“If you believe you can, you probably can. If you believe you won't, you most assuredly won't. Belief is the ignition switch that gets you off the launching pad.”
Denis Waitley
“यदि आप यह मानते हैं कि आप कर सकते हैं, तो संभवतः आप कर सकते हैं। यदि यह सोचते हैं कि आप नहीं कर सकते, तो आप सुनिश्चित रुप से नहीं कर सकते। विश्वास वह स्विच है जो आपको आगे बढ़ाता है।”
डेनिस वेटले
Teach For India has opened the application window to apply for their two-year-long paid Fellowship Programme. The Fellowship entails two years of full-time teaching at schools for underprivileged children across eight Indian cities. The fellowship is open to both graduates and working professionals in India. The eight Indian cities are as follows: Delhi, Pune, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Bangalore, Kolkata, Chennai and Ahmedabad. Those who are selected for fellowships will receive training in the form of a residential workshop and "community engagement", before they are assigned to a school in one of these cities.
The Teach For India Fellowship application happens in four different rounds. Candidates can apply only once in any particular round. For the 2023 cohort, the dates for the four rounds are as follows:
For each round, applications must be received by 11:59 PM IST on the specified due dates. On the indicated result dates, the application decision and any necessary next actions will be conveyed by email to the successful candidates.
To be eligible to apply for the fellowship, the applicants must be an Indian Citizen or an Overseas Citizen of India and must have either graduated or be graduating with a Bachelor's degree, latest by June/July 2023. Furthermore, this must be their first application to the Teach For India Fellowship 2023 cohort. Applicants would get a monthly salary of Rs 21,943 in addition to a housing allowance.
How to apply for Teach For India Fellowship Programme 2023
Interested candidates can follow the given instructions to apply for the Fellowship Programme of Teach For India.
Step 1: Visit the official website of Teach For India
Step 2: Sign up using your email address or LinkedIn profile
Step 3: After registration, fill out the application form with all the relevant information
Step 4: Submit the application form
Step 5: After the submission of the form, candidates have to take a 25-minute online test that must be attempted within 72 hours
The selection process for Teach For India Fellowship Programme
To get selected for the fellowship programme, applicants have to go through the following three stages.
Stage 1: Submitting the application form and completing an online test
Stage 2: Phone Interview
Stage 3: Visiting the assessment centre for a 5-minute lesson, a group activity with other applicants, and a short problem-solving activity.
The Teach For India Fellowship provides the most talented and driven young citizens of India with the chance to work as full-time teachers in some of the country's most under-resourced schools, working with children from underprivileged communities. Fellows change the lives of the students in their classroom, which in turn changes them personally and propels them into leadership roles for quality education.
Source: The Telegraph, 20/07/22
If you’re living in 2022, you could not have escaped the term AI/ML. Short for Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, it has extended beyond just ‘tech-speak’ and is now a solid part of our collective imagination when it comes to modern-day science and technology.
You’ve heard this term everywhere, perhaps never fully knowing what it means and what purpose it fulfils. If you’re interested in technology in any form or if you envision working with computers and software, or if your daily routine includes managing a lot of data – now is the time for you to explore AI/ML. The Telegraph Online Edugraph brings you an insightful and enriching webinar that introduces you to the world of AI/ML and takes you through its various layers, including careers and opportunities, transforming you into an AI/ML expert!
The webinar How To Be An Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning Expert will be held on July 23, 2022 from 11:00 AM to 12:00 PM. The webinar is going to feature Guest Speaker Subhendu Dey, a globally revered thought leader in the fields of Cloud, Data, Strategy and Architecture.
Dey started his journey as an applications architect, then migrated to integration, followed by information architecture. While experimenting with data, he developed an interest in analytics and cross-skilled himself to work as a data scientist. He currently serves as Executive Architect, Cloud Advisory for Data & AI, IBM Consulting. His expansive range of experience has helped him emerge as a true leader in the technology consulting space, who can understand and appreciate inter-disciplinary complexities and serve as an effective guide for anyone who wishes to begin their journey in tangential fields of data and technology.
As most businesses in today’s time are undergoing a complete digital transformation, their work is becoming more and more integrated with data-handling. Most business operations include working with a tsunami of valuable data, which often becomes extremely cumbersome to collect, handle, analyse, and implement. The emergence of AI/ML has revolutionised the way we process data,thus, redefining the future of technology.
