After decades of strenuous research, the environmental scientists and mathematicians have highlighted two primary hypotheses about these Circles. They are Plant Competition Hypothesis and Termite Colony Hypothesis, writes Chitrangada Saikia
Wonder and mystery surrounds the magnificent “Fairy Circles”. They are one of the most beautiful creations of God. These unique “Fairy Circles” are found in the Namib Desert of Namibia in South-Western Africa. They are 10-65 feet in diametre. Usually, they are barren circles lined with patches of vegetation. They stretch for hundreds of kilometres. Surprisingly, these circles look other-worldly from images taken from various satellites. According to the local folklore, the “Fairy Circles” were once created by the God himself. Some say that they are no other than the footprints left behind by the God on the red soil of the Namib Desert. Another local tradition claims that these circles are patches of desert poisoned by the breath of dragons living beneath the Namibian Desert. This is mentioned in the folk tales of the Himba residents of Namibia.
Much beyond, it has always been popular in South-Western Africa that “Namibia is the land that God made in anger”. This comes from the wide areas of Namibia that consists of rugged and deeply forbidding jungles. Indeed, rare records show that this series of expressions believe to derive from the local inhabitants who directly refer to the treacherous skeleton coast of the Namib Desert. Thus the tales of the Fairy Circles go on. They provide us clues to rediscover the strange patterns.
Some mathematicians say that the whole landscape that covers the Fairy Circles looks like polka dots dress. Interestingly, these dots are regularly spaced across the Namib Desert. From far and the sky, they look like islands in a sea of small grasslands. Even the biologists have found it difficult to unearth the existence of them. Tarnita, a theoretical biologist and her team at the prestigious Princeton University in the US say that it is not possible to conduct close experiments about the Fairy Circles in an area like the Namib Desert. Therefore such vast areas pose real big hurdles to test multiple hypotheses.
However, after decades of strenuous research, the environmental scientists and mathematicians have highlighted two primary hypotheses about these Circles. They are Plant Competition Hypothesis and Termite Colony Hypothesis. Firstly, the entire Namib Desert is an arid desert. And such arid deserts are normally found closer to the equator because of direct sunlight it gets. Water is very rare and the existing plants struggle to survive in areas like the Namib Desert. About the growth of strange patterns like the Fairy Circles, Tarnita says, “As vegetation expands, and thrives into a patch, smaller plants nearby cannot get the water necessary to survive. The amount of vegetation thins or disappears at the edges of the patch, forming regular distanced gaps.”
Thus, all the Fairy Circles exhibit regular patterns across this desert. Secondly, the Termite Colony Hypothesis says that under each of these patches, there exists a termite colony. According to the ecologists, the eusocial insects where individuals are divided into specialised groups to support the overall survival of their colony make a large number of underground tunnels to transport food for the rest of the members. In this whole process, the termites seem to destroy the vegetation around their colonies. Further, scientists state that in case of encroachments of one colony by the other, they fight till their enemy is finished. In this long and underground war of survival, a series of termite colonies develop in due course of time. But interestingly, these colonies are seemed to be of equal size and there is no “termites land” between two colonies. These are some of the novel revelations that open up scope for future research.
Thus, the Namibian Fairy Circles represent a unique ecosystem so far till 2015. In the year 2016, such Fairy Circles were discovered outside Newman, in a small mining town called Pilbara region in Western Australia. This provides a new opportunity to the scientific community to once again uncover the origin and growth of such phenomena. By now, the Australian Fairy Circles indicate that these circles are the reaction of the plants to scare waters. Though both the Australian and Namibian Fairy Circles are more than almost thousands of kilometre apart, they are declared to be identical. Unlike Namibia, where a large number of insects of species like ants and termites are found in the Fairy Circles, the majority of the circles found in Pilbara do not have ant or termite colonies. Such nests or mounds of insects wherever discovered in Australia are also randomly distributed unlike the Namibian ones.
Besides their mysteries and scientific discoveries, the Fairy Circles add to the beauty of the biodiversity of Namibia and Australia. They attract numerous insects and animals such as ants, bees, geckons, spiders, wasps and small mammals like golden moles, bat-eared foxes, black-backed jackals and aardvarks. Again, the Fairy Circles can be well-regarded as fine examples of allogenic ecosystem engineering. Such ecosystems refer to an environment that transforms the environment by mechanically changing materials from one form to another. Such land forms helps in restoring water, perennial plant and termite biomass across the Namib Desert. As far as they are not a threat to human and natural environment, the Fairy Circles are to be preserved.
For years, though the scientists and researchers have suggested various theories about the Fairy Circles yet the mysteries have not come to an end about them. Hence, its very existence is highly debatable. They would remain enigmatic unless destroyed in the course of nature or through some man-made actions.
(The writer is a young environmental activist)
Just two years ago, a tribal boy was killed in Karmatar because he wished to marry a widow. Has anything really changed in modern India?
On September 26, 200 years ago, an extraordinary personality was born in a village in south West Bengal. By the standards of his time, why, even by today’s standards, Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar was unique in every respect. As Rabindranath Tagore once said, “One wonders how God, in the process of producing 40 million Bengalis, produced a man.”
The 19th century Bengali society was in an advanced state of decay brought about by a lethal cocktail of superstition, depravity and exploitation, being trapped inside a complex hierarchy of castes and sub-castes embedded within each other. One half of the society — women — was excluded from education and economic activities, being confined to homes where they had no voice. They were treated as intellectually and morally inferior, and hence unworthy of education. Superstition proclaimed that a girl’s education would inevitably beget her widowhood. Her best contribution to society was to become one of the countless wives of Kulin Brahmins, whose main aim was collecting handsome dowries from multiple marriages — one had as many as 156 wives as per records. She would be lucky to enjoy her absentee husband’s company a few nights a year. She would attain salvation by burning on the same funeral pyre with her husband, who was 50-60 years older than her. Through the efforts of Raja Rammohan Roy (1772-1838), the horrendous practice of Sati was abolished in 1829, nine years after Vidyasagar’s birth.
