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New Police Act must
protect, not impede, freedom On
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Marriages become
contract affairs
Profile Tackling exam
muddle in varsities Diversities
— Delhi Letter
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On Record
Among
the world’s leading agricultural scientists, Dr M.S. Swaminathan has played a catalytic role in India’s green revolution. In the past five decades, he has worked with many noted scientists and policymakers on a wide range of problems in basic and applied plant genetics and agricultural research. He has published over 650 papers in international journals and written books. He bagged the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership (1971), Padma Shri (1967), Padma Bhushan (1972) and Padma Vibhusan (1989). He received the Albert Einstein World Award for Science in 1986. Next year, he won the World Food Prize. A leading US magazine has acclaimed him as one of the 20 most influential Asians of the 20th century and one of the only three from India, the other two being Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore. Dr Swaminathan is heading in an honorary capacity a Research Centre at Chennai for sustainable agricultural and rural development based on the integration of traditional and frontier technologies. He is the Chairman of the National Commission on Farmers.
Excerpts: Q: Does the country need another green revolution? A: The green revolution
increased our productivity and doubled food production. The development,
production and use of better seeds increased the productivity of wheat and rice
in the seventies and eighties. In the nineties, however, the annual growth rate
in production fell to about 1.66 per cent from 3.54 per cent in the Eighties.
It is a matter of concern as agricultural growth rate is hardly keeping pace
with the annual growth rate of population. We are again at a critical stage in
our agricultural history. We need an ever-green revolution which can be
achieved through sustainable agriculture. Q: What are the areas of
concern? A: The agricultural distress now witnessed in the country, which
occasionally takes the form of suicide by farmers, is symptom of a deep-rooted
malady arising from inadequate public investment and insufficient public action
in recent years. The precise causes of agrarian crisis are varied but the
basic factors include unfinished agenda in land reforms, quantity and quality
of water, technology fatigue, access and timeliness of institutional credit and
opportunities for assured and remunerative marketing. Adverse meteorological
factors compound these problems. Indebtedness of farmers is growing even in
Punjab — the heartland of Green Revolution. Q: How can the farmers’
problems be tackled effectively? A: To prevent farmers’ suicides, the
steps needed are credit reform to enhance total amount available for farm
loans, reduction in interest rates, linkages with technology and market and
reduced dependence on the informal sector for loans, a corpus for assisting
farmers affected by crop losses and expansion of crop insurance to the entire
country and all crops. The state governments should improve delivery of
schemes in the farm sector. There should be convergence and synergy among all
on-going programmes on the field. Self-help groups, group farming and contract
farming based on a code of conduct should be adopted suiting local conditions.
There should be a massive programme to recharge wells and other water bodies
and a mandatory water harvesting regulation. Soils, particularly in dry
farming areas, suffer from hidden hunger caused by deficiency of
micro-nutrients. Soil testing laboratories should be upgraded. The farmers
require proactive advice on land use. Computerised data can be transmitted to
farming families through the Village Knowledge Centres. Farm schools can play a
notable role in this regard. Assured marketing is required for the success of
crop diversification. Cultivation of water intensive cash crops in dark and
grey zones should be regulated. There should be legislation to regulate and
deter the sale of spurious seeds and chemicals. MSP is a must for coarse
cereals and pulses. Q: What about Village Knowledge Centres? A: The
Village Knowledge Centre received support in the Union Budget of 2005-06.
Launched in 2004, it aims to facilitate setting up of a centre in each of India’s
600,000 villages by 2007, the 60th anniversary of the country’s Independence.
