Education News

Uttar Pradesh

Educational gimmickry

Yadav: backfiring sops

While officials in the state government’s education depart-ment evasively claim that details are being worked out, school principals are plagued by another worry. Comments Vinay Tiwari, principal of RSM Inter College (class XII): "Schools anyway get very little by way of tuition fees. But whatever little we get we try to put to good use in providing meagre facilities to our students. Now if schools can’t charge tuition fees at all, their managements will find other ways to get money out of students. This will give a fillip to corruption."

R.P. Mishra, president of the UP Intermediate Teachers Association is also sceptical about this "political gimmick" which in his opinion won’t be implemented. "The government is not really serious about improving the standard of education in UP. Moreover a government which is reeling under huge deficits cannot afford such profligacy," he says. Currently the state government’s fiscal deficit is an unsustainable 9.1 percent (cf. the Centre’s 4.8 percent) of GDP.

With Yadav’s whimsical tuition fee waiver firman likely to remain a dead letter in the cash-starved state, his other unprompted declaration that all government educational institutions will work from 8 a.m to 12 noon on Fridays proved equally ill-advised. The decision, says Yadav was taken "in the best interest of students" on the assumption that the state’s 30 million strong Muslim community would welcome the opportunity of sending school-going children for Friday prayers.

But much to his surprise, this proclamation made with one eye on the Muslim vote bank aroused an unexp-ectedly violent reaction within the state’s beleaguered Muslim community. "Since only elders generally offer namaaz on Fridays, it would have been better if government employees were given an hour’s relaxation on that day. The government is unnecessarily seeking to draw young children into its political design," remarks renowned cleric Maulana Kalbe Jawad.

The absurdity of the chief minister’s changed-timings decree — and the sagacity of the Muslim clergy and secular leadership in the state in promptly rejecting it — was highlighted by RSS and other militant Hindu organisations threatening a state wide campaign to demand changed school timings on Tuesdays to enable Hindu students to offer prayers to Lord Hanuman.

Stung by the burst of criticism, within 24 hours Yadav admitted he had made a "mistake" and withdrew the order. In a fresh order, the onus of deciding whether or not to adjust the timings of education institutes on Friday was devolved upon district magistrates and local education authorities in Muslim dominated areas.

The upside of Yadav’s populist gimmickry and interventions in education in India’s most illiterate state is that it has forced community leaders to scrutinise populist decrees more carefully. Comments Maulana Khalid Rasheed, member of the All India Muslim Personal Law Board: "No tangible benefits could have accrued to the Muslim community from this decision for which there was never a demand. It would be so much better if our children are given access to modern education so that we can shake off our economic backwardness."

The point is as obvious as it is well articulated. In a state where only 57 percent of the population is literate, where 17 million children are out of school and the teacher pupil ratio is a mind-blowing 1:67, more needs to be done for education than changing school timings once a week.

Puja Rawat (Lucknow)

Tamil Nadu

First campus radio gets going

India’s first campus-based community radio with a range of 10 km is singing out loud and clear from Chennai’s Anna University. Inaugurated by deputy prime minister L.K. Advani on February 1, with chief minister J Jayalalithaa and Union minister of state for information and broadcasting Ravi Shankar Prasad on hand, Anna FM will disseminate news and views on education, health, science, technology, environment and community development with dashes of music thrown in. The capital cost of the project was Rs.15 lakh, with the recurring expenditure likely to be between Rs.3-5 lakh per year, which will be footed by the University Grants Commission (UGC) through the Anna University Research Centre.

"The basic objective is to develop the less-privileged community which includes slum dwellers, fishermen, child labour, gypsies and others by imparting knowledge and information. It will also be used as a radio tutor for under-privileged students," says Dr. E. Balguruswamy, vice-chancellor of Anna University. Of the 17 audio visual research centres (AVRCs) in the country, Anna University’s AVRC is the first to obtain clearance for starting a community radio. "We have the infrastructure facilities, eminent faculty and the commitment to take the lead and produce programmes with quality content," he adds.

