October 7: World Cotton Day 2021

World Cotton Day was observed on October 7, across the world, in a bid to raise awareness regarding the cotton sector among people.

Key Points

• UN World Cotton Day (WCD) is celebrated annually on October 7 with the aim of raising awareness regarding the critical role of cotton sector in international trade, economic development and poverty alleviation.
• Annual celebration of the day provides a unique opportunity to recognize historic importance of cotton as global commodity.

Theme of World Cotton Day 2021

World Cotton Day 2021 was observed under the theme- “Cotton for Good”. This theme celebrates the enduring positive impact of cotton, such as providing employment, giving us natural fibres and protecting environment.
Furthermore, according to experts, cotton has a negative carbon footprint because it degrades 95 per cent faster as compared to polyester in wastewater. Thus, it helps in keeping the environment clean.

Background of World Cotton Day

World Trade Organisation (WTO) had launched the “World Cotton Day” in 2019 at the initiative of four cotton-producing sub-Saharan African states namely Benin, Chad, Burkina Faso and Mali. The day offered an opportunity of sharing knowledge and showcasing cotton-related activities.

About Cotton

Cotton is the only agricultural crop that provide both food and fibre. It is used in every other cloth because it is comfortable, breathable, hypoallergenic and durable. Cotton is grown in 75 countries of 5 continents, sustaining about 28.67 million growers. Cotton is the major source of livelihood as this sector provides employment and income in the rural areas.

Annual revenue from cotton

As per International Cotton Advisory Committee (ICAC), annual revenue from cotton is about USD 41.2 billion while, cotton trade accounts to USD 18 billion per year. As per UN, cotton crop is resistant to climatic changes. So, it can be planted in dry and arid zones. The fibre occupies only 2.1 per cent of the world’s arable land, but it meets 27 percent of the textile needs of world.

Climate change set to worsen resource degradation, conflict: IEP report

 

Afghanistan gets the worst score on the report, which says its ongoing conflict has damaged its ability to cope with risks to water and food supplies, climate change, and alternating floods and droughts.

A vicious cycle linking the depletion of natural resources with violent conflict may have gone past the point of no return in parts of the world and is likely to be exacerbated by climate change, a report said on Thursday.

Food insecurity, lack of water and the impact of natural disasters, combined with high population growth, are stoking conflict and displacing people in vulnerable areas, the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP) think-tank said.

IEP uses data from the United Nations and other sources to predict the countries and regions most at risk in its “Serge Stroobants, IEP director for Europe, the Middle East and North Africa said the report identified 30 “hotspot” countries – home to 1.26 billion people – as facing most risks. This is based on three criteria relating to scarcity of resources, and five focusing on disasters including floods, droughts and rising temperatures.Ecological Threat Register”.

“We don’t even need climate change to see potential system collapse, just the impact of those eight ecological threats can lead to this – of course climate change is reinforcing it,” Stroobants said.

Afghanistan gets the worst score on the report, which says its ongoing conflict has damaged its ability to cope with risks to water and food supplies, climate change, and alternating floods and droughts. Conflict in turn leads to further resource degradation, according to the findings.

Six seminars including governments, military institutions and development groups last year returned the message that “it is unlikely that the international community will reverse the vicious cycles in some parts of the world”, IEP said.

This is particularly the case in the Sahel and the Horn of Africa, which has seen more and worsening conflicts over the last decade, it said. “With tensions already escalating, it can only be expected that climate change will have an amplifying effect on many of these issues,” the report said.

Source: Indian Express, 7/10/21

Education Ministry report: At least 40% school children in 7 large states lack access to digital devices

 

The report, Initiatives by the School Education Sector in 2020-21, shows that the digital divide has hit some states disproportionately hard, while a few may have coped well due to adequate availability of smartphones and television sets.

BETWEEN 40% and 70% school-going children in seven large states – Assam, Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Gujarat, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh and Uttarakhand – do not have access to digital devices, according to a report prepared by the Union Ministry of Education that documents the response to challenges thrown up by the Covid-19 pandemic.

The report, Initiatives by the School Education Sector in 2020-21, shows that the digital divide has hit some states disproportionately hard, while a few may have coped well due to adequate availability of smartphones and television sets. However, the picture remains incomplete in the absence of data from states such as Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal, and questionable claims like that of Rajasthan that it does not have students without digital access.

The report, which was made public on Wednesday, has been prepared based on data shared by 22 of 28 states, and seven out of eight Union Territories. The state-wise interventions to bridge the divide also reflect the same disparity – with some like Tamil Nadu claiming to have distributed 5.15 lakh laptops among students, as against 42 mobile phones by the Bihar government.