The Mission’s objective is to facilitate and accelerate, through
multi-stakeholder collaborations the provision of knowledge centres in each
village. Each of these would be a centre for knowledge-based livelihoods and
income-generation opportunities for poor women and men, farming communities and
all disadvantaged people. A national alliance comprising over 230 organisations
representing IT corporates, government, academics and civil society
organisations powers Mission 2007. The initiative seeks to set up state-level
consortia of multi-stakeholder group to look at the five Cs — Content,
Connectivity, Capacity Building, Care and Management and Coordination. |
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Marriages become contract affairs The
United Kingdom has witnessed a unique innovation in marriage law. The Civil Partnership Act, which came into force on December 5, allows people in same sex relationships to form civil partnerships. About 22,000 people will sign civil partnerships between now and 2010. Britain is the fifth country to introduce law allowing same sex unions after Belgium, Canada, Spain and The Netherlands. Under the new British law, a civil partnership will be created by the signing of civil partnership document in contrast to a marriage contracted by registration. The requirements for civil partnership are the same as marriage, other than having to be of the same sex. Neither of the parties must be already a civil partner or married, those under 16 cannot enter into a civil partnership (between 16 and 18 the consent of a parent or guardian is essential) and the restriction of prohibited degrees of relationship would apply. Under the new law, both proposed partners must have lived in England and Wales for at least seven days prior to giving notice of their intended partnership. After giving notice, partners should wait for a further fortnight after which on request of either or both partners, a civil partnership schedule would be issued. The proposed civil partners then would have 12 months to sign the schedule before the Registrar. Such civil partnerships could be ended by death, dissolution or annulment. Non-consummation would not be a ground for annulment of a civil partnership and adultery would not be a ground to dissolve a civil partnership which can otherwise be terminated. A civil partnership cannot be dissolved in its first year. All claims for financial relief are available to civil partners on dissolution which would include maintenance, lump sum payments and transfer of property. In a jurisdiction where many people choose to live together as partners without any formal ceremony, the need to register relationships as civil partnerships indicates the rapid erosion of marriage as an institution. But what will this freedom achieve and is it worth it at the end of the day? In India, the Hindu ceremonial and sacramental concept of marriage is still intact. Checks on erosion of values in matrimonial life and protection of the traditional concept of marriage are proper barriers to insulate the Indian family, their home and the children who live in it. The Indian law, therefore, works well in society. A few changes may be necessary in the Indian law. But what about the three million NRIs living in the UK alone amongst 25 million NRIs settled worldwide? What will their offspring and future generations do? Will they keep their indigenous culture and values intact in an alien framework or will they adopt the law of the foreign land? The writer, who studied Comparative Family Law at the University of London for his LL.M degree, is a Chandigarh-based advocate |
Profile In 2005, he acquired the reputation of being the world’s biggest philanthropist and has chosen India for his charitable work. In an interaction, Bill was asked if he had a split personality. He confessed he has, and revealed: “There are days when I attend a meeting in the morning, discussing how to make more money and in the afternoon, I would be sitting in another meeting to give away the money that I made”. Bill Gates has a dream. His goal is not sales, but what he calls “a dream computer”. He has been working on the project. The “dream computer”, he feels, will change the way we live and put you and me back in control of our lives. Our dream is to see a PC on every desk and we are no where near the finish line. Gates and his wife, Melinda, have endowed a foundation with more than $27 million to support philanthropic initiatives in the areas of global health and learning, with the hope that in the 21st century, advances in these critical areas would be available for all people. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has committed over $2 billion to improve learning opportunities. They were married in January, 1994 and have three children. Six years back, Bill, an avid reader, wrote a book Business @ the Speed of Thought. This became the “bestseller” having been translated in 25 languages and made available in 60 countries. His another book The Road Ahea held the number one spot on the New York Times’ bestseller list. He donated the proceeds of both books to non-profit organisations that support the use of technology in education and skills development. Philanthropy to Bill is as important as his love for computers. Gates fell in love with computers when he was very young and began programming at the age of 13. Bill Gates and his school mate, Paul Allen got so enamoured with the machine that they would stay in the computer room all day and night, writing programmes, reading computer literature and anything else they could to learn about computing. Consequently, they used the Lakeside Prep School’s computer time in just a few weeks and created big problem. In the meanwhile, the Computer Centre Corporation started business in Seattle. It was offering computing time at good rates, and one of the chief programmers working for the corporation had a child attending Lakeside school. A deal was struck between Lakeside Prep School and the Corporation that allowed the school to continue providing its students with computer time. Gates and his schoolmates immediately began exploring the contents of this new machine. It was not long before that the young hackers started causing problems. They caused the system to crash several times and broke the computers security system. They even altered the files that recorded the amount of computer time. They were caught and the Corporation banned them from the system for several weeks. Bill Gates and Paul Allen then formed the Lakeside programmers group as they were determined