Though campus and community radios are dime-a-dozen in developed industrial nations, especially the US, getting clearances for India’s first campus FM radio from numerous ministries was a marathon exercise even for R. Sreedhar, experienced broadcaster and director of Anna University’s AVRC. Since January 2003 when the Union government decided to grant licences for FM transmitters to educational institutions and universities, the I&B ministry has received 39 applications from education institutions across the country — six each from Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh with Maharashtra close behind with five applicants. "There was a hot race between IIT Kanpur and Anna University for award of the first licence. We secured it first," says Sreedhar. To date 14 letters of intent have already been issued and eight licences have been cleared for imminent approval.

Broadcasting at Anna University: first off the mark

The broadcast mix includes vocal, instrumental music, poetry, lectures by eminent experts, interviews with a cross section of people involved in different trades and businesses and quiz programmes for school children. Since community radio stations are bound by a programme code drafted by the I&B ministry which prohibits any content related to news, current affairs, elections and politics, the live broadcasts from Anna FM focus on education and development subjects. As per government policy, the station cannot broadcast advertisements, accept sponsored programmes or play movie songs.

Community radio has huge possibilities and has already been successfully implemented in several countries which include the Philippines, Netherlands, Thailand, France and Australia. Closer home, Nepal and Sri Lanka have used community radio to empower people and China is a step ahead with its Chinese Radio and Television University.

"The radio’s popularity is on the rebound and it has a major role to play in economic development. There are 160,000 self-help groups in Tamil Nadu which are joining to form federations. Community radio can connect these federations and help disseminate market intelligence and thus make a positive contribution to rural society. We also plan to conduct lectures on ‘empowering women’ to help them to develop skills and transform into valuable employees," says Balaguru-swamy.

For several decades and for mysterious reasons rooted in dog-in-the-manger socialism, FM radio stations were not permitted to be established. However with the country’s first campus radio having been established without the heavens collapsing, students of Anna University have a great opportunity to demo that community radio can play a vital role in educating and entertaining local commu-nities. Hopefully they won’t muff it.

Hemalatha Raghupathi (Chennai)

West Bengal

Crunch time in Kolkata

Institutional autonomy, according to Marxist dogma is anathema because bourgeois professors might teach students logical thinking in lieu of the confused leftist hodge-podge which has devastated the developing nations of the third world, India included. For over 16 years West Bengal’s Left Front government has staunchly resisted the University Grants Commission’s (UGC) efforts to confer autonomous status upon some of the state’s better-run under-graduate colleges. Three colleges in Kolkata — Presidency College, St. Xavier’s and Asutosh College — and one in Midnapore (Midnapore College) are on UGC’s shortlist for conferment of autonomy. This shortlist is more of a waitlist because Communist Party Marxist (CPM) ideologues abhor the idea of losing their tight administrative grip over colleges.

But in a dramatic initiative that might snowball into a political controversy, UGC has now firmly declared that 16 years is a long enough wait. The news, as we go to press, is that the UGC has slapped an ultimatum on the West Bengal govern-ment, asking it to take an unequivocal stand on this issue at a meeting scheduled for end February.

The state government is viewing this development seriously. Unusually, it bestirred itself on a Sunday, February 22, to summon an emergency meeting of the syndicate of the University of Calcutta the next day. The syndicate is the university’s highest policy formulation body and the three colleges named above are affiliated to the University of Calcutta.

But since all university administrative and governance organisations are packed with leftist party members or sympathisers, it is highly unlikely that any university in the state will take a stand different from that of the Left Front government. For instance, Prof. Shottobroto Dasgupta, member of the University of Calcutta Syndicate believes it’s "best not to allow the Central government’s prescriptions to become successful". "Once a college becomes autonomous and gets the power to frame questions, methods of evaluation and admission, the standard of education would deteriorate. Also, many students won’t be able to afford higher education," he reasons somewhat disingenuously.

