No SC/STs in six new IITs this year

66 Reserved Seats Will Be Filled In 2009

TIMES NEWS NETWORK

New Delhi/Mumbai: The six new IITs will not have any SC/ST student this year. The 66 vacancies for them (19 for SCs and 47 for STs) will now be filled next year, over and above the prescribed quota. No decision, however, has been taken on the 68 vacant seats in the Indian School of Mines, Dhanbad and 14 empty slots in IT-BHU (IT school in the Benaras Hindu University).

Meanwhile, preparatory classes in the old IITs will be larger than previous years. The number of students admitted to the year-long preparatory course is based on the vacancy of reserved category seats in each discipline in each IIT. As three of the total four seats reserved for Scheduled Tribe students in the chemical engineering stream at IIT-Delhi fell vacant, three ST students will be admitted to the preparatory course.

Taking that logic forward, the seven old IITs will admit 163 SC students and 216 ST students to the preparatory course, according to information put out by the joint admission board, and those seats will be considered as filled seats. Dhande and M S Ananth, director of IIT-Madras, hence said, all the reserved seats in the old IITs have been occupied. The preparatory course is a feeder class; it trains quota students for a year to equip them to qualify for the IITs. After a year, these students need to take a test and they are admitted to the IIT only if they clear the test.

But the preparatory course will not run in the new institutions which have 66 vacant seats. Recreating the Nehruvian style of institution building, the IITs have also decided to reach out to Indian researchers and engineers abroad to come back and join the new IITs. “In the 1950s, jobs were offered in canteens and offices. We have a goal of hiring 3,000 teachers over the next three years. We have decided to reach out to 50,000 engineers/researchers all over the world. Even if 500 come, it would be fine,’’ Sanjay Dhande, director of IIT, Kanpur, said after a meeting of the IIT heads here on Wednesday.

He also said it was payback time for the seven old IITs by mentoring the six new ones. Dhande said the vacancies of SC/STs of JEE 2008 in the six new IITs would be made available for the admission exercise of 2009 as a one-time measure.

This year, 3.11 lakh students took the JEE for 6,992 seats in 13 IITs. Of these, 414 seats were reserved for ST candidates, but only 159 were shortlisted. Similarly, only 690 were shortlisted for the 832 SC seats. The OBC figures were 1,099 out of 1,134. The IIT directors also said all attempts are being made to ensure the brand equity of the institutes does not get diluted.

Get CAT scores through SMS, email
Ahmedabad: For any Common Admission Test (CAT) applicant, more than the months of preparation, what seemed longer were the few hours that they had to spend in front of a computer, waiting for scores. But the candidates for CAT 2008 to be conducted by IIMs in November will not have to wait at all as their score will be announced by a beep. For the first time, the IIMs will be making the CAT scores available on SMS and e-mail. The option of seeing the score on the website and receiving a formal letter from the institute still exists, but the SMS and email will help the candidates learn of their scores sooner. The institute will close the selling of application forms on Thursday and the test will be conducted on November 16. The CAT results will be declared on January 9, 2009.

Vasundhara Vyas Mehta

Math and English on the STREET

The students of this school may up and move anytime, but the teacher will stay

Pronoti Datta | TNN

Ramesh Joshi hasn’t watched a film in over a year. On the rare occasion he’s free, the 18-year-old Virar resident permits himself to glimpse movie clips on the internet or listen to some bhangra. The rest of the day goes in long journeys on the train, attending Siddharth College, coaching teenagers as part of Akanksha’s social leadership programme and teaching street kids. “I like to be busy all the time,’’ he explains with a gravity that matches his prematurely grey hair. “An empty mind is the devil’s workshop.’’

Joshi’s missionary zeal to educate underprivileged kids led to Ashayein, a year-old project that involves teaching street children at Churchgate and Worli. The initiative is part of Youth Ventures, a programme that mentors 27 social entrepreneurs by giving them fellowships of Rs 10,000 to act on causes dear to them. Does his absence of a social life bother him? “When I serve people, I get a different kind of energy,’’ he says with a self-effacing quality that’s uncommon for someone his age.

