 |
|
Enough is enough PM’s eduvision |
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Welcome home,
Sunita A triumph we all can share AS young children in India held up Sunita Williams’ Mona Lisa-like visage on banners and posters and prayed for her safe return home, the Atlantis space shuttle finally touched base on Saturday, completing a personal triumph for the US astronaut and a space odyssey that all of us can savour and cherish.
Expanding higher
education
American discretion
N. Korea
disarmament prospects improve Chatterati Bush moves closer to
closing Guantanamo
|
|
PM’s eduvision INDIA has no dearth of human resources, but their quality is too poor to meet the growing demands of the economy. The country may be faced with a shortage of skilled and educated manpower in the years to come if no concrete steps are taken in this regard. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s efforts to bring about a quantitative as well as qualitative improvement in higher education, therefore, deserve appreciation. As he announced on Sunday, the Central government has drawn up an elaborate plan to expand higher education and make it accessible to every section of society. The prevailing situation is appalling, as enrolment in institutions of higher education is “abysmally low” in almost 50 per cent of the districts in the country. Less than half of the students in the secondary schools fail to get admission to a college. The government’s plan includes setting up of 30 new Central universities and a college in each of the 340 districts where college enrolment is poor. But will the present school system be able to fulfil the enrolment requirement of these new centres of higher education along with the existing ones -- 367 universities and 18,064 colleges till 2006? Perhaps, not. That is why the government is working on a programme of universalising secondary education. Besides this, government-funded schools to provide quality education will be set up in every block to serve as roll models for other schools. If everything goes as visualised by the Prime Minister, the education scene in India will undergo a metamorphosis. There can be no better nation-building exercise than this. Since the Prime Minister seems to be concerned about the erosion of university autonomy with vice-chancellors in many states being hand in glove with the ruling politicians, he should come out with a mechanism to free universities from the stranglehold of state governments. This will ensure that his institution-building idea bears the desired fruit. This will also help improve the quality of education at the state universities and colleges. Jawaharlal Nehru is remembered for institution-building mainly because of his projects like the IITs and the IIMs, India’s brand names in the field of education. |
|
Welcome home, Sunita AS young children in India held up Sunita Williams’ Mona Lisa-like visage on banners and posters and prayed for her safe return home, the Atlantis space shuttle finally touched base on Saturday, completing a personal triumph for the US astronaut and a space odyssey that all of us can savour and cherish. Her 195-day record outing in space, the highest for a woman, and her four space-walking forays exceeding 29 hours, will now be told and retold in schools across India, sparking that light of wonder, aspiration and vicarious triumph in the eyes of many young boys and girls. Sunita thus shares space with Kalpana Chawla, who is now practically a legend, especially in these parts. While there is no doubt that their successes are as American as Indian, if not more, they are playing valuable roles as inspirational icons in a land where most can never dream of setting foot in an aircraft, let alone seeing a space shuttle. Of course, their achievements can never be a substitute for genuine technological progress and self-reliance within the country. Nor can the ultimate goal for a youngster be couched in terms of "getting out" in order to be an achiever. But Kalpana and Sunita, both in their individual careers and in the educational and technological systems that enabled their rise, are true icons. And the Indian space community, among others, has demonstrated that aspirations for the big league are not misplaced. Viewed from space, it is easy to imagine how a beautiful Planet Earth also looks a remarkably well-knit, cohesive entity, floating serenely in space. And through the fraying of thermal blankets on the shuttle, the shutdown of the Russian computers controlling navigation and oxygen generation at the space station, the storms that delayed the landings, and sundry other problems and challenges, it is that tantalising vision of home that would have spurred Sunita and her crew on to keep going. And that is a good final image to have — we all share the same home, and it is called Earth. |
|
The way to ensure summer in England is to have it framed and glazed in a comfortable room.
