At this time of the year, for hundreds of Infoscions, every Sunday, two Modern Colleges in Pune would become what jaggery is for flies. They go there either in the morning or in the afternoon, but make sure they are there. The reason: To fight a bloody battle that resembles a bigger battle, which they aim to fight later this year. They sit in these colleges, killing each other for a good 2.5 hours and coming out feeling crippled intellectually. Well, I do not want to talk about this any further for fear of going dyslexic as I get lost whenever I see my performance in these battles.
I am no exception for the hundreds of Infoscions, for that matter thousands of others who does the aforementioned ritual, religiously every week. Last Sunday was no exception either. I reached there on my AP registered Honda, extremely careful not to get into the eyes of an ever vigilant Cop (hence forth called as mama.) only to find a lots of mamas standing at the gates of the Battle Ground (Modern Law College). Preliminary enquiry told me that, the war which I have to fight has been postponed as there around 34000 wannabe mamas fighting the war for some 1000 posts, I guess. And I need to wait till the mamas and wannabe mamas clear off. I waited near the gate.
Within no time, the flies gathered around the jaggery. There are singles envying the boy friend-girl friend pairs coming on the Pulsar with female making sure that there is no amount of air passing between the male’s back and her front. And then there is a group of warriors puffing their lungs with their daily dose of Nicotine. Amidst all these actions, I observed to two stout figures approaching the scene, they were wearing a white shirt and a pair of khaki trousers, with a pot like think bulging out from area common to their shirt and pants. It looked as if they stuffed the whole thing forcefully inside. It hardly took anytime for me to realize that they are mamas. They have come here to over see the situation, you cannot have a chaos out side, you know?
One of these mamas, who happened to have good business sense, picked out his mobile, dialed a number and made some sounds, the first of which being “ kuthey ahe” and whatever spoken later by him did not seem to effect my brain any more, as the rest of the sounds went through the hole between my ears(I do not understand Marathi L) and with in no time another mama appeared in a truck and four guys jumped out of the truck and emptied around a dozen bikes from that area with in no time and disappeared from the scene. Only then did I figure out what he had spoken on phone; Great business sense, in deed.
Amidst all the drama, I hardly noticed a family living on the footpath along side the gates of the College. But, what is so special, it is not a surprise in my country, which always has something in the bag for rich and poor equally. But, why am I mentioning about this particular family? And what made me notice them? Was that my selfish nature or is it the natural tendency of an Indian? The questions which I asked just now might not have made sense to you, I will explain.
All the drama that was started has reached the climax, when Pune’s weather as expected started behaving in an unexpected way. The clouds filled the whole sky and the sun was hardly seen. And by this time, a few of the warriors disappeared, a few persisted and in no time a heavy down pour started, I along with a few other warriors ran for the shade under the tree that was next to the foot path family’s house. It was no use, the precipitation was heavy and the leaves of the tree are too weak to resist the rain. Some thing has to be done!
As every one was trying their best to save themselves from the rain, I saw a large roll of plastic has been rolled out; two kids came from no where and tied the plastic roll to the tree- V’oila- The make shift rain shelter of the footpath family was ready. My first instinct was to jump into the plastic sheet and so did a few of others and one among them who happened to be an extremely HYGENIC female, was not happy with the cleanliness of the plastic sheet, she made a noise CHEEE…… I felt like kicking her, but resisted, do not ask me why, of late I have become pretty considerate. The footpath family was pretty happy to see the crowd using their shelter and they were more than happy to open a second roll of plastic, this one is exclusively for the guests.
I was more than impressed to see the courteous nature of my hosts. They might have never been to school neither do they know what “athithi devo bavah” means, but they were courteous and handsomely so. It left me short of comprehension to describe their courteous nature and as I was thinking, the rain faded and the mamas were done and the warriors were ready for the fight and hence the host was left behind as all the opportunists emptied the footpath home. And so did I.
I entered the battle field, I fought and fought and was beaten black and blue for 2.5 hours, but I was able to fight, because I was not drenched in the rain as those crows on the tree, which almost dropt on my head, thanks to the foot path family. As I rode my bike out, I just glanced at them; they were their usual self, as if nothing happened, little did they know that they made a difference to a person and at least a dozen others like me. And as I passed by, I took an oath “athithi devo bavah”.
Friday, August 31, 2007
Friday, August 24, 2007
Behind every successful man, there is a dog......
Sony, Pluto, Chi-Chi, aaaaaaaaaaaaah(you can safely assume here that a female is screaming), all these sounds can be associated with one thing in common, a dog, yes a canine!!
Now, why I wanted to write about dogs? From a stray dog to so called breeded dogs there is one thing in common for them, what ever they want to do, they do it without shame! Ah- this, I reckon shamelessly, has inspired many a politician. But, now I do not either want to talk about politics. So what's about dogs that made man successful?