Child marriage was the order of the day. Girls were married before attaining puberty in a custom called gouridan. Born into a Kulin Brahmin family, Vidyasagar himself was married at the age of 14 to a girl eight years old. Bankimchandra, who was born 18 years after Vidyasagar, was married at 11 to a girl only five years old. Female infanticide was also the order of the day. Female foetuses would be destroyed brutally through what was called “ghat murder.” These monstrosities still exist in many pockets in rural India despite all the laws we have in our books.
Women had no right to property or inheritance. Once they became widows, a lifetime of misery awaited them. They were forced to a single stringent vegetarian meal a day to rob them of their sexuality, youth and beauty. Sexual exploitation by relatives and termination of unwanted pregnancies leading to death were not only common but met with society’s tacit approval. Legal abolition of sati did not end women’s miseries. The daily privations, insults and misery of existence forced many to join the brothels that were there to sustain the perverted Babu culture of Bengal. In 1853, the population of sex workers in Kolkata was 12,419 and by 1867 it touched over 30,000. And 90 per cent of them, according to the Amritabazar Patrika, were widows. By a crude estimate, the sex worker population increased from about five to nearly 10 per cent of Kolkata’s population over this period.
This, then, was the society Vidyasagar was born into, and this was the society he had sought to reform. He did so with a gusto and a fearlessness we have not seen in any other personality ever since. To fight the orthodox society steeped in deep superstition and ruled by the semi-literate Brahmins, Vidyasagar knew he would have to beat his adversaries at their own game. So, in January and October 1855, he wrote his two famous treatises on the Marriage of Hindu Widows, drawing upon the Sutras (literary compositions) and the Sastras (scriptures) to establish his logical argument that there was no prohibition on remarriage of widows in the Sastras.
Rather the Parashara Samhita sanctioned widow remarriage: “Women are at liberty to marry again if their husbands are insane, dead, have renounced the family or are impotent or outcasts.” About 2,000 copies of the first book were sold in the first week itself, followed by 3,000 and then a third reprint of 10,000 copies got sold out too. But the sales figures did not indicate society’s response. He was heaped with criticism, insults, motives, ridicule and even threatened with death.
The Hindu Widows’ Remarriage Act was finally passed on July 26, 1856 and the reform did not remain limited to Bengal alone. In 1864, Jyotiba Phule succeeded in persuading a Saraswat Brahmin widow to remarry. In 1866, Vishnu Shastri Pandit translated Vidyasagar’s book on widow remarriage into Marathi. But passing of the statute was only the first of the many obstacles. Vidyasagar personally presided over the first remarriage of a widow, Kalimati, with Srishchandra Vidyaratna, and then many others at his own expense, in the process gathering significant personal debt.
He even got his only son, Narayanchandra, married to a widow, Bhavasundari. Not many have the courage to practise what they preach. As he wrote to his brother: “Remarriage of widows is the noblest deed of my life. I don’t think I shall be able to accomplish a greater one, ever. I have sacrificed everything for this cause and won’t mind even laying down my life for it.”
He was also propagating women’s education. In 1849, he set up the Calcutta Female School along with Drinkwater Bethune for educating the girl child. In 1856, appointed Special Inspector of Schools, he established 30 schools exclusively for girls. Between 1857 and 1858, when the Mutiny was ravaging the country, he was fighting a different kind of battle, opening 35 girls’ schools all over Bengal.
After widow remarriage, it was the turn of polygamy. In 1857, he orchestrated a petition to the Government with 25,000 signatures for the prohibition of polygamy among Kulin Brahmins. The Mutiny postponed any action on this petition but in 1866, he inspired another petition, this time with 21,000 signatures. The Government, reluctant to interfere in Indian customs, refused to take any legislative measure, instead allowing time and education to bring an end to the practice.
In 1871 and 1873, he wrote two brilliant critiques on polygamy, arguing that it was not sanctioned by the sacred texts, but was opposed by five eminent scholars, led by his friend Taranath Tarkavachaspati of Calcutta Sanskrit College. Outlawing polygamy among Hindus, however, had to wait till 1955, eight years after Independence, through the Hindu Marriage Act. As regards child marriage, the Indian Penal Code, 1860, had fixed the age of consent to 10 years for girls, which was raised successively to 12 (1891), 14 (1925), 16 (1940) and 18 (2013). The Child Marriage Restraint Act, 1929, also known as the Sarda Act, fixed the age of marriage at 14 for girls and 18 for boys, that was later raised to 18 and 21 respectively in 1978. This has since been repealed and replaced by the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act, 2006.
In 1873, disgusted with the so-called bhadralok society, Vidyasagar went to live with the Santhals at Karmatar, a sleepy hamlet about 20 km from the district headquarters of Jamtara now in Jharkhand, where he would spend the last 18 years of his life till his death in 1891. There he set up a girls’ school and a night school for adults on the premises of his house, which he called Nandan Kanan. The house today lies in shambles.
The irony is that though in this village 24 tribal child widows were remarried by Vidyasagar, just two years ago, a tribal boy was killed in Karmatar because he wished to marry a widow. Has anything really changed in modern India?
Sati was abolished only in name. Countless satis continue to get burnt in 21st century India, though not on pyres. Countless brides get burnt to death in their nuptial homes for dowries, the faces and minds of countless more are scarred forever by acid attacks inflicted by spurned lovers and others. Scores of girls are murdered in “honour-killings” in rural India for marrying into another caste or community, by defying their families’ diktats.
Sati has actually metamorphosed into another form that is equally brutal and vicious. It is not about burning a woman. It is about denying her the choice to decide the course of her life. She is continued to be treated as morally and intellectually inferior to men, as she was 200 years ago. We need another Ram Mohan Roy and a Vidyasagar now, more than ever.