— Horace Walpole |
Expanding higher education While
we do have much to be proud of, we have a long distance to travel in the field of higher education and research in India to attain world standards. We are at an important cusp in our developmental trajectory. We are at a point when the dynamics of population growth can catapult us into a prolonged cycle of rapid economic growth –- growth which can be the basis for the eradication of the ancient scourges like poverty, illiteracy, ignorance and disease. For this to happen, we need to translate this potential into reality. The reality at the moment is that around 10 per cent of the relevant age group is enrolled in any institute of higher education as compared to 40-50 per cent in most developed economies. In almost half the districts in the country, higher education enrolments are abysmally low. Less than 50 per cent of secondary school students continue into college education in any form. Almost two-thirds of our universities and 90 per cent of our colleges are rated as below average on quality parameters. And most importantly, there is a nagging fear that university curricula are not synchronised with employment needs. If we need to capitalise on our latent human potential, we need a quantum leap in our approach to higher education. We need to revamp the higher education system so that it walks on the two legs of access and excellence. On the one hand, we need a massive expansion of higher education opportunities. Through this, we can expand access to knowledge to all classes of society and to all regions of the country. This is the only way that the lamp of knowledge can be taken to every door. On the other hand, we need to upgrade the quality of the higher educational institutions so that they work on the frontiers of knowledge, harnessing its immense capabilities for our common societal benefit. The higher education system must grow on these two pillars if it is to fulfil its role in nation building. It is with this objective in mind that we had appointed the National Knowledge Commission. The commission has come forward with many interesting ideas, giving us food for thought on the steps that are necessary to propel us into the knowledge era. A key recommendation of the Knowledge Commission is that we must undertake a massive expansion of higher education. The commission believes that by 2015, India should attain a gross enrolment ratio of at least 15 per cent if we are to be in line with most modern societies. Such a quantum jump in our university system has to be well planned and well funded. We need not just financial and physical resources, but also human resources. We have to universalise our secondary school system so that we generate enough good quality students who can then seek admission to higher education. We need more and better teachers and better facilities. Our government has taken the task of expanding higher education seriously. We have started new national institutions in the fields of science, technology and medicine. In the last 100 years, we have had only one Indian Institute of Science. In past two years, we have sanctioned six more. We have opened new national institutes in medical sciences, engineering and management. We intend to establish 30 new Central universities across the country. The work on the modalities for setting these up has begun and the Ministry of Human Resource Development, the UGC and the Planning Commission are working to operationalise this in the next two-three months. This expansion is going to be a landmark in expanding access to high quality education across the country. These universities should focus on achieving international standards of excellence and should be rated among the top institutions in the world. They should have the best faculty, excellent physical resources, a wide range of disciplines and, most importantly, a diverse student body. They should become the launching pads for our entry into the knowledge economy. States and local governments must also do more to expand access to remote areas and to marginalised groups. As I had said earlier, 340 districts have extremely low college enrolments. The Central Government would work with the states to support the expansion of colleges to these 340 districts. Each of these districts should strive to have at least one good college and the Central government is considering ways of funding their establishment. Access to higher education has two dimensions of which expansion of supply is only one. If the latent demand for higher education is to be converted to a real one, we need to consider ways of improving the financial resources of aspiring students as well. While our government has taken several steps to expand the scholarships available to students, including SCs, STs and minorities, we need a much larger national programme so that no one who wants to pursue further education is denied this opportunity for lack of resources. We are working on a national system of scholarships and easily available loans so that all the needy and deserving students have access to the necessary finances to fund their education. We will realise this goal in the coming year. If the university system expands, it also needs a larger pool of school leavers. We are working on a plan to gradually universalise secondary schooling. This programme will build on the success of the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan and will cover the entire country in two-three years. Further, in order to promote excellence, we are working on a programme for having one high quality school in every block of the country. These publicly funded 6000 schools will establish benchmarks for excellence in public schooling which can then be role models for the rest of the public education system. The Knowledge Commission has emphasised, and rightly so, that such a quantitative expansion of the university system must be accompanied by qualitative improvement. Not only should new universities be better universities, but even the existing ones, including the state universities, must reform and improve themselves. The reform of the existing university system should, therefore, be as much of a priority for us as its expansion. Our university system is, in many parts, in a state of disrepair. We need better facilities, more and better teachers, a flexible approach to curriculum development to make it more relevant, more effective pedagogical and learning methods and more meaningful evaluation systems. The quality of governance of many state educational institutions is a cause for concern. I am concerned that in many states, university appointments, including that of Vice-Chancellors, have been politicised and have become subject to caste and communal considerations. There are complaints of favouritism and corruption. This is not as it should be. We should free university appointments from unnecessary interventions on the part of governments and must promote autonomy and accountability. I urge states to pay greater attention to this aspect. After all, a dysfunctional education system can only produce dysfunctional future citizens! We also need to move away from routine approaches to overcome quality bottlenecks in our university system. We should look at alternative ways of improving the remuneration of professors, at ways of tapping into the large pool of Indian origin teaching manpower spread across the world’s universities, and of linking up with the best universities across the world to promote cross-fertilisation of ideas. I urge all those associated with our higher education system to think of and suggest solutions for improving quality. We are ready to listen. The article has been excerpted from the Prime Minister’s address delivered at the 150th anniversary function of the University of Mumbai on June
22.
