“When you go in search of honey you must expect to be stung by bees.”
Joseph Joubert
“जब आप शहद की खोज में जाते हैं, तो आपको मधुमक्खियों द्वारा काटे जाने की संभावना को स्वीकर कर लेना चाहिए।”
जोसेफ जोबर्ट
Tuesday, April 12, 2022
Quote of the Day April 12, 2022
What makes a happy student?
With the World Happiness Report released recently, perhaps we should look at compiling a World Student Happiness Report
According to the World Happiness Report (WHR) 2022, prepared by United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN), India is in the 136th position among 146 nations surveyed. This makes it the 11th least happy nation in the world. Finland, known for its extraordinary education system and excellent work-life balance, is first for the fifth year in a row. This year marks the 10th anniversary of the WHR. Ever since WHR was published, India has been in the category of least happy nations in the world. India is far behind Nepal (84), Bangladesh (94), Pakistan (121) and Sri Lanka (127).
About nine million people, surveyed in over 150 countries, were asked to rate their well-being on a scale of 0 (worst possible life) to 10 (best possible life). The report deals with issues relating to happiness, importance of ethics, policy implications, and so on.. Though the methodology has been questioned by critics in India, it is good to ask these questions — what makes a nation a happy/unhappy? Why is India far behind many developing nations in the happiness index? Is there any link between education and happiness?
Many do not know that March 20 is the International Happiness Day. Sonja Lyubomirsky, professor in the department of Psychology at the University of California and author of The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want, defines happiness as “the experience of joy, contentment, or positive well-being, combined with a sense that one's life is good, meaningful, and worthwhile.”
A report for students
Let us assume that a global organisation conducted a similar survey to assess the happiness quotient of students across the globe and published a report (let us call it “World Student Happiness Report”), what would be the position of Indian students in the ranking? Would it not be a great service to the student community if such a report was published every year?
Do you feel good about yourself? Do you enjoy going to school/college? Do you have freedom to choose the subjects you like? Are you happy interacting with your teachers? Do you have the freedom to express your opinions on various issues in the classroom? Do your teachers consider your opinions? Are you treated well? Are you happy with the education system? Do you lead a stress-free life as a student? Do you enjoy taking exams? Are you confident that you will get a good job?
If we asked such questions to students in India, what would be their responses? How many would say that they have good mental health and enjoy their student life?
Need for stress-free education
On the International Day of Happiness, I had asked on social media if our country’s students are happy and whether the education system and educational institutions make them happy. Suganth Ram, a former student, wrote, “A big NO is my answer. Educational institutions are being run by people of previous generations who haven’t faced happiness themselves. Their stringent and dictatorial methods are being encouraged by parents who haven’t faced happiness themselves. Their toxicity and negativity is being carried over to the next generation. I too was a victim of that and I swore long back that this ends with me and I will do everything in my power to protect my kids from the toxicity in future.”
It is true there are many things that make students feel stressed. Educational institutions focus more on academic success than on their well-being, which includes “mental and physical health, physical and emotional safety, and a feeling of belonging, sense of purpose, achievement and success”. Commercialisation of education, lack of academic freedom, institutionalised religious/caste discrimination, and threatening school/college environment are some of the factors that affect student well-being at primary, secondary and tertiary levels.
Countless meaningless rules and regulations also make students’ lives miserable. The recent ban on the hijab in Karnataka is an example of meaningless rules that affect the mental health of Muslim girls.. Which is more important: uniform or mental health/education? Any right-thinking person would say that mental health and education is the answer.
For decades, the term “successful schools/colleges” have been defined as those that produce students who excel in exams. In other words, those that focus on scholastic achievements and neglect non-scholastic aspects such as mental, physical and emotional well-being. We need to re-define this. A successful school/college is one that focuses on the holistic development of students, prepares them to face challenges in life confidently, and helps them achieve true happiness. The need of the hour is a World Student Happiness Report. Will any organisation come forward to do research on this?
Albert P’ Rayan is an English Language Teaching (ELT) resource person and education columnist. rayanal@yahoo.co.uk
Source: The Hindu, 26/03/22
BHU LAUNCHES SCHOLARSHIP SCHEME FOR INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS
Banaras Hindu University, an Institution of Eminence under the IoE initiative of the Education Ministry, Government of India, has introduced a new scholarship scheme to promote and motivate international students. The scheme “Scholarship to International Students”, also aims at attracting overseas students through this programme. Under the programme, foreign students will receive Rs. 6000 per month which will be renewed annually on the basis of satisfactory performance. In case a student is already getting a scholarship of lower value, he/she will be entitled to receive the difference. The decision to launch “Scholarship to International Students” was taken in the meeting of Governing Body of Institution of Eminence, BHU, under the chairmanship of Vice-Chancellor Prof. Sudhir K Jain.
