Monday, October 03, 2016
Indian NGO bags UN climate award for clean energy project
With India ratifying the Paris agreement on Sunday, the project highlights the importance of micro-level, scalable initiatives to contribute to India's ambitious renewable energy target.
An Indian NGO, Swayam Shikshan Prayog, has bagged the UN climate award this year. The NGO, which trains women to become clean energy entrepreneurs across Maharashtra and Bihar, is one of the 13 projects to be recognised at the forthcoming UN climate summit in Marrakesh in November.
In an official release, the UNFCCC, the nodal UN climate body, has applauded this project for building a rural distribution network of 1,100 women entrepreneurs facilitating access to clean energy, water and sanitation products and services in several communities.
Prema Gopalan, co-founder of Swayam Shikshan Prayog, who has worked for ten years in the clean energy sector, told The Hindu that many of the women in her NGO hail from the Marathwada drought-hit areas and have attained a new identity as a result of their entrepreneurial work.
“They have learnt to be better community leaders. The initiatives they have undertaken are both sustainable and scalable,” she said. The NGO, founded in 1989 in Mumbai, has received financial support from the Maharashtra government, USAID, Miseorer, Europe, and CSR funds from HSBC and Alstom, till now.
With India ratifying the Paris agreement on Sunday, Ms. Gopalan highlighted the importance of micro-level, scalable initiatives such as these to help the rural population contribute to India’s ambitious renewable energy target. India’s Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs), submitted to the UNFCCC, speak of increasing share of renewable energy in India’s energy mix to 40 per cent by 2030.
“While the government only eyes big-ticket projects when it comes to renewable energy it should also look at the potential of reaching out to vast rural population through small initiatives such as these. It requires marrying the government’s livelihood missions with that of new and renewable energy,” Ms. Gopalan, who is also an Ashoka Fellow since 2003, said.
Improving the quality of living
Nita Tanwade, 36, one of the rural entrepreneurs who works with the NGO told The Hindu that over 2000 families in her village Sawargaon in Tuljapur taluka have purchased solar lights and cook stoves from her, helping the villagers improve their quality of living.
“For several hours in a day, people in my village suffered power cuts. Many couldn’t afford to get an electricity connection. An aged couple who lived in my neighbourhood often complained about having to eat and sleep in the dark at night and feeling unsafe due to lack of lighting, but after villagers pooled in Rs. 500 to install a solar light in their house, they were grateful to have it,” she said.
For those who cannot afford to buy the solar lamps, priced between Rs. 500 to 700 and the cook stoves that cost between Rs. 2500-3000, Ms. Tanwade said she sold it to them on credit and the villagers paid her back in monthly instalments they could afford.
The use of woodfire for cooking in rural areas has been identified as one of the primary causes of indoor air pollution, which contributes to global warming, and also causes respiratory illnesses. According to the International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook 2015, 67 per cent of the population in India depends on traditional biomass for cooking, which, in absolute numbers, works out to 841 million people in the population.
Ms. Gopalan said that the UN climate award is a global recognition for replicable models on clean energy that can help put an end to India’s biomass dependency. The UNFCCC release cites how through the promotion of clean cook stoves by women entrepreneurs, over 200,000 women and households now save almost 100 tonnes per day of fuel wood.
“Maharashtra has now started allowing women to even supply excess solar energy to the grid. If all Indian states adopt such enabling policies, India can soon become self-sufficient in energy, the clean way.”
Source: The Hindu, 2-10-2016
Just a question of rights
The plagiarism allegations against Udta Punjab come as a huge disappointment at a time when the film industry is becoming acutely aware of the importance of obtaining rights to novels
Of late, Bollywood has begun to read. An industry not known to dive into literature, other than a rare Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay or Premchand, has been seeking inspiration in books. While embarking on his Detective Byomkesh Bakshy!, filmmaker Dibakar Banerjee bought the rights to all of Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay’s Byomkesh Bakshi stories in all the languages other than Bengali. His Shanghai was based on the French novel Z by Vassilis Vassilikos. He also has the film rights for V. Sudarshan’sAnatomy of an Abduction: How the Indian Hostages in Iraq Were Freed, about the kidnapping of three Indians in Iraq in 2004.