It was only natural that Joshi chose to work with street kids. As a supervisor of a construction site at Cuffe Parade, his father helped poor children in the area get into schools. The student decided to take up where his father had left off and began to scout around for kids to teach. He zeroed in on a group of children who live across Fashion Street near Churchgate and a bunch that calls the area behind Worli’s Adarsh Nagar slums home. (The Worli branch is run by Joshi’s friend Tauqeer Sheikh.)

Thrice a week, Joshi, four volunteers and eight to 12 children occupy a quiet corner of the street to study. The pupils are between the ages of six and 14 and while most of them attend school, there are a few who are too poor to afford formal education. “We teach them whatever they feel like learning that day,’’ says Joshi. While the volunteers communicate with the children in Hindi, they teach them both Hindi and English as well as math.

Most of the kids’ parents have been supportive as they want better futures for their offspring. However, Joshi has had to field abuse from parents who consider education an indulgence and would rather their kids lend a hand at home. The social worker’s efforts have paid off. Just over two weeks into Ashayein, Joshi was given a pleasant surprise by one of his students, Sachin, who perfectly recited the English alphabet and showed off handwriting that was remarkably beautiful for an untutored kid. In “two-three weeks I made such a difference’’, Joshi muses. “If I continue like this the children will bloom.’’

However, given the nomadic lives of pavement dwellers, Joshi is afraid that he might one day find that his students have upped and left or been evicted. “I hope I continue with the same kids,’’ he says. “I only pray they let me make a difference in their lives.’’ The children have, in turn, made a profound impact on Joshi. “I’m more confident than before,’’ he points out. Ashayein has been one step forward in a series of efforts at overcoming his inhibitions. He spent six years training in naval exercises with the Sea Cadet Corp at Colaba. Two years ago, he joined Akanksha’s social leadership programme as a trainer educating teenagers about relevant issues such as the environment and child sexual abuse. He might wear his modesty like a badge, but there’s no mistaking Joshi’s supreme self-assurance.

The metamorphosis Joshi is experiencing is an indication that Youth Ventures has been a success, according to its director Vipin T. The aim of the programme is not “the impact the participants have on society but the transformative experience.’’ The 27 changemakers, he hopes, will engender a community of people who will alter the perception of social work, which continues to be regarded as the purview of people in “torn kurtas’’, to something that is “an integral part of life’’.

(This is part of an Independence Day series on youngsters who have chosen to light a candle rather than curse the darkness)

FROM SIR, WITH LOVE: A stone’s throw from Churchgate Station, a pavement turns into a patshala

Education as fundamental right soon?

Cabinet Takes Up Bill Promising Free Edu In 6-14 Age Group Today

Akshaya Mukul & Mahendra Kumar Singh | TNN

New Delhi: After a wait for four years, and after a lot of dithering and resistance from finance and law ministries, the Union Cabinet on Friday will finally take up for consideration the Right to Education Bill, promising free and compulsory education to children in the age group of 6-14, by making it a fundamental right.

The proposed enabling legislation, first mooted by the Kothari Commission in 1964 and passionately argued for by former education minister M C Chagla later, would come before the cabinet six years after the 86th Constitutional Amendment making free and compulsory education a fundamental right. Earlier it was part of Directive Principles of State Policy of the Constitution. The proposed bill is expected to be introduced in the monsoon session of Parliament and is unlikely to meet any resistance since both NDA and Left have been demanding this legislation. The Constitutional amendment was done during the NDA regime but it would be notified only after the enabling bill becomes a law.

The right to education will cost the exchequer Rs 12,000 crore a year, and even unaided schools would not be outside its ambit since 25% of seats would have to be reserved by them for poor children in the neighbourhood. The Centre would reimburse the cost to these schools. The legislation has host of features that stresses not only on reaching out to every child in the 6- 14 age group but also on quality and accountability of the state and education system.

To ensure the law gets effectively implemented, the bill has provisions prohibiting teachers from undertaking tuitions as well as not letting them being used for non-educational purposes. The bill provides for school management committee in all government and aided schools. It would monitor and oversee the working of the school, manage its assets and ensure quality. There is also a provision that teacher vacancy should never exceed 10% of the strength. To monitor the law implementation, the bill proposes a National Commission for Elementary Education.

