Quota leads to surge in OBC aspirants for IITs

Hemali Chhapia | TNN

Mumbai: As reservation for backward category students rises in the Indian Institutes of Technology, competition among them has also intensified. Of the 3.95 lakh applications that the IITs received from aspirants wanting to take the Joint Entrance Exam in April, close to 40% candidates—1.55 lakh—are in reserved categories. In 2007, a year before the IITs implemented the first phase of the 9% reservation for the Other Backward Caste category, 45,000 OBC students had applied to take the JEE. This year, more than 98,000 OBC candidates—26% of all aspirants—will take the JEE.

Bhaba Sarma, JEE chairman at IIT-Guwahati, which is organising this year’s exam, said, “About 75% of OBC applicants belong to the non-creamy layers. But this is preliminary data. We are yet to go through 16,000 applications received online.’’

SIMPLE MATHS
Number of JEE aspirants this year: 3.95 lakh
Aspirants in reserved category: 1.55 lakh (75% from non-creamy layer)
ercentage of reserved seats: 18 in 7 old IITs, 27 in 8 new IITs

CANDIDATES PER SEAT IN EACH CATEGORY 72 OBC 62 Open 40 SC 28 ST IITs lower bar for SC, ST students

Mumbai: This year, the seven old IITs will set aside 18% seats for OBC candidates, and the eight new ones will have 27% reservation for them. Last year, 1,134 OBC candidates qualified for admission at 13 IITs.

The tech schools did not have to lower the entry bar to fill seats reserved for OBC candidates. However, fearing that SC and ST seats may remain unfilled, IIT directors are allowing a 50% relaxation of scores in these categories from 2009, up from 40%.

For JEE 2009, the percentage of SC and ST candidates has gone up only marginally. More than 35,000 SC candidates have applied for 890 seats reserved for them at 15 IITs. And over 12,000 ST students will battle it out for 434 spots.

A faculty member from IITBombay pointed out that the number of ST applicants has always been low. “Forms are available to them at half-price, but few ST candidates feel they have the academic capability to get into the IITs. However, when we conduct the preparatory course for some of these students, we find some really bright ones amongst them. Most of them really just have a problem in communicating in English,’’ he added.

IIT sources said the number of OBC applicants has gone up dramatically with the government raising the income ceiling for non-creamy candidates from Rs 2.5 lakh to Rs 4.5 lakh. Former director of IITMadras P V Indiresan felt that reservation was the sole reason for OBC applications going up. He said, “I can’t think of any other reason why so many candidates would apply.’’

Echoing his thoughts was IIT-Guwahati director Gautam Barua, who said that students across the country were now aware that a reservation policy was in place. “An OBC student who scored 80% or 85% will psychologically feel that he has a better chance to get into the IITs now that there’s reservation.’’ With so many OBC applicants, the IITs may be able to fill all the seats reserved in that category, he added.

The stakes in this exam are going to be high for OBC students as well as those from the general category. Close to 90,000 OBC students from the noncreamy layer will compete for 1,245 seats (72 aspirants to a seat). And close to 2.3 lakh general category candidates will vie for 3,728 spots (62 hopefuls per seat).

In the 2008 JEE, if the last general category student was admitted with an overall score of 172 out of 489, the aggregate cut-off for an SC/ST student was 104 (after a 40% relaxation). If the general category cut-off remains the same this year, the bar for SC/ST candidates will be lowered to 86 (50% of 172). Subject-wise cut-offs would be similarly affected.

Like last year, the number of students planning to take the JEE has risen by over 30%. The Mumbai zone has the highest number of applicants, followed by Chennai, Kharagpur and Delhi.

2006-2008 are the number of students who took the JEE from each zone
JEE 2009 refers to applications received by the IITs (online applications not included) for JEE 2009 to be held in April 2009 (The IIT reserve 15% and 7.5% seats in each program for the scheduled caste and scheduled tribes respectively. Starting 2008, all IITs set aside seats for the Other Backward Classes; most IITs reserved 9% seats for OBCs in 2008.)

Start-up firms march into IIT to woo freshers

Hemali Chhapia I TNN

Mumbai: Head hunters from start-ups are usually elbowed out by the bigwigs during placement season at Indian Institutes of Technology, when fancy compensation figures win the day. But this time, it’s a different story.

Of the 600 students graduating from IIT-Bombay this year, more than 140 have signed up for interviews to be taken by new venture firms on Sunday.

Sixteen of these young firms, including Maharaja Games, Pagalguy.com, IWeb, Hidden Reflex, Redb-us.in, Zice and Naaptol.com, landed at the Powai campus on Saturday. And, their aim was to convince the freshers of how important they would be for the development of these newventure groups.