Banerjee is not the only one. Karan Johar’s Dharma Productions had acquired the film rights for Amish Tripathi’s The Immortals of Meluha, Rahul Bose clinched Pakistani author Mohsin Hamid’s Moth Smoke, and Shah Rukh Khan’s Red Chillies Entertainment is reported to have Anuja Chauhan’s The Zoya Factor in its kitty. Not to forget the crowd favourite author, Chetan Bhagat.
Plagiarism allegations
It’s in this light that the plagiarism allegations against Udta Punjab, a film on the widespread drug abuse in Punjab, come as a huge disappointment. A recent story on a news website detailed the striking similarities between certain characters, situations, plot points, and devices in the film and Ben Elton’s 2002 novel High Society. If there were so many takeaways from the book, why couldn’t the film rights for it have been negotiated legally? In times of the World Wide Web, when any information is just a click away, the stealth also smacks of sheer foolhardiness and misplaced overconfidence that the inspiration will remain covert, that it won’t become public. The truth is that in this day and age, we have no place to hide.
It’s in this light that the plagiarism allegations against Udta Punjab, a film on the widespread drug abuse in Punjab, come as a huge disappointment. A recent story on a news website detailed the striking similarities between certain characters, situations, plot points, and devices in the film and Ben Elton’s 2002 novel High Society. If there were so many takeaways from the book, why couldn’t the film rights for it have been negotiated legally? In times of the World Wide Web, when any information is just a click away, the stealth also smacks of sheer foolhardiness and misplaced overconfidence that the inspiration will remain covert, that it won’t become public. The truth is that in this day and age, we have no place to hide.
Plagiarism is not new in Bollywood. It has been an eternal hashtag, especially when it comes to music. You can draw up a huge laundry list of films copied from — or, at the least, inspired by — other films.
It Happened One Night became Dil Hai Ke Maanta Nahin and Chori Chori, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers got made as Satte Pe Satta, Sabrina got turned into Yeh Dillagi, The Silence of the Lambsplayed out as Sangharsh, Ek Chhotisi Love Story blatantly lifted from A Short Film About Love right down to the title. Nothing came out of these revelations; perhaps the makers of the originals never even got to see or hear of these tributes.
The possibility of the imitation getting called out openly happened a few years ago when an online post went viral for detailing scene-by-scene lifts from foreign films in Anurag Basu’s Barfi!, India’s official entry to the Oscars.
Obtaining rights
Something has been changing since then. Even filmmaker Sanjay Gupta, much maligned by accusations about consistently stealing from foreign films (he turned Reservoir Dogs into Kaante and Oldboy intoZinda) sought legal remake rights for his recent film Jazbaa, based on the Korean film called Seven Days. Like him, most mainstream filmmakers are becoming conscious of obtaining legal permission and remake rights. Warrior was officially adapted as Brothers, and The Man From Nowhere became Rocky Handsome. The Hindi version of The Fault in Our Stars is under production. Filmmaker Sujoy Ghosh travelled all the way to Japan a while ago to seek the film rights of Keigo Higashino’s The Devotion of Suspect X, even as viewers kept debating about the shadow of it lurking in the Malayalam film Drishyam.
Something has been changing since then. Even filmmaker Sanjay Gupta, much maligned by accusations about consistently stealing from foreign films (he turned Reservoir Dogs into Kaante and Oldboy intoZinda) sought legal remake rights for his recent film Jazbaa, based on the Korean film called Seven Days. Like him, most mainstream filmmakers are becoming conscious of obtaining legal permission and remake rights. Warrior was officially adapted as Brothers, and The Man From Nowhere became Rocky Handsome. The Hindi version of The Fault in Our Stars is under production. Filmmaker Sujoy Ghosh travelled all the way to Japan a while ago to seek the film rights of Keigo Higashino’s The Devotion of Suspect X, even as viewers kept debating about the shadow of it lurking in the Malayalam film Drishyam.
At one level, the disingenuity of the makers of Udta Punjab undoes their own genuine efforts as well — the socio-political contextualising of the story, for instance. The time and effort spent in doing research in Punjab, the recreation of the dystopia the State has become, and how the film sheds light on the havoc that drugs are wreaking in Punjab all get sidestepped now under the looming shadow of the allegations.
It also comes as a major blow in how it gets the emerging young, offbeat, idealistic Hindi cinema under the scanner. In one shot, the cinema that had purportedly been re-energising the industry with its inventiveness, out-of-the-box ideas and narratives stands to lose much of its sheen, capacity for grandstanding, and moral high ground. If only the makers of Udta Punjab had made a call or sent an email to Ben Elton.
namrata.joshi@thehindu.co.in
Source: 2-10-2016
IITs to set up special cells to help Hindi-medium students understand better
If all goes well, students from Hindi-medium schools who gain admission to the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) will no longer face the language barrier in class.