(The author is a retired Director-General from the Office of the CAG)
Formulation of integrated strategy for development of Arth Ganga model among different ministries and sectors
25th September, New Delhi: Meeting of Empowered Task Force, chaired by Honourable Jal Shakti Minister was conducted with several central ministries, departments and the state governments for ensuring better coordination and convergence among agencies and programs.
Updates from Ministries:
- Department of Drinking Water & Sanitation, Ministry of Jal Shakti will ensure high priority is given to Ganga Villages in Swachh Bharat Mission II. The department is also focusing on solid, liquid waste management in Ganga villages, afforestation and conservation of wetlands/traditional water bodies.
- Ministry of Agriculture & Farmers Welfare reported a significant surge in organic farming clusters. Area taken up for organic farming has increased from 840 hectors to 50,000 hectors in Uttarakhand, from 6400 hectors to 35780 hectors in Uttar Pradesh and from 2060 hectors to 14000 hectors in Bihar.
- Ministry of Environment, Forest & Climate Change shared updates on CAMPA funds utilised for afforestation in Ganga basin and status of project Dolphin.
- Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs proposed to increase the solid waste management capacity in Ganga towns. Also, urban water bodies will be protected on priority.
- Ministry of Culture has identified 136 venues for Ganga Sanskriti Yatra and will have dedicated Ganga galleries in museums. They are also working with NMCG to develop a database of archaeological and cultural sites along Ganga tributaries.
- Ministry of Tourism would be completing its action plan for development of Ganga Tourist Circuits within one month.
- Ministry of Rural Development is working on convergence of activities under MNREGA for rejuvenation of small rivers and conservation/ protection of traditional water bodies.
NITI Ayog, Ministry of Power and Ministry of Science & Technology also presented the work done on their part on Ganga rejuvenation. All ministries were directly to form a Ganga cell which will exclusively focus on work related with Namami Gange mission.
Representatives of Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar apprised the status of mission and discussed the plan to for revival of smaller rivers in their respective states.
Arth Ganga, an initiative for Integrating people’s participation and economic development with Ganga rejuvenation was emphasised during the meeting. The efforts on Arth Ganga will be segregated into six sectoral interventions – Sustainable Agriculture and Allied Areas, Afforestation and Biodiversity Conservation, Culture and Tourism Development, Inland Waterways, Promoting Clean Energy towards Sustainable Livelihood, Rejuvenation of Water Bodies.
Shri Ratan Lal Kattaria, MoS, Jal Shakti Ministry, Shri U. P. Singh, Secretary, Department of Water Resources, RD & GR and Shri Rajiv Ranjan Mishra, Director General of National Mission Clean Ganga were present at the meeting.
The rising crime against women has emerged as yet another factor for augmenting the traditional preference for sons
Last week, a six-month pregnant woman in Badaun, Uttar Pradesh (UP), was attacked by her husband with a sharp-edged weapon. Her family alleged that he slit her stomach to find out the gender of the unborn baby. They told the police that the father of five daughters was so desperate for a son that he resorted to this brutal way to check if the foetus was that of a boy or a girl. Although a First Information Report (FIR) has been registered and the husband arrested, this gruesome crime underlines once again the deeply-entrenched preference for sons in our culture. Despite the best efforts of the Union Government, States and non-governmental organisations over the years, there seems to be very little change in attitudes towards the girl child in the country. This is not just deeply worrying but also frightening.
It is not, however, surprising that girls are less valued than boys in UP, a State that has recorded the most crimes against women in the country. The latest 2018 National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data ranked the State as the worst for women’s security with 59, 443 crimes against them. Incidentally, in 2018, the crime rate was the highest for cruelty by husbands and relatives. Although the NCRB data for 2019 has not been released as yet, media reports of crimes against women in UP during the last two years do not inspire confidence in the possibility of any turnaround.
But do the rising crimes against women have any bearing on the preference for a son? Yes, says a new study conducted in UP and Haryana. Its objective was to examine discrimination against the girl child and its linkages with the declining child sex ratio and violence against women. The report states that the responsibility of security and maintaining the chastity of daughters in the context of rising sexual violence in the country has added to the larger concern of wanting a son. In other words, the increasing crime against women has emerged as yet another factor for augmenting the traditional preference for a son.
Supported by the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR), the study was conducted by Bijaylaxmi Nanda, Nupur Ray and Ritwika Mukherjee. The preliminary findings indicate that perceptions about crime play a pivotal role in the increasing preference for a male child. Thus, as long as women continue to remain insecure in the nation, chances that girls will be unwanted by families will be high.
Further, with three out of every 10 women, who had more daughters than sons, reporting that the husband/family members express dissatisfaction at the birth of a girl child, the study also reinforces the fact that gender inequality remains at the heart of violence against women in UP. The male offspring is preferred because he is culturally perceived as a protector and provider during the old age of the parents. An earlier study to understand the intrinsic relationship between masculinity, son preference and intimate partner violence came to similar conclusions.
The 2014 study by the International Centre for Research on Women (ICRW) and United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), found that in UP, the two most important reasons for having a son were to carry on the family name and to provide support to parents in their old age. Six years later, as the ICSSR study shows, little seems to have changed on the ground.
The ICRW-UNFPA report found that of the seven States studied, UP had the largest proportion of men reporting high control over their intimate partners and the lowest proportion of men displaying gender equitable attitudes.
Education is a big tool to engender transformation in beliefs, attitudes and practice. It is an equally important predictor of son-preference attitudes. In UP, the ICRW-UNFPA study found that 55 per cent of men with no education had a high preference for sons compared to 39 per cent of men with graduation or higher degrees.