Cyrus Vesvikar from the institute’s entrepreneurship cell said, “IIT-Bombay students placed in these start-ups will be directly absorbed in the core teams of the companies, which will offer them an opportunity to take decisions at the highest level and face the toughest of challenges, something that a big firm will not let them do at the beginning.”

Akash Dongre, COO of Mofirst, said, “Freshers will become industry-ready right from the first day as they will face the toughest of the challenges. We basically save the time big firms spend on training.’’

For the start-up firms, Vimal Shah, head of Animedia said, having IIT students work there would definitely enhance their performance.

And to top it all, the startups are offering not just toplevel posts to the freshers, but also quite a decent compensation package. “This year, we plan to get almost 40 students placed in new firms. That would be tough considering that most of the freshers have already been placed by now. But looking at the enthusiasm among students, we feel we would get as many to join lesser known companies,’’ Vesvikar added.

Teens get a taste of business

Anahita Mukherji | TNN

Mumbai: Those who launch a new business during an economic downturn can hardly expect their product to sell like hot cakes—unless, of course, the product is hot cakes. A bunch of Class XI commerce students in the city has got into the entrepreneurial spirit, and is gaining hands-on business experience running its new company, which manufactures brownies.

The 16-year-old commerce students from RN Podar school, Santa Cruz, put their heads together to create their own company, complete with a CEO, board of directors and shareholders. The five directors pooled in their own money, a grand total of Rs 3,750. They generated an equal amount by selling shares in the company to their classmates. “We used the money to set up Brownies Inc. We bought two ovens and an egg beater, and rented a classroom from the school at Rs 200 per month. That’s where we manufacture the brownies,’’ says CEO Arnav Singh Bisht.

The purchase team buys the ingredients, the production team bakes the brownies, and the sales team walks around school with trays of the finished product, priced at Rs 10 a piece.

Brownies Inc is part of the company project begun by Junior Achievement (JA), an organisation that works with schools nationwide to give students a taste of the outside world, so that they’re better prepared for choosing a career. JA has started a similar project in a school in Chandigarh, and another one in Bangalore. The board of Brownies Inc initially consisted of both students and a few teachers and members of JA. But within the first few weeks of the company’s formation, school authorities pulled back and let students take their own decisions.

“The company is doing really well, but the most important part of this exercise is for students to develop interpersonal skills as well as to grasp issues related to scaling up a company and maintaining quality control,’’ says Ramesh Krishnamurthy, who heads JA’s western region operations.

A few days ago, the two-month-old Brownies Inc suffered a setback. “A whole batch of brownies didn’t turn out well, and we had to discard it,’’ says one of the directors, Risheeta Agrawal.

BROWNIE COMPANY Student-run firm has plans to diversify into carrot cake

Mumbai: Brownies Inc, a company launched by Class XI commerce students of R N Podar school, Santa Cruz, recently survived its first setback, when an entire batch of brownies had to be thrown away, resulting in a loss. “We decided to discard them all the same and write off our loss, because we didn’t want to compromise on quality. And we thought it would be unethical to provide our customers with a product that wasn’t good enough,’’ says Brownies Inc’s 16-year-old CEO, Arnav Singh Bisht.

For production team member Haren Paul Rao, the recent mishap was heart-breaking, especially as the brownies are baked during the students’ free periods.

The company has been a huge success at the school, as students of all ages readily fork out their pocket money on the freshlybaked brownies. The school even hired Brownies Inc for its annual day function, buying brownies from its students.

Encouraged by its success with brownies, the company is considering branching out into carrot cake as well. “Many students are weight-conscious, and one can’t stay slim eating brownies everyday. So we thought carrot cake may be a good idea, especially since carrots are cheap,’’ adds Risheeta.

Working for Brownies Inc is no labour of love—students in all the departments of the company, except the board of directors, receive a salary ranging from Rs 10 to Rs 20 per session.

Podar school principal Avnita Bir says the exercise has helped students get hands-on experience of what they read in their textbooks. “They have a better understanding of what it means to form a company, raise capital and sign MoUs,’’ she adds.

The young entrepreneurs of Brownies Inc are very attached to their creation. “We’ll continue working for the company even in Class XII. Eventually, we may sell the company to our juniors,’’ says Risheeta.

SUCCESS IS SWEET: Brownies Inc entrepreneurs display their product.

‘We can reverse poverty, but not global warming’

Q& A

Paris-based political scientist Susan George, one of Europe’s best-known public intellectuals, spoke to Pamela Philipose during her recent visit to Delhi:

Would you change the argument you made in your first book of the 1970s, ‘How The Other Half Dies’?
No. Unfortunately. Of course, there have been changes in the scope of hunger and where it’s most prevalent. Another big change is the fact that the food riots of last spring were global in scope. That’s a world first: earlier they were either local or national. It’s obvious now that neo-liberal answers to the crisis are discredited. Meanwhile, millions of small farmers have been ruined. They have been dispossessed of any possibility of either growing their food or buying it because they don’t have jobs. Governments, if they continue like this, are playing with fire because they are not only contributing to destroying the base of food security, they are creating conditions for future social upheaval. So, it seems to me that this is a time when one can advocate different policies and hope governments listen.

