“If I feel depressed, I go to work. Work is always an antidote to depression.”
Eleanor Roosevelt
“यदि मैं उदास महसूस करती हूं तो मैं काम पर चली जाती हूं। काम में व्यस्तता उदासी का उत्तम प्रतिकार है।”
एलेनोर रूजवेल्ट
“If I feel depressed, I go to work. Work is always an antidote to depression.”
Eleanor Roosevelt
“यदि मैं उदास महसूस करती हूं तो मैं काम पर चली जाती हूं। काम में व्यस्तता उदासी का उत्तम प्रतिकार है।”
एलेनोर रूजवेल्ट
Zen says Buddhahood is not somewhere far away. You are just sitting on top of it. You are it!... It has already happened. Nothing has to be achieved, nothing has to be practised. Only one thing: you have to become a little more alert about who you are.
IIT-Bombay emerged as the best educational institutions in India in the first of it’s kind QS World University Rankings: Sustainability released on Wednesday. With a total of 15 Indian universities getting a place in the list, the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay (IIT-B) featured in the 281-300 rank range, followed by IIT-Delhi (321-340 rank) and Jawaharlal Nehru University at the third rank (361-380).
In order to assess how universities are taking action to set the world’s most pressing environmental and social issues, QS World University Rankings: Sustainability ranking has been started this year.
As of this year, experts took view of over 1300 higher education institutions meeting particular eligibility requirements, out of which 700 institutions made it to the final ranking list.
Fourth rank has been saved by the University of Delhi which marks in the 381-400 rank range and the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur (IITK) took on the fifth spot (451-500).
However, not just these but many other Indian universities like the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee (IITR), Aligarh Muslim University, Jadavpur University, Indian Institute of Science, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur (IIT-KGP), Banaras Hindu University, Birla Institute of Technology and Science Pilani, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati (IITG) and the Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IITM) also featured in the list.
Meanwhile globally, the University of California, Berkeley (from the US) has taken the lead in the sustainability frame as it has achieved top scores in both the Environmental Impact and Social Impact categories, each providing 50 per cent of the all-around score. It is followed by two Canadian institutions, the University of Toronto securing the second place and the University of British Columbia making it to third spot.
Source: The statesman, 27/10/22
Almost ten years on after the Delhi rape case, 4,28,278 cases of crimes against women were registered in 2021, almost double when compared to the 2,44,270 reported cases in 2012.
The gang rape of a woman in a Delhi bus on December 16, 2012 is seen, for many reasons, as a watershed moment in the discourse of crimes against women and relevant deterrence. A decade is perhaps an adequate time to take stock of the situation. A year after the horror, the rape law was amended — the definition of sexual assault was expanded, the quantum of punishment for rape increased, the unscientific ‘two-finger test’ discontinued, and filing police complaints made less bureaucratic — at least on paper. Almost ten years on, 4,28,278 cases of crimes against women were registered in 2021, according to the National Crime Records Bureau, almost double when compared to the 2,44,270 reported cases in 2012. These are just official figures. The ground reality could be far worse because sexual crimes often go unreported owing to shame, ostracisation, fear of perpetrators, and an expensive, long-drawn-out and often fruitless legal process. After 2012, a dedicated corpus called the Nirbhaya Fund was established, partly to get rape victims easy access to justice — 30% of this fund remains unutilised; in Maharashtra, the money was used to provide security to legislators. The conviction rate of rape cases stood at a poor 28.6% in 2021. This can be attributed to institutional warts: poor investigation, procedural flaws that weaken prosecution and so on. Combined with institutional failures is the attendant social regression: rapists being asked to marry their victims by quasi-judicial authorities is not unheard of; these days, there seems to be tacit political support for certain instances of transgression — Bilkis Bano’s tryst for justice is a case in point. The popular endorsement for instant retribution — the death penalty remains in place in India — is an outcome of larger failures.
NCRB data also throw up a more potent source of threat — the home — but the law remains non-committal. Even though 32% of all crimes against women were committed by their husbands, there is a dogged refusal to address, even recognise, marital rape. The regression on women’s safety is also evolving. India saw a 45% increase in rapes of Dalit women and girls between 2015 and 2020, many of these were punishments for ‘violating’ caste lines. An NGO working to provide legal aid to rape survivors has noted that the nature of the crime itself has changed — the rise in gang-rapes bears evidence of the transformation. Things have certainly changed in 10 years — but for the worse.
Source: The Telegraph, 21/12/22