-

To complicate the issue further, the West Bengal College and University Teachers’ Association (WBCUTA) is upset because the state government "has not bothered" to discuss the matter with it. "Initially, we were totally against autonomy and suggested some changes. Some of our suggestions were accepted and incorpor-ated in the Tenth Plan document. We can comment on this proposal only after we go through it. However our major objection is to the UGC’s self-finance policy for autonomous colleges," says Prof. Anil Bhattacharya, a WBCUTA spokesperson.

Curiously, although the CPM and the BJP are poles apart ideologically, ideologues in both parties are equally reluctant to part with control over teaching institutions — especially financial control, even if colleges and institutes don’t need subsidies. On the issue of control of the IITs and IIMs or Kolkata’s run-down colleges, the mindsets of Dr. Murli Manohar Joshi and West Bengal chief minister Buddhadev Bhattacharjee are convergent.

But in Kolkata matters have come to a head. Quite evidently the state government doesn’t want to take a final decision before the Lok Sabha polls coming up in a few weeks. On the other hand, having been pushed into a corner by the UGC, it has almost no option but to take a stand on autonomy for the four colleges cited by UGC.

Sujoy Gupta (Kolkata)

Maharashtra

Mysterious persistence

Eighteen months ago the Maharashtra government had to face considerable embarrassment when it was forced to rescind a proposal introducing the PSCE (the Primary School Certificate Examination), for class IV students across the state following protests from all sections of society (see EW September 2002). Now once again it seems to be headed towards another school and curriculum related mess. The PSCE board exam was finally cancelled by the Bombay high court towards the end of 2002, but every February students who chose to do so, continued to write the Scholarship Examination, an optional test conducted by the state government for class IV students. Maharashtra’s education secretary J.Phatak, claims that of the 2 million class IV students in the state, 300,000 wrote the test last year and that this year 500,000 will do so.

However, the controversy about compulsory board exams for eight-year-olds appears to be rearing its head again with the state’s education ministry recently (January) having circulated question papers among school principals and teachers, recommending a "preliminary examination" which, it says will "improve children’s capabilities". Teachers were instructed by the state examination board to give a report to its representatives on how each pupil has performed. Curiously the format of the circulated question papers is the same as that of the board examination proposed in 2002. Says S.H.A. Jamati, honorary secretary, the Parent Teachers Association United Forum (PTAUF, promoted in 2001, has more than a hundred members in Mumbai, Pune and Nagpur): "The earlier syllabus for the Scholarship Exam has been suddenly dispensed with and replaced by the question paper, style, content etc, of the now stayed class IV PSCE ."

While the ministry claims that the similarity of the two papers is due to the fact that the board examination paper was based on the scholarship test paper and that preliminary examinations had been introduced to improve students’ capa-bilities before they write the scholarship test, PTAUF is unimpressed. Convinced that this is the state government’s ploy to reintroduce board examinations for class IV students through the back door, the forum also claims that the sudden increase in the number of children writing the scholarship examination is the handiwork of the state government.

"The scholarship exam was meant only for very bright students of the class, whereas the education inspectors are insisting on schools persuading the maximum number of students to write the exam, resulting in some schools asking all students of class IV to do so. School teachers have been preparing students for the whole year as per the old pattern of the scholarship exam, but now suddenly they have to abandon the same and switch over to a new system," says Jamati.

Opposed to the idea of putting eight-year-olds through the trauma and stress of a competitive public examination, 150 Catholic schools have announced that they will withdraw from the voluntary scholarship examination from next year. According to Fr. Gregory Lobo, secretary of the Archdiocesan Board of Education, which administers the schools, principals have been complaining about education department officials pressurising schools to send more students for the scholarship exam. "In some schools, education inspectors even entered classrooms and forced students to fill the forms. This year our principals will permit scholarship students to write the exam as they’ve already started preparations. But from next year, no student will write this exam," he says.