In absolute numbers, prepared on the basis of surveys of various sample sizes by the states and UTs in 2020 and 2021, 29 crore students, including 14.33 crore in Bihar, were found without access to digital devices. “The ‘new normal’ may also have a huge impact on the learning levels for almost all children; learning loss may be a reality for many children,” the report says.

Among the states to have responded, those having a very high share of students without digital access include Madhya Pradesh (70%), Bihar (58.09%), Andhra Pradesh (57%), Assam (44.24%), Jharkhand (43.42%), Uttarakhand (41.17%) and Gujarat (40%). Among the better placed states and UTs are Delhi with around 4% students without access, Kerala 1.63%, Tamil Nadu 14.51%.

A look at some of the findings of the report:

Assam: The state reported 3,10,6255 students with no digital device. According to Unified District Information System for Education data, it has 7,01,5898 students across 65,907 schools. While the state did not distribute devices, it organised home visits by teachers, and launched a toll-free helpline for students to clear academic doubts and address psycho-social issues.

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Andhra Pradesh: The state surveyed 29.34 lakh out of the total 81.36 lakh students in May 2021 and found 2,01,568 students have no cellphone access. Parents of 10.22 lakh have phones that can only make calls, and 4.57 lakh students have access to phones with no mobile data. It found that 3.88 lakh students don’t have access to TV. Only 5,752 students have laptops. The state has so far distributed 2,850 laptops and 18,270 tabs, and is planning a toll-free number.

Bihar: The state, which has 2.46 crore students, reported that 1.43 crore children have no access to digital devices. In terms of interventions to bridge the gap, it gave cellphones to 42 students, and plans to provide tablets to 250 schools. With assistance of UNICEF, mobile vans equipped with TV, videos, math game, and toys were deployed across seven districts, with special focus on Mahadalit/Mushahar communities.

Gujarat: A UNICEF survey of 12,000 schools found 40% of the students did not have access to smartphones and Internet. The state has 1.14 crore students across 54,629 schools. To bridge the gap, the state government distributed blended learning modules, and launched an IVRS helpline. Around 11,200 devices were provided to students and 40,000 to teachers.

Jharkhand: Out of 74.89 lakh students, 32.52 lakh do not have digital access. The state informed the Centre that tablets had been provided to schools and cluster resource centres in 2018-19. As the number of android phones in remote tribal-dominated villages is “very low”, the state tied up with UNICEF to develop modules of home-based learning and started mohalla schools in remote areas.

Madhya Pradesh: An education department survey of 98 lakh of the state’s 1.57 crore students found that 70% of them do not have access to smartphones. The April 2021 survey said 53 lakh have access to TVs, and 57 lakhs to radio sets. Among the interventions listed are mohalla classes and regular teacher-parent interactions over the phone. A radio school programme was also launched immediately after the national lockdown.

Uttarakhand: State authorities surveyed 5.20 lakh out of 23.39 lakh schoolchildren and found 2.14 lakh do not have access to digital devices for online learning. It proposes to distribute more than 35,000 e-books to school students. The state also attempted community outreach to keep in touch with such students, distribute worksheets among them and also took the help of community radio in five districts

Driving home a point

The Education Ministry report once again spotlights the grim reality of differential access to education, made starker by the pandemic-induced disruption and the consequential digital divide. The official figures also validates the concerns expressed by non-profits working in the education sector. The report also highlights the interventions at various levels to bridge the divide, but one cannot emphasise enough on the need to scale up the efforts.

Source: Indian Express, 8/10/21

There is more to the evictions in Assam than the demands of ‘development’

 

Sanjib Baruah writes: Evictions have long been an explosive subject due to the region’s demographic and political history, as well as the displacement and dispossession caused by riverbank erosion.

Encroachment of land designated as “government lands”, “reserve forests” or “grazing lands” and the eviction of “encroachers” have long been a staple of politics in Assam. The recent evictions in Sipajhar are in line with this history, but they also stand strikingly apart in significant ways.

Encroachments and evictions are not unique to Assam. But they are more common and widespread — and they span the urban-rural divide — because of certain peculiarities of the region’s physical landscape and political and demographic history.

Assam regularly loses large swathes of land to riverbank erosion. Unlike the annual floods that attract significant media attention — though yielding little by way of a long-term flood hazard management strategy — riverbank erosion is less dramatic, and it barely makes news. Significant numbers of people are regularly displaced and dispossessed by riverbank erosion. An article by an IAS officer, Aranyak Saikia, that draws on his experience as assistant commissioner of a flood-prone district in Assam is quite telling (‘Not just floods, Assam needs an urgent, long-term strategy on erosion’, IE, September 12, 2021). Riverbank erosion uproots people from their land — their most important asset — forcing them to relocate. Some of the displaced, he observes, seek refuge in government lands, protected forests, or wildlife sanctuaries. “While undocumented migration has been a historical problem in Assam,” writes Saikia, “today a large fraction of the encroachments are also by families, uprooted by erosion”.

