During the conference, ITG will be showcasing its innovative educational platform EduWave
DU advise: Stick to our help-desks to avoid confusion
Help-desks are meant to make things easier for aspirants during the admission season. But if DU officials are to be believed, help-desks on DU campus are doing exactly the opposite. According to DU officials, many aspirants have turned up at the office of the dean, students' welfare (DSW) with complaints against help-desk volunteers. The aspirants claimed the volunteers allegedly misguided them due to which they filled the forms wrongly. 'Many students have given verbal complaints to us that the helpdesks on the campus misguided them. These volunteers are not well-versed with the procedure and often give wrong or incomplete information to the applicants,' said Gurpreet Singh Tuteja, deputy dean, students' welfare.
Though the university has banned any private institute to set up a help-desk on the campus, the Delhi University Students' Union (DUSU) and some other students' organizations have been allowed to do so. According to Tuteja, there have been cases in the first week of sale of forms wherein a student was asked to fill up two copies of common pre-admission form each for applying in BCom (honours) and BCom. Many applicants had also filled the subject and course codes wrong. However, DUSU officials say that such mistakes on part of their volunteers are just one-off. Nupur Sharma, president, DUSU, said, 'We guide the aspirants out of our own experience and after reading the information bulletin of the university. Such mistakes can happen once or twice, not always.' DUSU has 17 help desks at various centres where the pre-admission forms are being sold.
Scholarship program by DoST
The Department of Science and Technology (DoST) has posted their scholarship program which will benefit those who took up courses or may want to take up fields of study related to Science and Technology (S&T) disciplines. First of their four scholarship programs is the Junior Level Science Scholarship (JLSS). JLSS is intended to all regular 3rd year college students throughout the academic year 2009-2010 who are at present enrolled in state universities under any of the subsequent recognized priority S&T courses, namely: Agricultural Chemistry, Biochemistry, Biology, Chemical Eng'g., Chemistry, Computer Eng'g., Physics and Statistics, among others. The deadline for the program application will be on June 26, 09. There are also scholarships available for those professionals engaged in research, fresh graduates, and on-going MS/PhD students who took courses in Agriculture, Forestry and Natural Resources, Biology, Biotechnology, Chemistry, Earth and Space Science, Environment, Fisheries and Marine Science, ICT, Materials Science and Engineering, Mathematics, Medical and Pharmaceutical Sciences, Microelectronics, and Physics.
This program is called Accelerated Science and Technology Human Resource Development Program (ASTHRD), which is offered to University-based MS/PhD Program and Thesis/Dissertation Grant Support for R&D priority areas of DoST. Deadline for this is on August 31, 09. Engineering Research and Development for Technology (ERDT) Human Resource Development Program is the application available to professionals with a BS/MS degree in Engineering. Study placement for ERDT includes Ateneo de Manila University, De La Salle University, Mindanao State University-IIT, University of the Philippines Diliman and Los Ba
PU pays student for clerical error
The Panjab University (PU) here has been asked by a consumer forum to pay INR 50,000 to a student, who was not allowed to sit for an exam on time due to a clerical error. According to the complainant, Gurdeep Singh, a student of BA-III of PU, he had gone to the < ?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />
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He added, 'Immediately after the exam I approached the concerned officials in PU and they told me that such mistakes are common.' Singh said that due to this confusion he could not concentrate on his exam and that affected his performance. 'I suffered a lot of mental and physical harassment so I decided to approach the consumer forum,' said Singh. The district consumer disputes redressal forum here on Tuesday directed PU to pay Singh INR 50,000 as compensation. The university was also directed to pay INR 5,000 to the petitioner as cost of litigation proceedings.
HRD to give prority to educational reforms
The Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) has chalked out its 100-day agenda in which it has given top priority to a scheme for providing interest subsidy to non-creamy layer students on educational loans and introducing a Bill to regulate foreign educational institutions in India.
The scheme, which was approved by the committee of secretaries, awaits approval from the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs. A committee, headed by Higher Education Secretary R P Agrawal, is looking into establishing educational tribunals in institutions for settling disputes between the staff and authorities. Minister for MHRD Kapil Sibal, while taking charge of the ministry, had said that priorities were yet to be decided, the extensive 100-day plan also emphasises on accreditation to be made mandatory for all the higher and technical educational institutions. Currently, only 10 per cent of the institutions have been accredited.
The ministry also aims to establish autonomous State Higher Education Councils in all states with the support of the University Grants Commission. The government will also introduce academic reforms like semester system, credit transfer and revision of curriculum in educational institutions. The government hopes to implement a new scheme to give education loans to economically backward and meritorious students at subsidised interest rates.