Predictably, there is one group within the state’s education community which whole-heartedly approves of the government’s proposal to make board exams — in one guise or another — for eight-year-olds compulsory. Textbook publishers and edupreneurs who run coaching classes are unanimous that preparing students for competitive examinations as early as possible is an excellent idea. That perhaps explains the persistent enthusiasm of the state’s education ministry officials for the PSCE by whichever name called.

Gaver Chatterjee (Mumbai)

Swelling outflow evidence

Surely it’s a devastating indictment of India’s dumbed down colleges and universities that no matter how low the rupee plunges, how high college fees rise in the US and how many visa and entry restrictions are imposed, the outflow of students in search of quality higher education swells with each passing year. Currently the number of Indian students in the US has crossed 70,000, overtaking the Chinese student population in America for the first time. And if the number of students who flocked to an interactive exhibition of American colleges and universities christened Study USA 2004, on February 17-18 at the Oberoi Towers Hotel in Mumbai is any indication, the already huge annual exodus of Indian students voting with their feet (and wallets) in favour of American education is likely to keep rising.

Says Ali Asgar Motiwala, an employee of the consulate general of the United States of America and coordinator of the exhibition: "The US department of commerce which sponsored Study USA is a federal agency whose aim is to promote US exports. It regards the provision of education as an export. Therefore it is the department’s job to assist American universities to market themselves in India and other countries."

Study USA 2004 scene: rapturous response

Though there could be an element of diplomacy, good manners and salesmanship in American varsity reps claiming to have a special soft corner for "model" Indian students, the scholastic, research and entrepreneurial performance of students from the subcontinent in the US lends some credence to their compliments. "Indian students speak good English, are very well prepared and are a good match with the university," says Stanley Nel, vice president (international relations) of the University of San Francisco.

Commerce department spokesmen also took pains to stress that while there is a ceiling on the number of HI-B visas issued to Indians, there is no ceiling on the number of student visas issued. In the year 2000 the US issued only 37,000 visas to Indian students; the number jumped to 67,000 in 2002. In the current year, the number of visas issued to Indian students is expected to cross 100,000.

Do such jamborees serve a purpose? The growing number of student visitors seem to indicate as much. Comments Himanshu Shah (20): "This is much better than accessing the university site on the internet, because it is interactive and I can speak to representatives and narrow down the universities I should apply to."

In sharp contrast to HRD ministry officials and sinecured university administrators in India, government and varsity officials in the US are well aware of the revenue generation and capacity fulfillment as well as research inputs of high achievement-oriented foreign students. Indian students are expected to constitute 25 percent of the international student population in the US with the number of Indian students applying for admission to American universities growing by about 25 percent annually. This should serve as a timely warning — and example — to ministry and varsity officials in India where education is casual business as usual.

Mona Barbhaya (Mumbai)

Novel Valentine

With the shadow of the Shiv Sena and sundry goon brigades which have ‘banned’ the celebration of Valentine’s Day (February 14) as a corrupt alien tradition which defiles the purity of Indian culture hanging over the city, Pune University students observed the spirit of the day (when young people exchange tokens of love) by distributing naturally carved mineral and rock samples and extolling the virtues of conservation. "Instead of red roses, we exchanged mineral and rock mementoes collected from all over India during our field trips," says Kuhelee Chatterjee of the university’s geology department.

The rock samples included zeolite, calcite, amethyst, marble, banded agate, kyanite, echinoid (star fish), coral and tritonium (snail) which could be put to good use as table decorations or paper weights. A second year M.Sc geology student from Ranchi, Chatterjee (23) says that with the city’s moral police issuing threats that indulgences such as "kissing vissing" and amorous displays would not be tolerated, the department’s students hit upon this novel idea. "We took a pledge to protect the beauty of the earth, her soil, and to encourage sustainable development in harmony with nature," says Yuvaraj Jadhav (25), a second year M.Sc geology student.

