PRIMARY EDUCATION

EDUCATING Ammi and Abba

The Tanzeem-e-Walidaen works at enlightening Muslim parents as a prelude to schooling their children

Mohammed Wajihuddin | TNN

In an airy first-floor room at suburban Vikhroli, around a dozen middle-aged couples are listening attentively to a bespectacled man holding forth in chaste Urdu. Ibrahim Abedi talks passionately, his speech laced liberally with Quranic commands and couplets of the revered poet Allama Mohammad Iqbal. At the end, he hammers home a basic point: “Don’t let your children go astray. Hand them over to our custody.

No, this isn’t a dharma guru’s discourse to his devoted disciples on parental care. Rather, it’s an adult education class with a difference—one which parents of poor Muslim students attend to equip themselves to deal with the vicissitudes of their first-generation-learner children’s academic lives. Conducted by the Tanzeem-e-Walidaen (Parents’ Association), a group which reaches out to needy children through their parents, its unusual inasmuch as methods go: while many NGOs work directly with disadvantaged children to keep them in class, the Tanzeem first drills some discipline into parents through motivational talks and counselling by clinical psychologists.

“There’s no point spending time and energy on kids whose parents are not motivated,’’ says Abedi, Tanzeem-e-Walidaen’s general secretary. “Since 1997, we have guided over 15,000 students. Around 75% of them have cleared the SSC exams. That means we have substantially checked the drop-out rate among the targeted group.’’

Since the Tanzeem confines its work to parents who send their wards to municipal schools, its volunteers scour civic schools in minority pockets like Bhendi Bazaar, Kurla, Govandi, Mumbra and Bhiwandi. Once the back-benchers are identified, the organisation approaches parents. Why municipal schools? Apart from the concern about poor kids dropping out and “swelling the number of unemployable and unemployed angry youth’’, there’s another reason: a municipal rule says that no child till the fourth grade will be failed, and by the time the children reach fifth grade, many of them are hopelessly unfit to be in higher grades. It is here that the Tanzeem intervenes.

The parents are first told why they need to enroll their kids in special classes conducted by the Tanzeem’s teachers. They are also told that poverty should not be an excuse to take their kids out of school. A few sessions later, parents learn that their seemingly dull kids too could excel if guided properly. Examples of successful people, who also had humble beginnings, are given. Parents are free to voice their doubts and inhibitions, if any. “At our initial meetings, we heard parents complain against teachers who failed their children,” says Ali M Shamsi, the Tanzeem’s president. “We asked the parents to evaluate their own conduct.’’

As a pilot project, the Tanzeem “raided’’ the slums of Kurla, held meetings with the parents and adopted over 200 children, incubating them for five months. “As the word spread, people started coming to us with requests to coach their children beyond the fifth grade as well,” says Sheikh Abdullah, president of the Tanzeem’s Kurla unit. “We didn’t do that but guided them to other organisations which helped them financially.’’

The result has been overwhelming. Kids who didn’t know the three Rs even in the fifth standard are showing rapid progress. “My daughter didn’t even know how to write her name when we brought her here. Now she is in college,’’ says Qamruddin Khan, a factory worker. “My other four kids were also coached and are doing well academically.

Most of the parents are poor— tailors, taxi drivers, labourers at construction sites and factory workers. “I probably wouldn’t have sent my three daughters to college had these people not convinced me. They guided me and my children at the right time,’’ says a visibly obliged Ansar Patel, a BEST employee and father of three. Patel’s elder daughter Sajeda, now a third-year BA student, recalls: “I was very inhibited and couldn’t even go out alone. Their training equipped me with the confidence to do my things on my own.’’

BACK TO SCHOOL Poverty is not an excuse to deny your kids education, parents are told

Soon, the biggest thing since www

The Grid Coming To A Computer Near You

Shobhan Saxena | TNN

CERN (Geneva): With domain names in Hindi, Arabic and Chinese set to become a reality on the web, the pundits in this science hub of Switzerland, where the internet was arguably invented, claim the next giant leap towards internationalisation will be the grid, which is just weeks away from powering up. The grid, made of thousands of desktops, laptops, supercomputers, data vaults, mobile phones, meteorological sensors and telescopes, will start work when proton beams collide in the world’s biggest experiment ever inside a deep tunnel here on the French-Swiss border.

It is a revolution, say scientists of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) because it uses the internet but is not the internet. Using cloud computing, the grid will combine the computing resources of more than 100,000 processors from more than 170 sites in 34 countries and will be accessible to thousands of physicists globally. The scientists claim it will change the way the information superhighway works.

Small computer grids similar to power grids have been in operation for some time, but CERN’s will be the biggest one of them all and will become a reality when its Large Hadron Collider (LHC) becomes operational this month.