TIMES VIEW
This is a cause very dear to us. On July 6, we launched the Teach India campaign to make our little contribution towards education for all. Now the government is set to give the movement a huge boost by making education a fundamental right. A lot of time has been lost—for 44 years we’ve toyed with the idea but just not moved ahead. There is no time to lose. It’s an idea whose time has come.

1st time, 2nd round of IIT admissions

Govt Asks Institutes To Lower Cut-Off Marks To Fill Vacant Quota Seats

Hemali Chhapia | TNN

Mumbai: In the history of the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT), never has there been a second round of admissions. This year, though, all vacant seats at the 13 IIT campuses, as also at IT-BHU and ISM-Dhanbad, will be filled after a second admission list is put out soon.

After a campaign by TOI, officials from the Union HRD ministry met the IIT chiefs in Delhi on Tuesday and asked them to fill up the vacant seats.However, what comes as a shock is that the HRD ministry is not interested in dereserving the vacant seats that were meant for SC, ST and OBC candidates. Instead, the ministry wants the premier engineering schools to dilute merit and further bring down the cut-offs to admit reserved category students. After Tuesday’s meeting, IIT-Delhi director Surendra Prasad said, “We will be taking additional students.’’ The IIT Joint Admission Board has called for an urgent meeting next week to discuss the modalities of filling up the seats that have gone abegging. Director of IIT-Madras M S Ananth pointed out that it would be criminal to take in students by further lowering the cut-offs (see box). “These students will suffer, and so will their self-confidence,’’ he told TOI.

While the last general category student secured admission scored 180, the last SC/ST candidate got 104.

More students will also be accommodated in the preparatory course, which is like a feeder class that trains SC/ST students for a year to equip them to qualify for the IITs. Students need to take a test at the end of the year-long tutorial. If they qualify, the IIT gates are opened to them. For the preparatory course, each IIT relaxes the lowest SC/ST cut-offs by 55%.

With that figure being 104 for both reserved categories this year, the preparatory course cut-off turned out to be 57 out of a total of 489. This cut-off will dip further if additional students have to be admitted.

Times View
We had argued last week that the 430-odd IIT seats that were going vacant because the reserved quotas (OBC/SC/ST) couldn’t be filled should be thrown open to general category candidates in a second round of admissions. Unfortunately, the government seems to have accepted part of our argument—that letting so many seats go unfilled is a waste of resource—and has twisted it into something that threatens to dilute academic standards. Remember that the cut-off for SC/ST students was a much lower 104 marks (out of 489 marks) compared to 180 for general category students. Even then, there weren’t enough students from the OBC/SC/ST categories to fill the entire reserved quota of 2,380 seats (out of a total of 6,992). Allowing general category students to fill up the unutilised quota would’ve resulted in bringing down their cut-off from 180 to say 170, which would still have been way above the 104 cut-off for SC/ST. Instead, the cut-offs for the reserved categories are now likely to be lowered still further. Apart from the impact it could have on IIT standards, past experience shows that a lot of academically weaker students find it difficult to keep up with the rest, and are later forced to drop out. That does not serve the purpose of helping disadvantaged sections of society.


New IITs to also start preparatory courses
Mumbai: With IITs forced to go in for a second round of admissions to fill their seats, IIT-Delhi director Surendra Prasad said preparatory courses would begin at the six new IITs too from this year. While this will put an additional burden on the institutes born overnight, it will prevent a repeat of the ‘vacant seat’ scenario next year as those candidates will be eligible for admission then.

The older IITs managed to fill some SC/ST seats with students who were admitted to the preparatory course in 2007, but there were no such admissions at the new IITs.

This year’s sorry situation is the result of the government commissioning six new IITs—in the process increasing the pool of seats by 720—which led to the increase in quota seats (for which there were simply not enough eligible applicants). Despite the cut-off percentage being lowered in the name of affirmative action, enough reserved category students did not made the grade.

This year, 3.11 lakh students took the Joint Entrance Exam for the 6,992 seats in 13 IITs, the Benaras Hindu University (Information Technology school) and the Indian School of Mines, Dhanbad. Of these, 414 seats had been reserved for ST candidates, but only 159 students were shortlisted. Similarly, only 690 were shortlisted for the 832 SC seats. The OBC figures were 1,099 out of 1,134.