Studies have shown that spouses of men with no or little education are unlikely to have ready access to sexual and reproductive health services. In the Badaun case, the fact that the woman had five children and was pregnant with her sixth child indicates she may have faced barriers in accessing family planning services. The fourth National Family Health Survey (NFHS 2015-16) states that the unmet need in UP was 18 per cent for currently married women aged between 15 and 49 years. This means an estimated 8.2 million women have been denied access to family planning. In Badaun, which has a more than 70 per cent rural population, the total unserviced need is almost 14 per cent. This is higher than the national average of 12.9 per cent.
The preference for sons puts women under so much pressure to produce a male heir that many times they are forced into numerous pregnancies and a series of abortions until they do so. The preference for a son has led to around 4,60,000 girls going missing due to sex selection at birth each year between 2013 and 2017, according to the UNFPA’s 2020 State of the Population Report.
Last month, noted researcher Fengqing Chao of King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Saudi Arabia, and his colleagues projected an even darker future for girls in India. According to their research published in the journal PLOS ONE, the average annual number of missing female births between 2017 and 2025 was likely to be 4,69,000 per year and would increase to 5,19,000 per year for the time period between 2026 to 2030. This research singles out UP as the Indian State most likely to have the maximum missing female births due to the preference for a boy and accounting for almost a third of the total number projected.
But girls don’t just go missing at birth. India also has the highest rate of excess girl child deaths at 13.5 per 1,000 births. This critical data suggest post-birth sex selection. An estimated one in nine deaths of girls below the age of five may be attributed to post-birth sex selection, says the UNFPA report. So, while gender-biased sex selection accounts for about two-thirds of the total missing girls, post-birth girl child mortality accounts for about one-third.
UP lags behind on many indicators of gender equality, including early marriage and crimes against women.
If Yogi Adityanath really wants development, the Chief Minister must make greater investments in improving gender indicators. Prejudice against girls can be countered by programmes that focus on engaging boys and instilling values of gender equality in them at an early age. Comprehensive sex education in schools could help redefine notions of masculinity and foster respect for women.
(The writer is a senior journalist)
Competition in education and research brought through the evaluation system may drive all in the same direction at the cost of diversity
Feedback is a very important tool to nudge people and organisations to adopt desirable behaviour. Nobel laureate Richard H Thaler and his co-author Cass R Sunstein, in their international bestseller Nudge, suggest feedback as one of the strategies to motivate agents to adopt responsive behaviour. It is against the idea of command and control policies of governments or paternalism of any institution. Nudging human behaviour in a desirable direction without any command and control is what they call “libertarian paternalism.” A nudge in the right direction may be as simple as the laptop warning the users to plug in the charger when the battery is about to die out, or the display screen of a car suggesting that the driver change gears when the gear applied and the speed of the car mismatch. These feedback mechanisms are alarms which nudge people to take corrective measures.
Education, being delivered by organisations, Government or private, benefits from feedback to spearhead in the intended direction. It may be feedback on the course, faculty or educational institute. It helps enhance performance and improve the delivery of education service through the voluntary adoption of corrective measures. In higher academics, the ranking of journals, again based on the feedback on the quality of research work published, is an important mechanism to improve research and publication. Feedback, when made public, increases competition among peers. Then comment works as a mechanism to remove the asymmetry of information in the market. The potential customers or beneficiaries become aware of the quality of goods or services offered. Different agents or stakeholders give comments for all elements of education and research. On the course and faculty, it is students who provide the feedback. It is meant to improve the course content and delivery of the faculty. Educational institutes are given ratings by different agencies, including the Government, national and international bodies and media about their infrastructure, processes and quality of education. The assessment of research journals is obtained by the number of citations of research articles published in them over a stipulated period. In all this, the moot question is how far does the feedback mechanism serve the purpose of delivery of education services in the desired direction?
If we consider that the feedback on the course and faculty is given by the students, then it may be counterproductive. The desired pattern of delivery may not be best determined by students as they are not competent enough to assess. Nevertheless, many renowned educational institutes use their feedback to evaluate faculty performance. It is even considered for promotions. However, there are exceptions. Harvard Business School does not take student response on any course or faculty. When asked about it, one tenured professor replied that “we do not take feedback from amateurs.” If they have to assess a course or faculty, some experts of the area attend the class and appraise the course delivery.
Research is an extremely complicated output which is determined by the methodology, results and overall interest on a particular topic. The citation of the articles may depend on all these factors. The journals in the area of social sciences and management at times may prefer publishing certain types of results. Journals may aim at increasing citation and hence prefer the articles which deal with subjects that are likely to have enough research funding in future. New ideas or results which contradict some existing dominant idea may not receive enough funding and attention. Thus, it creates an endogenous system which encourages a dominant idea and is detrimental to newer, provocative ideas.
This problem is more severe for lesser-known institutes from developing countries. Each research article goes through a peer-review process conducted by the journals. The editors take a decision on publication after taking into account the reviewers’ comments. Nevertheless, the reviewers’ performance is not predictable. In a 2007 study on 306 experienced reviewers, published in PLOS Medicine, researchers found that there is no scientifically-established predictor of reviewer performance. Hence it is not possible to systematically improve the selection of reviewers and implement a routine review rating system.
Sadly, journals do take reviewer ratings from the editors. Furthermore, journal editors may find articles with a very new or provocative idea or result contrary to dominant ideas unacceptable, more so when the researchers are affiliated to renowned institutes, or they themselves are well-known. Hence, the feedback process in research may not always encourage path-breaking discoveries, especially for developing nations.
Ranking or rating of educational institutions is considered as a way of giving feedback on the performance of the institute on certain predetermined indicators. Over the years, ranking and accreditation have gained strength and momentum globally, including in India. Ranking is perceived as an indicator of quality of services offered by educational institutions. There seems to a be growing consensus that ranking influences the perception of stakeholders (students, recruiters and investors) about the prospect of educational institutions. While there is no denying that ranking has made institutes look at the quality of services, it also introduced new practices within the sector. From the viewpoint of organisational research, ranking has offered a new template to educational institutions and codified them in different categories. Post the ranking announcement of the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF), it has been observed that many of the educational institutes have showcased their positions on their websites to demonstrate their skills, achievements and desirability to stakeholders.