Women seem to be among the worst affected in such times.
In most societies, women are the first victims of hunger. I was shocked to read that nine out of 10 pregnant women in India are getting less than 80 per cent of the necessary caloric and protein supply. Women are very often food producers but are not in control of its marketing and, therefore, the resultant income. This is an ongoing problem. It has nothing to do with the actual amount of food available. Cultural and anthropological factors determine how food is distributed — inside families, communities, countries.

What do you see as the big crisis facing the world?
There are so many that you can talk about them in many plurals. The social crisis of poverty is getting worse: the rich are getting richer, the poor, poorer. There’s no hope of ever reaching the Millennium Development Goals. The social crisis is aggravated by the food crisis. There’s a water crisis, which means increasing numbers won’t have access to sanitation and drinking water, which in turn means a health crisis. Then, of course, recently, we had the financial crisis, which affects everybody even if they don’t have a rupee in the stock market because it impacts the real economy.

But the most serious crisis of all is the ecological crisis. We can reverse poverty today, but not global warming. Once it’s off the charts, it’s off the charts. It’s going to make the lives of poor people unbearable in large swathes of the world. This process is happening faster than scientists had predicted. We haven’t even begun to measure the impacts of this crisis. So that’s the one that keeps me awake.

Women’s Feature Service

Now, learn the ABCs of regional languages for free

Pronoti Datta | TNN

Mumbai: It’s a common lament among Indian language teachers in the city. As English has become the unequivocal language of progress, regional languages are being consigned to the attic of anachronisms along with letter writing and safari suits. It’s a sorry state of affairs if finding an individual below the age of 40 who can read Bankim Chandra in Bengali is about as hard as locating an honest man in the BMC. However, staving off imminent endangerment are a bunch of valiant language schools that entice students with the offer of free classes.

Suhasini Kirtikar has been teaching Marathi at Mumbai Marathi Sahitya Sangh (MMSS) for the past 34 years. Apart from the MMSS headquarter at Girgaum, classes are held at branches of the Bombay Tamil Sangham in Chembur and Sion, which also has free classes in Tamil. “We teach there just for our pleasure,’’ Kirtikar says.

It was a keenness for languages that led 23-year-old singer Sagar Sawarkar to Pratima Goswami’s Bengali class in Goregaon. It was a good experience, he says.

Goswami rues the fact that there are few youngsters in the despairingly small class she conducts. A teacher for the past 29 years, she runs one of the three centres of Kolkata’s Banga Bhasha Prachar Samiti (BBPS)—the other centres are in Thane and Powai—where she instructs a class of about eight students. “Bengalis in Mumbai are not interested in learning the language,’’ she says angrily.

The Bengali teacher would find a sympathiser in Satram Makhija, a retired ayurvedic doctor who runs a month-long Sindhi class in Thane every May. Makhija began his summer class in 1991 in an attempt to teach his language to as many youngsters as he could. He says he used to have nearly 80 students a few years ago. These days, attendance is down by half.

On the other hand, Zuber Azmi will be starting free Urdu classes to remind Mumbaikars that the Hindi they speak is full of the lofty north Indian tongue. “Urdu is the common minimum language,’’ he points out. Azmi’s dream is to restore to the language the glory of the early twentieth century when the tea shops of Nagpada and Mohammed Ali Road resounded with Urdu verse by poets and writers such as Kaifi Azmi and Sadat Hasan Manto.

For details of classes, call Banga Bhasha Prachar Samiti (Bengali) 2877-4261, Bombay Tamil Sangham (Tamil) 2409-4021, Mumbai Marathi Sahitya Sangh (Marathi) 2385-6303, Satram Makhija (Sindhi) 99204-69040, Zuber Azmi (Urdu) 93226-95208

Ride like the wind with a car that runs on just thin air

London: Soon, your carbon footprint may vanish into thin air, literally. An American company has designed a “green car” that runs on wind energy and can attain a top speed of 249kmph.

Designed in California, the environment friendly Formula AE car will initially use a solar-powered battery to move, but later depend upon the airflow around it to power a turbine. The high performance car will take less than four seconds to accelerate from 0 to 96kmph. The car is expected to cost around £100,000 when it hits the market. The two-seater’s bodywork boasts paper-thin solar panelling that could fully charge the battery in just 1.5 hours. However, this time will be reduced to just six minutes with a new prototype battery. A full battery would enable the drivers to cover more than 322km or to race around a track for at least an hour.