GREAT DIVIDE-III

BUCK STOPS HERE

Education is still the preserve of those who can pay for it

Subodh Varma | TIMES INSIGHT GROUP

If the economic structure of our society seems like a pyramid with a large base of low-income people, educational levels are a mirror image — the lower the income, the less educated people are. Conversely, high incomes invariably mean a much higher level of education. Even after 60 years of Independence, the equation between poverty and lack of education is chillingly stark.

Consider the poorest third of the rural adult population, made up of over 105 million people, earning about Rs 11 per day — 61% of them have had no education and a minuscule 0.7% were graduates or technical qualifiers. Compare this to the richest one-third — 33% were illiterate and 7% were graduates or technically qualified.

The remaining one third of the population, called ‘middle’ for convenience and not to be confused with what is generally called the ‘middle class’, has monthly expenditure between Rs 365-580 in rural areas and Rs 580-1100 in urban areas. Its educational level is somewhere midway between the two extremes.

A similar divide exists in urban areas. Here, the poorest one third, numbering some 45 million, are those with monthly spending of less than Rs 20 per day. Among them, 38% were illiterate, and just 3% were graduates or other diploma holders. On the other hand, among the richest onethird, with monthly spending of more than Rs 1,100, just 6% were illiterate, and 35% were graduates. These are results from a National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) survey in 2004-05.

In case you are thinking that this is a legacy of an ill-managed past, think again. Tracking current attendance in educational institutions, the survey found that nearly 29% children between 5 and 14 years of age of the poorest families were out of school in rural areas. In the next age group of 15 to 19, 75% were not attending. For the richest families, the situation was different — only about 8% in the first age group and 45% in the next age group were not attending school. In urban areas, 20% of the 5-14 age group from poorest families were out of school, increasing to over 64% for the next age group. In the richest section, these shares of children not studying were only 2% and 16%.

What is the reason for this mass abandonment of education by the poor? It cannot be that education is seen as irrelevant to future income. A graduate can earn anything from three to ten times more than an illiterate person, as another NSSO survey found. This is also true of agricultural work. So it is not as if the poor want to remain uneducated, for they well know that education may provide a way out of their present misery.

The main reason is that they are poor. A family of five, earning Rs 1,175 per month, can ill afford to send its kids to school for 12 years, not to mention college. As soon as the children grow up, they start contributing to family income. The survey found that over 35% persons said that they were not attending an educational institution to supplement the family income, while another 16% said they were helping in domestic work, which includes economic activities like looking after cattle.

Rising costs are also a barrier to spread of education at all levels. Between 1999-2000 and 2004-2005, family spending on tuition and other fees went up by an astounding 188% in rural areas and 153% in urban areas. The general price rise in this period was about 30%, showing that education demanded a very high premium.

Quality of education also varies among institutions, with higher quality schools and colleges usually demanding much higher costs. So the less privileged sections have to make do with poorer quality.

OBSTACLE COURSE: Students in a Bengal village have to carry the blackboard home as their school is just a tent

Search for school takes a model turn

A couple’s quest for a good school for their kids gives Rajasthan a unique teaching centre

Amit Bhattacharya | TNN

Back in the 1970s, Doon School alumnus, J P Singh, had a peculiar problem. He just couldn't find a school where his three children could get an “appropriate” education. “My wife, Faith, and I didn't want them to go to an elite public school like I did, because children in such schools don't get to know the real world,” says the scion of a well-known Rajput family.

The Jaipur-based Singh and his English wife, who had by then set up apparel brand Anokhi, sought an environment where their kids could learn at their own pace. “We didn't want lessons stuffed down their throat,” says Singh.

The couple found what they were looking for at Neel Bagh, a unique school in rural Andhra Pradesh being run by a pioneering British educationist, David Horsburgh. But Neel Bagh, located in Srinivasapur taluk of AP, took in just local children. So Horsburgh made the Singhs an offer — if they start a small school of their own, he could train the teachers for it.

Thus in a section of an apparel factory in Jaipur, with three children of well-off parents and the rest working class kids, started a small experiment in alternative education that was named Digantar. The name, meaning a change in direction, was chosen by the school's founders and its only teachers, Rohit Dhankar and Reena Das. “We started in 1978 and eventually had 25 children of various ages. The two of us taught all subjects from Class I to X,” says Dhankar.