For more than a century Assam and Northeast India have been a settlement frontier attracting massive immigration from the rest of the subcontinent. While the colonial government that pictured Assam as a wasteland initially encouraged immigration and settlement by peasants from deltaic eastern Bengal to raise revenue, it also introduced the line system demarcating areas where immigrants could settle. But the colonial state found it difficult to defend the no-occupation areas against the pressure of immigration and many forest reserves, grazing reserves and tribal belts had to be de-reserved. The state, in effect, accepted its failure to prevent settlement in those spaces. This process has continued in old and new forms since decolonisation.

In recent decades, internal factors such as riverbank erosion and development-induced displacement — not immigration — have been the primary sources of demographic pressure on public lands. For example, Assam’s present capital complex in Dispur was built in the 1970s after the “de-tribalisation” of land belonging to a tribal belt. Like those displaced by riverbank erosion, those displaced by development too find their way into government lands and reserve forests, turning these land-use designations into little more than legal fictions.

It is hardly surprising that while officials like to present the eviction of encroachments in the apparently neutral language of the law, it has been an intensely political subject.

Evictions became an explosive political issue in the 1980s. One of the demands of the Assam movement (1979-85) was the eviction of non-tribals from the tribal belts. The All Assam Students Union (AASU) and the All Bodo Students Union (ABSU) were behind this demand. One of the clauses of the Assam Accord stipulated the prevention of encroachment and the eviction of unauthorised encroachers from public lands and tribal belts and blocks. But when the first Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) government tried to implement this clause, it quickly learned that the “unauthorised encroachers” are a motley group of people that included many Bodos and other tribals as well.

It was a costly political mistake for the AGP. It was the single major factor that alienated the Bodos from the ethnic Assamese political society and radicalised the Bodo movement. From a movement focused on Bodo culture and the deprivation of educational and employment opportunities, the focus of the Bodo movement changed to the demand for a separate state, captured by the slogan, “Divide Assam 50-50”.

Assam has come a long way since then. The current state government of Assam does not take any political chances. Evictable encroached areas are carefully identified and targeted for development projects, which apparently involves foreknowledge of the alleged encroachers to be evicted. Their religious and ethnic affiliations appear to feature in the design of the project. The development project is fast-tracked to start immediately after the physical eviction is completed by the police, bulldozers, and elephants.

In her budget speech to the state Assembly in July, Finance Minister Ajanta Neog spoke of an “experiment” to “remove encroachers from more than 77,420 bighas of land” in the Garukhuti area of Sipajhar. A committee of legislators was formed “to lead the agricultural initiatives for development of agriculture and allied activities”. The project’s goal, she claimed, was to provide livelihood opportunities to the area’s “indigenous youth”.

The so-called experiment was fast-tracked in an unparalleled manner. The state government had already identified a group of farmers to form part of a Multipurpose Agricultural Producer Organisation. There was no explanation for why none of the alleged encroachers could be included among the project’s potential beneficiaries.

The government, she said, had already deployed an advance party of the Indian Army’s 134 battalion of the Ecological Task Force (ETF) to undertake “massive afforestation activities” in the evicted area; and a veterinary expert team from Gujarat was already in place to oversee a pilot project for the introduction of the Gir cow to the area.

The local media reported that the committee of legislators overseeing the project had “camped in the Gorukhuti area to monitor the eviction drive”. On the day of the eviction, the committee chairman said it had engaged 22 tractors to till the land.

Development has been aptly called “a concept of monumental emptiness” since it can mean just about anything. Therefore critical scholars of development have long argued that it is crucial to ask, “what development does, who does it, and whom it actually benefits”. It is hard to think of a better case to illustrate this argument than Assam’s new “experiment” with eviction for development.

This column first appeared in the print edition on October 8, 2021 under the title ‘Eviction and development’. The writer is Professor of Political Studies at Bard College, New York.

Source: 8/10/21

Quote of the Day

 

“The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.”
Stephen Hawking

“ज्ञान का सबसे बड़ा शत्रु अज्ञान नहीं है, बल्कि ज्ञान का मिथ्याभास है।”
स्टीफन हॉकिंग

Tips to keep in mind when selecting a certification course

 

Practical over theoretical: A common question often asked is: does certifications guarantee a job? Here are some tips to keep in mind when selecting a certification course.

There is a long-standing view that the more certifications one has, the higher the chances of a successful career. Earlier, a good education was linked to a successful life. While this may have been true in the past, today, organisations want people to showcase their skills, not just their certificates.

