IGNOU launches AICTE approved new online MBA programme

 

Candidates who have passed Bachelor’s degree with 50 per cent marks for the general category and 45 per cent marks for reserved category can take admission into this programme without any entrance test.

School of Management Studies (SOMS), IGNOU has launched the Master of Business Administration (Online) programme. The MBA (Online) programme which is going to be on offer from January 2022 admission cycle is approved by AICTE.

Candidates who have passed Bachelor’s degree with 50 per cent marks for the general category and 45 per cent marks for reserved category can take admission into this programme without any entrance test. Interested candidates can apply online at – ignouiop.samarth.edu.in

The programme offers five different specializations such as: Human Resource Management, Financial Management, Marketing Management, Operations Management and Services Management. Learners have to complete 28 courses spanning across four semesters and have 116 credits. 

As per the release, ​​multiple media will be used for delivery of MBA (Online) programme, which includes self-study material in digital form, asynchronous and synchronous counseling, sessions through GyanDarshan, mobile app, social media platforms, Gyanvani, and e-mail support.

The minimum duration of the programme is 2 years and the maximum is 4 years. The programme coordinators are Prof. Rajeev Kumar Shukla and Dr. Venkataiah Chittipaka, SOMS, IGNOU.

Source: Indian Express, 12/01/22

Tackling India’s unemployment wave

 

Trishali Chauhan, Christophe Jaffrelot write: Across sectors, age groups and gender, there has been an increase in joblessness, which cannot be blamed solely on the pandemic

Over the last few months, the Government of India and the mainstream media have highlighted the return of economic growth. However, very little attention has been paid to the job market. India’s unemployment rate has been soaring. It went up to 7.91 per cent in December 2021 from 6.3 per cent in 2018-2019 and 4.7 per cent in 2017-18, when the trend started to change — a sign that this phenomenon is not just due to Covid. In urban areas, this has gone up to 9.30 per cent in December 2021 from 8.09 per cent in January 2021. In rural areas, it has gone up to 7.28 per cent against 5.81 per cent.

Clearly, unemployment is more in the urban areas as compared to the rural areas. Between 2019-20 and December 2021, the manufacturing sector has lost 9.8 million jobs; by contrast, agricultural jobs jumped by 7.4 million. One probably needs to get back to the Raj years to see such a movement towards ruThe quality of jobs is also at stake. The percentage of salaried people has dropped from 21.2 per cent in 2019-2020 to 19 per cent in 2021, which means that 9.5 million people have left the salariat and become jobless or part of the informal sector. But the informal sector itself has shrunk, so much so that — to return to aggregate figures — the employed population, over the same period, has decreased from 408.9 million people to 406 million, at a time about 10 million young Indians were entering the job market. The age pyramid does not help, despite the belief in the so-called demographic dividend.

India’s Labour Force Participation (LPR) does not compare favourably with other emerging countries — a category that is vanishing quickly. According to the World Bank, it stood at 46 per cent in 2020 (it has not improved since then), while that of Brazil stood at 59 per cent, Chile’s at 57 per cent, China’s at 67 per cent, Ethiopia’s at 76, Ghana’s at 66, per cent, Indonesia’s at 66 per cent and Malaysia’s at 64 per cent.

Certainly, there are variations among Indian states. As per CMIE data, the unemployment rate in December 2021 was the highest in Haryana (34.1 per cent), followed by Rajasthan (27.1 per cent), Jharkhand (17.3 per cent) and Bihar (16 per cent).

There are also variations age-wise. Based on the data from CEDA-CMIE (between January 2019 and July 2021), the year 2020-21 saw 42.4 per cent fewer 15-19-year-olds employed in comparison to 2019-20. The age group of 20-29-year-olds saw the average monthly employment numbers go down by 15.6 per cent.ralisation: Workers are back in their villages even though urban jobs provide better wages.

In fact, according to the NSSO, in 2019, when India had the highest unemployment rate in the last 45 years, this rate was particularly high among India’s youth: 34 per cent for those between 20 and 24 years. For urban dwellers in this age group, this rate was 37.5 per cent. This figure is coherent with the CMIE figures: For the age group of 20-29 years old, the rate was around 28 per cent, meaning that nearly 30.8 million young people in this age group were jobless, compared to 17.8 million in 2017. An astonishing fact is that the more educated the people, the more unemployed they were — 63.4 per cent of graduates falling in the age bracket of 20-24 years were unemployed. This number has increased with time.

Variations according to gender are also important. Unemployment among women is higher than men, both in urban as well as rural areas. For women, the average unemployment was 14.28 per cent and for men, it was 7.88 per cent. Further, of the women willing to seek work in urban areas, 92.1 per cent don’t get any work. This count for rural women stands at 54.8 per cent.