Maarten Litmaath, the Dutch physicist who heads CERN’s computing centre, told TOI, “When it begins operation, the LHC will produce roughly 15 petabytes (15 million gigabytes or equivalent to storage capacity of 20 million CDs) of data annually which thousands of scientists around the world will access and analyze.”

Grid: The Future of Science
The Web just shares info on computers, the Grid also shares computing power and data storage capacity Scientists can log on anywhere in the world, processing on machines across the planet CERN needs the Grid to store 15 pentabytes — equivalent to a 20-km high stack of CDs Grid computing can help drug discovery by speeding up the computer-based screening and testing process

Grid to be ‘global computer’
Our grid will make it possible for scientists around the world to access this data real time.’’ Till now, a giant grid was considered something of a pipe dream, says Litmaath. Its implications, he says, are enormous. “Imagine several million computers from all over the world, and owned by thousands of different people. And imagine if these PCs, workstations, servers and storage elements can all be connected to form a single, huge and super-powerful computer. This sprawling, global computer is what the grid will be.’’

CERN says it is only right and proper that the giant grid be developed in the place where the world wide web was invented.

Although there are several claimants to the internet’s authorship, it was here that British software whiz Tim Berners-Lee and other scientists set the stage for the internet explosion in 1990. At the time, Berners-Lee’s boss at CERN offered the measured response—“vague but impressive’’—to the scientists’ proposed system that would allow scientists around the world to swap information on research.

It was in that proposal, written in a small room in a CERN building, that the terms “http’’ (global hypertext language) appeared for the first time. A small placard saying ‘The web was invented here’ still hangs on the door of the room where Berners-Lee and the other scientists developed the first blueprint of the internet.

The web changed the world forever and now CERN expects great results from grid computing, which, Litmaath says, will power science around the globe—scientists can share data, data storage space, computing power, and results. Together, researchers can tackle bigger questions than ever before: from disease cures and disaster management to global warming and the mysteries of the universe.

CERN already has at least three centres in India with which it shares data and expertise on a regular basis, something that can only grow exponentially.

In ’06, a test grid analysed 300,000 avian flu drug components

FOR THE RECORD MOHAMED NASHEED ‘Climate change will be an election issue in five years’

Young presidents are in vogue. None more so perhaps than Maldives’ 41-year-old president Mohamed Nasheed, who ended dictator Maumoon Abdul Gayoom’s threedecade grip on power. Nasheed, who has long prodded the country’s nascent democratic process, has been to prison 16 times, been tortured twice and remains committed to liberal politics. He’s been in office just over a year and is busy trying to build new institutions to last, even as he tries to save his country from disappearing — literally. If global warming proceeds apace, sea levels around the Maldives will rise 60 cm in the next 50 years, swallowing large tracts of the country, says the president. During a visit to Delhi, he talked climate change and constitutional change to Ranjan Roy. Excerpts from the interview

Are you able to adhere to your roadmap of establishing democracy in Maldives?

Our expectations were a little higher than what we are achieving right now. In terms of institution-building, the judiciary lacks the capacity to deliver. With the first multi-party election, we were able to come up with the first fresh executive. With the first parliamentary elections, we were able to come up with a fresh parliament. But we never had anything fresh in the judiciary, so the judicial system is as it was under the dictatorship.

Do you trust the old judiciary?
I trust them, but the thing is, to my mind, they do not know what is going on. They might, on one fine day, ask the president’s office for instructions on asentence. The next judge might do something more ridiculous against the legislature or the executive, another judge might start giving media interviews.

Do you want a liberal judiciary or a bit of shariah?
We don’t want a mixture of shariah. We are looking at a liberal judiciary. But you have to be mindful that Maldives is a Muslim society. So the shariah and the liberal judiciary aren’t contradictory. Shariah can be as liberal as common law or Roman law. The other area is corruption. I can’t expect people to be completely honest the very next day.

You’ve had personal experience of torture?
I was tortured twice but that was long ago. But we do not want to torture our people. But there will always be some people at the penitentiary who’ll do it.

Should the man you ousted, Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, be worried?
We don’t think Gayoom should be worried. But he should take responsibility for his portion and say sorry.

How can India help?
India is already helping. The Prime Minister was very quick to give us a soft loan of $100 million — 50 million in grant and 50 million in loan. So, at least I got three months to sort things out. It gave us that breathing space. India is also very willing to invest heavily in lucrative areas like tourism. India can assist us by building capacity in the judiciary. And India can assist us so much by being the huge example that it is. Maybe others misunderstand India but I don’t because maybe I know India.