BOLLYWOOD
I strongly think, and rightly so, that Bollywood has been benefited by the canine race's quintessential tendency to be shameless in every thing they do and hence their being shameless in romancing has inspired many a director of bollywood to be inspired by dogs for almost all of their romantic scenes(read pornography) in their movies. These dogs also have helped many an actor in improving his/her skill in these scenes, insider information says that Emraan Hashmi, Mallika Sherawat, Neha Dhupia and the likes have lots of dogs. I am not sure what animals Shilpa Shetty and Kangna Ranaut have, they need to really improve their performance, might be a few of dogs in their house might help.
SCIENCE
In countries like ours, where sex education is a taboo, dogs emerge as saviors for all those sex education protagonists. Because, more often than not, the first time an eigth standard or a ninth standard student sees in practical, what the first step towards the Reproduction described in their texts is, when they see dogs on the street; the divine bliss these little creatures are into during the mating season has educated many a human. In fact, there is a strong belief that Vatsayana used to have different breeds of dogs in his garden and used to observe them a lot. My dear dogs, kudos to your race!!!!
MUSIC
If you think that dogs have inspired the human in a rather awkward thing, you are mistaken!!!!
But why? Well, these little creatures when they make all the weird sounds in the night have inspired many a music director and one such MD is our beloved Himesh Reshammiya(HR). Well, in his initial projects HR lacked that punch of ooooooooooooo sounds in his songs, he had a tough time and started working over nights and then he heard the music of dogs on the street near his building and after that EUREKAAAAAAAAA, and its no looking back after that. HR still has that recording of that night's dogs howling, whenever he runs short of creativity he listens to the recording with great concentration, and in his personal diary there are confessions that this is his secret for his success. No doubt his songs are integral part of NIGHT LIFE.
Infact all the night life that people enjoy in the bigger cities is just an inspiration from the dogs, one gentleman who happened to be a night watch man has observed that dogs have lots of fun towards the end of the day(read late night) and inspired by that he quit the job and rented a small garage and started doing all weird things there, these include playing weird music(as compared to howling, it was too embarrassing for him to shout like dogs you know?), head banging(as compared to tail wagging; mind you, humans dont have tails!) and hence the Discos!!! Where you can be shamelessly shameless!
SPORTS
One day Mr. Ferrari was driving his local made car back home after one of those "Disco Parties", needless to say that he has been chased by a pack of dogs in their most jubilant of the moods, Mr. Ferrari resisted, he depressed the accelerator to the abysmal but the dogs won and shamelessly so. And on that fateful day was the idea of a high speed car was sown. And when the dream materialized it was renamed F1.
Infact most of the games that involves a ball- Cricket, football, volleyball, hockey etc are all initially started by humans as a measures to save the ball from the dogs and eventually became games.
INVENTIONS
Behind all the inventions that made difference to mankind there is a dog.
Wheel and Fire: Man invented wheel and fire to save him from the dogs that used to chase him to hell.
Earth is Round: Scholars concluded that Earth is round and it rotates about itself about an axis, when they saw the dogs going round and round trying to catch their tails.
Newton's Laws: There is a school of thought that the reason behind law of gravitation is not an apple falling on Newton's head but it is the tail of his pet dog which used to curl up no matter what.
Theory of Relativity: Once Einstein was traveling back home in his car and as ususal a pack of dogs started chasing him and Einstein accelerated and so did the dogs and no matter how fast he drove there was always a dog adjacent to his door as if both the car and dog was stationary and the theory of relativity was born.
Dogs inspired many other things, they inspired the democracy, parliament, wars, competition, homo sexualism you name it and they inspired it. Now this is called the Canine Conspiracy theory.
Now you know why, behind every successful man, there is a dog.........
Now, why I wanted to write about dogs? From a stray dog to so called breeded dogs there is one thing in common for them, what ever they want to do, they do it without shame! Ah- this, I reckon shamelessly, has inspired many a politician. But, now I do not either want to talk about politics. So what's about dogs that made man successful?
BOLLYWOOD
I strongly think, and rightly so, that Bollywood has been benefited by the canine race's quintessential tendency to be shameless in every thing they do and hence their being shameless in romancing has inspired many a director of bollywood to be inspired by dogs for almost all of their romantic scenes(read pornography) in their movies. These dogs also have helped many an actor in improving his/her skill in these scenes, insider information says that Emraan Hashmi, Mallika Sherawat, Neha Dhupia and the likes have lots of dogs. I am not sure what animals Shilpa Shetty and Kangna Ranaut have, they need to really improve their performance, might be a few of dogs in their house might help.
SCIENCE
In countries like ours, where sex education is a taboo, dogs emerge as saviors for all those sex education protagonists. Because, more often than not, the first time an eigth standard or a ninth standard student sees in practical, what the first step towards the Reproduction described in their texts is, when they see dogs on the street; the divine bliss these little creatures are into during the mating season has educated many a human. In fact, there is a strong belief that Vatsayana used to have different breeds of dogs in his garden and used to observe them a lot. My dear dogs, kudos to your race!!!!
