Indian Education System
Re: Indian Education System
very interesting indeed.
Re: Indian Education System
@Raja ram-ji,
There are several other Dharmic groups that are expanding their footprint in education. All Hindu spiritual leaders from Sri Sri Ravi Shankarji to Sadguru Jaggi Vasudev to Mata Amritanandamayi have elaborate school systems to universities (in case of Sri Sri and Mata Amritanandamayi). Some of them operate in franchise model where anyone with appropriate land and resources can start a Maharishi Vidya Mandir or Sri Sri Ravishankar Vidya Mandir, or Isha School but the fee structure, school management, teacher admission and training, etc., are taken over by TM movement or Art of Living with the school proponent maintaining hostels and good share of the revenue if any. These students are given a modern, truely secular and value based education with full exposure to Indian arts, history, culture and are taught Yoga, Pranayama and meditation. The teachers also are expected to practice yoga and meditation on a daily basis. Some of these schools organize bajans as well on various occasions. They are also exposed to the spiritual discourses and videos of the respective founders such as Sri Sri or Sadguru or Amritanandamayi ma.
There are several other Dharmic groups that are expanding their footprint in education. All Hindu spiritual leaders from Sri Sri Ravi Shankarji to Sadguru Jaggi Vasudev to Mata Amritanandamayi have elaborate school systems to universities (in case of Sri Sri and Mata Amritanandamayi). Some of them operate in franchise model where anyone with appropriate land and resources can start a Maharishi Vidya Mandir or Sri Sri Ravishankar Vidya Mandir, or Isha School but the fee structure, school management, teacher admission and training, etc., are taken over by TM movement or Art of Living with the school proponent maintaining hostels and good share of the revenue if any. These students are given a modern, truely secular and value based education with full exposure to Indian arts, history, culture and are taught Yoga, Pranayama and meditation. The teachers also are expected to practice yoga and meditation on a daily basis. Some of these schools organize bajans as well on various occasions. They are also exposed to the spiritual discourses and videos of the respective founders such as Sri Sri or Sadguru or Amritanandamayi ma.
Re: Indian Education System
The stranglehold that Missionary educational network had on school education has been broken as a result of decades of hard work by various Indian spiritual organizations and other groups such as BVB or RSS. Now missionaries cannot openly propagate religion on their students nowadays as there is so much choice for students.
However in higher education, especially in Arts and Humanities, Christian colleges still rule the roost. Engineering and professional education is mostly secular with minority institutions mostly for money making than for religious indoctrination.
In every state, the top 5 best arts and humanities colleges will likely include minimum 2 to 3 Missionary run colleges. Tamil Nadu for example has Lyola, Madras Christian College, Madurai American College, and other renowned Missionary colleges in Trinelveli / Palayamkottai, Nirmala College in Coimbatore, Jamal Mohammed college and Biship Heber college in Trichy among the top one dozen arts and humanities colleges in the state. About 8 out of top 12! When we realize that the students from these Arts and Humanities colleges provide bulk of the students that get into journalism, media, teaching, academics, government jobs, we can understand why our mainstream society seems to gravitate away from Indian ethos.
We do have an urgent need for Indic organizations to embrace Arts and Humanities education. That is the next battle to be faught along with cleaning government owned and aided colleges of commie, naxal, EJ and Jihadi types.
However in higher education, especially in Arts and Humanities, Christian colleges still rule the roost. Engineering and professional education is mostly secular with minority institutions mostly for money making than for religious indoctrination.
In every state, the top 5 best arts and humanities colleges will likely include minimum 2 to 3 Missionary run colleges. Tamil Nadu for example has Lyola, Madras Christian College, Madurai American College, and other renowned Missionary colleges in Trinelveli / Palayamkottai, Nirmala College in Coimbatore, Jamal Mohammed college and Biship Heber college in Trichy among the top one dozen arts and humanities colleges in the state. About 8 out of top 12! When we realize that the students from these Arts and Humanities colleges provide bulk of the students that get into journalism, media, teaching, academics, government jobs, we can understand why our mainstream society seems to gravitate away from Indian ethos.
We do have an urgent need for Indic organizations to embrace Arts and Humanities education. That is the next battle to be faught along with cleaning government owned and aided colleges of commie, naxal, EJ and Jihadi types.
Re: Indian Education System
Before that, we also need to completely revamp the syllabus of "Arts and Humanities" course itself *. We should move away from learning stuff like how many wives James I had, and when did the Third Crusade start etc. Today a Bachelor of Arts degree is considered by many as just an entry level criteria to apply for many government/PSU job.schinnas wrote:We do have an urgent need for Indic organizations to embrace Arts and Humanities education.
* I myself am an Arts Graduate.
Re: Indian Education System
Mata Amritanandamay's university alone has 20,000 students and five campuses. I was there at its Coimbatore HQ last weekend, and the atmosphere is very dharmic. It was in fact ranked India's top private university by Times Higher Education of London this year.schinnas wrote:@Raja ram-ji,
There are several other Dharmic groups that are expanding their footprint in education. All Hindu spiritual leaders from Sri Sri Ravi Shankarji to Sadguru Jaggi Vasudev to Mata Amritanandamayi have elaborate school systems to universities (in case of Sri Sri and Mata Amritanandamayi). Some of them operate in franchise model where anyone with appropriate land and resources can start a Maharishi Vidya Mandir or Sri Sri Ravishankar Vidya Mandir, or Isha School but the fee structure, school management, teacher admission and training, etc., are taken over by TM movement or Art of Living with the school proponent maintaining hostels and good share of the revenue if any. These students are given a modern, truely secular and value based education with full exposure to Indian arts, history, culture and are taught Yoga, Pranayama and meditation. The teachers also are expected to practice yoga and meditation on a daily basis. Some of these schools organize bajans as well on various occasions. They are also exposed to the spiritual discourses and videos of the respective founders such as Sri Sri or Sadguru or Amritanandamayi ma.
Re: Indian Education System
One more EJ route are ICSE schools. We shouldn't have two national boards. The govt has no control over ICSE syllabus. The two boards should be merged.
Re: Indian Education System
How Gandhi's India created Indian techie & how at least 100 of them received degrees from MIT before 1947.