The organisational template propagated through ranking carries its own characteristics. For example, under the NIRF, the template is assessed through five parameters focussing on teaching, publications, consultancy, employability and overall perception. Institutes are measured along these parameters to identify the “best” ones scoring the highest marks/points across these parameters. Going forward, these institutes would become a role model and irrespective of their individual values, purpose and origin, all would be in a race to adopt a codified organisational template. This would have a detrimental impact on institutions striving to pursue a niche domain. The codified organisational template would often fail to recognise the unique features of educational institutions by virtue of their values and origin. As a result, such institutes would often fall behind in the so-called performance indicators, creating a poor impression about the quality of education imparted by them. This, in turn, would have a detrimental impact on their ability to attract resources and eventually lead to quivering of the very existence of individuality among organisations.
As the ranking is made public, this feedback mechanism ignites fierce competition among the educational institutes. The urgency to perform well in the ranking exercise has resulted in many adopting the recommended organisational template in a hurried manner. The high-speed diffusion of the template is often facilitated by a new breed of “institutional intermediaries” i.e. entities helping organisations to build capacity so as to adopt the new template. In recent years, the ranking industry in higher education has been populated by intermediaries certifying institutions through their own ranking exercises. Their role was primarily limited to assessment of quality on indicators. We should now expect to see more intermediaries who would be helping the educational institutions to build their capacity to perform well in rankings and adopt a standardised template.
The feedback mechanism should nudge desirable behaviour, but it may be counterproductive to education and research when that feedback is made public. Then it becomes a means of increasing competition in a particular direction. Two major problems in the evaluation mechanism in education have been identified. One, when feedback is taken from those whose expertise, capability or eligibility to provide an assessment is questionable. A difficult subject would be eventually dropped from the curriculum or a strict instructor would be penalised. Bias in the assessment of a new idea or contradictory results in research may throttle publication in journals. Second, when assessment is based on a standard set of criteria and is made public, then it nullifies the emergence and growth of educational organisations with diverse ideas and objectives. Competition brought through the feedback system may drive all in the same direction at the cost of diversity.
(De is Associate Professor and Sarma is Assistant Professor, Institute of Rural Management, Anand. Views expressed here are personal)
The World Bank’s human capital index shows the potential development of kids slid to 50 per cent in pandemic times
As expected, the impact of the Coronavirus pandemic has not just been on health and global economies; its multi-pronged effect is now threatening to erase the gains made in improving child education and health in the years before the outbreak. This fallout of the contagion is the most evident in the poor and Third World nations, the World Bank said while commenting on the Human Capital Index for 2020, which ranks countries on how well children are prepared for the future, with an emphasis on factors like schooling and healthcare. Despite the fact that most countries made steady gains in improving health and education prior to the pandemic, the virus has dealt a body blow to all these efforts. Children in a low-income country will likely achieve only 56 per cent of their human capital compared to ones with access to a complete education and full healthcare. This is alarming as human capital is absolutely vital to the financial and economic future of any country as well as its social well-being. And as World Bank President David Malpass has warned, “inequalities among children are set to increase” and as “more than one billion children have been out of school due to Covid, they could lose as much as $10 trillion in lifetime earnings.” In our case, the girl child would be the first victim as her education is the first casualty in poor households forced to choose between feeding the family and reserving knowledge pursuit as a rare privilege. Besides, while the education of children from well-heeled families will not face so much disruption, students from marginalised families and in rural areas will suffer, both due to lack of smartphones, computers, laptops and the lack of infrastructure and knowhow on how to use these enablers. Though both teachers and students have adapted to online classes to a large extent in urban areas, teachers themselves are not satisfied because they feel that the learning experience can never compete with brick and mortar classrooms. In an online setting, students may have more distractions and less supervision, which can reduce their motivation to do well academically. First there is the issue of keeping them engaged. Then how do you teach subjects which require live experiments and demonstrations? What of personal attention to struggling students? Research shows that students who struggle in physical classes are likely to struggle even more online. Also, being in school/college in person with teachers and friends creates social pressures and benefits that can help motivate the young to engage.
On the health front, too, there is cause for concern as the lockdown impacted programmes tackling malnutrition. With schools closed, children from impoverished families have been deprived of their one, daily nutritious food in the form of free mid-day meals. Immunisation programmes have been hit by the lockdown as has the community vigilance by the ASHAs and ANMs, who were the first point of contact for parents with sick children. If the world had to work hard to provide an equitable world for children, it will have to work doubly hard to mend the damage caused by the contagion in the years to come.
Fly ash is inevitable while producing thermal power. However, leaving it to pollute the environment is not desirable
Fly ash, a by-product of coal-fired electricity-generating power plants, has always been a predominant challenge for the environment, as its unsafe disposal or ineffective recycling can pose a direct threat to the quality of the air we breathe. Such is our dependence on thermal power plants for energy that apart from the air pollution caused by these behemoths, the fly ash is also compromising other aspects of our environment.
For instance, the breach of the fly ash dyke at the Vindhyachal NTPC Super Thermal Power Station in Singrauli district of Madhya Pradesh in October 2019 led to the seeping of nearly 35 lakh metric tonnes of fly ash into the Govind Vallabh Pant Sagar, popularly known as the Rihand water reservoir. The Essar power plant at Mahan in the same district, too, saw breaches in its fly ash dykes leading to its seepage into the environment.
The huge level of water pollution triggered by the seepage of fly ash into the Rihand reservoir raised a red flag and the National Green Tribunal (NGT) imposed an interim penalty of Rs 10 crore on the NTPC and Essar after reviewing the ground report filed by its committee. Additionally, the NGT also rapped the Lanco-Anpara power plant to stem the excess ash pond flow into the reservoir. The fly ash caused soil pollution, too, due to which agricultural land became infertile and standing crops suffered.