MUSIC
If you think that dogs have inspired the human in a rather awkward thing, you are mistaken!!!!
But why? Well, these little creatures when they make all the weird sounds in the night have inspired many a music director and one such MD is our beloved Himesh Reshammiya(HR). Well, in his initial projects HR lacked that punch of ooooooooooooo sounds in his songs, he had a tough time and started working over nights and then he heard the music of dogs on the street near his building and after that EUREKAAAAAAAAA, and its no looking back after that. HR still has that recording of that night's dogs howling, whenever he runs short of creativity he listens to the recording with great concentration, and in his personal diary there are confessions that this is his secret for his success. No doubt his songs are integral part of NIGHT LIFE.
Infact all the night life that people enjoy in the bigger cities is just an inspiration from the dogs, one gentleman who happened to be a night watch man has observed that dogs have lots of fun towards the end of the day(read late night) and inspired by that he quit the job and rented a small garage and started doing all weird things there, these include playing weird music(as compared to howling, it was too embarrassing for him to shout like dogs you know?), head banging(as compared to tail wagging; mind you, humans dont have tails!) and hence the Discos!!! Where you can be shamelessly shameless!
SPORTS
One day Mr. Ferrari was driving his local made car back home after one of those "Disco Parties", needless to say that he has been chased by a pack of dogs in their most jubilant of the moods, Mr. Ferrari resisted, he depressed the accelerator to the abysmal but the dogs won and shamelessly so. And on that fateful day was the idea of a high speed car was sown. And when the dream materialized it was renamed F1.
Infact most of the games that involves a ball- Cricket, football, volleyball, hockey etc are all initially started by humans as a measures to save the ball from the dogs and eventually became games.
INVENTIONS
Behind all the inventions that made difference to mankind there is a dog.
Wheel and Fire: Man invented wheel and fire to save him from the dogs that used to chase him to hell.
Earth is Round: Scholars concluded that Earth is round and it rotates about itself about an axis, when they saw the dogs going round and round trying to catch their tails.
Newton's Laws: There is a school of thought that the reason behind law of gravitation is not an apple falling on Newton's head but it is the tail of his pet dog which used to curl up no matter what.
Theory of Relativity: Once Einstein was traveling back home in his car and as ususal a pack of dogs started chasing him and Einstein accelerated and so did the dogs and no matter how fast he drove there was always a dog adjacent to his door as if both the car and dog was stationary and the theory of relativity was born.
Dogs inspired many other things, they inspired the democracy, parliament, wars, competition, homo sexualism you name it and they inspired it. Now this is called the Canine Conspiracy theory.
Now you know why, behind every successful man, there is a dog.........
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
Please Politicize heath care.......
"It" broke my heart. "It" here is not a ghastly act by a girl, nor that I lost something or someone important. But, "it" somehow managed to break my heart and made me think about one of the most important facility that shall be talked about for a country. The facilty that is seldom talked about unless there is an epedimical outbreak. Yes, the "it" here is the "Medical facility in India".
And why did "it" break my heart?
In India, more often than not, the most important things are always least talked about. It is hard to think of anything more important than health for human happiness and the quality of life. And yet, health is virtually absent from public debates and democratic politics in India.
How do I know? Just observe the newpapaers, news channels and any other media,they talk about Politics, Sports, Entertainment, Woman empowerment etc. But the last time when the debates scratched the surface of Medical Faciltity was when they talked about Sex education and its appropriateness. Holy god!!!!. Otheriwise they do not even bother to talk about.
Does that mean that Indians are a healthy lot and it is a waste of time talking about this? No, infact the situation is far beyond for being called worst! According to a Harvard study, absence rates among health workers range between 35 and 58 per cent in different Indian States. A similar picture emerges from an ongoing study of health services in Udaipur district (Rajasthan). More than half of the health sub-centres were found to be closed during regular opening hours, and even in the PHCs and Community Health Centres, 36 per cent of the personnel was absent on average. Meanwhile, local residents suffer from horrendous levels of morbidity: one-third of all adults had a cold during the 30 days preceding the survey, 42 per cent had "body ache", 33 per cent had fever, 23 per cent suffered from fatigue, 11 per cent had chest pains, and more than half suffer from anaemia. Close to one-third would find it difficult to draw water from a well and one in five has difficulty standing up from a sitting position. The situation is similar, if not worst, almost through out the country.