To start with, the proportion of women who get employed and get paid is low and continues to decline over the years. This is happening even though more and more women are attending school and college in the country.

The absorption of women in the workforce, as compared to men, is much less for two main reasons. One, most women were involved in agricultural jobs in rural areas; the mechanisation of these jobs has had a huge impact on female labour force participation in the country. Two, India’s manufacturing sector is not labour-intensive. This has made it difficult to compensate women who got displaced from agricultural jobs.

There has been a lot of discussion about how women’s role as primary caregivers and ownership of domestic chores is a reason for the low participation of women in the workforce. The cultural norms and deep roots of patriarchy apparently limit women’s labour participation in India. In fact, young women tend to abstain from looking for a job when their own brothers cannot find one.

The employment scene will improve only if private investment picks up. At the moment, the situation is grim on that front. The investment rate is declining — almost in a linear manner — since 2011. It has dropped from 34.3 per cent then to 27 per cent in 2020. One of the reasons why companies do not invest is weak demand – which is partly due to joblessness — that dissuades enterprises from hiring more. This vicious circle is also fostered by growing inequalities, resulting in the shrinking of the middle class.

Unfortunately, investors will also be at an unfair disadvantage of more delicate access to credit in the coming weeks and months: Not only are Indian banks still badly affected by NPAs, but interest rates are bound to increase because of inflation — the rate has almost touched 5 per cent. In December, the State Bank of India raised its base rate for the first time in two years.

Unemployment in India has undeniably reached a critical stage and perhaps, raises serious questions on the quality of the economic recovery, which the third wave of the pandemic may affect anyway, making joblessness an even more acute problem.

Written by Trishali Chauhan , Christophe Jaffrelot

Source: Indian Express, 12/02/22

Quote of the Day January 11, 2022

 

“Patriotism is not so much protecting the land of our fathers as preserving the land of our children.”
Jose Ortega Gasset

“देशभक्ति का अर्थ अपने पुरखों की भूमि की रक्षा करना नहीं, अपनी संतानों के लिए भूमि का संरक्षण है।”
होसे आर्तेगा गासेत

Building blocks for self-awareness

 

Only from deeper self-knowledge can tangible growth and transformation be set in motion. This is where feedback comes into play

You know that feeling when someone begins to tell you about yourself, when a churning sensation takes over at the pit of the belly and you brace for the bite of being told something unsavoury about yourself — a physiological response to “What do they really think about me?” Nothing good or bad about this feeling that lingers, as you soften to listen-in to your impact on someone else. A pity that many of us are unfamiliar with this experience of receiving solicited feedback, in the course of living and growing up.

While self-improvement or self-awareness are now familiar individual quests, the inherent role of feedback for holistic acceptance and growth has not gathered steam. There’s another angle to this status quo. While the art of giving feedback is important and intricate on its own, the ability to seek and allow feedback — as insights and building blocks for self-awareness — is not yet an integral part of the self-improvement tool-kit. Please note that feedback, here, refers to constructive feedback from someone with the skill, awareness and intention to do so.

Johari Window

So, let’s begin from there. The idea being expanding our understanding and interpretation of ourselves with the allowance and acceptance of feedback. The Johari Window with its four quadrants of human interaction is an efficient model to illustrate this. Created by psychologists Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingham in 1955, this simple tool is used primarily in self-help groups and corporate settings as a heuristic exercise to deepen self-awareness and understanding.

Imagine a quadrant with four equal parts — Open, Hidden, Blind and Unknown. As the names suggest, the Blind square refers to our blind spots that we are unaware of but are visible to others. The Hidden square covers all aspects that we hide from others. Simply put, once our intention is to be deeply aware of our beliefs, triggers and patterns of behaviour, we will need to expand the walls of the Open square (self-awareness). This expansion naturally widens into the Hidden or Unknown parts about us, and improve our knowledge of self.

On an individual level, the tool helps people understand what others see in them. We cannot improve what we don’t know and don’t see. Once we decide to change that, we sow the seeds of Trust in the process. At its core, the Johari Window is hinged to trust. The success of this virtual window of opportunity lies in the honesty of an individual’s quest to enhance self-awareness; and their earnestness to understand the self, better. Only from deeper self-knowledge can tangible growth and transformation be set in motion. And once we trust enough to seek feedback, the choice of the person is critical since the invitation to feedback and the act of revealing information to someone, is a partnership of trust.

Equality is important

Yet another prerequisite of a successful feedback loop is for the giver and receiver to feel equal in the process. Feedback is rarely constructive when a person is speaking from a position of superiority to the receiver. An ideal feedback session is collaborative.