Thanks to the fly ash pollution, the levels of mercury in the soil, air and water spiked besides causing health complications for local communities as the Rihand reservoir is a source of drinking water for many. All these adverse developments took place despite the existence of statutory notifications from the Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change (MoEFCC) under the Environment Protection Act (EPA) that mandates a 100 per cent utilisation of fly ash.
However, the full extent of the damage caused by the fly ash pond breach has come to light now thanks to a new report submitted recently by the joint committee comprising the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) and the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Roorkee. The report estimated that the fly ash breach by Essar Power Limited caused damages worth Rs 7.35 crore while the damage inflicted by the fly ash dyke breach at the NTPC plant was pegged at a whopping Rs 104 crore. The committee based its damage estimations on two parameters: One was the Green House Gas (GHG) emissions caused by the clean-up operations and two the extent of water pollution due to ash overflow.
The use of diesel during the clean-up operations caused the carbon footprint to spike, leading to the damage estimation spiking as well. Similarly, the fly ash infusion into the water bodies led to heavy metals and suspended solids leaching into the water. This, too, was translated into cost and added to the damages.
Thermal power stations are still the mainstay of our power sector with renewable sources of energy being nowhere near the required potential to take over as primary sources of our needs. Moreover, the opening up of the coal sector for mining to private players, besides nixing of the mandatory coal-washing requirements, is set to increase the production of fly ash in the future.
Already the ash ponds are overflowing across the nation due to increasing output and decreasing utilisation. As a result, the dykes are frequently breaking, leading to the ash polluting the nearby fields and water bodies.
The last 10 years saw the ash ponds contain a humongous 627 million tonnes of unused material. This is three times the fly ash being generated per year today, which is 200 million tonnes per annum. The close of 2019 saw an unused fly ash stock quantity of 1,647 million tonnes in India, which is eight times the annual generation quantity.
This is despite the fact that India has the regulations in place that mandate 100 per cent usage of fly ash and there is technology available to put this into action. Yet we are still far from a “full utilisation status.”
The Government-driven initiative to promote the use of fly ash in the construction material industry has not been a spectacular success as red bricks continue to be sold and used in open violation of the Government’s rules that ban them. Bricks are made out of top soil which is a precious part of our environment. An inch of top soil takes 500,000 years to form as it essentially involves the breaking down and erosion of rock.
If the Government cannot shut the countless red brick kilns that can be seen dotting the countryside, it cannot promote the use of fly ash in the building material industry. The buyer will have no option but to continue with the traditional red brick, which is easily available. Once the red brick production and supply chain is broken, it will not only save the top soil but also stem the pollution caused by these kilns as they use diesel and sugarcane waste as fuel.
Fly ash can be successfully used to produce bricks in combination with gypsum or lime. The resultant brick is not only eco-friendly but lighter and stronger. Technologies are available today that use compressed natural gas (CNG), an eco-friendly fuel, to fire autoclaves or huge ovens to manufacture fly ash bricks. Each autoclave can manufacture 22,000 fly ash-lime bricks in an eight-hour span.
So, if the thermal power plants in the country were mandated with a target to produce a certain quantity of bricks using the autoclave technology, then the problem of excess fly ash would disappear. There are ways to ensure full utilisation of fly ash; only a strong political will is required to implement the rules that have been put in place for this.
(The writer is an environmental journalist)
There’s proof of life in the unlikeliest of planets, also known for being one of the least explored
For years, the search for extraterrestrial life inside our solar system has always concentrated on the “red” planet Mars. That is because Mars is similar in size to Earth. There is now clear evidence that there was once water on its surface and most importantly, like Earth, it is also in the so-called “habitable” zone, close enough to its star for enough radiation but not so much that life wouldn’t take off. Mars is, therefore, considered to either have life or to have once harboured life and capable of supporting a human expedition. As a result, we are constantly sending probes to Mars and even to its tiny moons. Probes that circle the planet as well as robotic vehicles that have roamed its surface. We actually have a greater grasp of the surface of Mars than we do of the bottom of our oceans. Even now, the aim for mankind, both in real and reel life, is to make Mars the first step on our eventual voyage to the stars.
Venus, the second rock from the Sun, is, however, given as an example of where global warming will take us. A planet benign on the outside but one where every probe sent since the start of space exploration has been dissolved in acid in the atmosphere or fried by the extreme heat that the greenhouse effect has caused. Even though the Soviet Venera programme did land several probes on Venus and many survived a few hours, there was a succession of lens cap failures. As a result, Venus is one of the least explored planets of the solar system, lacking the romanticism of Mars and the grandeur of Jupiter and Saturn, which have both seen billion-dollar spacecraft visit them in the past decade. Yet, the discovery of phosphine in the Venusian atmosphere is an intriguing prospect because the only way for this gas, with three hydrogen molecules attached to one phosphorus molecule, to occur naturally is as a byproduct of biological processes. While the gas can be made industrially by man, that isn’t clearly a possibility on Venus. So, have we been barking up the wrong tree for decades? After all, as the old adage goes, “Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus” and as we all know, women have all the answers. Maybe some strange process creates phosphine on Venus that we are unaware of and we should send a probe or two to the planet we never thought could harbour life. But as we know from Earth herself, life can survive in some really extreme conditions. This time though, let us make sure that the lens caps work.
