Government against privatizing education, says Sibal

Bangalore: The government will not allow education to be privatized as institutions have to serve a societal purpose, but it was not against "private participation" in the education sector, union Human Resource Development Minister Kapil Sibal said on Thursday.

"I think privatization is a very dirty word. We do not believe in privatizing education. Educational institutions have to serve a societal purpose," Sibal told reporters here.

Clarifying that the government was not against private participation in the education sector, Sibal said private participation was different from privatization, which serves private goal.

"I do not mean there should be no private participation in education. It is different from privatization. Private participation must serve public goal," Sibal said on the margins of the 36th annualconvocation of the state-run Indian Institute of Management-Bangalore (IIM-B) here.

In this context, Sibal referred to the government's efforts to set right the education system to make sure stakeholders served a societal purpose.

"The ownership of educational institutions should vest in stakeholders, which includes government, private sector, faculty, youth, civil society, leaders who have achieved excellence in their fields and the student community. That is how we view education," Sibal said.

To facilitate a greater participation of the private sector in higher education, especially in professional courses, the minister said the government was changing the regulations of the All India Council of Technical Education (AICTE). 

"We have made the whole system far more transparent and accountable. We want the institutions to go through a self-disclosure process instead of an inspector raj," Sibal asserted.

Referring to the latest national census, which has shown the population at 1.21 billion, an increase of 181 million people in the last decade, Sibal said the government was looking forward to management institutions such as IIM-B and IIM-A (Ahmedabad) to provide solutions to achieve full literacy in this decade.

"I firmly believe we are at the cusp in the next 10 years to achieve full literacy in the country. There will be lot of pressure on educational institutions, more so as transformation of society is taking place. We will need management solutions to very complex problems," Sibal said in the presence of IIM-B chairman Mukesh Ambani of Reliance Industries Ltd.

According to the latest census, literacy in the country has gone up to 74 percent from 64.8 percent during the past decade, with female literacy to 65 percent from 53 percent and male literacy to 82 percent from 75 percent.

Noting that education was becoming multi-disciplinary and therefore management institutions could not function as standalone, Sibal said they have to interact with the government and diverse sectors such as health, education, agriculture and small and medium enterprise (SME).

"You need management solutions at every level. I don't think society has recognized the importance of management and in creating those solutions. We cannot move forward unless you manage things in a holistic and progressive way," Sibal pointed out.

source:http://indiaedunews.net/Today/Government_against_privatizing_education,_says_Sibal_13785/

Forging new relations with institutions

Project English aims to provide every teacher and learner with skills, ideas, and access to the best resources from the U.K., says Mr. Sellers.

The British Council has expanded its programmes in the country by implementing several educational and cultural projects over these years. Paul Sellers, the new Director of the British Council for operations in South India, says that the council is keen on building relationships with a variety of institutions and people in India through its ongoing and forthcoming initiatives. In an interview to The Hindu-EducationPlus in Kochi, Mr. Sellers, who had earlier held senior positions with the British Council worldwide, elaborates on a wide-range of topics related to the council. Excerpts from the interview:

How good is the demand for U.K. higher education among students in India? How do you plan to tap the growing opportunities in the Indian higher education sector?

The demand for U.K. higher education keeps increasing every year. We had a 16 per cent increase last year. There are around 15,000 Indian students going to the U.K. [every year] to study the undergraduate or postgraduate programmes offered by the universities in the country. That is the number of students on our record. It is probably more than that. Interestingly, Kerala accounts for around two-third of the number. It is the biggest among the States. The largest number of students come from Kerala. We attribute this to the good school education and literacy.

Possibly the demand for courses in certain subject areas isnot met even though there are very good higher educational institutions in South India especially in health care and engineering.

And IT is also coming up. British Council institutions around the world have always had a mission to promote the U.K. as a higher educational destination.