The webinar promises to offer an in-depth discussion on AI/ML. Here are the major themes that will be highlighted and discussed in the webinar:
Students can submit their queries in the registration form and they will be picked up during an Q&A segment at the end of the session.
Register for the webinar here: bit.ly/htb-aiandml and take the first step to becoming an AI/ML expert.
Source: The Telegraph, 19/07/22
Global Hunger Index report highlights the chronic food and nutritional insecurity plaguing India
Some simple truths bear repetition: climate change is real and India is going to face the brunt of its impacts in the next few decades. A recent report by the International Food Policy Research Institute estimates that India would be facing a 16% drop in food production, with the number of those at risk for hunger increasing by 23% by 2030 due to climate change. This revelation is significant since it comes in the wake of India’s poor showing in the Global Hunger Index 2022 wherein it ranked 101 out of 116 nations.
Such sobering statistics highlight the chronic food and nutritional insecurity plaguing India. During the raj, the colonial government did little to reduce hunger or poverty because of a myriad structural constraints and fiscal irresponsibility. Poverty in British India came to be understood from the unidimensional lens of hunger, a notion that was challenged by Amartya Sen who sought to do away with the artificial distinction between social characteristics of poverty (such as education and health) and economic characteristics of poverty.
Having suffered devastating famines and starvation deaths under oppressive colonial regimes, after the 1950s, developing nations strove to do two things: first, they agreed to progressively realise the socio-economic right to food in the long term; second, State Parties agreed to secure for citizens a ‘needsbased’ minimum core of the said right. A needs-based minimum core essentially means that State Parties need to ensure that a minimum acceptable level of food is provided for citizens’ needs and survival. India complied with the second commitment by guaranteeing adequate daily calorie requirements to its populace through a judicious mix of legal and policy initiatives like the Green Revolution, the public distribution system, and the National Food Security Act 2013.
These efforts led many African and Latin American nations to view India as a model to emulate in matters of providing food and safeguarding food security. But India still has a long way to go. Domestic surveys like NFHS5 have revealed that every third child in India below five years is stunted (35.5%) and underweight (32.1%). Further, FAO’s State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2020 concluded that India suffers from a 14% chronic malnutrition rate.
In practice, food security is not always understood comprehensively. There is thus an immediate need to rethink the current definitions of ‘right to food’ and ‘hunger’ so as to implement a multi-faceted approach. The correct question to ask is this: how does one ensure that food insecurity, starvation and malnutrition do not hinder the development of human capabilities in line with Sen’s vision? The answer lies in reconceptualising and realigning the domestic right to food laws and policies with a ‘value-based’ core approach as opposed to a need-based approach to the right to food and nutrition. A needs-based approach does not make a distinction between whether a person meets his pre-determined caloric intake, either by consuming one kilogramme of sugar in a day or through a balanced diet comprising necessary micronutrients and essential food groups. Per contra, a dignitarian value-based approach requires the State to secure the maximalist standards of dignity for citizens by broadening the ambit of what it considers to be ‘core’ obligations with respect to right to food. This is borne out when the State starts weaving into its legal fabric and policy formulations comprehensive dignitarian definitions of the right to food and hunger that cover such multi-faceted aspects of food security as safety, minimum nutrition value, means of access and control, differential dietary requirements and so on.
Even as India celebrates 75 years of Independence, it is unfortunate to note that official and judicial attitudes towards food security remain rooted in the outdated needsbased approach. With climate change set to exacerbate the food security situation in the country, a broader conceptualisation of the positive core obligations of the Indian State is the need of the hour.
Sushant Khalkho is with the National Law School of India University, Bangalore
Source: The Telegraph, 20/07/22
India as a country might have existed even without colonial rule, but would that have been a ‘modern nation’? There's no simple answer to this
The term ‘colonial mentality’, often used by cultural nationalists today, especially towards their western-educated compatriots, has got one thinking. If one supposes that it applies to those Indians who do not value their own cultural past but only look to the West, it seems valid enough.
But let us first consider what the Indian nation owes to colonialism. There are, of course, those who say that without the British, India would not have been unified politically, but there was a Mughal empire before the British arrived. India might not have had its present shape if that empire had continued or evolved into other things but it could still have remained a unity of sorts.