Wearing turbans in the more paranoid parts of the US today could get you into trouble, so it is ironic to read a US State Department memo from 1945 about how "every Indian" coming to the country should wear a turban, even if he didn't regularly wear one, during the first weeks of "his stay in any community".
This was to show he was Indian, not African-American, and hence should not suffer the discriminations that the latter group had to endure.
The combination of helpful hint, easy use of stereotype and acceptance of racial discrimination is a telling glimpse into the attitudes of that era — and that's not even getting into the assumption that, as Ross Bassett notes, "only men would be coming".
The Tech-savvy Indian This is just one of many fascinating details in Bassett's new book The Technological Indian, which could be described as a study of how the image of the Indian techie was created. Bassett is an associate professor of history at North Carolina State University and a specialist in the history of technology.
But he first trained and worked as an engineer, alongside many colleagues of Indian origin. This is now so common as to have become a cliche, with television shows like The Big Bang Theory showing techsavvy Indians. But in high school, Bassett had been interested in Gandhi and read his writings and knew how he was usually shown as deeply opposed to modern technology.
How did Gandhi's India also create the Indian techie? This is a question India often ignores, as when prime ministers from Jawaharlal Nehru to Narendra Modi have simultaneously praised Gandhian values while promoting an anti-Gandhian vision of industrialised India. Or, it is used opportunistically by the emigration-minded as a justification for leaving a country they argue is eternally bound to Gandhi's agrarian, anti-modern mindset.
Bassett found that the issue was more complex. He focused his research on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which has a rich database of student information, thanks to its early founding in 1861, and high reputation, which made it a magnet for technology seekers from around the world. He expected to find many Indian students from the post-Independence era, but what surprised him was to find at least 100 who received MIT degrees before 1947.
Even more surprising, many had links to Gandhi. A disproportionate number came from Saurashtra, like Gandhi, and many were inspired by or received assistance from a close friend of Gandhi's, a man sometimes seen as his representative in the area. This was Devchand Parekh, born two years after Gandhi, whose father was a minister in a local state, just as Gandhi's father had been.
Like Gandhi, Parekh went to the UK to become a lawyer, though at Cambridge rather than London. And it was at Cambridge in 1893 that he had a formative encounter with the economist Alfred Marshall, who told him frankly that young Indians like him should not be coming to the UK to become lawyers; "instead they should go to America — specifically to MIT — to study engineering and then return to India to set up industries that would improve the Indian standard of living".
This was something several Indian leaders, specifically in western India, were also advocating. Bassett starts his book with an account of a meeting held in Pune in 1884 where MM Kunte, headmaster of the Poona High School, had called on Indians to learn "the art of mechanisation" which "has become a Kalpavriksha", the wish-granting tree that would help India progress from its current sad state. It is an appeal that sounds much like PM Modi's recent call to Make in India.
As with the PM's regular evocations of India's past glories, 19th century advocates of progress pointed to the subcontinent's past mastery of technologies like weaving which had first brought foreigners to India to trade, but then unfortunately to conquer and control the means of production. Worse, with the rise of the Industrial Revolution in the West, foreign rulers actively destroyed India's abilities to keep the country in a passive, exploitable agrarian condition. Learning technology was a nationalist imperative.
How Gandhi's India created Indian techie & how at least 100 of them received degrees from MIT before 1947
MIT Connect
But the British didn't encourage this. At best, they allowed learning low-level skills to help implement projects that benefitted the colonial state, but even this was not a priority. The viceroy, Lord Curzon, could sanction major funds for the Victoria Memorial in Calcutta, but disparaged plans to set up an institute of technical education in her memory. India's economic problem, he declared "is not to be solved by a batch of Institutes or a cluster of Polytechnics".
The answer then was to go outside the British Empire, to new technological powers like Germany and Japan but, above all, America where inventors like Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell were developing new technologies and, practically, English was spoken.
Bassett records how Indian journals like Bal Gangadhar Tilak's Kesari (Marathi) and Mahratta (English) gave extensive coverage to technological developments in the West, often mentioning them in the context of MIT, which was a hub for innovation and learning.
MIT assiduously developed this image, not least as part of its long struggle to avoid being taken over by Harvard, the academic superpower next door. As part of this effort, it was keen to take international students, even appointing an alumnus, Jasper Whiting, in 1910 to extend MIT's international influence.
Whiting focused on China and although he visited India, there is no record of what he did here. But other links were developing. MIT had already had its first Indian student by then in Keshav Bhat, who took courses there, in 1882-84 and again in 1890. His example helped advocates of technology overcome one of the biggest hurdles to Indians studying abroad — the caste censures against those who crossed the seas. Technological imperatives overruled caste concerns, though the travellers often had to go to great lengths to avoid problems like eating meat.
How Gandhi's India created Indian techie & how at least 100 of them received degrees from MIT before 1947
Devchand Parekh did visit the US and became a fervent advocate of US education. This was probably helped by the problems he faced getting a job in British India, which saw him returning to Kathiawar.
Native states could use their limited independence to support young Indians and with the help of Prabhashankar Pattani, dewan of Bhavnagar, Parekh was able to start a chemical industry (though his actual first venture was canning mango juice!).
Parekh used his position, and the monetary support of Bhavnagar, to help many young men study in the US, specifically at MIT. One example was Anant Pandya, who on returning to India had the usual problems getting work with British companies. He moved to London, where ironically he had better opportunities, and used the experience gained there to become a principal of the Bengal Engineering College in Sibpur.
When World War II forced the British to develop Indian industry to support the war effort, Pandya became deputy director of munitions production. In 1948 he became the first Indian general manager of Hindustan Aircraft, before returning to private practice. Tragically, he died in 1951 in a car accident, but his career showed a clear path for technocrats who embraced industrial development.
Parekh's son-in-law TM Shah had a very different experience. He was a committed Gandhian who, after returning from MIT, took up a job with Tata Iron and Steel in Jamshedpur, only to run foul of the management when he organised a strike in support of the Congress' Quit India resolution. Shah ended up in Hazaribagh jail for 18 months.