Increasingly, we want to build sort of mutual links between U.K. universities and India. We make it easy for the U.K. universities to come and present themselves before Indian students by holding U.K. education exhibitions. We also work closely with the British High Commission so that they can give information on visa requirements, which is an important issue. We are conscious of the competition from Australia, South East Asia, and Europe. The U.K.'s niche is often the postgraduate programmes that complement the undergraduate programmes students pursue here especially in niche subject areas.

One of the ways forward is to link educational institutions in India and the U.K. so that students have a real choice where to study and from where they get quality education.

Do you think that the move by the Indian government to allow foreign universities to open shop here would pave way for the entry of higher education providers in the U.K. to India?

I think definitely there is an opportunity. The new legislation is a positive step forward. I see the U.K. institutions going for joint ventures in India. Some would set up their own campus. But I understand it requires a lot of investment. Some universities thrive on that — Middlesex, Nottingham and some others. They already have campuses in China and the United Arab Emirates running successfully. The reputation of universities is very often based on its locality or presence. The best option, the low-risk model, is to have joint programmes and exchange of faculty and students. And again here British Council intends to help by maintaining the contact with the Indian universities. We can put them together when institutes in the U.K. want to go for joint collaboration.

Do you think that the visa restrictions imposed by the U.K. government would impact genuine applications for higher education?

No, definitely not. There is no barrier at all in terms of the standard students who want to pursue a programme in the U.K. on a bonafide basis especially in undergraduate and postgraduate programmes. What the U.K. government has done is to tie-up some of the loose ends in the legislation. It is a fact that some students heading to the U.K. for short-term programmes like language courses are not necessarily going for that sole purpose. We encourage students to come. The student with the right qualification is offered a place in the U.K. in the right institution.

What is your advice to students who are searching for data on the higher educational opportunities in the U.K.? How would they be able to identify fake agents and agencies?

They should go through the British Council web site (www.britishcouncil.org). We have a database of all the universities in the U.K. And this list is vetted and guaranteed by the British Council. It also gives a breakdown of the courses and subjects specialised by each university.

If you are lucky enough to be in a place where you have access to one of our U.K. education exhibition, you can talk directly to the representatives of the universities.

I think the vast majority of agents do a really good job, as they assist the students in finding their right course.

If their advice and data match the initial research you have done on the basis of the British Council web site, it is more likely that they can help you. Do not pay fees upfront without a written guarantee and a contract or paper work. I believe nearly a dozen agents based in Kochi have passed the British Council training for agents.

We offer them a special training. Another thing to do is to check whether they are accredited by the council. It is not mandatory. But it is yet another guarantee.

Could you elaborate on the ongoing ‘Learn English' project initiated by the council?

Project English, a regional initiative on English language teaching (ELT) and training, was launched in November 2007 with the commitment to provide every teacher and learner with skills, ideas, and access to the best resources from the U.K.

A target of indirectly training 7.5 lakh teachers in India from 2007-12 has been set. We have currently reached 74 per cent of the target. Since November 2007, we have trained 4,266 master trainers, 5,56,166 teachers and 28 million students through this initiative.

We are in the middle of a very productive contract with the Kerala government to train teachers of English in the public sector.

The methodology is to train a cadre of master trainers. In the past 18 months, we have trained 300 master trainers. They have trained over 6,000 teacher trainers. These trainers have taught two lakh students in Kerala so far.

We do have similar agreements with nine State governments including Tamil Nadu and Karnataka. Our aim is to get as close as to the end user — the student.

The council keeps a quality control over the programme. Considering the huge demand in India, our ambition is to become more high-tech with learning of English. We are now researching and investing in English through mobile phone technology and online programmes. Picking the right technology is the key.

One technology might be right for Europe but may not be right for India. Mobile phone market in India had outstretched. Our Internet provision is very good. It will help in increasing your capabilities in learning English. There is a whole range of free materials on the council's web site on learning English.

The focus is still on the teacher. There are very good teacher support materials on the web site.