The NEP expects every teacher to develop a comprehensive perspective on life and living and follow an application-based module
For over six decades, one has never witnessed such a strong projection of the national resolve to implement a policy. This rare privilege goes to the National Education Policy (NEP), 2020. The President of India addresses the nation, the Prime Minister addresses twice within a week, the Union Education Minister and his team seem busy 24X7, conducting and guiding national-level webinars on specific topics that would require new initiatives and action at the implementation stage. It’s evident that the nation has realised that for equitable growth, progress and development, it has to be “education, education, and education.” India is now determined to create a pool of teachers who would not only be degree-holders but possess “personalities.” These would be people imbued with a comprehensive multi-disciplinary and multi-dimensional perspective.
In fact, the new approach to teacher preparation would expect every instructor to develop a comprehensive perspective on life and living. They would internalise the higher goals of education. The focus, henceforth, would be on them believing in Sarva Bhut Hite Ratah. And as was the ancient tradition, they would be life-long learners, yavadjeevait adhiyate viprah. It is, in a sense, a revolutionary recommendation that by 2030 all teachers would be prepared in multi-faculty colleges and universities through four-year integrated programmes. As one goes through the various sections of the NEP, this expectation becomes evident to everyone.
The objective of achieving scharyatwa would require a strong support system that must emerge from the establishment and society. There are clear indications to ensure that: “In order to improve and reach the levels of integrity and credibility required to restore the prestige of the teaching profession, the regulatory system shall be empowered to take stringent action against sub-standard and dysfunctional Teacher Education Institutions (TEIs) that do not meet the basic educational criterion, after giving one year for the remedy of breaches. By 2030, only educationally sound, multi-disciplinary and integrated teacher education programmes shall be in force.” This objective of restoring the credibility of TEIs is achievable. The National Council for Teacher Education (NCTE) had, during 1998-99, successfully exercised this authority, and certain well-known but sub-standard teacher preparation programmes were closed down. Once teacher educators accept this responsibility, they could transform the entire system. Let them never forget that the recommendations on teacher education arise from the expectations and aspirations of the young. But somewhere besides these is also the hidden pain and anguish which was recorded – with a heavy heart – by late Justice JS Verma: “A majority of stand-alone TEIs – over 10,000 in number – are not even attempting serious teacher education but are essentially selling degrees for a price.” One could mention it only with immense pain, as the first chairperson of the NCTE said, that all these 10,000 institutions selling degrees were certified by senior teachers, teacher educators, professors and other academics. The policy has done its part, no more stand-alone colleges. Now it is the responsibility of teachers, teacher educators and professionals in the field to ensure that in future regulatory mechanisms are not trivialised.
This policy suggests alternative regulatory structures, which would transform the manner in which future multi-disciplinary teacher preparations institutions and universities would emerge. The responsibility of teachers at every stage would grow multi-fold as autonomy would be the in-thing. When one goes through the various general recommendations in the policy, one finds serious concern for drastic change in teacher education in content and pedagogy, and the need to achieve an attitudinal transformation among aspiring teachers. It is now learning, learning and more learning. Examinations shall no more be days of nation-wide anxiety and widespread tension. The focus of assessment in schools shifts to application of knowledge gained and internalised.
The present pattern of examinations was transplanted in this country by alien rulers. It had been discarded in Britain much earlier but we still adhere to it in India. Teachers, and teacher educators, have a tremendous task ahead in implementing curriculum load reduction, to ensure that textbooks and textual materials are neither deficient on new knowledge nor too overloaded with obsolesce content. Teaching and learning shall become more interactive, and much would transpire outside the closed classroom. Skill development and bringing in vocational education elements early in schools would require TEIs absorbing them in their own curricula. Those who know the story of Richard Feynman would find it much easier to visualise its great transformative and inspiring impact on the system as a whole. It would be possible only when the promises to ensure the assured recruitment process are put to practice, and the assurances on the professionally acceptable teacher-student ratio is implemented without any aberrations. One must not ignore considerable dilution in the quality of education and decline in the acceptability and credibility of schools funded by the public. The policy realises this.
The ancient Indian tradition of knowledge quest spreads over four stages: adhyayan, manan, chintan and upayog. And its relevance is eternal. It is the essence of the process of transfer of knowledge to generations ahead. Every teacher, henceforth, would be expected to comprehend the essence of Indian philosophy of education that finds reflection throughout this policy. Let me recall three sentences of Sri Aurobindo; first being that the process must begin with “from near, to far”; and hence the mother tongue medium and other aspects. His second principle was that “nothing can be taught.” Every active, alert and vibrant teacher shall have to grasp its essence. It is “learning the treasure within.” It is the perfection within that the child is discovering, and teachers are assisting, supporting, guiding, and much more.
When Sri Aurobindo states that the “mind must be consulted in its growth,” he is emphasising how pertinent it is to “know the child.” It is the comprehension of these basic principles that has led to the restricting of the school education system to 5+3+3+4. The most significant is the addition of initial three years, after the age of 3. India would need very specialised teachers for this age group.
A couple of years ago, India had anticipated the importance of open and distance learning. That experience comes very handy as the global attention diverts to online learning. Creation of digital platforms and e-content had already begun in full swing and has come handy during the corona crisis, as children are confined to their homes. The pedagogy is undergoing unprecedented change, teachers associated with schools will have to gear up to learn new skills. While tools and techniques shall change – sometimes beyond recognition – the pedagogical principles would remain the same.
(The writer works in education and social cohesion)
Those in charge of publicity policies hardly realise that by attacking critics they are instigating an equally vitriolic counter-narrative
The criticism of the present turmoil in the Indian media, particularly television, comes with the rebuttal of the critic being a Libtard. The next volley is about the media being sympathetic to the earlier regime too and why then no questions were asked for such sympathies. There is no denying the fact that many present-day vociferous flag-bearers, protesting the slant being brazenly projected in the media, were themselves guilty of enjoying undue access and patronage, blighting the line between honest journalism and patronised pen-pushing.
Having said this, the aforementioned premise cannot be justified as the only factor for acrimony and rancour, which has come to define the state of Indian television. It has more to do with the market and the revenue models. This writer worked with The Pioneer at a time and in an era when it was seen as the only major Right of the Centre English daily. But to the credit of the editorial leadership of the newspaper, despite the slant, it never discouraged contrary opinion and gave prominent space to it.