If this is the health condition of a country which continously relies on it Human Resources, the health services condition is even dismal, to say the least. As a ratio of GDP, public expenditure on health in India is among the lowest in the world — about one per cent. In fact, the health system is almost totally privatised. To illustrate, only 15 per cent of total health expenditure in India is public expenditure; the rest is private expenditure, such as over-the-counter drug purchases from chemist shops. By contrast, the ratio of public expenditure to total health expenditure is 40 per cent in east Asia, 50 per cent in Latin America, 75 per cent in Europe, and as high as 85 per cent in Britain. In large parts of India, there are no public health facilities worth the name, except for female sterilisation and polio immunisation.
If you attribute the state of affairs to the Poverty of the masses, you are mistaken!!! The harsh reality is that, even the rich, more often than not, do not have the access to decent health services. The technology and the expertise are there, but public facilities are highly inefficient and private services are virtually unregulated, leaving patients at the mercy of unscrupulous practitioners. Fraud, over-medication and unnecessary surgery are the bread and butter of the private health sector. To illustrate, according to a recent study of health services in Mumbai, about 65 per cent of deliveries performed in the private sector end up with a Caesarean, compared with 9 per cent in the public sector (the latter is close to WHO norms).
What is the solution? How can one tackle this problem? If you ask me, I would tell, Politicize the issue, yes, make the health part of democratic politics, make health care a part of election campaigns and let the Politicians talk about it. The benefits, mid day meals, free medicines, more vaccinations, active Public Health Centers and a Healthy Country. I am not dreaming this, nor am I showing an unrealistic picture, I have a proof. The states like Tamilnadu and Kerala where health is a part of the Politics.
The health facilties in states like Tamilnadu are far better, the Health centers are clean and lively. There are lots of medicines available for free and the health centers are well maintained and staffed, thanks to regular inspections. How was this possible? Competetion! Competetion between two governments, one has provided good facilties and the other has no option but to better them. On the contrary, in north India, the situation is rather gloomy. If you go to a PHC you are greeted by a hostile environment which is reluctant to serve. The reason, health care is not the part of Politics here.
I am not saying, polticizing the issue is the only solution, but it solves many a problem.
SO PLEASE POLITICIZE HEALTH CARE.
And why did "it" break my heart?
In India, more often than not, the most important things are always least talked about. It is hard to think of anything more important than health for human happiness and the quality of life. And yet, health is virtually absent from public debates and democratic politics in India.
How do I know? Just observe the newpapaers, news channels and any other media,they talk about Politics, Sports, Entertainment, Woman empowerment etc. But the last time when the debates scratched the surface of Medical Faciltity was when they talked about Sex education and its appropriateness. Holy god!!!!. Otheriwise they do not even bother to talk about.
Does that mean that Indians are a healthy lot and it is a waste of time talking about this? No, infact the situation is far beyond for being called worst! According to a Harvard study, absence rates among health workers range between 35 and 58 per cent in different Indian States. A similar picture emerges from an ongoing study of health services in Udaipur district (Rajasthan). More than half of the health sub-centres were found to be closed during regular opening hours, and even in the PHCs and Community Health Centres, 36 per cent of the personnel was absent on average. Meanwhile, local residents suffer from horrendous levels of morbidity: one-third of all adults had a cold during the 30 days preceding the survey, 42 per cent had "body ache", 33 per cent had fever, 23 per cent suffered from fatigue, 11 per cent had chest pains, and more than half suffer from anaemia. Close to one-third would find it difficult to draw water from a well and one in five has difficulty standing up from a sitting position. The situation is similar, if not worst, almost through out the country.
If this is the health condition of a country which continously relies on it Human Resources, the health services condition is even dismal, to say the least. As a ratio of GDP, public expenditure on health in India is among the lowest in the world — about one per cent. In fact, the health system is almost totally privatised. To illustrate, only 15 per cent of total health expenditure in India is public expenditure; the rest is private expenditure, such as over-the-counter drug purchases from chemist shops. By contrast, the ratio of public expenditure to total health expenditure is 40 per cent in east Asia, 50 per cent in Latin America, 75 per cent in Europe, and as high as 85 per cent in Britain. In large parts of India, there are no public health facilities worth the name, except for female sterilisation and polio immunisation.
If you attribute the state of affairs to the Poverty of the masses, you are mistaken!!! The harsh reality is that, even the rich, more often than not, do not have the access to decent health services. The technology and the expertise are there, but public facilities are highly inefficient and private services are virtually unregulated, leaving patients at the mercy of unscrupulous practitioners. Fraud, over-medication and unnecessary surgery are the bread and butter of the private health sector. To illustrate, according to a recent study of health services in Mumbai, about 65 per cent of deliveries performed in the private sector end up with a Caesarean, compared with 9 per cent in the public sector (the latter is close to WHO norms).
What is the solution? How can one tackle this problem? If you ask me, I would tell, Politicize the issue, yes, make the health part of democratic politics, make health care a part of election campaigns and let the Politicians talk about it. The benefits, mid day meals, free medicines, more vaccinations, active Public Health Centers and a Healthy Country. I am not dreaming this, nor am I showing an unrealistic picture, I have a proof. The states like Tamilnadu and Kerala where health is a part of the Politics.