We already have the Cambridge teacher training course. And we are looking for ways to transmit a similar course through television.

source:http://www.hindu.com/edu/2011/03/08/stories/2011030850030100.htm

India's best students who became CEOs

NARAYAN MURTHY

As a boy, Nagavara Ramarao Narayana Murthy was someone who could easily go unnoticed in a crowd. He was short, but sharp. Often, his seniors in school came to him for solving Science problems.

Murthy came from a lower middle class, Brahmin family from Mysore. His father, a school teacher, was fond of English literature. And like all the boys of his class, he too had dreams of going to IIT. So he worked hard, studied in the shade of boulders close to Chamundi hills, and helped many in his class to prepare for the entrance exam.

Murthy wasn’t surprised when he got through. When he broke the news of his success to his father, it is said his words were: ‘Anna, I have passed the exam…I want to join IIT.” Proud he was of his son’s achievement but he couldn’t afford the fees and so Murthy had to relinquish his IIT dreams. Murthy stayed back in Mysore. When asked about his decision to stay back, he said to his friends, "It is not the institution but you alone who can change your life with hard work".

He lived up to his own words. Several years afterwards, Narayana Murthy revolutionised India’s software industry by founding Infosys. And this has made him the icon of middle class dreams. He redefined India in the eyes world. India was no longer a third world country, but a fast developing nation. In the process, he promoted thousands of young, creative Indian minds to the world and made Infosys and India a hub of talent.

It is known to the world that he founded Infosys along with six others with just a few thousand rupees which his wife, Sudha Murthy gave. It was an incredible risk to take, but Murthy knew it was going to work, just as he knew he would get through IIT. Which he did, eventually. After Murthy graduated from the National Institute of Engineering, Mysore, he joined IIT, Kanpur.

Thanks to IT and its development, the little known romance of Murthy and Sudha Kulkarni is talked about everywhere. It is hard to believe reading from Sudha’s account of an introvert, quiet Murthy, that he is the same person to have revolutionised the IT industry.

When Murthy was asked by Sudha’s father about his ambitions, he said he wanted to become a politician in the communist party and wanted to open an orphanage.

While he has opened several orphanages since, his dream of becoming a politician still remains unfulfilled. After retiring from Infosys, Murthy was hoping to become President of India after the term of Dr. Abdul Kalam. Even though he denied having political ambitions, his supporters would like to see him on the throne.

Our Mysore Murthy is, no doubt, a visionary who has ignited millions of young minds.

Education

B E (1967)

MTech (1969)

Honours and Awards

Padma Vibushan- 2008

Officer of the Legion of Honor- 2008

World Entrepreneur of the Year- 2003

Business India’s “Businessman of the Year- 1999

JRD Tata Corporate Leadership Award- 1996-97

INDRA NOOYI

Chairman & CEO, PepsiCo

Chairman of PepsiCo's Board of Directors, Indra is the highest-ranking Indian-born woman in corporate America, and she attributes much of her success to her upbringing in India. "Being a woman and being foreign-born, you've got to be smarter than anyone else," says Nooyi, who often dons a sari at PepsiCo events.

Education

She completed schooling at Holy Angels AIHSS, Chennai, has a BSc (Chemistry) from Madras Christian College in 1974 and a PGDM from IIM Calcutta. In 1978, Nooyi earned a Master's degree in Public and Private Management from Yale School of Management. At Yale, she worked as a receptionist from midnight to 5 a.m. to earn some money.

Career graph

Starting her career in India, Nooyi held different positions at Johnson & Johnson and textile firm Mettur Beardsell. In the US, Nooyi worked with BCG, Motorola and ABB. Nooyi joined PepsiCo in 1994, and became chairperson in 2007.

Childhood memories

As a child, Indra’s grandfather insisted on academic excellence from his grandchildren. According to Indra, when she did not figure in the top three ranks in class, she preferred to throw herself under a bus than face her grandfather.