How Gandhi's India created Indian techie & how at least 100 of them received degrees from MIT before 1947
An extract of a letter from Bal Kalelkar to GD Birla (the edits were made by Gandhi)
The Westward Shift
Post Independence the prospects for MIT-trained engineers seemed great, especially with the launch of the massive infrastructure development of the Five-Year Plans. Yet the experience of those who got involved with these projects, like Minu Dastur, was mixed. Time and again, they found themselves sidelined by the international engineers brought in by the foreign governments sponsoring these projects. Even when Nehru advocated engineers like Dastur, bureaucracy would put up barriers.
This would be the repeated experience of others who tried working in India, so it comes as no surprise that many who went to MIT decided to stay in the US. Initially this was tough due to racist laws designed to keep out "Oriental" immigration to the US. Immediately after World War II, Indian students on American ships were attacked for taking the place of American soldiers who wanted to get home. And, as Bassett notes, MIT itself went through a period of privileging international students from Europe over Asia after World War II.
However, by the 1960s these policies started changing and other factors encouraged the Westward shift. One of the most basic was the American libraries originally set up in India in Calcutta (1943), Bombay (1944) and Delhi (1946) during World War II. These became sources of information about US college programmes and helped students make their way to the US. Another successful initiative that Bassett notes was a programme to get the children of senior Indian bureaucrats and business families to colleges like MIT.
MIT was also changing by then. Its earlier focus on manufacturing technology was giving way to the new world of information technology, and Indian students were eager to learn. But they couldn't do this in India. In 1961, IIT-Bombay turned down a Soviet offer of a computer, "believing that the money could be better spent elsewhere". When Calcutta Electric Supply bought a computer, workers gheraoed and forced it to be sold. TCS happily snapped it up, but it was the rare exception of an Indian company to believe in the potential of computers. For young Indians intent on being part of this revolution, the only way was West.
Gandhian Tech
Where was Gandhi in all this? Most would see him abandoned in the rush for a technological future. But Bassett takes a cue from Bal Kalelkar, a young man who, remarkably, would go from walking with Gandhi on his Dandi March to studying in MIT and later working at Birla's Texmaco company. Kalelkar never quite managed to match his Gandhian beliefs with the technological world he came to work in, yet he seems to have believed that Gandhi himself might have found a way.
Kalelkar wrote a memoir in which, Bassett writes, he "creates an image of Gandhi as an engineer of human souls". More prosaically, Bassett notes Gandhi's insistence on punctuality, enforced by the watch he carried all his life, and his fervour for quantification — of skeins of yarn spun, of exact amounts of food eaten, of his exact weight, all beliefs in the value of numbers to help govern and improve the world. This was the hallmark of an engineer and a suggestion that Gandhi was not as technophobic as he might seem.
Perhaps Gandhi was simply sceptical of technology pursued as an end in itself, but not of technology that really tried to find real solutions to the problems of India.
Towards the end of his book, Bassett notes the world of a few Indian MIT graduates like Almitra Patel, the first Indian woman to gain an engineering degree from MIT, who has now become a "garbage activist", helping Indian cities find answers to solid waste disposal.
Or there is Deep Joshi who went to MIT on a scholarship, but got more interested in social issues like nutrition and poverty alleviation. In 2009 he won the Magsaysay Prize for his work. It is stories like theirs that show how the old dream of the technological Indian, now clearly achieved, might not just remain an accomplishment only in itself, but could really change India, in ways that even Gandhi could appreciate.
Wearing turbans in the more paranoid parts of the US today could get you into trouble, so it is ironic to read a US State Department memo from 1945 about how "every Indian" coming to the country should wear a turban, even if he didn't regularly wear one, during the first weeks of "his stay in any community".
This was to show he was Indian, not African-American, and hence should not suffer the discriminations that the latter group had to endure.
The combination of helpful hint, easy use of stereotype and acceptance of racial discrimination is a telling glimpse into the attitudes of that era — and that's not even getting into the assumption that, as Ross Bassett notes, "only men would be coming".
The Tech-savvy Indian This is just one of many fascinating details in Bassett's new book The Technological Indian, which could be described as a study of how the image of the Indian techie was created. Bassett is an associate professor of history at North Carolina State University and a specialist in the history of technology.
But he first trained and worked as an engineer, alongside many colleagues of Indian origin. This is now so common as to have become a cliche, with television shows like The Big Bang Theory showing techsavvy Indians. But in high school, Bassett had been interested in Gandhi and read his writings and knew how he was usually shown as deeply opposed to modern technology.
How did Gandhi's India also create the Indian techie? This is a question India often ignores, as when prime ministers from Jawaharlal Nehru to Narendra Modi have simultaneously praised Gandhian values while promoting an anti-Gandhian vision of industrialised India. Or, it is used opportunistically by the emigration-minded as a justification for leaving a country they argue is eternally bound to Gandhi's agrarian, anti-modern mindset.
Bassett found that the issue was more complex. He focused his research on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which has a rich database of student information, thanks to its early founding in 1861, and high reputation, which made it a magnet for technology seekers from around the world. He expected to find many Indian students from the post-Independence era, but what surprised him was to find at least 100 who received MIT degrees before 1947.
Even more surprising, many had links to Gandhi. A disproportionate number came from Saurashtra, like Gandhi, and many were inspired by or received assistance from a close friend of Gandhi's, a man sometimes seen as his representative in the area. This was Devchand Parekh, born two years after Gandhi, whose father was a minister in a local state, just as Gandhi's father had been.
Like Gandhi, Parekh went to the UK to become a lawyer, though at Cambridge rather than London. And it was at Cambridge in 1893 that he had a formative encounter with the economist Alfred Marshall, who told him frankly that young Indians like him should not be coming to the UK to become lawyers; "instead they should go to America — specifically to MIT — to study engineering and then return to India to set up industries that would improve the Indian standard of living".
This was something several Indian leaders, specifically in western India, were also advocating. Bassett starts his book with an account of a meeting held in Pune in 1884 where MM Kunte, headmaster of the Poona High School, had called on Indians to learn "the art of mechanisation" which "has become a Kalpavriksha", the wish-granting tree that would help India progress from its current sad state. It is an appeal that sounds much like PM Modi's recent call to Make in India.