Experience vs certification

The main thing to remember is that certifications no longer guarantees one a job. To put that into perspective, think about this: If you’ve been looking for a job online, when was the last time you saw “ must be certified”? and how many times have you seen “ must have experience”? This is proof that employers don’t always care about your certificates. Here’s why:

First, companies today need you to be ready before you get the job. They want someone who can dive straight in and go with the flow, as they don’t have time to train or groom recruits. A certification does not show them the candidate’s skills.

Second, a certification usually covers a generic area of learning. For instance, someone may have a certificate in Data Science, but the company may need someone who understands the base base, cloud, and related areas for them to be effective.

Retention and application gap

There is usually a gap of around three to six months between certification and getting a job. This means that you would have lost some of what you learned, and cannot expect to apply yourself completely to the job. As learning evaporates rapidly, certification is not equal to practical hands-on experience.

Fast technological changes

Given the speed at which technology is changing, the knowledge gained today could be obsolete or outdated in a year or two. Someone who completes a software course will be stuck with a piece of valueless paper when the company rolls out a new version. On the other hand, learning on the job as it evolves will not only keep you up to date but also helps you to develop other skills.

Thus, it becomes clear that hands-on experience will always trump a certificate. So it makes more sense to develop a skill set that can be used to get a job rather than gain theoretical knowledge that offers you no such guarantee.

The writer is Founder of BridgeLabz

Narayan Mahadevan

Source: The Hindu, 2/07/21

Universities are key in educating the young

 

While Central universities are doing well, few State universities stand out

While we have highlighted the importance of introducing humanities and social sciences in the IITs, the roles that universities and colleges play in educating their youngsters need to be pointed out. During the British colonial rule, while on one hand they charged exorbitant amounts as taxes for their revenue, there were some academicians too, who set up colleges and universities in the Bombay, Madras and Bengal Presidencies. In Bombay, they set up a regular academic college, and medical and law colleges. In Madras, they set up the Madras Presidency College in 1840, and in Bengal the Calcutta Presidency College in 1817.

All these offered quality and contemporary education. In addition, Christian missionaries also started some colleges in Delhi, undivided Punjab, Madras and Assam. Notable among these is the Christian Medical College at Vellore, which continues to offer world-class clinical practice and research to this day.

Royal initiatives

Quite besides these are the schools and colleges started by the Maharajas and Princely State Kings across India, particularly in the South. They have been the bedrock of imparting knowledge and wisdom, history, geography, and religions, over the last century. They have produced scholars, historians, writers and poets, civil servants, judges, chief ministers, governors and Presidents of India, and also M.S. Swaminathan of the Green Revolution and M. Visvesvaraya, the famous dam builder, and also the Nobel Prize winners (C.V. Raman, S Chandrasekhar and most recently Venky Ramakrishnan who is an alumnus of the century-old M.S. University Vadodara).

Outstanding institution

One outstanding institution founded in 1909 at Bangalore through the joint efforts of J.N. Tata and the Maharaja of Mysore is the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), which has been spearheading research in science and technology from the very beginning. Outstanding research in genetics, molecular and cell biology, and protein structure and function has been going on from the very beginning. In recent times, IISc has become world-famous for its achievements in computer science and software technology. Thanks to the series of books on this subject by Dr. V. Rajaraman (which has been the Bible for thousands of students) and the investment by Shri. N.R. Narayanamurthy, who founded Infosys Foundation, India has become a world-leader in software. They have made many graduates from IITs and universities to turn to this area and flock to Silicon Valley in California for jobs, and do very well there.

Moving on to two Central Universities at Delhi, namely, Delhi University with its North and South campuses, and Jawaharlal Nehru University or JNU, we find quite notably that apart from their proven expertise in the areas of economics, humanities and social sciences, they have been doing remarkably well in science and biotechnology. The North Campus has been a forerunner in botany and plant sciences, and the South Campus in medical and biotechnology. And JNU, apart from its distinction in economics (Prof. Utsa Patnaik, who estimated how the British Empire impoverished India by 500 trillion dollars to become the richest Empire in the world), has also an active genetics and biotechnology group (Prof. Anand Ranganathan) that works on TB and Malaria, thus protecting us from these diseases.

But, alas, none of the 400+ State universities successfully stand out in their achievements – be it in language and literature, economics, technology and its use. The lone exception may be Punjab University which has come to the service of the community through its excellent rice production, successful fight against swarms of locusts, and also in the history of the Punjabi language. We have already referred to the work being done at the Jadavpur and Presidency Universities at Kolkata, and also the Osmania University at Hyderabad, in certain areas of science and technology, besides language, literature and economics should be mentioned.

Private universities

Recently, several non-profit private universities have been started and are doing excellent service in software sciences (Azim Premji University), genetics, molecular biology and virology, sociology and history (Ashoka University), and SRM University in Chennai and Amaravati. May there be more such private and non-governmental universities!

dbala@lvpei.org

Source: The Hindu, 2/10/21

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