More importantly, it held the ideological position, paying a commercial price as many Government agencies and departments worked overtime to demolish the revenue model of the newspaper. It indeed was a challenging task to be the paper of the Opposition and also being the paper of the Right of the Centre thought.
The same cannot be said about the present-day votaries of the Right of the Centre ideology. It’s more a case of being on the right side of the Government. Being honest to an ideology demands a price, which these present-day pretenders did not pay then, nor are they paying now, as on both the occasions they were on the right side of the Government.
Then there is another issue. Does being supportive of a political thought make a media house mortgage its right to question a Government of the same ideology? During the prime ministership of Atal Bihari Vajpayee, there was this instance of a border skirmish with Bangladesh in which a Border Security Force officer was killed. His corpse was returned in a most undignified manner. The images made one shudder and at the same time angry even as the Government talked of peace.
The front-page editorial in The Pioneer said, “Bend, don’t genuflect.” Now this was a startling criticism coming from the newspaper known for its ideological proximity to the Government of the day. This must have needed much courage on the part of the editor, and a real large heart on the part of the Government to take the criticism in the right spirit.
The current news trend followed by the media houses, of the Government never going wrong, should make the powers that be worry. This worry should be on two counts: First, the loss of credibility of these media houses and anchors known to be sympathetic to the Government. Second, by giving no space to the Opposition, the mainstream media has pushed it into a situation where it has launched its own agitprop vehicles, expressing distrust in the media houses, calling them vehicles of Government propaganda.
Those in charge of the publicity policies of the Government, by unleashing a vendetta towards critics, realise little that they are instigating an equally vitriolic counter-narrative. With social media and technological advancements completely democratising the media space, a Government’s image cannot be lynchpinned on mere whataboutery of prime-time anchors.
We live in times where troll armies are ever-ready to provide their services at mud-slinging. It’s just the question of who is hiring them. While it has taken more than half-a-century to create memes of Jawaharlal Nehru, Prime Minister Narendra Modi is being subjected to this obnoxious criticism in his lifetime. Nehru and several Prime Ministers after him were lucky that they were subjected to such criticism by erudite scholar-cartoonists like RK Laxman. They were at the same time fortunate that the space of social media did not exist then, which could have dragged them into the muck.
Today counter-narratives on Government claims make it to various social media platforms within moments of being released in the public domain. Dependence on fake and misrepresented facts has come to create an atmosphere of distrust, where ready acceptance of a news, howsoever true, is not easy.
This situation has given rise to such an atmosphere that reason is the biggest casualty. When fake information becomes a marketable commodity, there would not be very many clients for evidence-based, well-reasoned information. Let’s take the case of the “infodemic”, a term coined by the World Health Organisation (WHO) on the surge of information regarding the Covid-19 pandemic. The contagion in fact has hit the media hardest both in matters of finances and credibility. The failure of journalists, both television and newspaper, to go beyond the Government’s briefings on the pandemic and its opinionated criticism has left the consumers of news absolutely chary. Nobody has a clear picture on where the virus is steering the world.
If there is distrust for a product, there obviously would not be a market for it. The market searches for such products which can be easily consumed. So here is a case of a market looking for news products. In fact, the present situation reminds one of Italian dramatist, novelist, poet and short story writer Luigi Pirandello’s early 20th century play titled, Six Characters in Search of an Author. The initial reception to the play from the audience was it being incomprehensible. It was only after Pirandello added a foreword to the play a few years later that it came to be better appreciated. The connoisseurs of news are today eagerly waiting for the foreword to the current incommensurable media scenario.
(The writer is professor-chairperson, Vivekananda School of Journalism and Mass Communication, VIPS, GGSIPU, Delhi)
Shinzo Abe changed the way the world perceives Japan, Can his successor do more of the same?
2020 was supposed to be a big year for Japan with its capital Tokyo hosting the Summer Olympics but we all know how that went. Instead, as the year comes to a close, Japan finds itself with a new Prime Minister after Shinzo Abe retires from politics for health reasons. Under Abe’s steady hand for almost a decade, a new Japan has emerged, one much more confident on the global scene. Something that has proven to be very important as a bulwark to China’s increasingly assertive stance in the region. Abe’s leadership has played a major role in Japan trying to rid itself of the military guilt caused by actions it took in the first half of the 20th century.
Yoshihide Suga, the son of a strawberry farmer and Abe’s chief spokesperson for the last few years, is the man handpicked by the outgoing leader to succeed him. While there is little doubt that Suga will stay the course, Abe’s great success, like Shinzo Koizumi, was keeping the various factions of Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic party (LDP) at bay. This is a party whose intense factionalism had led to a revolving door; between Koizumi’s tenure ending in 2006 and Abe’s second term starting in 2012, Japan had six Prime Ministers (including Abe himself for a year). Keeping the factions at bay while pleasing the rank and file of the party, which preferred former defence minister Shigeru Ishiba for the top job, was quite the feat. The fact that Suga was appointed as Prime Minister without winning a popular mandate also rankles several politicians and analysts although elections are likely to be called very soon. Japan has proven itself to be a strong, resurgent power and the Olympics were meant to highlight a new, more self-confident nation. Its ties with the US are stronger than before and the nation has played a key role in the creation of the ‘Quad’ with the US, Australia and until very recently, a very reticent India. Abe’s personal friendship with Narendra Modi has seen a huge amount of investment by Japanese firms in India, although tempered by India’s stop-start economic growth. Suge is almost certain to keep the momentum of Japan’s new-found military and economic confidence going and indeed no matter what happens in that country politically over the next few years, it has turned a corner under Abe and will not keep looking back at its past.
(Courtesy: Editorial-The Pioneer)
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