TISSNET 2022: List of recommended books to ace the exam

 

The TISSNET Exam 2022 is expected to be held in January or February 2022. Know here which are the best books to prepare for the exam. 

Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai will soon announce dates and details of TISSNET 2022. The exam is held for candidates who wish to get admission in Master of Arts / Master of Science / BEd-MEd Integrated programmes. The exam is highly competitive and the candidates who qualify for it are called for the further round of the admission process.

Candidates who are aiming to take the upcoming exam will be able to fill the TISSNET 2022 application form by the end of October or in the first half of November 2021. To ace the exam, candidates need complete knowledge of the exam and good study material. To help the students, here is a list of best books for TISSNET 2022 preparation

Best books for English proficiency: As per the TISSNET 2022 syllabus, the topics which are important in this section are — antonyms, synonyms, idioms, phrases, one word substitution, fill in the blanks, reading comprehension, sentence correction, error detection, etc. Some of the best books which help prepare these sections well are Word Power Made Easy by Norman Lewis, English Is Easy by Chetananand Singh, High School English Grammar and Composition Key by Wren & Martin, English for General Competitions by Neetu Singh, Language Skills and Reading Comprehension for CAT by Arun Sharma, Mastering the Verbal Ability for CAT by Ajay Singh. 

Best books for general awareness: The exam pattern of TISSNET 2022 is such that this is one of the most important sections in the exam. Candidates must have knowledge of personalities, geography, literature, current affairs, economics, business, awards, sports, etc. Books that will help in preparing well are Manorama Yearbook by Manorama, Current Affairs Yearly by Arihant, The Best Book of General knowledge by Subhash C. Soni, General Knowledge 2020: Latest Current Affairs & Who’s Who by RPH Editorial Board

Best books for mathematics and logical reasoning: During TISSNET 2022 preparation for maths and logical reasoning section, candidates can use these books –How to Prepare for Quantitative Aptitude for the CAT by Arun Sharma, The Pearson Guide to Quantitative Aptitude and Data Interpretation for the CAT by Nishit K. Sinha, Quantitative Aptitude by Dr. R.S Aggarwal, How to prepare for Logical Reasoning for CAT by Arun Sharma, Verbal and Non-verbal Reasoning by R S Aggarwal, Quantitative Aptitude Quantum CAT Common Admission Test for Admission into IIMs by Sarvesh K. Verma

TISSNET is a one hour and 40-minute exam. In this duration, candidates have to solve 100 multiple choice questions on English proficiency (EP), General Awareness (GA), and Mathematics and Logical Reasoning (M&LR). From the EP section, 30 questions are asked. From GA 40 questions are asked and from the MLR 30 questions are asked. Each question carries 1 mark and there is no negative marking in the exam.

Candidates preparing for TISSNET must read the newspaper daily and keep track of the current affairs. While doing so, candidates can make a rough notebook and note down the important dates and names. Learn a lot of tricks and shortcuts to gain the speed required in Mathematics. Solve some brain puzzles and riddles to enhance your logical reasoning.

Solve reading comprehension passages daily and learn new words from the dictionary. Read some good books and English newspapers which will enhance your vocabulary. Have confidence while giving the exam and have a good sleep before the exam day.

Source: Indian Express, 19/10/21

Economics Nobel laureates and the credibility revolution

 

Pranav Patil writes: The work of this year’s Nobel Prize-winning economists helped in formulating more rigorous, objective and rational interventions to solve problems like poverty

This year’s Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences (the Nobel prize) has been awarded to David Card for his empirical contribution to labour economics and to Joshua Angrist and Guido Imbens for pioneering new methods to analyse causal relationships. The trio invented methods that have led to the so-called “credibility revolution” in empirical economics.

The scope of issues that economists examine has widened over the last three decades as the discipline began exploring answers beyond mathematical models and ideological discourse. Although neoclassical theories are elegant, questions were raised about their real-life evidence. Do economists have credible evidence such that policymakers and the public can take them seriously? Nobel laureates Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo point out that the lack of evidence is one of the reasons economists were considered less credible.