If you are the one chosen to offer feedback, be the bearer of responsible observation. Describe what you experienced. Make feedback about sharing what you saw and how it made you feel. Begin with “This is how that came across to me,” or “This is what made me think”. When you relay your reaction in specific detail, you are not judging, giving rating or fixing the person; you’re simply sharing their one-off impact, made in a moment, in an action or behaviour — as experienced by you. And precisely because it isn’t a judgment, it is, at once, more powerful.

Source: The Hindu, 18/09/21

Nivedita Das Narayan

Current Affairs- January 11, 2022

 

INDIA

– Administration of ‘precaution dose’ of Covid-19 vaccine to healthcare, frontline workers and those above 60 years started

Health Ministry issues revised advisory for managing HCWs working in COVID and Non-COVID areas of Health Care Facilities

– ICMR issues an advisory on purposive testing strategy for Covid-19 in India

– Visually challenged students will soon have access to Braille Maps, enabling them for ease of use: Govt

– Punjab Lok Congress party of Ex-CM Captain Amarinder Singh allotted hockey stick, ball as election symbol

ECONOMY & CORPORATE

– Labour Minister Bhupender Yadav releases report on 2nd round of Quarterly Employment Survey

WORLD

– Sri Lanka launches Jaffna-Colombo luxury train service with India’s assistance

– Kazakhstan: President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev says coup d’etat averted

– Golden Globe Awards: “The Power of the Dog” wins best drama film award; “West Side Story” wins best musical/comedy film award

– ECOWAS (Economic Community of West African States) sever relations with Mali in response to its “unacceptable” delay in holding elections

– New York City apartment building fire kills 19, including 9 children

– Bob Saget, actor known for TV series ‘Full House,’ dies at 65 in US

SPORTS

– Ten athletes added by Youth Affairs and Sports’ Ministry’s Mission Olympic Cell to TOPS (Target Olympic Podium Scheme) including golfers Anirban Lahiri, Aditi Ashok and Diksha Dagar

– Bharath Subramaniyam (14) becomes India’s 73rd chess Grandmaster

Becoming a ‘Weird’ society may no longer be necessary for India

 Of the several books I have read recently, Plagues and Peoples by William H. McNeill and The WEIRDest People in the World by Joseph Henrich have been very important, for they gave me good clues on the evolution of the world in terms of economic development and material prosperity. Both have to be read together to understand how and why Asian and other civilizational areas fell behind in the second millennium. They help us understand why several economies in developing South Asia and in Africa have not been able to organize commerce and industry on a scale as large as the West and a few North Asian countries have done. Perhaps I am guilty of over-generalizing, but it is true of India too. In Can India Grow? Gulzar Natarajan and I wrote about the fragmentation of many industries in India. Scale is conspicuous by its absence. What was not entirely clear was how the West got there. Henrich’s book fills that void.

A three-line summary of the book: The ability of the West to interact, do commerce with and trust strangers, thus creating scale economies and the institutions that sustained and supported them, can be traced to the strictures that the Catholic church placed on ‘kinship’ marriages.

WEIRD stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Religious and Democratic. People raised in societies are highly individualistic, self-obsessed, control-oriented, non-conformist and analytical. They focus on themselves— their attributes, accomplishments and aspirations—over their relationships and social roles.

In ‘Weird’ societies, as defined, one is expected to behave ‘consistently’ with all others. Whereas in non-Weird societies, it is normal to change one’s behaviour in accordance with the context. One could be very humorous with friends, for example, and extremely deferential to those in authority. That would be hypocritical to members of Weird societies, but entirely normal in others.

An inability to behave differently in varied contexts and seeing it as hypocritical leads Weird members to lean towards moral universalism. In other words, moral truths exist in the way mathematical laws exist, writes Henrich. It also leads to overconfidence in their abilities. Combine the two, and we now have a good handle on the response of Western policymakers to the global financial crisis of 2008 and the ongoing covid pandemic.

It also explains why their economics textbooks are written as though they are universally applicable. There is no room for path-dependency in their economic theories. There is only one right way to frame policy: Free trade, balanced budgets, flexible labour markets, globalization and deregulation. Now that the context is changing, they are struggling to adapt. Universalism and overconfidence helped Weird members colonize the world and spread their word. Now, they may prove to be their undoing.

Henrich does not delve into the downside of Weird psychological attributes. However, he correctly warns that superimposing impersonal institutions of politics, economics and society that developed in Europe on kinship-based societies means that the web of social relationships that bound and protected people gave way to urbanization, social safety nets and individualistic notions of success. People in such societies faced a loss of meaning they derived from being a part of a broad network of relationships. This poses a dilemma for non-Weird societies that is not easy to resolve. Their economic imperatives necessitate emulating and copying the Weird model of impersonal trust, fairness, equality before the law and the institutions of governance that these entail. At the same time, these are alien to their own social models that date back in time. Indeed, even the inhabitants of Weird societies are not exempt from the loss of meaning that Weird values and social arrangement eventually generate. Has Weird psychology, therefore, driven all of modern humanity into an existential cul-de-sac?