As with the PM's regular evocations of India's past glories, 19th century advocates of progress pointed to the subcontinent's past mastery of technologies like weaving which had first brought foreigners to India to trade, but then unfortunately to conquer and control the means of production. Worse, with the rise of the Industrial Revolution in the West, foreign rulers actively destroyed India's abilities to keep the country in a passive, exploitable agrarian condition. Learning technology was a nationalist imperative.
How Gandhi's India created Indian techie & how at least 100 of them received degrees from MIT before 1947
MIT Connect
But the British didn't encourage this. At best, they allowed learning low-level skills to help implement projects that benefitted the colonial state, but even this was not a priority. The viceroy, Lord Curzon, could sanction major funds for the Victoria Memorial in Calcutta, but disparaged plans to set up an institute of technical education in her memory. India's economic problem, he declared "is not to be solved by a batch of Institutes or a cluster of Polytechnics".
The answer then was to go outside the British Empire, to new technological powers like Germany and Japan but, above all, America where inventors like Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell were developing new technologies and, practically, English was spoken.
Bassett records how Indian journals like Bal Gangadhar Tilak's Kesari (Marathi) and Mahratta (English) gave extensive coverage to technological developments in the West, often mentioning them in the context of MIT, which was a hub for innovation and learning.
MIT assiduously developed this image, not least as part of its long struggle to avoid being taken over by Harvard, the academic superpower next door. As part of this effort, it was keen to take international students, even appointing an alumnus, Jasper Whiting, in 1910 to extend MIT's international influence.
Whiting focused on China and although he visited India, there is no record of what he did here. But other links were developing. MIT had already had its first Indian student by then in Keshav Bhat, who took courses there, in 1882-84 and again in 1890. His example helped advocates of technology overcome one of the biggest hurdles to Indians studying abroad — the caste censures against those who crossed the seas. Technological imperatives overruled caste concerns, though the travellers often had to go to great lengths to avoid problems like eating meat.
How Gandhi's India created Indian techie & how at least 100 of them received degrees from MIT before 1947
Devchand Parekh did visit the US and became a fervent advocate of US education. This was probably helped by the problems he faced getting a job in British India, which saw him returning to Kathiawar.
Native states could use their limited independence to support young Indians and with the help of Prabhashankar Pattani, dewan of Bhavnagar, Parekh was able to start a chemical industry (though his actual first venture was canning mango juice!).
Parekh used his position, and the monetary support of Bhavnagar, to help many young men study in the US, specifically at MIT. One example was Anant Pandya, who on returning to India had the usual problems getting work with British companies. He moved to London, where ironically he had better opportunities, and used the experience gained there to become a principal of the Bengal Engineering College in Sibpur.
When World War II forced the British to develop Indian industry to support the war effort, Pandya became deputy director of munitions production. In 1948 he became the first Indian general manager of Hindustan Aircraft, before returning to private practice. Tragically, he died in 1951 in a car accident, but his career showed a clear path for technocrats who embraced industrial development.
Parekh's son-in-law TM Shah had a very different experience. He was a committed Gandhian who, after returning from MIT, took up a job with Tata Iron and Steel in Jamshedpur, only to run foul of the management when he organised a strike in support of the Congress' Quit India resolution. Shah ended up in Hazaribagh jail for 18 months.
How Gandhi's India created Indian techie & how at least 100 of them received degrees from MIT before 1947
An extract of a letter from Bal Kalelkar to GD Birla (the edits were made by Gandhi)
The Westward Shift
Post Independence the prospects for MIT-trained engineers seemed great, especially with the launch of the massive infrastructure development of the Five-Year Plans. Yet the experience of those who got involved with these projects, like Minu Dastur, was mixed. Time and again, they found themselves sidelined by the international engineers brought in by the foreign governments sponsoring these projects. Even when Nehru advocated engineers like Dastur, bureaucracy would put up barriers.
This would be the repeated experience of others who tried working in India, so it comes as no surprise that many who went to MIT decided to stay in the US. Initially this was tough due to racist laws designed to keep out "Oriental" immigration to the US. Immediately after World War II, Indian students on American ships were attacked for taking the place of American soldiers who wanted to get home. And, as Bassett notes, MIT itself went through a period of privileging international students from Europe over Asia after World War II.
However, by the 1960s these policies started changing and other factors encouraged the Westward shift. One of the most basic was the American libraries originally set up in India in Calcutta (1943), Bombay (1944) and Delhi (1946) during World War II. These became sources of information about US college programmes and helped students make their way to the US. Another successful initiative that Bassett notes was a programme to get the children of senior Indian bureaucrats and business families to colleges like MIT.
MIT was also changing by then. Its earlier focus on manufacturing technology was giving way to the new world of information technology, and Indian students were eager to learn. But they couldn't do this in India. In 1961, IIT-Bombay turned down a Soviet offer of a computer, "believing that the money could be better spent elsewhere". When Calcutta Electric Supply bought a computer, workers gheraoed and forced it to be sold. TCS happily snapped it up, but it was the rare exception of an Indian company to believe in the potential of computers. For young Indians intent on being part of this revolution, the only way was West.
Gandhian Tech
Where was Gandhi in all this? Most would see him abandoned in the rush for a technological future. But Bassett takes a cue from Bal Kalelkar, a young man who, remarkably, would go from walking with Gandhi on his Dandi March to studying in MIT and later working at Birla's Texmaco company. Kalelkar never quite managed to match his Gandhian beliefs with the technological world he came to work in, yet he seems to have believed that Gandhi himself might have found a way.
Kalelkar wrote a memoir in which, Bassett writes, he "creates an image of Gandhi as an engineer of human souls". More prosaically, Bassett notes Gandhi's insistence on punctuality, enforced by the watch he carried all his life, and his fervour for quantification — of skeins of yarn spun, of exact amounts of food eaten, of his exact weight, all beliefs in the value of numbers to help govern and improve the world. This was the hallmark of an engineer and a suggestion that Gandhi was not as technophobic as he might seem.
Perhaps Gandhi was simply sceptical of technology pursued as an end in itself, but not of technology that really tried to find real solutions to the problems of India.