For an evidence-based approach, understanding the causal relationship between different factors, therefore, becomes imperative. A classic example of a causal relationship is the impact of education on lifetime earnings — would one extra year of education increase earnings and by what magnitude? Economists embraced the experimental approach to tackle the credibility crisis and to assess the precise causal effect of policies. Like in medical science, development economists launched smaller randomised controlled trials in the hope of establishing causality between different variables and to investigate which policy interventions were effective. In a randomised control trial, Duflo, along with others tested how monitoring and financial incentives reduced teacher absenteeism and improved learning in India. Based on experimentally derived causal inferences, economists can recommend more rigorous, objective and rational interventions to solve larger problems like poverty.

However, it is dreadfully challenging to conduct field experiments in many cases. They are expensive, time-consuming and ethically tricky. That is where the idea of “natural experiments” becomes illuminating which rely on random variation without any manipulation by researchers. Card and Alan Krueger designed their famous natural experiment based on the changes in the minimum wage in New Jersey and compared it with Pennsylvania, which has not experienced similar changes. They studied employment in the fast-food industry in the two states before and after the wage changes in New Jersey. Contrary to the predictions of standard economic theory, they found a slight increase in employment in New Jersey compared to Pennsylvania. This finding was a massive blow to conventional supply and demand models. Angrist and Imbens have also designed many natural (quasi) experiments and have been developing a statistical toolkit to precisely estimate the causal effects of policies.

The study of causality is not novel to the research community. However, causal relations were not extensively studied with empirical methods in social sciences. Newton’s second law proposes that an object in uniform motion will continue its motion unless some external force is applied. Credibility revolutionists use this very principle to explain economic dynamics. Nonetheless, “causality is no correlation” is the most common catchphrase for these revolutionaries. To distinguish causal links from correlation, economists rely on counterfactuals. For example, in the Card and Krueger study, they show that employment in two states had been evolving in parallel fashion before changes in the minimum wage. Based on that, they assume that employment would evolve similarly in both states without any intervention. Even if they did not observe what would have happened in New Jersey if there was not any intervention, they could observe the counterfactual situation in Pennsylvania.

Since economics closely deals with politics and the market, it is critical to identify which policy interventions are best (and cost-effective). It is worth considering two studies based on two flagship programmes of the Government of India — the Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana and the Rajiv Gandhi Grameen Vidyutikaran Yojana. The general assumption that policymakers make is that rural infrastructure programmes would increase farm and off-farm economic activities and reduce poverty. However, recent studies by Sam Asher, Paul Novosad, Fiona Burlig and Louis Preonas point out that while such programmes increase road and electricity connectivity, they do not cause significant economic development even four to five years after completion. It is thus meaningful to examine whether such interventions cause development, to what extent they increase welfare and where they fail.

Source: Indian Express, 20/10/21

Violence and communalism: South Asia’s disturbing commonality

 

Pratap Bhanu Mehta writes: Fundamentalists, even as they create walls between communities, recognise that South Asia has a connected destiny: They bank on it to achieve their ends

The violence against the Hindu minority in Bangladesh is an ominous development. But it is also a reminder of one cardinal truth: All of South Asia is “tied together in a single garment of destiny,” to borrow Martin Luther King’s phrase from a different context. Violence in one place will spill over to another; freedom endangered in one place will inevitably corrode the freedom of others. We have tried to act as if this was not true. But that modus vivendi has been unravelling for a while.

Anti-Hindu violence in Bangladesh is not new. The current violence is strategically timed. It is surely not a coincidence that the violence coincides with targeted attacks on Hindus in Kashmir. The intent is not just local ethnic terror, but a deepening of the communal divide in India. It is tempting to say that this violence is a strategic act by particular organised groups, perhaps with transnational links. It is not organically embedded in society. This is a comforting thought, and can empower us to the extent that it is still important to recognise forces that do not condone such violence. But in South Asia the link between strategic communal violence and organic embeddedness is always a tricky one. Such violence inevitably transforms the fabric of social relationships itself. It is fanciful to think that Kashmiriyat survived terrorism, or that remnants of Bangladeshi pluralism will survive this violence, or that blasphemy laws in Punjab will not play into hands of violent reactionaries, any more than Indian secularism survived the violence of so-called fringe groups. Over time, everywhere in South Asia, violence has fundamentally transformed politics. It is a tiger you ride at your own peril.