The health facilties in states like Tamilnadu are far better, the Health centers are clean and lively. There are lots of medicines available for free and the health centers are well maintained and staffed, thanks to regular inspections. How was this possible? Competetion! Competetion between two governments, one has provided good facilties and the other has no option but to better them. On the contrary, in north India, the situation is rather gloomy. If you go to a PHC you are greeted by a hostile environment which is reluctant to serve. The reason, health care is not the part of Politics here.
I am not saying, polticizing the issue is the only solution, but it solves many a problem.
SO PLEASE POLITICIZE HEALTH CARE.
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
My bike siezed
I am ashamed of myself. I am a mechanical engineer, I am supposed to know how a SI engine works, what is required to keep an engine going. But, last sunday, when I was riding my Honda machine there was a deep little moan, I thought I ran over a chicken, the marathi one, no I did not, it hardly took a few seconds for me to realize that it was my bike and it stopped abruptly near the famous E square. I am supposed to be at the Modern Law college to stcik my ass to a bench for a good 2.5 hours to take the AIMCAT. But I did not, rather I could not, as my bike refused to carry an idiot who thinks that all that is needed for a bike to run is petrol and just petrol.
My otherwise silent bike has been making weird noices of late, if I could call these noices moans, yes, my bike has been moaning of late. I just turned a blind eye to it and attributed it to the bad roads of Pune(if at all Pune has a few) but only now that I realize that those moans are SOS signals asking me for Engine Oil, but I never cared. And around last week, this moaning has become intense and prominent and this tickled my procastination and my bike was almost happy when I took it to a servicing center. But, its happiness ended there!!!! It seems, to have a privilage of your bike being serviced by the servicing center(Pashankar automobiles) you need to take an appointment, a bloody appointment, I have got no option but to take one and I got it for 16th August. That means I need to bear with my bike's moans for a week or so. I decided that I would.
My bike had other ideas, it (might have)thought that I shall be thought a lesson, but before that it started giving me warnings, the moans have started become more and more prominent, and now I just started thinking it is high time I take it to a servicing center and that I cannot wait until the appointment and whence I heard a deep moan, a moan that comes out of a dog run over by a lorry, a moan that comes when an ant is stamped by a shoe, a moan when some one kicks you hard on your ass and when I was trying to comprehend what it was, I realised that my bike stalled and it was not moving, only then did my shit filled brain realized that a bike needs engine oil apart from petrol. But, it was too late, the damge was done.
The road side mechanic made most out of the oppurtunity, and my wallet has become lighter by 1000 bucks and the bike is currently under observation and I am trying to make sure that the cylinder and piston are not damaged, fingers crossed.
My otherwise silent bike has been making weird noices of late, if I could call these noices moans, yes, my bike has been moaning of late. I just turned a blind eye to it and attributed it to the bad roads of Pune(if at all Pune has a few) but only now that I realize that those moans are SOS signals asking me for Engine Oil, but I never cared. And around last week, this moaning has become intense and prominent and this tickled my procastination and my bike was almost happy when I took it to a servicing center. But, its happiness ended there!!!! It seems, to have a privilage of your bike being serviced by the servicing center(Pashankar automobiles) you need to take an appointment, a bloody appointment, I have got no option but to take one and I got it for 16th August. That means I need to bear with my bike's moans for a week or so. I decided that I would.
My bike had other ideas, it (might have)thought that I shall be thought a lesson, but before that it started giving me warnings, the moans have started become more and more prominent, and now I just started thinking it is high time I take it to a servicing center and that I cannot wait until the appointment and whence I heard a deep moan, a moan that comes out of a dog run over by a lorry, a moan that comes when an ant is stamped by a shoe, a moan when some one kicks you hard on your ass and when I was trying to comprehend what it was, I realised that my bike stalled and it was not moving, only then did my shit filled brain realized that a bike needs engine oil apart from petrol. But, it was too late, the damge was done.
The road side mechanic made most out of the oppurtunity, and my wallet has become lighter by 1000 bucks and the bike is currently under observation and I am trying to make sure that the cylinder and piston are not damaged, fingers crossed.
Saturday, August 11, 2007
60 years of Educational (in)dependence
We are entering into the 60th year of Independence, happy, pretty happy. There is many a change in our country, most of which is recent, which we can boast about and be proud of. But, this is no reason to be complacent and if you ask me, I am more worried about the way we are changing to an IT/Outsourcing dependent economy. Worried because, the changing socio-economic situations, and market mechanisms are sucking the students from basic sciences to professional courses, with the lure of high salaries, like information commerce, management, information technology, and biotechnology.