Awards

2007, Padma Bhushan

2008 Elected as Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences

ARUN SARIN

Former CEO, Vodafone

Born on October 21, 1954 at Panchmari, Madhya Pradesh, Sarin was an academically bright student. He was equally good at sports like field hockey, boxing and various extracurricular activities. He wanted to follow his father's footsteps into the military by pursuing a career as a pilot, but when his mom protested, he applied and was accepted at IIT, Kharagpur.

He graduated from the IIT in 1975 with a Bachelor of Science degree in engineering in the top 10 percent of his class and received the BC Roy gold medal for academic excellence. He received a full scholarship to the University of California, Berkeley, Graduate College of Engineering.

In the year 2003, Sarin became the Chief Executive Officer of Vodafone. When he resigned in 2008 from his post Vodafone was the world's largest mobile phone company by revenue. It was the firm’s large market presence in India that catapulted Sarin into the limelight. Currently he serves on the boards of Cisco and Safeway, Inc.

Academics

BTech (IIT)

MBA (Haas UC,Berkeley)

Awards

University of California at Berkeley, Haas School Business Leader of Year- 2002

University of California Trust (UK) Award- 2003

Born in Nagpur, Pandit was the Citigroup’s youngest CEO when he took over in 2007. The first Indian to achieve this feat, the job was touted as the toughest in the world due to the company’s poor performance.

A brilliant boy in school, he moved to US when he was 16. After finishing his Master’s in electrical engineering and MBA from Columbia University, he was determined to get a PhD in a different subject. In those days, students preferred to either study medicine or engineering. And that was the time when his guide advised him to take up finance, as it was a good field. He followed the advice, and switched to finance.

For a brief span, he taught at Indiana University Bloomington, Columbia’s Business School. He stepped into the corporate world in 1994, as a head of Morgan Stanley. His administrative and technical skills, plus an ability to make himself indispensable to bosses like John J. Mack and Phillip J. Purcell, fuelled his career at Morgan Stanley, where he became the president. He dealt with the Institutional Securities Division, Worldwide Institutional Equities Division. For him, this was an interesting area to work on

“To do well you have to put a lot of yourself into it.”

BS, Electrical Engineering, Columbia University (1976)

MS, Columbia University (1977)

MBA, Columbia Business School, Columbia University (1980)

PhD, Columbia Business School, Columbia University (1986)

SABEER BHATIA

Pioneer of web-based e-mail

Sabeer Bhatia has done the unconventional ever since he decided to study abroad at the age of 19; two years into undergraduate education at the Birla Institute of Technology and Science, he qualified for a transfer scholarship at Caltech, considered to be the world's most competitive scholarship. After graduating from Caltech in 1989, he pursued an MS in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University.

At the age of 27, Bhatia was no longer interested in working for others, and together with Smith, began chasing what many people in Silicon Valley deemed a “crazy idea” – a free e-mail service. They raised about $300,000 for their venture - Hotmail. Within a year, Hotmail had one million subscribers. So revolutionary was it that Microsoft bought it for $400 million after 18 months.

Did you know?

* He was rejected by 20 venture capitalists before Draper Fisher Juvetson bought his idea.

* The original spelling was HoTMaiL

Award

TR100 by the MIT, given to 100 young innovators who are expected to have the greatest impact on technology.

Qualifications

BTech, BITS Pilani

BSc(Honours) California Institute of Technology, US

MS Electrical Engineering (Stanford)

source : http://in.education.yahoo.com/news/yeducareers360/indias-best-students-who-became-ceos-20110201

Book Review - Focus on issues that affect the livelihood of tribes

BEING TRIBAL: Shereen Ratnagar; Primus Books, Virat Bhavan, Mukherjee Nagar Commercial Complex, Delhi-110009. Rs. 825.

Dedicated to the memory of Satish Saberwal, anthropologist, this book has two objectives. The first is to understand the sustainable subsistence systems in two villages of eastern Gujarat, inhabited by people known as ‘Rathwa', ‘Naikda', and ‘Dhanak'. The second is to discuss, in the light of this study, the issues affecting the survival of tribes in general.