Towards the end of his book, Bassett notes the world of a few Indian MIT graduates like Almitra Patel, the first Indian woman to gain an engineering degree from MIT, who has now become a "garbage activist", helping Indian cities find answers to solid waste disposal.
Or there is Deep Joshi who went to MIT on a scholarship, but got more interested in social issues like nutrition and poverty alleviation. In 2009 he won the Magsaysay Prize for his work. It is stories like theirs that show how the old dream of the technological Indian, now clearly achieved, might not just remain an accomplishment only in itself, but could really change India, in ways that even Gandhi could appreciate.
Re: Indian Education System
>> Another successful initiative that Bassett notes was a programme to get the children of senior Indian bureaucrats and business families to colleges like MIT.
and so began the process of nurturing friendly elites of a foreign country to create agents of influence.
and so began the process of nurturing friendly elites of a foreign country to create agents of influence.
Re: Indian Education System
http://www.hindustantimes.com/education/iit-annual-fee-hiked-from-rs-90-000-to-rs-2-lakh/story-GHOc41AX9fRKyHbgbLtAcP.html
The annual fee for undergraduate courses in Indian Institute of Technology colleges (IITs) will be hiked from Rs 90,000 to Rs 2 lakh from upcoming academic session, officials of ministry of human resource development (HRD) said on Thursday. The order to this effect is likely to be issued on Friday.
The decision comes just a day after HRD minister Smriti Irani said that students belonging to the Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, and differently-abled categories will get a full tuition-fee waiver at all IITs. The general category students will get 0% interest free loan if they require.
Earlier, a proposal for a three-fold hike in annual fee of Indian Institute of Technology colleges -- from Rs 90,000 to Rs 3 lakh -- was approved by a panel last month, although the final decision needed the nod of HRD minister Smriti Irani. According to sources, the minister in her capacity as the chairperson decided to increase it to Rs. 2 lakh.
IITs have been trying to increase the fee for quite some time. The last meeting of the IIT Council held in October 2015 had taken up the issue but could not arrive at a consensus.
Another recommendation by the Standing Committee of IIT Council (SCIC) is the proposal of a new entrance examination conducted by the National Authority of Test (NAT) should be held from 2017. Final decision in this regard too rests with Irani, it is learnt.
Students of NITs will also pay an increased fee of Rs. 1.25 lakh per annum from this academic year, which was approved last year.
Re: Indian Education System
The popularity of ICSE among schools is dropping like a brick. Dozens of schools each year drop ICSE for CBSE or opt for international boards. CBSE is going very strong. ICSE is a gora operation but its days are numbered.Supratik wrote:One more EJ route are ICSE schools. We shouldn't have two national boards. The govt has no control over ICSE syllabus. The two boards should be merged.
Re: Indian Education System
Pune: D Y Patil school announces shutdown, parents on edge - Indian Express
Slowly, the RTE will kill many Hindu schools.
- They have to give 25% seats under RET quota.
- Hindus should get NOC from minority schools.
- They cant even determine school fees.
- Have to follow insane ground size ratios, labs and teachers salary, staff hiring/firing (while minorities does not need to follow these rules).
Among all landmines, I think RTE is the biggest left by Sonia's Evangelical Khangress. I think its profitable for Hindu owners to shut their schools and convert them into apartment/shopping complexes.
Since #RTE was passed through Parliament, NDA govt cant repeal it. Only way is BJP/RSS/Hindu organizations should assemble some best legal minds, challenge anti-Hindu, partisan RTE in SC and this time NDA govt should side with their concern and let SC modify Sickular, anti-Hindu, discriminatory nature of RTE.
Slowly, the RTE will kill many Hindu schools.
- They have to give 25% seats under RET quota.
- Hindus should get NOC from minority schools.
- They cant even determine school fees.
- Have to follow insane ground size ratios, labs and teachers salary, staff hiring/firing (while minorities does not need to follow these rules).
Among all landmines, I think RTE is the biggest left by Sonia's Evangelical Khangress. I think its profitable for Hindu owners to shut their schools and convert them into apartment/shopping complexes.
Since #RTE was passed through Parliament, NDA govt cant repeal it. Only way is BJP/RSS/Hindu organizations should assemble some best legal minds, challenge anti-Hindu, partisan RTE in SC and this time NDA govt should side with their concern and let SC modify Sickular, anti-Hindu, discriminatory nature of RTE.
“For many years, a group of parents has been harassing the school management. Our school fees are quite reasonable compared to nearby schools, yet they have been protesting even a marginal increase in fees. It has led to severe financial crunch.
.........
“In 2013-14, the school fee was hiked from Rs 8,000 to Rs 10,000. The next year, it became Rs 13,500. It is a hike of over 50 per cent in two years, which is illegal. {I think 13.5K is very reasonable fee by any standards}
........
Another parent, Nazeer Saudagar, said one of his sons in second standard would be allowed to continue till fifth grade, but his younger son in senior KG in nearby branch of the school, who was promised Std I admission earlier, has now been asked to look elsewhere. “All other schools in vicinity are costly and annual fees are above Rs 40,000. I can afford the Rs 13,500 annual fee here. But they said they wont give next year’s admission,” he said.
Re: Indian Education System
If it is quarterly that fee is reasonable. If it is monthly it is a bit high. Modi govt will need to amend the RTE at some point to make it reasonable.
Re: Indian Education System
The article says it is annual fee
Re: Indian Education System
Then it is peanuts compared to what some of the good schools charge in India now unless this school caters to the lower middle or lower class. Then it is high considering the per capita income is just about 1 lakh.
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vina
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Re: Indian Economy News & Discussion - Aug 26 2015
Ah , Bade Mian.. Everyone knows who the REAL IITians are. When someone says New York, everyone knows that they are referring to the City and NOT the state.. Same same onree no ?Bade wrote:that PG student population is 60% of the IIT student population
Re: Indian Economy News & Discussion - Aug 26 2015
This is good news. Thanks for posting. Some of those would be REAL IITians, i.e., if I understand vina correctly, people who did their bachelors in IIT and continued on to do their Ph.D. in IIT.Bade wrote:For your information the latest data shows, that PG student population is 60% of the IIT student population with a significant part being doctoral degrees in the hundreds each year.