Dhankar and Das, who got married around that time, adapted and developed Horsburgh's pedagogy of free learning — the school had no system of examinations (except after classes V, VIII and X, as required by the state government) and the teacher's role was that of a facilitator who helped children become independent learners. “It turned out to be a crucible where our teaching techniques were tested and refined,” says Dhankar.

The school ran till 1986, by which time all three Singh children had passed Class X and had gone to England for further studies. By this time, the teacher couple had realized that their methods had great potential to help rural children. Singh then donated a piece of his land at Todi Ramzanipura, around 20km from Jaipur, and chipped in with an initial grant for the building. So in 1988, with a grant from the Union HRD ministry, Digantar's experiment to bring quality education to rural children got under way.

It wasn’t easy convincing the villagers. Says Dhankar, “The standard reply we got was: ‘We don’t send girls to school in our community; schools don’t teach anything anyway’.” But the couple’s commitment and the school’s unique pedagogy slowly brought results. Today, there are long admission queues at the four Digantar schools that operate in the rural hamlet of Kho Nagoriyan (population around 10,000), where roughly 80% of inhabitants are Muslim and the rest mostly Dalits. “When we started in 1988, female literacy here was 2%. In 1992, we conducted a survey that found 91% of girls in the age group 5-14 didn’t go to school. In 2008, this figure is down to 12%,” says Das.

The schools’ children, most of them firstgeneration learners, do surprisingly well at examinations conducted by the state board. “Hardly anyone ever fails. Most of our students get above average marks in these tests though there’s hardly anyone who has an exceptional score,” says Dhankar. That’s remarkable for a system that lays no stress on examinations. In fact, competition of any kind is discouraged.

But Digantar’s story isn’t just about numbers. Its alternative teaching methods produce confident individuals who are slowly bringing about attitudinal changes in their communities. For instance, Rehana, Nasreen and Arjina, students of Class XI at Digantar’s school in Bandhyali village, are the first girls in their village to reach the Plus 2 level. All three have warded off family pressure to marry and convinced their parents to allow them to continue studies. “We constantly interact with the community in order to build trust,” says Das.

Digantar's activities have spread much beyond the four schools. It’s now a major resource centre for training of teachers coming from across the country, has a project for improving teaching techniques in 75 government schools, conducts research in early reading processes, helps the government with its flagship SSA programme, develops curriculum for government schools, brings out Shiksha Vimarsh, an acclaimed journal on education, and also collaborates in running a Master’s programme in elementary education at TISS in Mumbai.

The “directional change” that two teachers decided to take in 1978, is now showing the direction to a model of quality education for the deprived.

A principal at 18!

Divya A | TNN

Every evening, Anjali Singh, all of 18, becomes a headmistress. Her students — 20 youngsters from poor homes in Kolkata’s Park Circus area — don’t mind her age. For them, she’s mentor, teacher and friend, all rolled into one. By day though, Anjali is a regular first year student of Lady Brabourne College who is carrying on a tradition that her college established decades ago. Batch after batch of college freshers have tutored underprivileged kids from nearby areas.

Every year, two freshers are elected headmistress and assistant headmistress and they run the evening school independently. “We use innovative methods like personalizing question papers for students so that it matches their day school syllabus,” says Anjali, whose students range from Class I to X. Besides tuition, the college-goers also help out with funds for books and snacks, says Irina Chakrabarty who is assistant headmistress.

“We do help students run this ‘school’ but it’s largely their baby,” says hostel superintendent Writuparna Chakraborty.

This teaching initiative is almost as old as the institute itself, now in its 56th year. “The idea was to give students some organisational experience while they pursued academics. But more than that, it has given them a sense of social responsibility,” says principal Sanghamitra Mukherjee.

Parents, too are full of praise. Says Shabnam, a domestic help and mother of Raja, “Much of my son’s success is due to their efforts. We are illiterate and could never have provided such education.” While the evening effort is quite taxing, the students turned teachers don’t mind it. “These kids are part of the extended Brabourne family,” says Anjali.