Comments Satish Thigale, professor of the geology department: "The event spread an understanding of soil as imperative for water resource management, percolation of water, prevention of erosion and land degradation, pollution, forest cover, land use practices and the quality of ground water." Under Prof. Thigale’s leadership over the past decade and particularly after establishing its Geo-Info-Update Forum in 1996, the geology department of Pune University with 33 postgraduate and 12 Ph D students instructed by a 12-strong faculty, has acquired a nation-wide reputation for research and experiential learning programmes.

Meanwhile, even as BJP and Shiv Sena activists, the self-styled guardians of Hindu culture, patrolled the streets of the city on Valentine’s Day, a survey by the varsity’s economics department indicates that Valentine’s Day is here to stay.

One of the startling findings of the survey conducted last year is that a whopping 79 percent of college students believe that Valentine’s Day celebrations are now part and parcel of emerging Indian culture and ethos. And despite threats from the city’s culture police ("made up of goons who can’t get dates") 49 percent of college students celebrated the day and 73 percent of the city’s youth condemned anti-Valentine’s Day campaigns and politicisation of the event. Significantly, the survey noted that the lower income groups matched the spending power of middle and higher income groups while exchanging gifts.

Twenty students from the economics faculty of the university conducted the survey in college campuses, coffee shops and other popular youth hang outs and 677 college boys and girls between the ages of 17 and 30 were interviewed.

Michael Gonsalves (Pune)

Delhi

CBSE going mod

Against the backdrop of intensifying criticism of rote learning and memorisation oriented school curriculums in India, the country’s largest pan-India school examinations board — the Delhi-based Central Board for Secondary Education (CBSE) — has launched a slew of new schemes, subjects and measures to upgrade syllabuses and examination systems. With effect from April students in the 6,593 schools across the country affiliated to CBSE will be able to study novel subjects like defence studies, fashion technology, mass media and/ or opt for electives like biotech-nology, genetic engineering and entrepreneurship. Also on the board’s agenda is a continuous grading system to eliminate the ‘sudden death’ examination system.

The objective of these measures, says CBSE spokesperson Rama Sharma, is to make school-leaving students of CBSE affiliated schools globally compatible and to "de-stress" them. "We are a very progr-essive board with affiliated schools in 19 countries," says Sharma. "For instance, China offers school students over a thousand skill-based elective courses while Germany offers 3,500. These initiatives are part and parcel of our commitment to continuously upgrade and contemporise school education," she says.

Thigale (left) at rocks exchange ceremony: conservation celebration

Under the proposed reforms package recommended to affiliated schools, continuous grading will be introduced in class IX from the next academic session (June) and for class X school-leaving students from 2006. Moreover in a bid to encourage the managements of affiliated schools to pay more than mere lip service to holistic education, a broad template for comprehensive evaluation of students rather than merely judging them on academic grades, has been designed. Various parameters like a student’s extra-curricular activities, personality and leadership traits will also be evaluated.

Right now, these new initiatives are mere recommendations to the manage-ments of CBSE-affiliated schools. The hope is they will be voluntarily implemented. And if they aren’t? "Well, then we may have to take action against them," said CBSE chairman, Ashok Ganguly at a press conference in Delhi.

Under increasing pressure from anxious parents to contemporise curriculums in the new age of liberalisation and globalisation, school managements tend to cautiously welcome the proposed — and overdue — reform of the CBSE syllabus which is generally perceived as conservative. Opines Komala Mukherji, a senior teacher at the CBSE-affiliated St. Thomas School, Delhi: "We’re are all for innovation and upgradation, but the assimilation programme shouldn’t lead to unnecessary distraction and debate."

Such caution is understandable. With the Union ministry of human resource development calling all the shots in CBSE, there’s a strong possibility of saffronites, luddites and other species within the ministry grabbing the opportunity to introduce their untested pet nostrums into the revised syllabuses and systems.

Neeta Lal (Delhi)