Anyway, there are enough success stories from places other than IITs now though successful JEE candidates still seem to be the cream.
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member_23370
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Re: Indian Economy News & Discussion - Aug 26 2015
Most IITians who do their Btech's in IIT's don't pursue PhD's in IIT.
Re: Indian Economy News & Discussion - Aug 26 2015
Of course. But some of them do and that's what I said.Bheeshma wrote:Most IITians who do their Btech's in IIT's don't pursue PhD's in IIT.
Re: Indian Economy News & Discussion - Aug 26 2015
The PG population increase is because of the Dual/integrated degree programmes in most of the subjects
Re: Indian Economy News & Discussion - Aug 26 2015
The h1 circus this year got over around april9. 4:1 over booking ratio both in open and us higher studies buckets.
Despite potus increasing opt to 3 yrs many us ms/phd might not ever get into h1 at all.
One of our junior at work has got admission in uc irvine for 35 lacs first year fees and living expenses. Second yr he hopes to get assistantship. I have advised to go for phd or not at all.
Despite potus increasing opt to 3 yrs many us ms/phd might not ever get into h1 at all.
One of our junior at work has got admission in uc irvine for 35 lacs first year fees and living expenses. Second yr he hopes to get assistantship. I have advised to go for phd or not at all.
Re: Indian Economy News & Discussion - Aug 26 2015
thats despite the hefty fee increase
Re: Indian Economy News & Discussion - Aug 26 2015
This has been going on for the last few years. So what are all the students who didn't get their h1 doing? Are they returning to India/China or where ever?Singha wrote:The h1 circus this year got over around april9. 4:1 over booking ratio both in open and us higher studies buckets.
Despite potus increasing opt to 3 yrs many us ms/phd might not ever get into h1 at all.
One of our junior at work has got admission in uc irvine for 35 lacs first year fees and living expenses. Second yr he hopes to get assistantship. I have advised to go for phd or not at all.
Re: Indian Economy News & Discussion - Aug 26 2015
I know of lot of cases where the students have again taken admission for another Masters program which will give them access to CPT and/or OPT and then there are some who have applied for the Canadian residency. Some of them who are not so desperate and have made enough money on the OPT to repay the loans taken for education in the US have also returned back to India.
Re: Indian Economy News & Discussion - Aug 26 2015
All students are CPT and OPT. Only that STEM students get 2 years extension i.e. 3 years in Total so they get 3 shots at Visa Lottery, whereas non STEM only have 1 year OPT therefore only 1 shot at the lottery. Almost all the students who couldn't get through lottery have returned to India. Repaying huge student loans will be an uphill task them, considering each would have a minimum of 30-40 lakh.Vipul wrote:I know of lot of cases where the students have again taken admission for another Masters program which will give them access to CPT and/or OPT and then there are some who have applied for the Canadian residency. Some of them who are not so desperate and have made enough money on the OPT to repay the loans taken for education in the US have also returned back to India.
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Bade
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Re: Indian Education System
from the Econ thread...so as not to pollute it
thankfully that world view is held by dinosaurs onlee....
Sorry could not resist...like when someone says Hindu, it means Tambrahms onlee.....vina wrote:Ah , Bade Mian.. Everyone knows who the REAL IITians are. When someone says New York, everyone knows that they are referring to the City and NOT the state.. Same same onree no ?Bade wrote:that PG student population is 60% of the IIT student population
thankfully that world view is held by dinosaurs onlee....-
Bade
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Re: Indian Education System
That 60% figure for PG population is reflective of all IIT campuses...and it is only going to increase going forward. The reason being IITs want faculty with good research output, and who will accomplish this not the BTech monkeys who flee academia after 4 yrs..so there will be more dual degree holders. But the most encouraging thing heard from an ex-IIT diro was that more of their UGs are now staying also to do a PhD within the IIT system.
Fancy VC and startups are good no doubt, but expecting them to propel you to MIT level is never going to work....despite vina's beliefs and immense faith in the superiority of UGs.
Fancy VC and startups are good no doubt, but expecting them to propel you to MIT level is never going to work....despite vina's beliefs and immense faith in the superiority of UGs.
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Bade
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Re: Indian Education System
I believe this is the article that people who know the numbers were referring to. I will post it in full as it is quire relevant to the points made many days earlier.
IIT-Madras alumni run companies with combined revenue of $71 bn
IIT-Madras alumni run companies with combined revenue of $71 bn
More than 40,000 IIT-Madras alumni are collectively estimated to have a 2014 revenue responsibility of $71 billion based on the median amount calculated from a recent survey.
A recent survey of IIT-Madras alumni by an alumnus of the 1973 graduating class, Dr Gopala Ganesh, has brought some insights into how post-graduation priorities have evolved over the decades from the 1960s. More than 2,000 alumni participated in the survey, making it one of the largest undertaken by any IIT.
About 30 per cent of IIT-Madras alumni are currently employed in core engineering; the percentage is significantly higher among those whose first degree is a post-graduate one. Of those that left core engineering, about a third are entrepreneurs, a quarter are in service industries, and another quarter are in education/ research.
The percentage of IIT-Madras graduates living abroad peaked at 40 per cent in the mid-70s to mid-90s batches, and has now dropped to 34 per cent post-2000. The drop is even more severe post-2010, down to the 20 per cent range.
Post-2005, there has been an uptick in IIT-Madras graduates opting for manufacturing professions, versus information technology & software.
M Tech students as a group account for the largest share of 2014 revenue when estimated using the median. When examined by decades of alumni, the 1986-1995 and 2006-2014 batches stand out when median-based estimates are examined.
When the 2014 budget responsibility is examined, the IIT-Madras alumni are estimated to account for $105 billion (median-based).
Alumni are estimated to have contributed a total of 3.6 million jobs based on the median, The Master’s degree holders outshine the B Techs. The batch of 1976-1985 does best when looking at the median-based estimate of job creation.
About 70 per cent of the total revenue responsibility, and 90 per cent of jobs creation by alumni leaders, is in India. Post-2006 alumni have the largest current presence in the social sector.
