work campaign going on at that time, and his point was, why are we asking for the right to work, we should be asking for the right to be lazy! This is a live debate in Marxian political economy. The right to work essentially plays into capitalism and the work ethic — the right to work is the right to be exploited by capital. And that is a perfectly fair point of view. If you are really looking at the future of humanity, then one cannot take a narrow perspective. Work should be fulfilling, work should be creative, and work has to be put in its place, which is hopefully a very small place.

Amit Basole is Head, Centre for Sustainable Employment, Azim Premji University, Bengaluru; Reetika Khera  is Associate Professor of Economics at IIT-Delhi

Source: The Hindu, 13/11/20

The missing links in National Education Policy

Though ambitious, it doesn’t address problems of inequality, risks over-centralisation?

The National Education Policy 2020 (NEP) champions many ideals which, if realised, can truly transform our declining education system. However, it does appear to be somewhat limited in the operational details and some of its analysis.

Apart from “fundamental literacy and numeracy” and “overall cognitive development”, the NEP envisions “imparting 21st-century skills”, “well-rounded character building”, “critical thinking”, “holistic, inquiry-based, discovery-based, discussion-based and analysis-based hands-on learning”, “greater flexibility in choice of subjects” and “learning through innovative and experiential methods”. It also emphasises “scientific temper and evidence-based thinking; creativity and innovativeness; sense of aesthetics and art; oral and written communication; health and nutrition; physical education, fitness, wellness, and sports; collaboration and teamwork; problem-solving and logical reasoning; vocational exposure and skills; digital literacy, coding and computational thinking; ethical and moral reasoning; knowledge and practice of human and constitutional values; gender sensitivity; fundamental duties; citizenship skills and values; knowledge of India; environmental awareness, including water and resource conservation, sanitation and hygiene; and current affairs and knowledge of critical issues facing local communities, states, the country, and the world”. In a very welcome step, it also talks about strengthening the anganwadis and the mid-day-meal scheme. It, however, falls short in identifying what exactly has prevented us from achieving these ideals. It also fails to evaluate the risks in some of its recommendations.

First, it is not clear how such transformations may be brought about in a society, which has little respect for argumentative discourse, and instead treats education as synonymous with examination. We have made an industry out of coaching, tuition, “notes”, “practice problems” and “finishing the syllabus”. Even our elite institutions often fail to acknowledge that marks are random samples drawn from unmodelled probability distributions, and, as such, sorting them in order for ranking or admissions through competitive examinations — without any calibration or even any well-articulated admission objectives — is conceptually flawed. It appears unlikely that mere changes in syllabus or even structure can bring about fundamental changes in the mindset. Something more ingenious may be required for introducinSecond, the NEP has failed to boldly address the two main problems that plague our society and education system — inequity and inequality. Though the NEP addresses the issue of dropping out of schools at some length, and suggests strengthening infrastructure and accessibility as a remedy, it does not investigate the structural causes that may be rooted in inequality and discrimination.“scientific temper” in our education system.

The NEP advocates that early education should be in one’s mother tongue. This welcome suggestion, however, should not result in underemphasising English, which is a great equaliser in our society and opens up the world for many. That may turn out be discriminatory for some because the privileged will learn English anyway. There are similar risks with the seemingly innocuous and welcome step of introducing optional vocational training in schools, and it should not turn out to be merely an exit route for the underprivileged. Both require careful balancing to avoid unforeseen behavioural adaptations, causing them to end up as tools of exclusion and denial of opportunities.

Also, reservation has undoubtedly worked wonders in our country and has empowered many over the years. However, it has not been all smooth sailing, and there are some manifest structural problems. On the one hand, it is undeniable that it curbs opportunities of choice to many ready, eager and qualified young students, which is undesirable in any free society. On the other hand, it projects some students assessed to be at handicap by extant evaluation systems into environments which are often insensitive, disparaging or discriminatory, and which continue to use the same yardsticks of evaluation – often blindly – without any structural changes or effective remedial measures. The NEP needed to address this headlong.