An advanced alternating current induction motor with a power output of 212 kilowatts will propel the Formula AE. The chassis will be constructed from lightweight aluminium and super strong steel in a Formula 1-style monocoque shell. Rory Handel and Maxx Bricklinas from Beverly Hills, California designed the sleek motor of the car, and they expect the prototype to be ready in August.

“The Formula AE car embraces a rarely thought of alternative source of energy,” the Telegraph quoted a RORMaxx spokesman as saying. He said: “The target market would be the sports car, track day, eco-concerned auto-enthusiast. In addition, those enthusiasts who support and would want to promote the future development of revolutionary green technologies.”

He added that funding for the project was from a major “fuel and commodities corporation” which wishes to remain anonymous. And he said that the engineering expertise comes from two professional mechanical engineers and Handel, who used to work for a racing team as an engineer. ANI

Our children may go to school, but do they really learn?

It Does Not Add Up

Rukmini Banerji

One morning in a village in Sultanpur district, Uttar Pradesh, we were making a village report card for education. Every household was asked if its children were enrolled in school. Every child was asked to read a short paragraph and do a simple subtraction problem. As was customary, we went to the Pradhan to tell him what we were doing. The Pradhan took a cursory look at us and said, “Achcha... survey hai? Kariye, kariye” (Oh... It’s a survey? OK, go on). Accustomed to numerous surveys, he did not seem interested in what the survey was about.

We moved systematically household by household, hamlet by hamlet talking to parents, interacting with children. Questions like “Do your children go to school?” got quick and sometimes disinterested answers. But us asking the children to read grabbed everyone’s attention. Children would flock around, wanting to try. Parents would stop working and come to observe. Children playing in the fields put on shirts before coming to read. Mothers and fathers called their children back from wherever they were to be “tested”. The exercise was transformed from a “survey” — collecting data for someone else — into information gathering that everyone wanted right now.

The curiosity was immense. Many parents had no idea whether their children could read or do arithmetic. This was true of both illiterate and literate parents. Young people who were watching the proceedings with interest were requested to help. Within minutes, the whole business turned into a hugely absorbing exercise with people participating in getting children to read or discussing why children could or could not read. Yes, there was some blaming. In Uttar Pradesh, the blame often starts with the British, then moves to the chief minister, then to schools, teachers and onwards.

Finally, the hamlet results were declared: “There are 40 households, 75 children. Seventy children go to school but only 35 of them can read or do sums.” Even as the results were being digested, there was intense discussion about how this was not okay and what could be done to improve things. Clearly the situation would not sort itself out. It needed urgent and rapid change. People agreed that schools must work, teachers must teach but that parents or someone at home or in the neighbourhood too had to help.

Stepping back and looking at the unfolding scene, you could very definitively say that this exercise mattered to those people because it was about children they knew and cared about. It mattered because it was new: people did not know about children’s learning or how to look at it in this simple way. It mattered because they had seen the information being generated right before their eyes. The simplicity of the tool and the method mattered in enabling people to participate. What also mattered was that it was easy to know the results — for your own children and for all the children in the neighbourhood. Whether people were literate or illiterate, it was obvious to all that their own school-going children should be able to do these basic tasks.

In a few days we finished the village report card. We went back to the Pradhan. Without looking up from what he was doing he asked where he should sign. The report card had no need of a signature. Pradhanji thought this was very odd. He looked up at me and said, “Numbers have to be sent up and that needs my signature.” I tried to explain what the report card exercise had found. He listened for a minute and then stated loudly, “The numbers are false. No one actually goes and collects information from all households in the village. That is too much work.” I painstakingly took him through the results — hamlet by hamlet. Now he was paying attention. At the end of my explanation, he blurted out, “The figures have to be wrong.

How can it be that children are going to school and they cannot read?” Now we had Pradhanji’s full attention. There was only one way to settle this issue. Armed with the reading tool, Pradhanji walked into the village. Every child he met was asked to read. By the tenth child, Pradhanji sat down and said, “Yeh to meri izzat ka sawal hai” (This is a question of my honour). He asked how this could be the situation in his village, which he didn’t know about.

The fourth ASER (Annual Status of Education Report) for 2008 is being released today. ASER was designed around countless experiences like the one in Sultanpur, scaled for application in every district in the country. For four years, it has been a nationwide citizens’ initiative to understand the status of children’s schooling and learning in every rural district in the country. Using a common set of simple tools and a common sampling frame, in each district there is a local organisation that does an ASER and then disseminates its findings. Like the village report cards, ASER too is fundamentally based on the participation of ordinary people.

If we do not know, we cannot act. Waiting for the government alone to improve things will take a long time. Like Pradhanji and the parents in Sultanpur, it is essential that we get involved in measuring, understanding and acting to improve the future of our children.

The writer is a Delhi-based educationist.