Bharat Rakshak

http://www.tribuneindia.com/news/nation ... 18302.html
on the granting of institution of eminence status to reliance for an institute which exists on paper
excerpts

The Department of Higher Education, a branch of the Ministry of Human Resource Development, has clarified its stance on granting “Institution of Eminence” (IoE) status to Reliance Foundation's Jio Institute in Maharashtra, which, as of now, only exists on paper.
Secretary of Department of Higher Education, R Subramanyam, said Greenfield private institutions, such as Jio Institute, can be granted the aforementioned status.
“There are three categories under which the ‘IoE' status can be granted, the first of which is the Public institutions category, which includes Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, and Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Mumbai and Delhi were considered. The second category was private institutions, under which Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS) Pilani and Manipal University have been granted the status,” he explained.
“The third category, under which Jio Institute was granted the status, was the Greenfield Private institutions. These are institutions that do not exist right now, but well-meaning, responsible private investors want to bring global standards to the country. These should be welcomed,” he added.

This is absolute idiocy...How did the ministry or the PMO gave green flag to this? How do they think this will look to the public? Giving 1000crores of tax payers money to an institute which hasn't even started functioning? And their explanation is that "there is a provision in the new law" to give the status to upcoming institutes?..'.Well meaning private enterprises'...? Since when did Ambani fall in this well meaning category.? This chap cheats the taxpayer of millions ..Nah..Billions to the exchequer over these years and is rewarded like this?
One year to election and they decide to shoot themselves in the foot.!! Wonderful

1000 crores are not meant for private institutions..falsehold perpetuated by incorrect reporting

It's not only about 1000 crores...How can they include an institute which is just in the announcement in such a group where institutions like IIMs, IIT Madras and others don't make the cut?...instituions create reputations and quality over decades of performance, and here someone just announces his intention and voila!..its nations pride...is he bringing nobel laureates to teach?. Are the staff going to be cherry picked from ivy leagues?...What caught the imagination of govt to include Jio institute in this list?

And that too by a Businessman whose credentials are shoddy in the mind of an average citizen...Sure they will lap up the cheap data plans his company is providing..But people associate Ambani with cheating taxes, bribing govt and getting to change laws to suit himself... They wouldn't have bought it if it was the Tatas...But not the Ambani...

^ There is something fishy going on in education, esp. STEM.

1. Jadvekar has made faculty student ratio 1:20 for engineering colleges. The earlier ratio of 1: 15 was abolished.

Apparently , " Some Engg. Colleges were not maintaining this ratio but showing fake staff during audit." OK. So what does he do? Cancel the license / accreditation of such institutions? Naw....he changes the rule itself.

In TN, staff tried approaching Supreme Court and explaining that Western Institutes of repute have ratio of around 1: 10, at Bachelor Level.

Masters / PhD can be upto 1:1. (This means a large US university with 400 Professors will guide / produce one PhD candidate each, slightly higher than the 380 PhDs the entire India produced in 2007-8).

The West recognises that more Professors are required to impart good quality education in STEM, get patents, produce more M.Tech / PhDs.

I know from asking around that BE guys have problems solving technical problems in Industry, however an M.Tech guy will batten down , burn his bridges and solve it. (Ha Ha , our forum T-REX / GD with his 2600 lines of code)

More M.Tech / PhD people required to solve country's problems, get patents, generate employment, etc.

Why they not doing?

What is the source of your information?

One of the categories in eminent institutes was "Greenfield". Reliance got it under that category. There were many sub-criteria under that which Reliance fulfilled. So three different categories - public, private, greenfield. The list is just phase 1. Reports suggest Reliance is going to invest 9000 crores in it. Similar initiative was taken by Vedanta in Odisha more than a decade back but jholawalas sabotaged it. Modern STEM is capital intensive. Jholawala logic is not going to work.

Why did the govt create a Greenfield category in the first place.?..
The whole Greenfield category is a big mistake... as I mentioned before, there is no way anyone can create a world class institute out of thin air... Infrastructure is just one small component. The staff, the system, the administration, research output, student intake, the quality of the alumni .. throwing money at it doesn't solve all this...ambani just made a PowerPoint and the govt took it on face value?...Why couldn't they wait like 10 years or so for him to prove his promise of a world class university before rewarding him like this?

The whole exercise smells fishy...it feels like the eminent institute thing was created to help the amabnis and the rest of the institutes were added just to shut up any criticism...oh..btw, the secretary who worked on the proposal in 2016 is now working for the Ambanis...Go figure....

That is conspiracy theory. The institutes were judged by a committee not the govt. There were 11 greenfield institutes which applied. Except for the tag govt is not giving them any money. Much of the US university ecosystem were built by private money including robber barons like Howard Hughes. They will bring in scale instead of teaching shops like Amity.