For all their supposed impersonal kindness and fairness, Weird European societies did not hesitate to pursue wars and wreak destruction on non-Weird societies. The latter were won over, perhaps, as much by war and deceit as by the demonstrated superiority of Weird norms, ideas, institutions and economic prosperity.

Further, as Henrich writes, the absence of external competition has made the Weird society turn on itself and is causing fragmentation. Elites in Weird societies have not understood that being Weird is what has made them successful. They are unWeirding themselves. So, homogeneous Weird societies may be breaking up into clans and groups. So, before non-Weird societies could shed their identity-based politics, Weird societies have begun returning to their identity-based clashes.

In the end, there is little doubt that Weird societies that feature monogamy, religion and impersonal trust enabled scale-based capitalism. But these Weird societies could not stop the development of ‘winner take all’ attitudes in the field of economics and commerce. Maybe that is the inevitable last act of scale and technology-based capitalism. The denouement could well be the end of Weird societies as we know them.

V. Anantha Nageswaran is visiting distinguished professor of economics at Krea University.

Source: Mintepaper, 11/01/22

Unlocking the future

 

What is the long-term direction of the changes that may be seen in 2022?

The future is about time frames. A year is a short time to experience the gravity of educational shifts, but large enough to spot the signals and drivers of change. The National Education Policy and its allied ideas of equity, quality and access remain popular forces for the future. But, there are less-debated subtle themes. Here are five such themes clustered from different signals and drivers, which allow us to align macro forces such as tech-innovations with tiny changes such as flexible curriculum.

Rise of alternative learning providers: Who is an alternative learning provider? Anyone from a YouTube teacher to a university offering an industry-partnered degree or an ed-tech venture. They come in different sizes, credibility, recognition, and cost. Quality standards range from good to bad to ugly. It is a shift from the traditional educational experience that operates around prescribed modules in specified sequence, with standardised evaluations and approval status. Such providers pioneer new models and innovations, and convert academic sessions into work-integrated learning. Their agile nature equips them to offer more affordable learning compared to most traditional institutions.

Non-traditional providers impact changes in pedagogy and credentialing, though they are neither widespread nor quick. For example, learning can be more solutionary, an advanced form of problem-centred learning, and will be portfolio-targeted and outcome-driven.

Cohort-based courses and new credentials: The last two years have seen unprecedented enrollments in MOOC platforms. While it may continue to attract learners, cohort-based interactive courses will be on the rise in the current year. These carry and cherish an active learning community in hybrid spaces and serve fewer learners but with higher engagement levels compared to MOOCs.

The employers’ focus on learning outcomes over traditional credentials will push the need for real-life work experiences. This will question the value of classroom seat-time and probably see some institutions experiment by merging theory and practice and designing an entire programme around field experience.. We may also see more collaboration among educational entities, businesses and civic organisations leading to new credentials and badges, particularly in technical courses.

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Design your own degree: Designing individualised majors and minors has been around in many institutions abroad. Academic Bank of Credit (ABC), a proposed databank for accumulating and withdrawing learners’ credits supported by multiple-entry and exit across institutions, carries the seed of a rich learning experience in India. At a finer level of practice, learners can customise their degrees by bundling credit hours and modules, matching their interests.

Ecoversities and sustainability: What if learners and communities reclaim the diversity of knowledge, ecologies, cultures and economies? The answer lies in Ecoversities, a movement and model that re-imagines education through ecological leadership. The Ecoversity Alliance has more than a hundred learning spaces in the world and some are in India. They currently reside on the margins and mainly cater to independent and alternative learners. They may not come to the mainstream soon, but will endure as a reminder of the possibilities of education on a fragile planet. For the rest of the learning community, the educational response to the climate emergency is already delayed. Some progressive institutions will voluntarily opt for carbon-aware practices. But the majority need a regulatory push.

Experiments ahead: The future of education is neither a one-step process nor a policy panacea. It is a path with ambiguities that simultaneously demand stability and innovation. Experiments allow us to balance this paradox. So, institutions, communities and countries that are open for experimentations will benefit in the future. Creating a preferred future is far different from preparing for the future. Creating requires questioning the assumptions and opening to a series of micro-level education experiments to address the uncertainties.

What will not change?

The future is also about resistance. We will continue to talk about blended learning even as questions of digital inequity and pedagogical readiness are raised. The wish to protect the status quo of the physical campus and the monopoly over credentials will inhibit large-scale educational transformation. On the other hand, the larger narrative of education will maintain its obsession with competitive exams, quality-talks, and ranking-romance.

Source: The Hindu, 1/1/2022

Salil Sahadevan