|
American discretion
In
a recent American contest, the “indiscretion” as attributed to Mahatma Gandhi and Indian gods and goddesses (remember the “You Tube dance” and “Maxim bout” ! ) may have been in bad taste, but the amount of discretion that society gives to its grassroots -level functionaries is something that won our hearts during our sojourn in that country this summer. We were then in Denver, the capital of Colorado. We set out to go for a city tour when at the ticket counter of a historical monument, we were asked to present our identification documents. We had forgotten to carry our passports and what I could flaunt to the woman on the counter was my I-card. She recognised my photo and quipped, “An officer!” “Indian Police Service”, I said with pride. With a matching glint of appreciation, she said, “Welcome, sir, and bring the lady also in.” We did not have to buy tickets; instead the tour was all gratis with a guide in tow. At an unaffordable town inhabited by rich and fashionable people, Aspen, also famous for being one of the world’s top destinations for skiing, the question as to whether a “Group of five concession” should be given to us or not arose again. We were four adults besides our one-year-old grand-daughter, Anaysa. She being the fifth member, we claimed the group concession. The woman on the cash counter, having a good look at Anaysa, wrapped in a pink snow-suit then, smiled and happily conceded the desired concession. While going in a city bus to King Sooper, a grocery store, the driver of the bus played what turned out to be an innocuous prank on us. He was a Muslim from Mumbai, and his complexion being pinkish-white, we could not make out his Indian connection. I offered three one-dollar bills for being fed to the ticket machine when he said I needed to put “Thirty dollars, sir”. I was shocked, for that was a fare demanded 10 times more than the actual. I held my hand back when he smiled again speaking in Hindustani, “Hota hai bhaijaan, yahan bason main bhi chalna padta hai!” And he allowed us a free return ride on our way back. Next day again we took the same route when on our return journey on the same tickets, the new driver said we needed to buy fresh ones. When we told him about the previous day’s journey undertaken on the same route, for the same duration and between the same stations, he allowed us his discretion. At Glenwood Springs we reached Adventure Park through the cable cars at five in the evening. The charges being quite high, we were advised to preferably come the next day, for just an hour was left when the park would close. We wanted to visit the park, time being very short with us, notwithstanding. “Alright, in that case you can visit the park on the same tickets tomorrow as well in case you are able to find some time” offered the man on the counter. Here again at Star Bucks, ordering Chai Latte for four “to go”, we enquired as to where could we find milk for the baby, since at quite a few places visited that evening we could not arrange milk for Anaysa. Lo and behold! The stewardess filled a take-away container with two glassfuls of milk and said, “You don’t need to go anywhere else. And don’t need to pay either!” |
N. Korea disarmament prospects improve After
months of stalled negotiations, international efforts to disarm North Korea of nuclear weapons abruptly shifted into high gear last week as U.N. inspectors prepared to visit and a senior U.S. diplomat said his hopes had had been “buoyed” by his surprise visit to Pyongyang. Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill, the top U.S. negotiator on North Korea, expressed rare optimism that the communist regime will shut and seal its main nuclear fuel processing facility at Yongbyon within weeks, thus completing the first step toward its pledge this year to dismantle its weapons program. “I come away from this two-day set of meetings buoyed by a sense that we are going to be able to achieve our full objectives, that is, the complete denuclearisation,” Hill, who usually speaks in far more cautious language, told a news conference after arriving in Seoul, South Korea. Hill was the highest-ranking U.S. official to visit North Korea in nearly five years. The Bush administration previously refused to conduct one-on-one talks with Pyongyang, but softened its hard-line position after North Korea conducted an underground test of a small nuclear device last October. The North Korean government, which now is believed to possess enough plutonium for six to 10 atomic weapons, has long sought direct relations with Washington. After joint negotiations with the United States, China, Russia, South Korea and Japan, Kim Jong Il’s aides agreed in February to renounce further production of plutonium and to ultimately dismantle its nuclear weapons program in exchange for promised fuel oil, humanitarian aid and ultimately, normalised relations with the West. Hill described his talks with North Korea’s foreign minister, Pak Ui Chun, and its chief nuclear envoy, Kim Kye Gwan, as “very useful and positive.” Hill said they “indicated that they are prepared, promptly, to shut down the Yongbyon facility as called for in the February agreement” and to implement a disarmament deal likely to stretch out over several years. Hill warned that he and other