Indian education system started off in a modest way after independence, with 25 universities chiefly imparting the Science education through the affiliated colleges at the time of Independence and in the last six decades, the number of institutions for higher science education has grown enormously. Today, there are 20 Central universities, 215 State universities, 100 deemed universities, 13 institutions of national importance, and more than 17,000 colleges. Under the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD), the government established the University Grants Commission (UGC) in 1956 and the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) in 1987 through Acts of Parliament to administer, regulate, and supervise the functioning of higher science and technology (S&T) education in the country.
The good news end here, the proportion of India’s population that enters higher education is around 7%, which is 1/2 the average for Asia. There is about 1 university for nearly 4 million people. This figure is too small for any significant impact of higher education, science education in particular, on the country. The number of universities has not grown in relation to the population, thus greatly restricting the opportunities for higher education. The system needs a massive expansion to establish about 1,500 universities countrywide so that the country can achieve a gross enrolment ratio of about 15 per cent by 2015. China, for example, has authorized the creation of 1,250 new universities in the last three years. Unfortunately, the expansion that is evident in India is only in the form of dubious deemed universities and unregulated private engineering colleges that have mushroomed mainly as commercial ventures.
Compared to an enrolment of 5.7 million (1995 data) at the tertiary level in India, it is 14.20 million in the United States, which works out respectively to 613 and 5,399 tertiary students per 100,000 populations. Even though enrolment at the tertiary level has been low, the absolute numbers have been increasing. In particular, enrolment in the science stream has increased from 127,200 in 1950-51 to about 1.5 million at the turn of the millennium. However, there are disquieting features in these numbers.
The number of students opting for science after the secondary school stage has dropped from 32 per cent in the early 1950s to 19.7 per cent in recent years. More significantly, in the 1950s the brightest entered science but today’s 19.7 per cent is from the lower middle level. This shows that young students, particularly the brighter ones, are drifting away from science. The choice of the National Talent Search awardees also reflects this trend in recent years. Of the 750 awardees, hardly 100 opt for science and only 15-20% pursue science to the post-graduation level. Peer pressure, the changing socio-economic situation, and market mechanisms have further added to the process of the drift away from basic sciences to professional courses, with the lure of high salaries as you step out, like information commerce, management, information technology, and biotechnology.
The dwindling number of students joining the Sciences after the secondary education is not a good sign; in fact it is not at all good. A recent study based on 10-year enrolment data (1992-2002) both at Plus-Two and college levels in Delhi, showed that priority for science disciplines as a whole is on the decline even at the Plus-Two level. Data of college enrolment in the sciences between 1990-91 and 1997-98 revealed that, on an average, about 48 per cent of the students drifted out of B.Sc courses to join professional courses. These students are those who got admission after securing 80-90 per cent marks at the Plus-Two level. Data from a few colleges outside Delhi too showed a similar trend, which indicates that this disturbing phenomenon is countrywide.
The above also indicates that students who remain in science do so as a last resort thus leading to a situation where most students in higher science education are unmotivated and uninterested. To compound matters is the fact that 88 per cent of the students who opt for science after school are taught in affiliated colleges, which are ill-equipped, have woefully inadequate library and laboratory facilities, are overcrowded and poorly staffed.
Even those highly motivated few who choose to remain in science and move into universities for post-graduation and research are only confronted with outdated curricula, uninspiring teaching and disinterested teachers, entrenched bureaucracy and improper administration, poor infrastructure, obsolete laboratory equipment, lack of an academic environment, and, to top it all, lack of opportunities for the youngsters to do even reasonable research, let alone be creative and engage in front-end work. Data since the 1980s bear this out this as well. While the absolute numbers of student enrolment and universities have increased, the number of research degrees awarded in natural sciences has almost stagnated, whereas in engineering sciences the numbers have actually declined. This led to an all-round lack of qualified people for specialized jobs, in particular teaching in institutions and this is vicious cycle. The latter is bound to have a serious cascading effect in the years to come.
This lack of qualified people for specialized people for teaching is manly attributed to the lack of monetary benefits for this Profession. It will be no surprise if you hear a complaint or two from a motivated science student, that his" quantum mechanics lecturer is a joker and all he does is vomits the text book in the class". The reason being that the salaries for these professions are so less that a call centre employee would be earning more than a research professor. All this is a consequence of what happened back in 1951, when the then government has decided to have standalone research institutions. The idea is to move research out of the universities, but the important point was missed upon. The point is that teaching and research go hand in hand, one enriches the other. So, it is high time we reverse what happened in the past. Let us make the Universities the hub of research. Let the system learn a lesson or two from the Outsourcing industry.