On climate change, does Maldives get the sinking feeling that no one is really bothered about the victims?
We need shared responsibility. You can’t ask countries like India to stop consumption. We might be the victims but there are millions and billions of others. I shouldn’t be so selfish to push for that. Countries like India should invest heavily in renewable energy and maintain lower emission levels and higher energy consumption. I think the winners of the 21st century will be those who are bold enough to venture into new technology. We are on the verge of a technological breakthrough, a revolution again that would have more impact than the industrial revolution perhaps.

Do politicians worldwide really care about global warming or are they just protecting their turf?
I don’t think people are still that concerned about it. Countries still don’t have climate change as a major election issue. Until it becomes an election issue, politicians aren’t going to take notice. But it will become one in the next five years. There is a new generation of people growing up for whom climate change is a serious problem. Even as early as next summer, you’ll see huge numbers of people out on the streets, in the same fashion they were out in the 1960s, to save the world. There are narratives about the end of the world in every culture and religion, so here is going to be no backlash against the emergence of climate change as the big issue.

DID YOU KNOW?
Maldives gained independence from Britain on July 26, 1965
It’s the smallest Asian country
At just 4 ft 11 in above sea level, it’s the lowest country on the planet
Its original inhabitants were Buddhist; Islam arrived in 1153

IIT agrees to bare JEE marks, but only just

Insists On Hard Copy That Makes Detecting Anomalies ‘Impossible’ Manoj Mitta | TNN New Delhi: Stung by the exposure of admission anomalies in recent years, the IIT system has come up with an innovative method of blocking transparency even as it agreed to give data under RTI on the marks obtained by the four lakh candidates in this year’s joint entrance examination (JEE). It insisted on giving the data only in the hard copy running into hundreds of thousands of pages rather than in the more convenient form of a CD. The information seeker, Rajeev Kumar, a computer science professor in IIT Kharagpur, is crying foul. For, the hard copy would not only result in a steep increase in the cost of information (running into six figures) but also make it almost impossible for him to detect irregularities in the latest JEE as he did in the three previous ones by analyzing the electronic data that had then by given to him under RTI. As a result of this change in the strategy of the IIT system, central information commissioner Shailesh Gandhi fixed a hearing for November 6 specially to resolve this soft vs hard debate. The hearing follows the unusual reasons given by Gautam Barua, director of IIT Guwahati and overall incharge of JEE 2009, for his failure to comply with the CIC’s disclosure direction passed on July 30. In his first mail to CIC on October 2, Barua said that as there were a number of RTI applications seeking the CD, “we are apprehensive that this request for electronic data is to profit from it by using it for IIT JEE coaching purposes (planning, targeting particular cities, population segments, etc).” The reference to the coaching institutes is reminiscent of the recent controversy over the move to raise the bar on 12th class marks to be eligible for IIT selection. Asserting that IITs had “nothing to hide regarding the results”, Barua said “we are ready to show the running of the software with the original data to the CIC, if it so desires.” As a corollary, Barua made an issue of the fact that Kumar “has not asked to see the data, but he wants an electronic version delivered to him. Why is this so?” Faculty to accept new pay structure The stand-off between the IIT faculty and the government over the “anomalies” in pay structure finally ended on Saturday with the teachers’ body deciding to accept the new package in the “interest” of the institutes, but maintained that concerns still remain. The All India IIT Faculty Federation asked the teachers of the seven IITs to agree to the new pay structure. “We have requested the faculty to accept the pay package in the interest of the IIT system. But we will pursue with the HRD ministry and the board of governors of the IITs on certain issues till they are resolved,” federation president M Thenmozhi said. AGENCIES

Saltwater film in clouds to cool Earth?

Geoengineering Technique Will Help Reflect Back More Sunlight

Washington: Amid growing concern over global warming, scientists have come up with an unique scheme to cool the earth with the help of a geoengineering method that would increase cloud reflectivity over the ocean.

Under the scheme, the scientists would increase cloud reflectivity over the ocean by spraying them with an ultra-fine saltwater mist from ships, a report in the Scientific American journal said.

“The clouds, containing more particles, would cast enough sunlight back into space to at least partially offset the warming effects of all that CO ² from burningfossil fuels,” the researchers said.

They added, “After all, clouds already reflect more of the sun’s radiation back into space than the amount trapped by human emissions of CO ² . So why not make them even more effective.”

Stephen Salter, an emeritus professor of engineering design at the University of Edinburgh, who is leading the research said, “marine cloud brightening could be done by populating the world's oceans with up to 1,500 ships of a somewhat exotic design — sometimes known as albedo yachts.”

“Each vessel would be remote-controlled, wind-powered, and capable of generating (via turbines dragged through the water) the electricity required to create a mist of seawater and loft it 1,000 meters into the atmosphere,” he added. Scientists have mixed reactions to the idea, which was first proposed in 1999.