negotiators would “spend a great deal of time, a great deal of effort, a lot of work” in getting North Korea to disable the facilities at Yongbyon and to fully disclose its nuclear program, including whether it has enriched uranium, the next major stages in the deal. “That’s an important step,” State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said. “You’re really getting into uncharted territory there.” Hill said shutdown of the Soviet-era reactor at Yongbyon could occur soon after U.N. inspectors have completed their examination of the site, about 60 miles north of the capital. Hours later, North Korean officials granted the necessary permission. The International Atomic Energy Agency announced that a five-member team of experts would depart head forNorth Korea to draw up formal plans to monitor and verify the shutdown of Yongbyon. The IAEA team, led by Olli Heinonen, deputy director general of the IAEA, is due to arrive Tuesday and stay in Pyongyang for five days. Once the team returns to Vienna, the IAEA board of governors must approve deploying a follow-up team since North Korea does not belong to the U.N. agency. Barring further difficulties, agency officials in Vienna said, the second team is likely to depart in about two weeks, with the shutdown in late July. “This is good news,” Mohamed ElBaradei, director of the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency, told a press conference in Vienna, where the IAEA is based. “I think we finally should be able to start a long and complex process, but I believe very much a process in the right direction.” The flurry of activity follows months of political deadlock. North Korea initially agreed to shut Yongbyon by mid-April, or 60 days after the Feb. 13 deal. But the deal immediately snagged over the U.S. failure to meet its pledge to return $25 million in alleged illicit North Korean assets frozen at the Banco Delta Asia, a small bank in the Chinese territory of Macau. The U.S. Treasury had barred financial institutions from doing business with the Macau bank after investigators accused it of sheltering North Korean funds obtained from counterfeiting, drugs and weapons trafficking. After the ban was imposed, U.S. authorities struggled for months to find a way to return the funds. The U.S. Federal Reserve Bank of New York finally operated as the conduit to transfer the money to the central bank in Russia. Confusion over the status of the funds continued Friday when Russia’s RIA and Interfax news agencies quoted an unnamed Russian official as saying Russia would complete the wire transfer to a North Korean bank Monday. Earlier in the day, the Itar-Tass news agency quoted a Russian deputy foreign minister as saying the $25 million transfer was essentially complete. Hill said he would head to Japan today to brief his counterparts there on his visit to Pyongyang. He said China, which is hosting the six-party talks, is likely to resume the negotiations in early July. By arrangement with
LA Times-Washington Post
|
|
Chatterati The search is on to find an official residence for the outgoing President Dr A.P.J. Abdul Kalam. So far, 31, Aurangzeb Road has been selected, keeping in mind the security aspect, in Lutyens’ Delhi. Termed as an “uneventful” place, this three-bedroom bungalow was earlier occupied by former chief justice of India, Ranganath Mishra. Keeping in mind Dr Kalam’s love for plants, the ministry is redoing the area surrounding this type VIII bungalow, which covers around 5000 square feet of plinth area. The horticulture department has already kept a stock of Dr Kalam’s favourite herbal and flowering plants. The bungalow is more or less in its original form as no extra construction or renovation has ever taken place. If it is approved by the presidential secretariat, there is a lot of work to be done to make it suitable for Dr Kalam. The President has made it clear that he will spend his time traveling around the country teaching. It is believed that he has packed only two bags, as everything else there was “Rashtrapati Bhavan property.” A simple man who walked in with two suitcases, walks away with the same, leaving his tenure with dignity and simplicity. Ungodly matters Former external affairs minister Jaswant Singh’s wife has filed a criminal complaint against a priest and BJP leader for hurting the religious sentiments of Hindus by depicting Rajasthan chief minister Vasundhara Raje as a goddess blessing her ministers, on a calendar. Heman Bohra had published a calendar depicting Ms Raje as Goddess Annapurna while local BJP MLA Surya Kanta Vyas released the calendar in Jodhpur. Hurting religious sentiments is a serious issue and such sycophancy is uncalled for. Senior BJP leaders Atal Bihari Vajpayee, L. K. Advani and Rajnath Singh were depicted as the trinity of Lords Brahma, Vishnu and Mahesh. Congress workers had protested last month against the publication of the calendar. But all this sycophancy is not new in politics. We also now have a Maya Chalisa. Well, Lalu had one, Mulayam Singh had one and now Mayawati has one too. Dr Tiwari of Meerut has written a Maya Chalisa praising her capabilities as a dalit leader. The Maya Chalisa is now being printed in a booklet as well as on a calendar, and will be sold across the state. Puja paats, superstitions are a part and parcel of politics. Sathya Sai Baba of Puttaparthi was figuring in all discussions on the presidential election at Congress headquarters. Two of his devotees were front-runners in the race for Raisina Hill: Motilal Vora and Shivraj Patil. The Home Minister had called on Sai Baba on several occasions and counts on his blessings. Vora has equal claim to his benediction too. Some time ago, when the AICC treasurer had met Sai Baba, the later had produced a ring with a swipe of his hand in the air. Vora still wears the ring. Many state Chief Ministers are his devotees too. |