The history of tribespersons, classified into about 650 communities and comprising 8.2 per cent of India's population, is a veritable saga of marginalisation and depression into the strata of landless agricultural workers and urban proletariat. Much of their impoverishment can be checked if the alienation of their land — whether by non-tribal land-grabbers or in the name of state-sponsored development projects — is put an end to.

The book argues convincingly that “modest land allocations” should be made to tribal households so that they could eke out their livelihood by adopting their time-tested traditional methods of cultivation. As Verrier Elwin said, the tribes should be left alone rather than the government imposing on them development schemes that bear no relevance to or are out of sync with the ground reality. Tribes should progress, Jawaharlal Nehru said, according to their own genius. Today these ideas constitute the design of endogenous, holistic, and culturally rooted development, which is sustainable and fulfilling.

Unfortunately, the protagonists of planned and directed change (the ‘development-walas', as the author calls them) are neither sympathetic to the concerns of the people nor do they have a sound knowledge of the diverse ways of life in rural and tribal contexts. The assumption is that their knowledge is superior to that of the local populace. So, when an externally crafted innovation meets with a lukewarm response, the urban-bred planners tend to see it as a consequence of the target group's “inherent backwardness,” because of which it fails to appreciate the benefits that would flow from the initiative. Therefore, for them, educating the ‘passive' villagers becomes the primary duty.

In most cases, the external experts decide what is good for the people instead of working through their cultures and visions of life. Since habitats and cultures vary from one society to another, development models have necessarily to be different. The book endeavours to dispel the notion that the same model can be uniformly applied across different societies. What we need is micro-level planning, which takes due note of the ground reality with all its socio-cultural nuances.

Fallacy

Many fallacies about tribal people are making the rounds. One is that they adopt a certain type of farming practice, called ‘shifting (or slash-and-burn) cultivation', which is considered regressive because it entailed massive destruction of forests. The colonial rulers thought the ‘wild men' indulging in this practice need to be goaded to take the route to civilisation by training them, even if forcibly, in plough cultivation. The British administrators strictly prohibited ‘shifting cultivation'. The forest, which was the very soul of life for the communities living therein, became a public property, subject to state control. The result is that, over time, the people's hold over, and access to, their lifeline resources got substantially reduced, thanks to an array of forest-related enactments and government policies. ‘Masters' became ‘serfs' and the forests, a commercial property.

This work demolishes the myth that ‘shifting cultivation' is “essential to being tribal.” Just 25 per cent of tribespersons practice it and a majority of them are settled agriculturists. In many cases, both the methods of cultivation go together. And, productivity from a slash-and-burnt field is not lower. From the myth about ‘shifting cultivation' emerged several notions about tribes — for instance, they are unfit to wield the plough; they cannot keep the livestock; they are ‘primitive'; and they do not store or save, or produce a surplus. These erroneous conceptions have persisted over generations of scholars.

The book argues persuasively that people, tribal or non-tribal, go by the quality and nature of the habitat in choosing the method of cultivation and they are equally concerned about regenerating natural resources.

Historically evolved

In a chapter that provides a sensitive account of the institutions and practices of the people, the author rebuts several typecasts and shows that tribes have historically evolved ‘safety nets'. Kinship and marriage ties are among them. Neighbours join hands and form informal groups to help a person in carrying out a task, and the recipient reciprocates by pitching in with his effort on a different occasion. This makes for solidarity among the people. This, however, does not mean that the world of tribes is closed. They do interact with the market, but do not acquire from there objects they need for their living. Their economy is not oriented towards ‘producing for the market', and this gives the tribespersons autonomy and robustness. The book is aptly titled and, refreshingly, it not only acknowledges its key respondent profusely but also carries his photograph.

source: http://www.hindu.com/br/2011/01/18/stories/2011011850061400.htm