Vice-Chancellor Prof. Sudhir K Jain has said that getting BHU among the top universities of the world is what university fraternity must strive for. This scholarship programme is one of the several steps taken with an aim to realize this goal. The university has constituted a three member committee for smooth implementation and monitoring of the scheme. All the applications under the scheme shall be submitted to the Institution of Eminence Cell of BHU.
Situated in the ancient city of Varanasi, which has been a symbol of knowledge, education and culture for centuries, Banaras Hindu University has a unique distinction of offering a vast range of programmes pertaining to all branches of humanities, social sciences, medicine, technology, science, fine arts and performing arts, hence, making it truly the Capital of Knowledge. The university attracts hundreds of international students every year who take admission in various disciplines of Agricultural Sciences, Arts, Social Sciences, Performing Arts, Visual Arts, Law, Commerce and Sciences in undergraduate, postgraduate, Ph.D. and Diploma courses. The total intake of foreign students is upto 15% of the total seats. These seats are of supernumerary nature. Currently 431 students from nearly 40 countries are enrolled in Banaras Hindu University. These include 261 male and 170 female students from United States, Brazil, France, Russia, Ireland, Australia, Yemen, Iran, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Mauritius, Sri Lanka, South Korea, Thailand, Myanmar and Cambodia among others. The scheme is expected to draw more international students to BHU. Besides, it is also in the spirit of National Education Policy 2020 which puts a greater focus on internationalization of the Indian Education System, by way of having more students from abroad in Indian campuses.
Source:indiaeducationdiary.com
Current Affairs- April 12, 2022
INDIA
– India flight-tests Anti-Tank Guided Missile HELINA fired from Advanced Light Helicopter at high-altitude range
– PM Modi awarded first-ever Lata Deenanath Mangeshkar Award by Master Deenanath Mangeshkar Smruti Pratishthan
– Tamil Nadu Assembly passes resolution urging Centre to withdraw CUET (Common University Entrance Test) for admission to courses offered by central varsities
– Gujarat: Six workers killed in blast at chemical factory in Bharuch
– Veteran Bollywood character actor and screenwriter Shiv Kumar Subramaniam dies
ECONOMY & CORPORATE
– NITI Aayog CEO releases State Energy and Climate Index (SECI); Gujarat tops among large states, Goa among small states
– Shares of Veranda Learning Solutions list at premium to issue price after 200-crore initial public offering (IPO)
– Ruchi Soya to change the name of the company to Patanjali Foods
WORLD
– Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) leader Shehbaz Sharif elected new PM of Pakistan by country’s lower house of parliament (National Assembly)
– Russia claims to have destroyed S-300 anti-aircraft missile systems supplied to Ukraine by a European country
– ‘The Eagle Has Landed’ author Jack Higgins dies at 92
India’s open data movement has found a white knight
Administrative datasets are generated using public funds but are typically withheld from the public. So I am glad to report that things appear to be changing. In an unprecedented step, the Union ministry of rural development has released data on key facilities (roads, bus stands, schools, hospitals, panchayat offices, agri-markets, etc) across 1 million rural habitations of the country. This dataset is a byproduct of India’s flagship rural roads scheme, the Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana (PMGSY).
A key goal of the PMGSY is to provide all-weather roads in the hinterlands to connect rural habitations (clusters of dwellings or village sub-units) to important sites such as schools or bus stands. The ministry used a weighting formula to prioritize roads that would link a habitation to a secondary school, hospital or a mandi (agri-market). To collect data, field engineers fanned out across India over the past few years to record the geographic coordinates of these facilities on an application developed by the Pune-based Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC). The data on these facilities have now been released as part of the rural connectivity dataset (https://geosadak-pmgsy.nic.in/OpenData). It is perhaps one of the most granular geo-tagged datasets available in the public domain today. Given the paucity of rural data, this database could help researchers and private firms understand and serve rural India better. The dataset has been released under an open data licence, which means that it can be used freely by both public and private organizations.
Poverty estimates are a shot in the dark
Earlier this month, two different estimates of poverty and inequality were published by authors affiliated to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB). They added to the existing pool of private estimates of poverty and inequality since 2011-12. Private, because the government, which used to conduct consumption expenditure surveys (CES) and update poverty lines, has abdicated its responsibility.
The last consumption survey of 2017-18 was junked for no reason. Based on the leaked estimates of consumption expenditure from that survey, S Subramanian reported an increase in poverty from 31 per cent in 2011-12 to 35 per cent in 2017-18 with the number of poor increasing by 52 million. Santosh Mehrotra and Jajati Parida reported an increase in headcount poverty from 22 per cent in 2011-12 to 26 per cent in 2019-20 using the consumption aggregates from the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) with the number of poor increasing by 78 million. As against these estimates, which used different consumption aggregates from the NSO surveys, estimates from the IMF and WB have reported a significant decline in poverty after 2011-12 although they differ from each other on the level of poverty as well as the magnitude of poverty reduction since 2011-12.