The mid-70s to mid-80s alumni have founded the most number of companies. Uniformly across batches, greater than 70 per cent of the companies are tech in nature. High revenue firms, defined as > $100 million per annum, are concentrated in the before-1976 and the mid-90s to mid-2000s alumni batches.
About 25 per cent of all alumni are currently in research& education, and 40 per cent have been there sometime. Of these, 20 per cent characterise themselves as being in leadership roles. Overall, 30 per cent of all alumni see themselves as leaders.
Nearly 25 per cent of alumni serve on Boards of Directors, and about 45 per cent have led a turn-around (half of them, more than one). About 40 per cent of alumni claim to have made a very high or high contribution to India. The percentage peaks for the pre-1976, and the mid-1990s to mid-2000s batches.
About 30 per cent of alumni claim very high or high contribution outside India, a number that peaks for the mid-70s to mid-90s batches. The preference for working in India has gone up in recent batches.
About 90 per cent of alumni rate the value of IIT-Madras education as very high or high, and this is fairly consistent across all batches.
Of the 1,228 respondents who completed the entire survey, 60 per cent were from India, 33 per cent from North America. Ninety per cent of respondents were male (comparable to their enrollment percentage), 50 per cent identified themselves as "middle class" and 47 per cent identified themselves as living in towns with a population more than one million.
Around 60 per cent identified their first IIT degree as a B Tech and the Electrical, Mechanical and Chemical Engineering disciplines accounted for 21 per cent , 18 per cent and 17 per cent of the respondents, respectively (consistent with enrollment trends). Around 35 per cent of the respondents graduated in the past 10 years.
Re: Indian Education System
I agree , even in the US it is the MS/Phd students who run the professors long term funded projects while the UG students do get some 'exposure' before decamping to snapchat or fbook after internship.
I do not see how UGs will make any impact in india given their high course load in 3rd and 4th year. so it has to be the dual degree and PGs in the lead.
unfortunately a chunk of IIT UGs within India are no longer in core technology work, they are usually on the hunt for startups that are in anything but core tech whether it be housing, delivery, uber, ecommerce etc or going the MBA route. so glass is half-full (they are working and contributing in india) and half-empty (no indian corporate is investing like the global industrial MNCs on r&d to engage these people).
beats losing them all to massa though - by a long long way. disastrous level of brain drain occurred upto the late 90s.
even in my nit-w cse and ee batches, there are maybe 20 people left in india out of 100+ ... one can imagine the scene in the next leg up in the iits.
I do not see how UGs will make any impact in india given their high course load in 3rd and 4th year. so it has to be the dual degree and PGs in the lead.
unfortunately a chunk of IIT UGs within India are no longer in core technology work, they are usually on the hunt for startups that are in anything but core tech whether it be housing, delivery, uber, ecommerce etc or going the MBA route. so glass is half-full (they are working and contributing in india) and half-empty (no indian corporate is investing like the global industrial MNCs on r&d to engage these people).
beats losing them all to massa though - by a long long way. disastrous level of brain drain occurred upto the late 90s.
even in my nit-w cse and ee batches, there are maybe 20 people left in india out of 100+ ... one can imagine the scene in the next leg up in the iits.
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Bade
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Re: Indian Education System
If opportunities are provided within the 6 campuses to work in core areas, then people will stick around going forward. I do not have the numbers for MIT/CalTech to see what their percentages are as to who remain in core technology work following graduation. It could be similar to IITs/NITs.
Re: Indian Education System
Cross posting. A scathing article by Sadanand Dhume on NaMo's govt (on Indic issues). Posting the article in full.
Modi’s middle class muddle: Failure to amend flawed RTE Act shows NDA’s disconnect with its most articulate supporters - TOI
Meanwhile in Tamilnadu 574 primary and secondary schools have been shut. Actually to meet high population demands, the number of schools should have increased, but cruel and Sickular #RTE is forcing Hindus run schools to shut.
For 1st time in 7 yrs, number of private schools dips in state - TOI
Modi’s middle class muddle: Failure to amend flawed RTE Act shows NDA’s disconnect with its most articulate supporters - TOI
--------As the Modi government approaches its second anniversary in office, it’s time to ask an increasingly obvious question. Is BJP alienating many of the vocal middle class supporters who helped power it to office?
On social media and email lists, as well as in person, once ardent fans now complain bitterly about the government. Unsurprisingly, their reasons span a wide spectrum – from government fiddling with provident fund rules, to the lack of privatisation, to flip-flops on Pakistan. But those chafing share a common grouse: that BJP appears tone deaf to their particular concerns.
Arguably no issue illustrates this disconnect between politics and policy better than the failure to fix possibly UPA’s single worst law: the 2009 Right to Education Act. The Modi government’s inaction illustrates a deeper malaise in the party – a lack of original ideas, a weak bench of leaders, and an overreliance on bureaucrats. As one prominent BJP-leaning intellectual said to me in exasperation, “this is an IAS government supported from outside by BJP”.
On the face of it, amending RTE ought to have been high on Modi’s to-do list. Animus towards the law unites two disparate groups that broadly backed BJP two years ago.
For many market liberals, RTE symbolises Congress’s faith in heavy-handed, top-down policies that pay lip service to idealism while hurting precisely those people they are meant to help. For a small but strident group of Hindu activists, the law has become synonymous with India’s flawed brand of secularism, which hobbles Hindu-run institutions with debilitating regulations while cheerfully waiving them for those run by religious minorities.
According to Geeta Kingdon, a professor at the University of London, RTE is dragging Indian education backward. It emphasises inputs such as playgrounds and laboratories over learning outcomes. By outlawing detention of students before eighth grade, the law effectively delinks advancement from educational achievement. {The above criteria applies to Hindus managed schools. On top of this, the Hindu school owners should get NOC from nearby minority schools, its nothing by pure blackmail and harassment of Hindus}
According to NGO Pratham’s highly regarded Annual Status of Education Report, between 2010 and 2014 the percentage of rural children in grade four capable of double-digit subtraction dropped from 58% to 40%. Fourth-graders able to read a first grade text fell from 68% to 56%.
In effect, RTE has recreated the dreaded licence-permit raj in education. School administrators need to worry more about pleasing bureaucrats – who have the power to shut down schools for non-compliance with a list of onerous and often unrealistic requirements – than about attracting students by improving the quality of instruction.