Third, education is a state subject in our federal structure, yet the NEP approach is suggestive of over-centralization. It may be all right for the NCERT to provide broad curricular and pedagogical suggestions, but the guidelines should not become overbearing. Otherwise, there may be definite risks of stifling local cultures and contexts in the curricula. Indeed, the exposure to fundamental science and engineering concepts in our schools has become somewhat hand-me-down and bookish, and it is imperative to fall back on local experiential contexts and heritage — at least, at the initial stages — for innate understandings to develop. Perhaps, the same holds true for history, civics and sociology as well.

Finally, the NEP has not effectively addressed the over-specialisation that happens too early even in our college education. As a result, we not only have many students of science, engineering and medicine devoid of any understanding of social and political contexts, but also have many students of the social sciences and humanities without even a rudimentary understanding of the sciences, mathematics and computing. Both are severely limited for the modern world, and this cannot be easily fixed by just adding some “liberal arts” type of courses in the curricula of disciplinary silos. Also, the introduction of advanced specialised concepts too early — sometimes even from Class IX in school as the NEP envisages – often makes real assimilation difficult. What we perhaps require is at least two years of common broad-based college education, where a larger number of students can learn about the basics of everyday sciences, foundational engineering, literature and ethics, mathematics, computing, history, sociology, economics and political science interspersed with socially-oriented hands-on projects, surveys and fieldwork. That should prepare some of the students adequately for gainful employment and some others for more specialised follow-up education in the sciences, humanities, law, social sciences, mathematics, computing, engineering and medicine.

The NEP is a tremendously important exercise. It is important that the initial conceptualisation is refined further through an inclusive process of feedback and wide public consultations involving communities, regional representations, school and college teachers and also the general public.

The writer is professor, department of computer science and engineering, IIT Delhig greater 

Source: Indian Express, 12/11/20

51% TISS students not comfortable with online classes, 70% want campus to reopen: Survey

 

As colleges across the country prepare to reopen their campuses after the lockdown, almost 70% students of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai, want their campus reopened soon.

As colleges across the country prepare to reopen their campuses after the lockdown, almost 70% students of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai, want their campus reopened soon.

A survey was conducted by Progressive Students’ Forum (PSF), an initiative by the students of TISS for building a democratic and secular space on campus, to understand the impact of online classes on students.

Of the 549 students surveyed across all four campuses—Mumbai, Hyderabad, Tuljapur, Guwahati—only 28.8% said they were comfortable with online classes. More than half respondents said they were not comfortable with online teaching and the rest said they weren’t sure. Institute officials were unavailable for a comment.

“In various parts of our country, discussion regarding reopening campuses is going on. In light of that, PSF decided to conduct a survey to find out the opinion of the general student body about the ongoing mode of education and re-opening of campuses,” said a member of PSF.

Most students (41%) said they wanted the campuses to reopen by next semester and 32% said the institute should reopen by the end of the current semester.

The institute shut down its campuses in March following the Covid-19 outbreak and the subsequent lockdown. Soon after, an online mode of instruction was adopted to continue classes.

While the institute is yet to announce any plans for reopening, the PSF has written to the TISS administration based on the findings of the study. The PSF had suggested a phase-wise reopening of campuses, guidelines for attendance and how to conduct classes while maintaining social distancing norms.

According to the PSF, students in the survey said that accommodation facilities such as hostels must be provided for all the returning students. “In order to reduce congestion, maximum single rooms or not more than two students per room can be ensured. There has to be mandatory separate rooms for high-risk groups,” said PSF in its letter.

Source: Hindustan Times, 13/11/20

Quote of the Day November 12, 2020

 “Happiness, I have discovered, is nearly always a rebound from hard work.”

‐ David Grayson

“मैंने पाया है कि सुख लगभग हर बार कठोर श्रम की प्रतिक्रिया ही होता है।”

‐ डेविड ग्रेसन