Are you sure it's just a tag? I'm not sure...then the whole purpose of 'eminent institute' is wasteful exercise. Why can't other private universities from calling themselves 'Eminent' ?...After all they can say it's just a tag...

The UGC says "these shall be regulated separately.."..We still don't have the full details of what that means.. as per the HRD secretary, "they will get complete autonomy and freedom from all regulations.."...Do you think this sounds right…? This is ambani we are talking about...Not the Tatas, not the Birlas..People who entered education sector when there was no money to be made of it...This is the guy who routinely subverts law, regulations et al to squeeze every penny of margins for himself ..Even his shareholders gets shafted every now and then...He robbed the nation of KG gas revenues by falsifying output and reserves, undeMined the whole 3G auction and have TRAI dancing to its tunes to destroy the competition..When airtel, vodafone, idea and the rest of telcos goes under, remember it's again the taxpayers money which will be lost in all those new NPAs...
And people think this guy want to spend 2 billion dollars to improve India's education sector..?High quality institutes like IISc never make profit..Because high quality research costs money..Their wealth is always the knowledge output meant for the public good...Ambani won't enter unless there is something in for him...Reputations are never built on what you are going to do..It's on what you did...And this man has a very damaging background

Yes, the tag gives you total freedom or autonomy or whatever you call it. I won't go by jholawala logic. I will wait to see the final product. We need to get away from sarkari godowns that we call universities and institutes in India. As mentioned above modern STEM is capital intensive. A modest equipment will cost in crores. So India needs to channelize more private money into education in the correct way. And this is a good start.

Mashelkar will lead Reliance Jio University. Some idea of the scale of the project in this report. I hope Vedanta revives its plans too.

https://in.news.yahoo.com/ril-board-mem ... 36540.html

Supratik wrote:Yes, the tag gives you total freedom or autonomy or whatever you call it. I won't go by jholawala logic. I will wait to see the final product. We need to get away from sarkari godowns that we call universities and institutes in India. As mentioned above modern STEM is capital intensive. A modest equipment will cost in crores. So India needs to channelize more private money into education in the correct way. And this is a good start.

Then why not remove the regulations and rules for all future and current private universities? Why restrict it to only Jio? All we have is a proposal...It is not even worth the paper it is printed on...Businessmen men makes all kind of shiny PowerPoint to influence decisions ..It doesn't mean anything...All I said was this special category concession could have been given to jio once they complete 5 or 10 years of operations....
I am not saying only govt universities should be encouraged...There are lots of private universities which are good and outperforms public ones...It is this selective positioning which ends up benefiting a proven crooked enterprise which is what I couldn't understand...Just imagine if it was the scamgress which set this up...We all would have had a field day ...

Just like all cannot get into IITs and all cannot become Ass. Prof at IISc, all cannot get the tag. Your contention is that Ambani is a crook (as if the other businessmen in India are saints) and hence his university will be crooked and will produce only crooks. That is a whole lot of assumptions without any basis.

jpremnath wrote:This is absolute idiocy...How did the ministry or the PMO gave green flag to this? How do they think this will look to the public? Giving 1000crores of tax payers money to an institute which hasn't even started functioning? And their explanation is that "there is a provision in the new law" to give the status to upcoming institutes?..'.Well meaning private enterprises'...? Since when did Ambani fall in this well meaning category.? This chap cheats the taxpayer of millions ..Nah..Billions to the exchequer over these years and is rewarded like this?
One year to election and they decide to shoot themselves in the foot.!! Wonderful

Many a grateful middle and lower middle class family have invested in reliance shares early in the game and done very well for themselves. They have educated their children and married off their daughters, built houses using their investments in reliance shares.

A great many in India still revere and hold Ambani in huge esteem because he introduced them to the stock market via the reliance shares that did very well, gave bonus shares and regular dividends even as its value appreciated and helped make their lives.

Only a few may think like you and their families didn't hold reliance shares.

In his time, Ambani and reliance were both phenomena.

Ambani was a power to be reckoned with and ministers groveled before him and not the other way around.

While he may have done what people say he did, don't forget that he also helped a great many honest hardworking ordinary, salaried, small business type of families who had faith in him and invested with him to make good.

To each of them, he kept his word and that is why to each of them he mattered.

In the end, its only Karma that matters.

Ambani like all other businessmen oils the system to get things done. Unless like say Mallya he is accused of wrong doing (let alone proven guilty) he cannot be denied to apply for a scheme. What should the govt tell him. Saar, jpremrath has said you are a crook so we cannot let you apply. And what has this got to do with elections. The category of "greenfield" was introduced to invite private money to get scale.