|
Bush moves closer to closing Guantanamo WASHINGTON –
The US Bush administration is moving closer to shutting down its bitterly criticised prison for terrorist suspects at Guantanamo Bay, but the process is being held up by disagreement among his closest advisers, and problems about where to send many of the 370 inmates who remain at the jail, at a US base in Cuba. Despite a White House statement that a meeting of top officials scheduled for yesterday to take decisions on the future of the facility had been cancelled, it become clearer by the day that the pressures to remove what has become a global embarrassment for the US are now well-nigh irresistible. President Bush himself has said he would like the prison to close its doors as soon as is feasible, and both Robert Gates and Condoleezza Rice, the Secretaries of Defense and State, have indicated their opposition to it. Only last Sunday General Colin Powell, Secretary of State when the first detainees arrived at Guantanamo Bay in January 2002, said he thought the facility should be closed and the prisoners moved to jails on the US mainland. On Capitol Hill, proposals are circulating for the prison’s closure, supported not only by Democrats but also by several leading Republicans. Guantanamo was not merely a problem but “an international disgrace that every day continues to sully this great nation’s reputation,” Steny Hoyer, majority leader and the second ranking Democrat in the House of Representatives, said this week. As the outrage has grown, US officials increasingly find that when they press for greater human rights around the world, their arguments are undercut by critics who point to how prisoners have been held at the prison for up to five years or more without charge, effectively incommunicado and without the right of habeas corpus. Only last year did legal action finally force the Pentagon to release a list of names and nationality of those detained. But four more suicides in the last 12 months alone, and years of reports of inhumane treatment, religious abuse and harsh interrogation techniques, have sealed Guantanamo’s reputation as a place of despair, where the normal requirements of the law and international conventions do not apply. US officials say the obstacles to simply shutting it down are practical: persuading other countries to take those inmates – 75 or so – who have been cleared for release, and finding enough space in secure military jails within the US. One possibility is the US Army jail at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Another is the US Navy brig at Charleston, South Carolina, where Jose Padilla, US citizen and one-time ‘dirty bomber,’ was held without trial or proper representation for three and a half years, before those charges were effectively dropped. But even at the brig, room exists only for some 200 prisoners at most, it is claimed. “These steps have not been completed and no decisions are imminent,” a National Security Council spokesman said. However the fate of Guantanamo Bay also exposes a long familiar fault line in the Bust administration, between those like Ms Rice and Mr Gates who want above all to salvage America’s reputation, and hardliners – led, as usual, by vice-President Dick Cheney, backed this time by the US Justice Department and the US Department of Homeland Security. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, the man who as President Bush’s first White House counsel was largely responsible for devising the “enemy combatant” status conferred on the prisoners, argues that to bring the detainees to the mainland would merely lead to a new flood of habeas corpus cases. For their part, homeland security officials worry about housing topdrawer terrorists like al-Qaida’s Khalid Sheik Mohammed, a prime organiser of the 9/11 attacks and transferred last year to Guantanamo, on US soil. In testimony on Capitol Hill this week, John Bellinger, the State Department’s top lawyer complained that although critics in the US and abroad were urging the prison’s immediate shut down, they had offered “no credible alternatives for dealing with the dangerous individuals detained there.” By arrangement with The Independent |
To his eldest son, Atharva, who gave it to Agni. In turn Angi gave it to Satyavaha. In this tradition Satyavaha gave it to Angiras. — The Mandukya Upanishad You must try all beliefs and traverse all the different ways once. — Shri Ramakrishna All life is shaped by God’s ordering. — Guru Nanak
|
| HOME PAGE | |
Punjab | Haryana | Jammu & Kashmir |
Himachal Pradesh | Regional Briefs |
Nation | Opinions | | Business | Sports | World | Mailbag | Chandigarh | Ludhiana | Delhi | | Calendar | Weather | Archive | Subscribe | Suggestion | E-mail | |