The IMF working paper is authored by Surjit Bhalla, Arvind Virmani and Karan Bhasin. This paper is similar to Bhalla’s earlier work on poverty in terms of methodology with not very different conclusions. Bhalla has argued for long that CES surveys do not capture the estimates of consumption expenditure correctly and are unfit for poverty measurement. He maintains that position here as well and in fact justifies the withholding of the 2017-18 CES survey by the government. He prefers using the Private Final Consumption Expenditure (PFCE) estimates from the national accounts. The difference between survey estimates of consumption expenditure and national accounts (NA) are not unique to India.
But the PFCE estimates do not give the distribution of consumption across households which is a prerequisite for estimating poverty. These are derived aggregates and are available for the country as a whole with no separate estimate for rural/urban or states. Bhalla or anyone else is left with no choice but to use the same CES surveys they dismiss as faulty for getting consumption estimates. One implication of this is that while the consumption expenditure estimates obtained from the surveys are deemed faulty and biased, the ranking of households from the same consumption surveys is seen as free from error. While they find the 2011-12 survey to be right, they see the 2017-18 survey as faulty even though both have been done using the same sampling strategy and concepts and by the same institution.
There is nothing new in this method of updating the NSS survey estimates using estimates from the PFCE. But it has been rejected multiple times by official expert committees after careful examination of the differences between the two estimates. All committees concluded that these are essentially non-comparable because of differences in concepts, design and aggregation methodology. All committees have unanimously rejected the practice of adjusting survey estimates based on NAS estimates of PFCE. This is not the practice in India, or anywhere in the world.
Based on this flawed methodology, Bhalla concludes that India has eradicated extreme poverty even before the pandemic with the percentage of population below the $1.9 poverty line of the World Bank at only 1.4 per cent. While the levels may vary, his conclusions on the trend in poverty reduction are not very different from a completely different exercise by the World Bank. Both conclude that poverty reduction has slowed down in the last seven years of the present NDA government compared to the 10-year period of 2004-2014 of the UPA. While Bhalla reports 26 million people moving out of poverty every year during the UPA regime, this number is one third at 8.6 million for the NDA government. In terms of percentage point per annum (ppa) reduction in poverty, it is 2.5 ppa for the UPA declining to one fourth at 0.7 ppa for the current NDA.
The World Bank estimates also come to a similar conclusion with the rate of poverty reduction between 2004-11 at 2.5 ppa which declines to almost half at 1.3 ppa for 2011-18. They arrive at their figures by using estimates from the Consumer Pyramid Survey of Households (CPSH), a privately conducted survey by the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE). They do this by reweighing the household and population weights of the CPSH given the problems with the survey. While their methodology is also questionable, they try and adjust for the anomalies of the CPSH surveys to arrive at estimates as close as possible to the NSS surveys. Notably, they also dismiss the Bhalla methodology as one of the options.
While the broad conclusion of a sharp slowdown in poverty reduction during the present NDA government compared to the UPA period may be valid, there are differences in the level and extent of poverty reduction claimed, with some studies showing a rise in poverty. But the real issue is not just what happened to poverty and inequality but also what factors contributed to poverty reduction.
There appears to be a consensus that many of the initiatives during the UPA era, including the rural employment guarantee programme and the Food Security Act have contributed to improvement in the lives of the poor, pulling them out of poverty. Bhalla also agrees and documents the stellar role of the in-kind transfers through the subsidised food scheme under the Public Distribution System. The expansion of the PDS during the pandemic has certainly contributed to reducing the misery of the poor who suffered through a sharp slowdown of the economy and the subsequent disruption in economic activity during the pandemic. This calls for strengthening the social safety nets and expenditure on food and livelihood schemes given the challenge of economic recovery coupled with rising inflation.
But an important message is also to strengthen the statistical system and make it independent of state interference. Poverty, inequality and a deeper understanding of what works for poverty reduction is not just an academic exercise but is crucial for designing policies and programmes that work. The responsibility of anchoring policies and programmes to clearly defined goals of poverty reduction rests with the government. Given the controversy over poverty estimates, it is all the more important that the government conducts the CES at the earliest and decides the yardstick of measuring poverty which is the poverty line.
Written by HIMANSHU
The writer teaches at JNU
Source: Indian Express, 12/04/22
Monday, April 11, 2022
Quote of the Day April 11, 2022
“The only place where dreams are impossible is in your own mind.”
Emalie
“वह एकमात्र स्थान जहां पर सपने असंभव होते हैं, वह स्वयं आपका मस्तिष्क है।”
ईमैली
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