Supratik wrote:Just like all cannot get into IITs and all cannot become Ass. Prof at IISc, all cannot get the tag. Your contention is that Ambani is a crook (as if the other businessmen in India are saints) and hence his university will be crooked and will produce only crooks. That is a whole lot of assumptions without any basis.

I never said his university will produce crooks. Do not put words in my mouth, and I did list the reasons why I dont trust Reliance. I dont want to derail this thread, lets just agree to disagree.

Amendment in RTE act.

a good initiative IMO

iit banaras course for new brides

The IIT Department of the Banaras Hindu University (BHU) is coming up with a three-month course to train new brides, as reported by deccanchronicle.com. The course apparently is designed to prepare women for marriage, which is called ‘Daughters’ Pride — Beti Mera Abhimaan and has been launched by Young Skilled India Start-Up Neeraj Srivastava. Besides that, the women students will also be trained in developing marriage skills, socialism.

Srivastava said that the selection process of the course will begin soon. The course will be started in the Vanitha Institute of Fashion Design, as reported by Deccan Chronicle. When asked why the star-up did not come up with a similar course for men, CEO of Young Skilled India Srivastava said that at the moment, we have only this course in mind.

really!!!! I am really confused which way we are going as a country. where do people find this 18th century mentality!!

fake news

https://www.justdial.com/Thiruvananthap ... G5I3_BZDET

this justdial link is the sole online presence of "Vanitha Institute of Fashion Design". any link to IIT-VHU is yet to be mentioned, other than in the clickbait headline. I do hope they sue the pants off of these malicious presstitutes.

souravB, I am really confused which way we are going as a country. where do people find this 16th century mentality of believing everything they read on the net!!

Well the news originated from Deccan Chronicles. If we cannot believe that, then I don't know which source of news to trust.
Even if the news itself is fake, and I hope it is doesn't it then pose a bigger question of reliability of the paper.
Deccan Chronicle link

use this as a rule of thumb and it will serve you well, any controversial/sensational news item published by Indian media is false unless proven otherwise.

souravB wrote:really!!!! I am really confused which way we are going as a country. where do people find this 18th century mentality!!

What's wrong with training new brides to be on how to manage household? In a country of 1.2 Billion with millions of marriages happening every year, it will help to train new brides to manage household - using tools & technologies to manage budget, banking, hygiene, "home science", cooking, energy management, generating additional income etc.

And what is wrong with it being done as a summer course under the aegis of IIT? Every graduate going to IIT is not going to come out as rocket scientist.

I think this mentality of looking down on skill development, even though it is packaged for "new brides to be" is so dinosaurian.

And fashion designing sometimes uses very high technology. Try to come up with a completely eco-friendly line of high fashion for example.

IIT student Quality has dipped because of JEE format.

There has been a dip in quality in the last 20 years. There are many reasons for this, but a key reason is change in the JEE (Joint Entrance Examination) format from problem solving to multiple choice. Now, you do not solve the problem, but try to guess the right answer. Guessing can be done by elimination, but for solving the problem one must know how to tackle it. The current system does not test your problem-solving ability.

Twenty years ago, I taught a class of 85 students at IIT-Madras. Later, I came to know that 67 of them had gone abroad as there were hardly any opportunities in the country. Five years ago, I taught a class of 120 at the same institution; only 19 went abroad. This is the scenario across IITs — hardly 10% are going abroad. Students are getting jobs in big companies here. They have also started thinking about startups, which was not the case 10 years ago.

disha wrote: What's wrong with training new brides to be on how to manage household?

You are so politically incorrect

disha wrote:What's wrong with training new brides to be on how to manage household?

Nothing. But where is the course teaching grooms on how to be good husbands?

I was in iit kanpur this week for campus hiring of interns for next summer.

will post comments/rants a bit later when i get free time.

ofcourse being one of biggest and oldest its resource rich vs anything else..... but there are some glaring gaps even there.

vera_k wrote:Nothing. But where is the course teaching grooms on how to be good husbands?

Such a course should also exist. What's wrong in training men as well. Currently You may not find such courses in IIT though!

its the old home science course thing.
it was and is taught in many colleges.

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/hom ... 793785.cms

interview with director iit ropar

Differentiated question papers in CBSE.

https://swarajyamag.com/insta/weak-at-m ... s-10-exams

https://swarajyamag.com/insta/medical-c ... -regulator
Medical Council Of India Superseded Via Ordinance, New Board To Run It Till Formation Of Regulator

President Ram Nath Kovind signed an ordinance on Wednesday (26 September) to set up a committee to run the Medical Council of India (MCI), India Today has reported. This arrangement will continue till the parliament passes the bill to replace the body with a new commission, Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said.