The Partition of India could work as a modus vivendi, if three conditions were in place. The first is that the internal conflicts in each of the states would not radically spill over into the other states. This assumption was never literally true. But it was shaken to its core by 1971. Pakistan’s horrendous internal conflicts spilled over, and Indian intervention helped the breaking up of Pakistan, creating a syndrome of deep Pakistani insecurity that still haunts the subcontinent. The second assumption was that the successor states behaved, as much as possible, like normal states in relation to each other: Pacifying violence, trading with each other, leveraging the advantages of their geographical proximity. They would, like all states, worry about the power of their neighbours. But the fact that they were states would give them enough confidence to deal with each other. Most states in South Asia, however, want to run away from each other. In Pakistan we got a state whose elites were ready to cut off its nose to spite its face, becoming an epicentre of transnational violence from Afghanistan to Bangladesh, and changing its own social character in the process.

But even the absence of these two conditions could, with some difficulty, be managed, if India remained a bulwark against spillover effects. Spillover effects don’t just work through retaliatory violence. They work by transforming the ideological climate in other states. The persecution of Hindus in Pakistan and Bangladesh is a pivotal strand in the mentality that India must be, if not a Hindu state, at least a “Hindus First” state. India could also remain a bulwark against these effects if in response to communalism elsewhere, it reaffirmed its own secularism more deeply. The assumption was that India is large enough to absorb a few pin pricks. Throwing cold water domestically over what our neighbours were doing, even as we tried to contain them internationally, was not a sign of weakness, it was smart strategy. The fact that Hindus are being targeted is not a creation of Hindu nationalism. The targeting of Hindus also has elements of sui generis logic. But the ascendancy of Hindu nationalism has profoundly changed how the dynamics of attacks play out. Hindu nationalism looks for pretexts to target Muslims, deepen internal divisions, and construct a seamless spectre of Muslim threat. The official response of the government of India to the violence in Bangladesh may be conventional. But this incident will have deep communal effects. Even if there is no immediate retaliatory violence, the cumulative communal undertones in India will erupt. Which is exactly what those groups who foment violence in Afghanistan, Pakistan or Bangladesh would like.

The spillover effects cannot be contained because, despite differences in political cultures, the ethnic fundamentalisms of these countries now feed off each other. They will give each other victories. All of these countries, including India, now have hegemonic ideologies at the level of civil society that revel in a vicious coarsening of discourse, are deeply committed to violence, and frankly don’t mind disorder if it increases support for society’s authoritarian instincts.

This is also of great strategic consequence. Some of Delhi’s macho strategic mandarins used to loudly thump their chests and say India can do without South Asia: It was too big and had too much legitimacy capital to have to worry about its neighbours. India’s legitimacy capital is slowly eroding as its democracy and secularism corrode. But, strategically, not placing South Asia front and centre was always a myopic view. It was also a mistake in a much deeper sense. The geopolitics of South Asia is not a conventional international relations problem; it is a deep, and increasingly traumatic, psychodrama in a long civilisational history. The international de-hyphenation of India and Pakistan may be considered a big diplomatic victory. But the de-hyphenation we are proud of is practically meaningless when even the ideological currents in most South Asian countries are now so deeply hyphenated.

In a twisted dialectic, fundamentalists, even as they create walls between communities, seem to recognise that South Asia has a connected ideological destiny: They are banking on it to achieve their ends. There are three ways of thinking about that destiny. The first is the current modus vivendi. But the historical conditions for its success are increasingly doubtful. What is replacing it is an intensification of the logic of 1947: Attempts at a deepening communal divide, ethnic cleansing and subordination in different keys, and a cult of violence. Is there a third option — a South Asia with states that reimagine the region not as joined by a murderous competition over community identity but as a new zone of freedom? This is a pie in the sky. But the thought that the only political language that unites South Asia is the deepening of the violence of 1947 is too dreadful to contemplate.