I believe there is an ample case in favor of private research based universities in India. What generally happens is that, when a multinational company wants some academic researches to be done on say electronic cooling techniques. It collaborates with a university in US. It gives a professor a grant of $2 Million to do it. And the professor has to buy experimental equipment, pay his electricity bill, give the university its hefty cut, and hire some graduate students (and pay their tuition, fee and monthly stipend).Another company, say its competitor which is cost conscious, also wants similar work done, but somebody in their ranks has heard of a university in India that can do the same thing for $0.6 million - and that's including the airfare. After all, paying a graduate student Rs 20000 per month ($500) instead of $1500 would do in India; expert technicians would work for a fraction of what they would for in the US. Sending experimental apparatus to India shouldn't be too tough either.So, the idea is that there is a massive case for research based universities in India. And once, these "universities" mature, they will attract excellent faculty from all around the world and this might change the horrendous numbers put forth before. But it is easier said than done.
Expansion of the university system to about 1,500 universities will call for large investment. But before that, the severe resource crunch that afflicts all universities, in fact the entire higher education system should be addressed to correct the years of neglect. As the Indian National Science Academy noted as a matter of serious concern a few years ago, the investment per student has nosedived from Rs.850 a year in the 1960s to Rs.350 a year at the turn of the century (at 1990 prices). The allocation to education has already declined in recent years to about three per cent of the GDP instead of attaining the figure of six per cent recommended by the National Education Policy. The share of higher education and science education in particular has dropped to 0.7 per cent and 0.2 per cent respectively. Compare the latter with those of the U.S. (1.6 per cent), the U.K. (1.4 per cent), and Japan (1.04 per cent). Considering the rate at which India is growing we shall have this rate at around 2%.
So what is required is a severe overhaul of our education system. While I agree that there are lots of underprivileged people who require higher education in premiere institutes and reservation is one means to do that, on the other hand one shall never forget the necessity to foster the talent and pave way for better education; this means a change in outlook towards education among the bureaucracy and the executive.
Reference: http://www.hindu.com/2007/08/11/stories/2007081150071000.htm
Indian education system started off in a modest way after independence, with 25 universities chiefly imparting the Science education through the affiliated colleges at the time of Independence and in the last six decades, the number of institutions for higher science education has grown enormously. Today, there are 20 Central universities, 215 State universities, 100 deemed universities, 13 institutions of national importance, and more than 17,000 colleges. Under the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD), the government established the University Grants Commission (UGC) in 1956 and the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) in 1987 through Acts of Parliament to administer, regulate, and supervise the functioning of higher science and technology (S&T) education in the country.
The good news end here, the proportion of India’s population that enters higher education is around 7%, which is 1/2 the average for Asia. There is about 1 university for nearly 4 million people. This figure is too small for any significant impact of higher education, science education in particular, on the country. The number of universities has not grown in relation to the population, thus greatly restricting the opportunities for higher education. The system needs a massive expansion to establish about 1,500 universities countrywide so that the country can achieve a gross enrolment ratio of about 15 per cent by 2015. China, for example, has authorized the creation of 1,250 new universities in the last three years. Unfortunately, the expansion that is evident in India is only in the form of dubious deemed universities and unregulated private engineering colleges that have mushroomed mainly as commercial ventures.
Compared to an enrolment of 5.7 million (1995 data) at the tertiary level in India, it is 14.20 million in the United States, which works out respectively to 613 and 5,399 tertiary students per 100,000 populations. Even though enrolment at the tertiary level has been low, the absolute numbers have been increasing. In particular, enrolment in the science stream has increased from 127,200 in 1950-51 to about 1.5 million at the turn of the millennium. However, there are disquieting features in these numbers.
The number of students opting for science after the secondary school stage has dropped from 32 per cent in the early 1950s to 19.7 per cent in recent years. More significantly, in the 1950s the brightest entered science but today’s 19.7 per cent is from the lower middle level. This shows that young students, particularly the brighter ones, are drifting away from science. The choice of the National Talent Search awardees also reflects this trend in recent years. Of the 750 awardees, hardly 100 opt for science and only 15-20% pursue science to the post-graduation level. Peer pressure, the changing socio-economic situation, and market mechanisms have further added to the process of the drift away from basic sciences to professional courses, with the lure of high salaries as you step out, like information commerce, management, information technology, and biotechnology.
The dwindling number of students joining the Sciences after the secondary education is not a good sign; in fact it is not at all good. A recent study based on 10-year enrolment data (1992-2002) both at Plus-Two and college levels in Delhi, showed that priority for science disciplines as a whole is on the decline even at the Plus-Two level. Data of college enrolment in the sciences between 1990-91 and 1997-98 revealed that, on an average, about 48 per cent of the students drifted out of B.Sc courses to join professional courses. These students are those who got admission after securing 80-90 per cent marks at the Plus-Two level. Data from a few colleges outside Delhi too showed a similar trend, which indicates that this disturbing phenomenon is countrywide.
The above also indicates that students who remain in science do so as a last resort thus leading to a situation where most students in higher science education are unmotivated and uninterested. To compound matters is the fact that 88 per cent of the students who opt for science after school are taught in affiliated colleges, which are ill-equipped, have woefully inadequate library and laboratory facilities, are overcrowded and poorly staffed.