to find a way to apply their computer skills in the real world. The first opportunity to do this was a direct result of their mischievous activity with the school’s computer time. The corporation’s business was beginning to suffer due to the system’s weak security. Impressed with Gates’ and other Lakeside computer addicts’ previous assault of their computer, the corporation decided to hire the students to find bugs and expose weaknesses in the system. In return for the Lakeside Programming Group’s help, the corporation would give them unlimited computer time. Gates has been quoted as saying “It was when we got free time that we really got into computers, became hard core”. It was here that Gates and Allen really began to develop the talent that would lead to the formation of Microsoft seven years later. Towards the fag end of December 1974, Bill and Allen had known that the home computer market was about to explode and someone would need to make software for the new machines. They produced one within record time of eight weeks after being requisitioned by a reputed Computer company. The programme worked perfectly well. Gates was convinced that software market had been born. Within a year, he dropped out of Harvard where he had gone to study and formed Microsoft. Since then there is no looking back for him. |
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Tackling exam muddle in varsities Reports
on examination blues — paper leaks, out of syllabus question papers, wrong question papers opened in the examination centres, demand for grace marks due to inappropriate evaluation, mass copying — have become too common. Strident voices are heard from politicians, bureaucrats and educationists, exuding concern for reforming the present examination system. The examination framework currently in place is also not being enforced meticulously. Consequently, the career prospects of many a brilliant student run the risk of being jeopardised. The whole exercise of the university examination begins with the framing of a question bank or a question paper for a specific examination. The Boards of Studies of various departments are entrusted with the responsibility of appointing paper setters for their respective examinations. The job is performed so casually that many a time experts with only peripheral specialisation are appointed as paper setters. Obviously such experts fail to do justice with the quality and balance of the questions posed. This discrepancy may also be the outcome of the extremely non-lucrative nature of the assignment in a manner that not many senior and experienced faculty members from universities show willingness to act as paper setters. No wonder, the Board members are hard put to choose randomly only from among the few personally acquainted professors. The universities constrain the Boards to appoint examiners only from the proximate regional universities, may be for frugality and the convenience of accessibility, but that restricts the choice which perniciously reflects in the below par quality of the question papers. The setting of a question paper is a specialised and sensitive job; it requires the examiner not only to balance it to encompass the whole syllabus, but to pose questions which may be amenable to be tackled by the examinees with different shades of brilliance. The questions ought to be so framed to elicit and prompt the examinees to spontaneously emit whatever knowledge they have acquired on the subject. However, the ground reality is that the question papers are so wantonly set that the questions tend to be ambiguous, naïve and unbalanced. How far is it justifiable to pose a question requiring the examinees to describe a whole theory of a concept for just two marks weightage in a question paper worth 100 marks? Obviously, such a question paper is casually and mindlessly framed that would either fail to test the relative grasp and presentation skill of the examinees with different levels of calibre, or will do injustice in terms of awards to those who know much more than others. Similarly, questions are unwieldy, ambiguous and unbalanced. That’s why the CBSE has recently decided not to frame exceptionally lengthy question papers at the secondary school level to avert the stress on the examinees. The paper setters’ job is not attractive, but the examiner must appreciate that many a brilliant career are pegged on the nature and quality of the question paper framed by him/her. Printing errors, conceptual ambiguities and truncated question papers are the result of the negligence of the printing presses or the university examination departments. Adequate attention is not paid by the officials in whetting and proof-reading the finally printed paper before it is sealed and packed for distribution. Unfortunately, the quality of publishing question papers has enormously deteriorated. The question papers are frequently marked by spelling and grammatical mistakes, unintelligible language of the questions, or even a part of the paper missing and unprinted completely. If the university decides to award only proportional grace marks to all the examinees of that particular paper instead of accepting the onus of the blunder and re-examining them, that amounts to equally rewarding the meritorious and the ordinary students, which apparently looks unfair and unjustified. So maintaining high standards of printing of question papers and closely guarding their secrecy and sanctity is the inescapable responsibility of the university. Any lapse should not go unpunished to deter its recurrence in future. Evaluation of the answer scripts is another grey area of the university examination system, which has accentuated mistrust about the sanctity of the system in society. Owing to an overzealous approach of the authorities to expeditiously declare final results, many norms and regulations governing examination evaluation are unwittingly compromised. The pestered and pressurised examiners callously evaluate answer books, without regard for objectivity and uniformity of the standards of marking. Earlier, a system of appointing head examiner used to exist. He/she would ensure some semblance of uniformity in the evaluation, by scrutinising a randomly selected bunch of evaluated scripts of a number of sub-examiners who were simultaneously performing the job. Though it was a little time-consuming method, it ensured relatively unbiased and rational evaluation. Today, however, to declare results in a hurry, many evaluation rules are short-circuited. For instance, whereas the rules entitle only the regularly