IIT authorities are setting up a support system to ensure that study material — otherwise taught in English — is put across in a way that students from Hindi-medium schools can understand. The institutes are using their Hindi cells, which handle administrative work such as translating texts and organising seminars, to assist them.
As the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) is conducted in both Hindi and English, many students from Hindi-medium schools manage to enter IITs across the country. It is after classes begin that things get tough — they fail to understand the study material and lectures, which are predominantly made in English.
Sources said many IITs, including the ones in Delhi and Roorkee, have witnessed a large number of such students failing or performing poorly due to this issue.
Incidentally, the IIT council – the highest decision-making body of the prestigious institutes – had commissioned a study in August to assess the performance of Hindi students who appeared for the JEE.
Admitting that students from a Hindi background have trouble understanding subjects taught in English, IIT-Delhi director V Ramgopal Rao said: “If they don’t grasp the basic concept, they face difficulties in exams. Hence, we have formed a support system, through which staffers of our Hindi cells explain the subject to them. We have launched it for first-year students.”
IIT-Roorkee, for its part, is holding extra classes where professors fluent in both the languages explain scientific concepts to such students in chaste Hindi. “This will help clear their doubts, ensuring that they don’t lag behind,” said Pradipta Banerji, director of IIT-Roorkee.
Sources said language was a major reason why many such students fail to achieve the required cut-off marks for getting promoted to the second year. A large number is also expelled from the premier institutes due to their inability to grasp the concepts taught in class.
An analysis of JEE results also showed that students who took the examinations in English performed much better than their Hindi-medium counterparts. For instance, while the success percentage of English-medium students who appeared for the Advanced exam in 2016 was 24%, only 15% who picked the Hindi option made it through.
Source: Hindustan Times, 2-10-2016
Financial inclusion: Indian women have something to bank on
For the first time, the majority of Indian women have been financially included. Fresh data show that the proportion of Indian women with individual accounts in formal financial institutions (primarily banks) reached 61% in 2015, a sharp increase from 48% in 2014, lagging men by only eight percentage points. A close look at these numbers reveals opportunities and challenges to build on this quiet, and important, victory.
The Intermedia India Financial Inclusion Insights (FII), an annual, nationally representative survey, confirms that both individuals and households show growth in bank registration, largely driven by the government’s Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana (PMJDY) and its emphasis on individual accounts (rather than household). By capturing demand-side data from individual citizens, the FII survey found that overall individual bank account ownership in India increased from 52% in mid-2014 to 63% in mid-2015. While the survey shows growth in financial inclusion for all adults, the gains were the highest in rural areas and for individuals below the poverty line, and, most of all, women. These encouraging numbers suggest financial inclusion is widening to reach the most vulnerable adults in India. Additionally the gender gap has decreased, as Indian men experienced an increase of nine percentage points, from 60% to 69% in the same period. These data mirror other recent studies such as Anjini Kochar’s finding that business correspondents (BCs) have increased the savings of both landowning and landless households in India; with the savings of the landless increasing more than those of landowning households. She explains this difference in terms of the fact that access to a BC increased the wage income and hours of work of landless households, particularly those of women, a likely consequence of the tie-up between the financial system and the MGNREGA.
This remarkable achievement for women should now be extended to the remaining 39% of them. This will require commitment to implementation, quality of service, and a willingness to look beyond one-size-fits-all solutions in addressing the diversity of women’s financial needs. For women, some of the features valued most in formal accounts are trust, privacy, and security from theft and harassment. When providers do not treat their customers in a fair manner — particularly low-income customers and women — trust in financial services is eroded. Experience has shown that efforts such as the “no-frill accounts” were abandoned by clients when payments were not received in time, and customers lost confidence in their financial providers. In the FII data, PMJDY holders reported experiencing issues with transactions and account terms. Specifically, they were more likely to complain about banks deducting fees without informing them, and a decrease in available account funds due to mishandling or fraudulent activities. A commitment to customer protection in implementation, and thinking through women’s needs at all stages, are one way to ensure sustainable growth and outreach.