But while India as a country might have existed, could that India ever have been a ‘modern nation’, considering that our Constitution owes itself to western models? Independent India’s first leaders were mostly lawyers and it was their training in the western legal system that made them see the need to depend on social values defined as essential in western democracies (democracy, egalitarianism, justice) and duly have them enshrined.
Yet, many still continue to refer to the “colonial mindset” as a negative factor, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi. In November last, on the occasion of Constitution Day, Modi said “the colonial mindset is giving rise to many distortions”. On another occasion, he said “India’s growth story is being disrupted by forces with colonial mindsets”.
In writing about the origins of nationalism in colonial India, political scientist Partha Chatterjee (The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories, 1993) notes that articulation of anti-colonial nationalism rested on a separation between two distinct spheres, namely, the spiritual and the material. The material realm is one of economy, statecraft, science and technology, in which the superiority of the West, represented by the colonial power, is an established fact. In the material domain, therefore, the historical task before the colonised was to reproduce for itself, the benefits of the project of colonial enlightenment and modernity.
Sovereign in the spiritual
The spiritual realm, on the other hand, represented true sovereignty for the colonised. It was a sphere of cultural distinctness from, and also superiority over, the colonisers, and hence needed to be preserved in that uncontaminated way. If the material sphere represented the superiority of the colonial rulers, it was the spiritual domain which was the main source of strength and autonomy for the colonised.
Therefore, the spiritual domain was one that needed to be preserved from colonial encroachments. This symbolised nationalism among the colonised people. Any kind of reforms or intervention in the said domain would be completely in the hands of the colonised masses.
Therefore, the essence of the ‘imagined’ nation rested in the so-called spiritual or inner domain in which the colonised masses were sovereign despite being ruled by an alien, foreign power in the material sphere. Extrapolating it to today, we could say that for a modern India to emerge, it would necessarily have to depend on the West in virtually every field that could have played a part it its ‘design’ as an independent nation – economics, political structure, and the areas of science and technology.
But I would also like to make an intervention here, which is that once the nation was constructed according to such material necessities, it would need to keep producing citizens who were well-versed in these areas. Which means that the education system would also have to be heavily western-oriented to produce them.
Where material and spiritual meet
That brings us to the spiritual domain in which the colonised masses were said to be sovereign and where there was strong resistance to allowing the colonial state to intervene since it affected ‘national culture’. But if national culture must also be built upon, a question would be whether it would not need to be studied through methods implicating the ‘material’?
Let us take classical music, for instance, something that cultured Indians are justly proud of. Would it be enough to simply preserve it – as in a museum – or would we need to understand how it came about to be this way? A matter worthy of investigation (for instance) could be why Indian and western classical music evolved to emphasise melody and harmony, respectively.
Since it is widely believed that music owes originally to prayer, a hypothesis could be that common prayer led to harmony in music while the notion of the personal god led to melody. Voices singing in unison would need to be organised for the result to be ‘musical’.
Another key observation is that for the spiritual in culture – which would include the arts – to bloom, it would need growth, since culture should address the contemporary in some way. But once we introduce study and development, I would argue that the ‘material realm’ would naturally intrude into the spiritual one. Apart from sociological investigations, music, for instance, would need to use the technology available to the fullest to improve upon itself.
Personal goals
Chatterjee does not elaborate on this aspect but the ‘spiritual’ side of Indian culture as opposed to the ‘material’ realm that the West dominates, owes, arguably, to Indian modes of thinking that place emphasis on personal salvation rather than social transformation and progress. But, extending the argument, how are a group of individuals preoccupied with personal (spiritual) ends to come together to imagine/create a nation collectively, entirely through such personal goals? For such a collection of individuals to band together with common ‘national’ objectives, they would necessarily have to stray deep into the ‘material’ realm.
Lastly, we also need to interrogate the notion of an ‘uncontaminated’ national culture. While one may be proud of the cultural achievements of the people in a designated space or community to which one belongs (a school, a family, a village), associating that pride with the ‘modern nation’ infects the notion. It is only the construct of the nation that makes a Kannada speaker from Bengaluru see an achievement in Bengal as his or her own, but that construct came about because of exercises undertaken in the material realm, like the writing of the Constitution. We could say that unless all these aspects are duly noted, the ‘colonial mentality’ will only remain a term of abuse.
(MK Raghavendra is a writer on politics, culture and film)
Source: The Federal, 4/05/22