and permanently appointed university and college teachers with a stipulated extent of teaching and evaluation experience for evaluating answer scripts in a university examination, many ad hoc or temporary inexperienced teachers or teachers appointed on contract, are commonly found evaluating undergraduate and post-graduate examination scripts. These young over-exuberant teachers over stretch themselves to scurry through the evaluation of examination scripts, may be in a jiffy to make a fast buck. Though the university remuneration for evaluation may be unconvincingly low, no one has the right to turn the examination evaluation into a commercial activity and to put the bright careers at stake. This malaise has cropped up mainly due to the dissipating strength of regular teachers in the colleges and universities owing to the over-austere government policy of disallowing the appointment of regular teachers on permanent basis even to fill up vacancies against sanctioned posts, thus making way for unscrupulous and irresponsible examiners. Most of these loopholes in the system of university examination are not beyond control and repair. What is needed is little more care, honesty and sincerity of purpose on the part of both the teachers and the university officials. The government should also lift the ban on the appointment of regular teachers on permanent basis by at least allowing the filling up of vacancies against sanctioned posts in the colleges and universities, and thus help arrest the dwindling teacher-student ratio in these academic institutions. That would help expand the pool of regular teachers for the examination work, which in turn would spontaneously stamp out the menace of unscrupulous and callous examiners and invigilators. The writer is Professor of Economics, Punjab School of Economics, Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar |
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Diversities — Delhi Letter I was in two minds whether to attend an UNESCO round-table on AIDS. For I believe that one cannot tackle this menace through sermons. Finally, the dilemma dimmed out the minute I thought of one particular book which Khushwant Singh was busy reading one evening when I had gone over to meet him. Keeping aside the book, he spoke of the strange love tale webbed in this book. He pointed at a particular line in the tale. The book was Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Memories of My Melancholy Whores (Random House). And the hitting one-liner is: “Sex is the consolation you have when you can’t have love.” Not just hitting are these words but so very apt in the times we are living in, where sex seems to have overtaken emotions and gentle feelings. Gabriel was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. This particular book was written very recently. This love tale is so well webbed that it makes one cry — reading and sensing the way two people can fall in great love — not sexual but all so very emotional. Some facts about
Manto Saadat Hassan Manto died 50 years back. Yet he lives as a writer. At one of the meets on progressive writers, I met his grand nephew, Abid Hassan Minto (he spelt his surname differently, instead of the ‘a’, there is a ‘i’). He is Pakistan’s leading lawyer and a senior advocate of the Supreme Court of Pakistan. He is also President of the National Workers Party
(NWP). On top of all this, he is a well-known literary critic. Anyway, my basic interest was to know some aspects about the controversies that continue to revolve around Manto’s very name, those centering around his weakness for prostitutes to his emotional fragility etc. This is what Mr Minto told me: “Saadat Hassan Manto was my father’s paternal uncle/chacha. I had become close to him when I came down to Lahore around 1953 to study law. He was already living there and I had interacted with him regularly for two years, till his death… “Regarding he being mentally fragile, that is just not too true. He was not mad. On the contrary, he was very clever. It’s just that he was an alcoholic and those days there were no de-addiction centres/ special clinics for alcoholics. So anybody with any problem related to alcohol was also dumped in an asylum. “Regarding his name getting linked to prostitutes etc, I can say with great confidence that he was absolutely in love with his wife and greatly committed to her. She was also a Kashmiri like us and her family that earlier shifted to Africa and later to Mumbai and that’s where they had met and married…” In response to my question regarding those endless tales of his visiting women of all shades, he said: “Maybe earlier, before his marriage, whilst he was living in Mumbai he mixed with all sections and all levels of people, but there could be an underlying factor to it. He was so very taken up by the non-elite and those from the socially lower strata that that could be one of the reasons why he liked to interact with that class. But after his marriage he was devoted and except for the alcoholic problem (and its associated side-effects), he suffered from no other disease or problem. He was also severely affected when his only son died as a child. Though he had three daughters, that loss played havoc. No, it’s not the Partition chaos that affected him as much as the death of his little son. Somehow till the end he couldn’t get over it. That death of his son wrecked him completely.” Last fortnight musicians and artists from Sudan held performances here. Now one gets this invite from Ajeet Cour which states that her Academy of Fine Arts and Literature is hosting the SAARC Charter Day. The celebrations include an art exhibition by eminent Sudanese artists and the release of the inaugural issue of the SAARC journal Beyond Borders. Getting back to Sudan, for getting his country into focus, credit goes to the Sudanese Ambassador to India, Abdalmahmood Abdalhaleem Mohammad. He is a writer and literary critic, besides being a career diplomat. |
His names are countless, so are his abodes. — Guru Nanak True love springs from the knowledge of universality with all forms of life. —The Upanishads Do not hesitate to share your food with the hungry or your shelter with the destitute. —The Buddha Brother! The whole world is poor; on one is rich; only the one who has the wealth of God name
is rich. — Kabir A true Brahmin should be the very image of humility and not be proud of his knowledge or wisdom. — Mahatma Gandhi Countless are the spheres of his influence and beyond our reach they are. — Guru Nanak
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