Hardest hit have been small, private schools that educate poor students at affordable rates. The National Independent Schools Alliance estimates that more than 5,500 schools have been forced to close since the law came into effect six years ago. At least another 15,000 have been threatened with closure. Some schools survive only by paying inspectors to look the other way at their inability to meet rigid requirements such as a teacher-student ratio of 1 to 30 or a minimum bachelor of education qualification to teach sixth grade.
Thanks to India’s populist discourse, few politicians would risk a frontal assault on RTE for fear of being labelled “anti-education”. Instead, the Centre for Civil Society, a New Delhi-based thinktank, proposes a “Right to Learning” law that would emphasise actual learning outcomes for children rather than a disembodied vision of what a school ought to look like. A new approach could also include skilling for trades such as carpentry and welding to make graduating students more employable in the real world.
Ironically, Modi’s Gujarat was once widely praised for dodging the RTE bullet. Regulators in the state effectively turned the law upside down by assessing most of a school’s performance by how much its students learnt rather than by whether the school complied with a lengthy list of required inputs. Those leading the fight against RTE had naturally hoped that with Modi in charge India would embrace the Gujarat model.
Instead the government has appointed a five-person committee – four of them retired bureaucrats – to come up with a new education policy, due at the end of this month. Few experts who track this issue believe Modi will embrace the deep-rooted education reform India needs.
Unfortunately, this absence of policy nous reflects a pattern. Lacking the intellectual infrastructure to think through policies on its own, BJP often just toes the Congress line, even when this explicitly goes against the party’s own stand in opposition and outrages its supporters. Last year, Communications and Information Technology Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad backed UPA’s hated Article 66A curbing internet freedom. By initially baulking at One Rank One Pension for soldiers, the government needlessly upset another core group of supporters. The finance ministry lurches each month from one tax snafu to the next.
Nor is BJP exactly brimming with administrative talent. Few can match Smriti Irani’s eloquence as a party spokesperson. But, to put it gently, she has not exactly distinguished herself as minister for human resources development.
The political ramifications of this brush off to middle class supporters remains to be seen. Perhaps those who view politics through the prism of policy, rather than identity, simply lack the numbers to matter. Nonetheless, only a foolish party willfully alienates its most vocal and articulate backers. The sooner BJP gets off this bewildering path, the greater its odds of winning them back.
Meanwhile in Tamilnadu 574 primary and secondary schools have been shut. Actually to meet high population demands, the number of schools should have increased, but cruel and Sickular #RTE is forcing Hindus run schools to shut.
For 1st time in 7 yrs, number of private schools dips in state - TOI
Re: Indian Education System
SC directive to conduct common entrance test is a direct dagger to the spirit of federalism. That too giving 2 days notice is making a mockery of state government's educational roles
Re: Indian Education System
It means less stress on students. All competitive exam in India should become one test shots. Having every one out there conducting multiple tests is a waste of resources and taxing on the students.
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member_28108
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Re: Indian Education System
It is actually needed. All these private colleges were fudging in these multiple exams and swindling students.
Re: Indian Education System
Students from state board schools & rural students have a significant disadvantage. Why entrance only for medicine? Why not an entrance for engineering, commerce, economics, law, etc? What's the role of school boards? Entrance based on CBSE in english & hindi- there we go why federalism then?
Re: Indian Education System
That is regressive federalism. There has been a massive increase in private education and education mobility where students from one region are getting admitted in another region. You need common, unified tests to make it easier for students. IIT-JEE is already the common test for IITs and NITs. Need to expand it to others. I see students running all over India to give tests for various streams and regions. It is taxing on them. Eventually there should be unified tests for all colleges and universities and even in non-specialist streams.
Re: Indian Education System
As for other things. I was in a non-CBSE school. We had no problem competing - even globally. Language is an issue specially for non-English, non-Hindi students although I would assume most states would have English as a compulsory language and in any case higher education is in English. If you haven't learnt it by class 12, there is a problem in your education. But entrance tests in other languages can be attempted. The syllabus of non-CBSE schools should be tuned up so that people can compete in these entrance tests. Rural population will have a problem even in regional entrance tests. The solution is to enhance their education levels. Trying to make students go through hundreds of tests for a medical or engineering entrance or preventing out of state students from competing by making the tests according to regional boards is an extremely regressive step.
Re: Indian Education System
Its easy to say about entrance examination based on CBSE for every student in India from a far of place. I come from a reasonably big town in TN (district headquarters) which has a population of 15 lakhs. There are about 2 or 3 CBSE schools for that population. Imagine a student from there who has no access to this mushrooming coaching classes which charge an arm & length to compete against students from Delhi or Chennai. If everything needs entrance test why need school boards & final board exams. Go to any Govt medical college in TN most students are from rural background whose quality is as good as anybody when are in right environment. Why should a State government fund another state student from its own pocket when that student is unlikely to work in that state in particular rural areas.
Re: Indian Education System
You are making it seem that CBSE teaches things from Mars and regional boards teach things from Venus. It can be made voluntary. If some states do not want to participate, they are free not to. Private colleges and universities cannot be forced to do that. However, if for example TN forces its colleges and universities to not follow a common entrance tests, Tamil students are going to have to appear for at least two tests if they want to get admitted outside TN. You cannot force others not to follow. I am pretty sure TN will not bar outside students based on common tests as it is discriminatory.
Re: Indian Education System
You probably don't know, TN has stopped entrance test few years ago. There is a 15% All India quota in all TN medical colleges. TN wouldn't admit anymore than that. Education is a state subject & each state has deviced its own education system to cater to its need. TN has an education system which caters to its needs & it doesn't need delhi to tell what's right for it. MCI can't even ensure the quality of doctors its suppose to regulate now it wants to see which student it can admit to medical colleges which It has no mandate to
Re: Indian Education System
First of all it is a SC judgement. Second, if what you are saying is true, then there is also no problem. The 15% All-India quota can be filled by a common test and the rest by regional tests. In fact the govt has already approached the SC on this.
http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report-al ... sc-2207331
http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report-al ... sc-2207331