The ordinance was cleared in a Cabinet meeting chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi this morning (26 September), Jaitley said.

Since term of the MCI's elected body is ending soon, Jaitley said, a need was felt for it to be run by a committee of eminent individuals. The Board of Governors includes Niti Aayog member Dr V K Paul and AIIMS Director Randeep Gul.

National Medical Commission (NMC) Bill 2017 to replace the Council with a National Medical Commission is pending in Parliament.

A great victory for reforms, for the health sector and above all medical profession. The caravan of reforms continues to move apace under the leadership of PM @narendramodi Personally delighted to see this reform move: https://t.co/nm3XXDr2ad
— Arvind Panagariya (@APanagariya) September 26, 2018




The proposed National Medical Commission (NMC) Bill 2017 seeks to radically overhaul the current structure and organisation of the MCI. The MCI, which is a self-regulating body and is run by doctors, has been accused of being thoroughly corrupt and inept.

The bill also seeks to dissolve MCI and form a new regulatory body NMC plus four verticals dealing with curriculum, assessment-cum-rating and registration. NMC will consist of four separate regulatory boards:
•UGMEB: Undergraduate Medical Education Board for regulating the entrance (NEET) and exit examination.
•PGMEB: Postgraduate Medical Education Regulation Board for postgraduate entrance and exit test.
•MARB: Medical Assessment and Rating Board for medical educational institutions
•BMR: Board for Medical Registration.

X-post

India's largest Edutech compnay Byju's

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/byjus-in ... mana-mitra

New list of IoE.

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/in ... 989808.cms

Centre Plans Bill in Budget Session to Extend Reservation to Higher Education Private Institutions

New Delhi: The Human Resource Development ministry is planning to introduce a Bill in the upcoming budget session for implementation of reservation for SC/ST/OBC and EWS in higher education private institutions.

On Tuesday, while announcing the 10% EWS reservation in general category in private and public institutions, HRD minister Prakash Javadekar clarified that “all reservations — for Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, Other Backward Classes and for economically weaker sections of the general category — will be introduced in private institutions from July”.

Social justice expert PS Krishnan has written to HRD ministers from Kapil Sibal to Smriti Irani and also Javadekar on the urgency and importance of legislation for reservation in private higher education institutions.

Krishnan said if the Bill is in the offing, the government will have to make two separate laws — one for SC/ST/OBC reservations in higher education public institutions and EWS in general category.

This is because the 93rd amendment inserted new clause 5 in Article (15) according to which, reservation can be laid down for a private sector institution by a law. “The government will have to make law in terms of clause 5 Article 15 to extend reservations for SC/ST/OBC in higher education private institutions. This is long overdue legislation for SC/ST/BC for admission to seats in private institutions. SC upheld the constitutional validity on various occasions,” Krishnan said.

The true purpose of clause (5) was to bring private professional and other higher educational institutions within the ambit of reservation. But the government at that stage moved for reservation only in government and aided institutions. “The true purpose of the new Clause (5) has remained unimplemented for long now,” Krishnan wrote to HRD ministers.

He added that for EWS category, there has to be a separate law and “the two legislations should not be mixed up”. He added, “By the 103rd Amendment Act recently enacted, there is similar provision for EWS providing 10% reservations in higher education public institutions. The constitutionality of the clauses recently added to Article 15 and 16 is yet to be determined by the SC”.

He believes a favourable SC test is not very likely to happen “because reservations were envisaged to benefit the social groups who have been excluded from the very field and faced discrimination”.

In the letters he wrote, Krishnan urged the ministers to fully implement the 93rd amendment and bring about quota for SC/ST/BC in higher education private institutes. He had observed in letters to ministers since 2008 that most of the seats in professional and other higher educational institutions in the peninsular states are in the private sector, which has fast expanded, and is similarly expanding in other parts of the country.

“The presence of SCs and STs is next to nil and of BCs nominal, and only children of well-to-do families, almost entirely non-SC, non-ST, non-BC, are able to avail themselves of the opportunities in this burgeoning educational sector in the absence of reservation,” he said.

https://www.news18.com/news/india/centr ... 04907.html

Just how shameless can this government be. Things are even more disappointing when the expectation was so much more

Govt is in election mode with appeasement agenda. if this law was long overdue they had all those years prior to implement.

GOI is fading and throwing all darts at the wall in the hope something will click.
next will be guaranteed and preferential reserved promotions too in pvt sector as in the "roster" system inside GOI.

thing is its everyone vs BJP now - no allies left, only the unreliable Niku. all state level leaders of non-BJP are upset they were "not allowed/facilitated" to make money in 2014-2018 so they will gang together regardless of local fights or ideology which anyway none exists in indian politics.

in these appeasement games its always the honest middle class who is thrown under the bus.