For instance, Andy Jones at the Hadley Center for Climate Prediction and Research thinks if marine cloud brightening were deployed in the Atlantic, it might help turn the Amazon rainforest into a desert by cooling the South Atlantic, which would lead to less evaporation from the ocean, thus reducing rainfall. PTI

Cheap green tech stays elusive Rich Nations Refuse To Budge At Delhi, Copenhagen Climate Deal Hopes Dim TIMES NEWS NETWORK New Delhi: The divide bet

Rich Nations Refuse To Budge At Delhi, Copenhagen Climate Deal Hopes Dim

TIMES NEWS NETWORK

New Delhi: The divide between rich and developing countries on the prickly issue of intellectual property regimes for green technologies came to the fore on the concluding day of the high-level climate change technology conference in Delhi on Friday.

With a consensus eluding the conference attended by 58 countries, including the US, China, Japan and several key G77 partners, references to the contentious topic were left out of the ‘Delhi Declaration on Global Cooperation on Climate Technology’, released on Friday at the end of the meet.

India, China and other G77 countries have for years demanded that industrialised nations should ease the IPR regime or buy out technologies from private hands to give them to the developing countries. The rich countries, which hold much of the technologies, instead say ‘investment environment’ should be improved for the private sector to bring in green technologies.

While some progress has been made on other elements of what could possibly form a deal on technology diffusion at Copenhagen, IPR remains the most contentitious subject with little breakthrough evident even at the end of the Bangkok round of negotiations concluded in the second week of October.

At the conclusion, the chair, environment minister Jairam Ramesh, noted: “There will be a continued need for further consultation on the role of IPR. We have recognised that there are different views on the issue.” He pointed out that countries had to still discuss how to ensure that “IPRs do not become a barrier to the achievement of common global goals”.

The high-level meeting in Delhi was not part of a formal negotiating process which is undertaken only under the UN but a strong signal from the meet would have influenced the UN talks at Barcelona and Copenhagen later. But at the meeting, several industrialised country representatives argued that the IPR regimes should not be touched.

PM Manmohan Singh, while inaugurating the meet, had said, “Climate friendly and environmentally sound technologies should be viewed as global public goods. This implies that the IPR regime should balance rewards for innovators with the need to promote common good.”

‘Emission more serious than fundamentalism’
New Delhi: The very existence of Maldives is threatened by climate change. So for Mohammed Nasheed, its young president and now the poster boy for climate change advocacy, global warming is a “more serious threat to the international order than Islamic radicalism, piracy or sharing of resources”. Addressing a think-tank on ‘environment and conflict resolution’, Nasheed said India’s position on climate change was acceptable, but appealed that renewable energy be used to provide power to over 300 million people. “Why do you want to go to yesterday’s diesel when you can go for tomorrow’s renewable energy and new technology? The world is on the threshold of new technology and you will be in the forefront if you use them,” he said. Nasheed said climate change was a real threat. “If we believe in science, and two plus two is four, climate change is happening and it is great threat to the world,” he said. TNN

Maldives president Mohd Nasheed

Gurus work nights to better grades

Himanshu Kaushik | TNN

Mahuva (Bhavnagar): It’s 10 pm. As Asarana village sleeps, a school wakes up in this part of Bhavnagar district abuzz with students, their hair neatly combed and ready with bags and notebooks.

A group of zealous teachers with a conviction to inject academic brilliance into students of this village have helped launch this unique night school at the government-run Gyanjyot High School at Mahuva. Students are flocking to this new initiative.

It all began a couple of years ago when Anand Seta, principal of the school, thought of extra coaching classes for students after they fared poorly in the boards. He discussed the idea with other teachers — D D Modhera and A U Rajyaguru — who agreed and decided to be part of this extra curricular activity.

At the night school, classes begin at 9 pm, when students assemble with their tiffins, eat together and then settle down to study. At midnight, they spread mattresses and sleep on the school premises with their teachers and the principal. In the morning, they sweep the ground, water trees and head home to get ready for regular school as teachers get ready for extra classes for girls between 8 am and 12 noon, just before school begins.

Thus, as results of the class X board exam in other schools here have hovered between 17% and 30%, Gyanjyot High School saw a 90% success rate last year. “In class VIII, I could not even read and now I am very good in mathematics and science. Three teachers take turns in teaching mathematics, science, English and Gujarati,” said Amit Kalsaria, son of a pan shop-owner who wants to become an engineer.

Mahesh Varia, son of a farm labourer, who dreams of becoming a doctor, added: “My father can hardly afford schooling expenses,so these revision sessions are a boon.”

Anand Seta, principal of Gyanjyot High School, conducts a special class for boys, which begins at 9 pm