Source: Indian Express, 20/10/21

Quote of the Day

 

“Anything that makes the world more humane and more rational is progress; that's the only measuring stick we can apply to it.”
W. Lippmann

“जो कुछ भी इस विश्व को अघिक मानवीय और विवेकशील बनाता है उसे प्रगति कहते हैं; और केवल यही मापदंड हम इसके लिये अपना सकते हैं।”
डब्ल्यू. लिपमैन

Current Affairs-October 18, 2021

 

INDIA

– Punjab CM Charanjit Channi launches ‘Mera Ghar Mere Naam’ scheme to confer proprietary rights on the people living in the houses within the ‘Lal Lakir’ of villages and the cities

– Centre renames Andaman’s ‘Mount Harriet’ as ‘Mount Manipur’

– Kerala: 27 die from floods, landslides; Kottayam and Idukki districts worst hit

ECONOMY & CORPORATE

– Over 4 crore unorganized workers registered on e-Shram Portal: Union Minister for Labour and Employment Bhupender Yadav

WORLD

– Russian crew returns to Earth after filming first movie in space titled “The Challenge”

– International Day for the Eradication of Poverty observed on Oct 17

– World Trauma Day observed on October 17

– No fear of inflation ‘runaway train’: IMF MD Kristalina Georgieva

SPORTS

– China win Uber Cup (women’s team) badminton tournament in Aarhus, Denmark; Indonesia win Thomas Cup (men’s team)

– Kenya’s Elisha Rotich (men’s) and Tigist Memuye (women’s) of Ethiopia win Paris Marathon

– India beats Nepal 3-0 in final to win SAFF football Championship in Male

Month: Current Affairs - October, 2021

Indian Project wins Eco Oscars

 

An Indian Project, Takachar’s Innovation, that recycles agricultural waste into fuel has won the “Prince William’s inaugural Earthshot Prize”, which is also called as “Eco Oscars.

Highlights

• Eco Oscars honour people who are trying to save the planet Earth.
• This award is presented with the aim of providing assistance to and inspire innovative local solutions as the climate crisis is growing globally.

Takachar’s Innovation

Takachar’s Innovation is led by Vidyut Mohan. This technology was recognised for its affordable technology in order to convert crop residues into sellable bio-products. It reduced smoke emissions by 98 per cent. Thus, it calls for improving air quality. Vidyut Mohan was awarded for this technology in “clean our air category”. This award was among fiver other winners of the prize worldwide.

Significance of the technology

World generate around USD 120 billion of agricultural waste per year. When farmers fail to sell, they often burn the waste. Burning of waste have catastrophic consequences for human health as well as environment. Burning causes air pollution, which has reduced life expectancy in some areas by a decade. Thus, this technology is significant in mitigating this challenge.

Background

For the next 10 years, the Earthshot will be awarding £1m each year to each of five projects that are working for findings solutions to the environmental problems on the planet.

About Earthshot Prize

This prize is awarded to five winners each year, whose projects help the environment. It will be awarded annually from 2021 to 2030. It is given by the Royal Foundation, which is headquartered in London, England. The prize is distributed in five separate categories that are supported by UN Sustainable Development Goals. This prize was launched in the year 2020 by Prince William, Duke of Cambridge and David Attenborough.

World Food Day celebrated on October 16

 World Food Day is observed every year on October 16. Year 2021 marked the 76^th World Food Day.

Key facts

• This day makes human realise how privileged are they to gorge on the delicacies from across the world as well as raises awareness regarding deprived & not-so-privileged people.
• It acknowledges the founding of Food and Agriculture organisation as well as highlights the section in the world that starves from extreme hunger.
• United Nations had found the ‘Food and Agriculture Association (FAO)’ on October 16, 1945.

Significance of the day

Starvation is a big problem in several countries, especially in underdeveloped parts of the globe. Thus, awareness is required to address this issue. World Food Day helps in addressing the issue.

World Food Day: History

World Food Day was set up by Member Countries of Food & Agriculture Organisation (FAO). It was established at the 20th General Conference of FAO in November 1979. Hungarian Delegation, led by former Hungarian Minister of Agriculture & Food Dr. Pal Romany, played a significant role at the 20th Session and recommended the idea of celebrating this day across the world. It has since been observed in more than 150 countries, every year. It raises awareness of the issues behind poverty and hunger.

Theme of the day

This day in 2021 was celebrated under the theme- “Safe food now for a healthy tomorrow”.

Purpose of the day

The main purpose to celebrate this day is to promote the message that “food is a basic and fundamental human right. It also spread awareness on malnutrition and obesity.