In addition, while technology and digital finance offer a promising solution to some of the traditional physical and other access barriers to extending financial inclusion to all of India’s women, women face a stark “digital divide”. To date only 44% of women — compared to 75% of men — own an individual mobile phone, and the simple difference between owning a phone and being able to “borrow one” plays a significant role in women’s technological skills development and privacy in financial transactions.
Ensuring that first-time users learn that banking is an experience of convenience and trust, and recognising the diversity of needs of Indian women in accessing financial services are the only ways to continue the remarkable trajectory of financial inclusion for women. We must build on this success to extend the gains to other important financial services such as insurance and credit. In this same FII survey, only 15% of women reported having a financial plan for unexpected events. Inability to deal with these events can be devastating for women and their families.
Bindu Ananth is Chair of the IFMR Finance Foundation and Amy Jensen Mowl is its Financial Inclusion Specialist
Source: Hindustan Times, 1-10-2016
India cannot become the third largest economy by bypassing women workers
In a 2012 document on gender diversity in India’s workforce, Catalyst, a non-profit with a mission to expand opportunities for women and business, predicted that there will be a shortage of 750,000 skilled workers over the next five years. “Because of the projected annual GDP growth of 7 percent and this projected talent gap, it is essential for companies to engage a key component of economic growth— the skills and talents of women,” the report suggested. The news is far from positive: A survey by ProEves, a gender diversity consulting firm, reveals that woman participation in India Inc is fixed at less than 20% for the past three years. Compared to the US, India is at half the women participation across all employee groups. India ranks 127th on the gender inequality index and 108th on the global gender gap index.The reasons for such low participation of women in the workforce are well known: Discrepancy in policies and implementation (the survey shows that 61% of the companies have a stated goal on diversity but only a third have a number target and have no target association on inclusion for leaders), lack of flexible policies and the larger issues of child care support system, commuting, infrastructure, safety concerns, education and training. Data also suggests that women in India are largely employed in the informal, semi- or unskilled sector such as domestic work, where incomes are low and there are limited benefits or job security. According to the ILO, in 2011-12, while 62.8% of women were employed in the agriculture sector, only 20% were employed in industry and 17% in the services sectors.
A recent McKinsey report shows why it is important to bridge this gender gap: The country stands to gain as much as $2.9 trillion of additional annual GDP in 2050. Along with education, bringing more women into the workforce also has a critical spin-off benefit: It will address the problems of patriarchy, gender discrimination and violence.
If the country is to become the world’s third largest economy in 2030, it can’t afford to bypass its women from equal opportunity in the workforce. Here’s what can ensure this diversity: More effective measures such as greater investments in secondary and tertiary education, vocational and skills training, and developing and strengthening laws and policies to support working women.
Source: Hindustan Times, 2-10-2016
For Mother Divine
KIRAN DHAR
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Dusk is falling, lamps are lit, the autumn air is cool and still.The bells are calling from afar.Join in Mother's adoration hour. I enter slowly, my heartbeat overtakes me. Will I see Her face to face? How shall I greet.... Dare I touch Her holy feet? The air is filled with incense smoke, the priest prostrates in reverent pose. The Mother in regal splendour stands enrobed in silks of red and gold. Glittering jewels and golden crown, from head to feet do Her adorn.Hibiscus, roses, marigold -in garlands fragrant, Her form enfold. Compassion fills Her lustrous eyes. Her coral lips are half-asmile. One hand is raised to grant us boons, the other dispels our deepest fears. Her beauty is beyond compare, with radiance of a thousand moons.The drums are beating rhythmic time, the cymbals sound a resonant chime. The bells are ringing loud and clear, conch shells sounding everywhere, scent of incense fills the air, devotees' voices raised in prayer, glory to the Mother evermore.Besides the Mother's shining form, a lovely maiden stands alone, gently turning with her hands a silken fan of rainbow hues. The priest begins the evening prayer, with sonorous chanting loud and clear. Then he takes the incense urn and all around the Mother turns.
O holy incense, fragrant smoke, your perfume does the Mother cloak. Next he takes the golden lamp, ablaze with myriad dancing flames, waves in circles round Her form, Around, around and all around, joy in every heart abounds. O holy lamp of brilliant light, blest you to be in Mother's sight.
O holy incense, fragrant smoke, your perfume does the Mother cloak. Next he takes the golden lamp, ablaze with myriad dancing flames, waves in circles round Her form, Around, around and all around, joy in every heart abounds. O holy lamp of brilliant light, blest you to be in Mother's sight.
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