Even those highly motivated few who choose to remain in science and move into universities for post-graduation and research are only confronted with outdated curricula, uninspiring teaching and disinterested teachers, entrenched bureaucracy and improper administration, poor infrastructure, obsolete laboratory equipment, lack of an academic environment, and, to top it all, lack of opportunities for the youngsters to do even reasonable research, let alone be creative and engage in front-end work. Data since the 1980s bear this out this as well. While the absolute numbers of student enrolment and universities have increased, the number of research degrees awarded in natural sciences has almost stagnated, whereas in engineering sciences the numbers have actually declined. This led to an all-round lack of qualified people for specialized jobs, in particular teaching in institutions and this is vicious cycle. The latter is bound to have a serious cascading effect in the years to come.
This lack of qualified people for specialized people for teaching is manly attributed to the lack of monetary benefits for this Profession. It will be no surprise if you hear a complaint or two from a motivated science student, that his" quantum mechanics lecturer is a joker and all he does is vomits the text book in the class". The reason being that the salaries for these professions are so less that a call centre employee would be earning more than a research professor. All this is a consequence of what happened back in 1951, when the then government has decided to have standalone research institutions. The idea is to move research out of the universities, but the important point was missed upon. The point is that teaching and research go hand in hand, one enriches the other. So, it is high time we reverse what happened in the past. Let us make the Universities the hub of research. Let the system learn a lesson or two from the Outsourcing industry.
I believe there is an ample case in favor of private research based universities in India. What generally happens is that, when a multinational company wants some academic researches to be done on say electronic cooling techniques. It collaborates with a university in US. It gives a professor a grant of $2 Million to do it. And the professor has to buy experimental equipment, pay his electricity bill, give the university its hefty cut, and hire some graduate students (and pay their tuition, fee and monthly stipend).Another company, say its competitor which is cost conscious, also wants similar work done, but somebody in their ranks has heard of a university in India that can do the same thing for $0.6 million - and that's including the airfare. After all, paying a graduate student Rs 20000 per month ($500) instead of $1500 would do in India; expert technicians would work for a fraction of what they would for in the US. Sending experimental apparatus to India shouldn't be too tough either.So, the idea is that there is a massive case for research based universities in India. And once, these "universities" mature, they will attract excellent faculty from all around the world and this might change the horrendous numbers put forth before. But it is easier said than done.
Expansion of the university system to about 1,500 universities will call for large investment. But before that, the severe resource crunch that afflicts all universities, in fact the entire higher education system should be addressed to correct the years of neglect. As the Indian National Science Academy noted as a matter of serious concern a few years ago, the investment per student has nosedived from Rs.850 a year in the 1960s to Rs.350 a year at the turn of the century (at 1990 prices). The allocation to education has already declined in recent years to about three per cent of the GDP instead of attaining the figure of six per cent recommended by the National Education Policy. The share of higher education and science education in particular has dropped to 0.7 per cent and 0.2 per cent respectively. Compare the latter with those of the U.S. (1.6 per cent), the U.K. (1.4 per cent), and Japan (1.04 per cent). Considering the rate at which India is growing we shall have this rate at around 2%.
So what is required is a severe overhaul of our education system. While I agree that there are lots of underprivileged people who require higher education in premiere institutes and reservation is one means to do that, on the other hand one shall never forget the necessity to foster the talent and pave way for better education; this means a change in outlook towards education among the bureaucracy and the executive.
Reference: http://www.hindu.com/2007/08/11/stories/2007081150071000.htm
Thursday, August 2, 2007
Why Cars are bad?
When I came to know about the recent soar in interest rates, I felt good, only because the sales volumes for the cars would go down. In 2006-07 Pune alone sold a good two hundred thousand four wheelers, much more than the previous years value. The only reason, people have money to buy these monsters which does nothing but suck oil.
Going at this rate we might even surpass the The States, in cars atleast and this is a no good reason to smile about, we have TATAs going in for one lakh car(mileage claimed to be around 16-18kpl, not sure though) and we have Renault wanting to have another small car and many more. For me all these ventures cruise us towards an oil hungry destination which we can well avert by regularizing Public Transport System.
A recent survey showed that a bus that occupies twice the space that a car occupies and would carry atleast 20 times more people than 2 cars does and would consume lesser oil when compared to oil required by cars to carry the same number of people, essentially I am saying that using buses would decrease the per capita oil consumptions.
For me even auto rickshaws are a better alternative to a car, these little machines would ideally have a mileage of say 30-35 kpl which comes to 8kpl per capita mileage which in case of a car would go to as low as 2 kpl so when you are travelling in a car you are consuming 300% more oil than when you travel by auto.
I do not even want to talk about the pollution caused by the cars, but I would just like to add that diesel cars have the highest particulate emmision index of all the vehicles. So, friends, before thinking of travelling by a car think whether you really need it
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