The scheme, for which the government has earmarked INR 4,000 crore and is awaiting Cabinet approval, intends to provide the benefits to non-creamy layer students for professional courses. MHRD is keen to introduce Foreign Educational Institutions (Regulation of Entry and Operations, Maintenance of Quality and Prevention of Commercialisation) Bill in Parliament.
Muslim women under focus of Minsitry
A scheme to provide skill development and leadership training to Muslim women exhibiting entrepreneurial skills is set to be rolled out soon by the Ministry of Minority Affairs as the Manmohan Singh Government begins work on a 100-day action plan for governance.
The Minority Affairs Ministry is giving final touches to the scheme, aimed at empowering Muslim women who have been left out of the development trajectory. The scheme, which would be Centrally sponsored, is likely to have a flexible one-time financial support component as well. Though the scheme would be implemented directly by the Minority Affairs Ministry, the services of state governments and NGOs would be sought to identify the beneficiaries. A selection committee would be set up to screen the individual applications and the names forwarded by states and NGOs.
While the Ministry is yet to finalize the lower & upper limits of the financial support aspect, sources said the National Minorities Development and Finance Corporation could be linked with the beneficiaries to ensure that they continued to get support till they became self-reliant. The Sachar Committee had pointed out that although Muslim women were ‘overwhelmingly self-employed’ and engaged in home-based work, they did not have independent access to credit facilities, opportunities for skill up-gradation, or access to markets. There was discrimination in giving Muslim women credit facilities.
The Ministry’s plan is to support such self-employed women to develop the leadership skills in them, sharpen their entrepreneurial talent and help improve their primary skills. The Sachar Committee had found that self-employed Muslim women were primarily engaged in activities like sewing, embroidery, agarbatti rolling and beedi making.
Home Internet for teachers by Bulgarian Education Ministry
A total of 70,000 Bulgarian teachers are to receive subsidised home internet connections, said Bulgarian weekly Computerworld. The maximum subsidy would be 15 leva a month, said, the weekly. The subsidy is only available for teachers in 1st to 12th grade and applications will be granted based on a set of criteria that include computer knowledge, possession of IT certification, the ability to speak one or more foreign languages and whether or not the teacher has a personal blog or site, among others
Teachers who want to make use of the subsidy have to apply online, using a special section of the Education Ministry's website. The application process includes a questionnaire that will automatically handle the classification. The first up to 25 000 teachers would start receiving subsidised internet in July 2009, the rest in September at the start of the new school year. The Ministry of Education has included more than 300 internet service providers in the programme, many offering preferential prices, though others also offer more expensive packages. Teachers who opt for a more expensive package would have to match the difference, said Computerworld. The programme is part of the ICT in Education programme, which is funded under the EU Human Resource Development Programme.
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European Scholarship to 300 students, teachers
A cooperation and mobility programme in the field of higher education by the European Union namely Erasmus Mundus, is being sought by over 300 Delhi University (DU) students, researchers and faculty members. Under this cooperation batches of students are sent as well as hosted from the European universities. In 2008 DU became a partnering university of the Erasmus Mundus programme. Since then the university has sent one batch comprising of 35-40 scholars to the European universities as well as boarded students from there.
The 2009-10 Erasmus Mundus programme also has two sub-programmes titled Lot 13A and Window India Learning Link Power or WILLPower. Under the Lot 13A sub-programme, the exchange of students, researchers and academic staff is facilitated. They are provided an opportunity to work or study in one of the partnered universities through a scholarshipprogramme, which covers all their expenses. Twelve European and eight Indian universities are partnering institutions in Lot 13A. The Indian partnering universities include Delhi University; Jadavpur University, Kolkata; Pune University; Kerala University; Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur (IIT-K); Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai; Pravara Institute of Medical Sciences, Loni; and Anand Agricultural University, Gujarat. Each scholarship covers tuition fees, subsistence costs, travel expenses and insurance.
Pratham Report on Education sector
India's progress in the education sector has been quite slow. However, the recently, brought out Annual Status of Education Report by Pratham, a leading NGO in field of education shows that 96 % of children aged 6-14 years in rural India are now enrolled in schools, while the quality of education remains dismal. Pratham did a survey across 575 rural districts (out of 583) in India. The data covered 16,291 villages, 338,027 households and 6,91,734 children.
It was reported that only 69% of students from class I in the surveyed rural areas were able to recognise numbers between 1 and 9. It also says that the quality of instruction in subjects like arithmetic and English remains poor. One of the findings from the survey indicated that about half of the children in class V in rural areas are unable to read a class III textbook.
