Wednesday, June 22, 2016
A Special Note To AP CM Chandrababu Naidu: 'Family Planning Is Not About Class But About Women's Rights And Choices'
Thursday, June 16, 2016
Political Play: AP Govt Bid To Take Control Of Sakshi Media Group Aimed At Crippling Naidu’s Rival Jagan
Wednesday, June 15, 2016
How Telangana CM KCR is Wiping Out The Congress And Telugu Desam Party From The State?
Tuesday, June 14, 2016
Crop Damage Hits Tomato Supply; Prices Surge Up To Rs 100 Per Kilogram
AP Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu Is Against The Dynasty Rule, Why He Is Grooming His Son Lokesh?
Indian National Congress: Death Of The 'Dynastic Rule'?
Sunday, June 12, 2016
Politics Of Language: Centre Promoting Hindi In South, Northeast India Smacks Of Parochialism
Cash-For-Votes Scams Are Here To Stay – And The Election Commission Seems Unable To Deal
Sunday, June 05, 2016
Fake Federalism: How 'National Parties' Turned The Concept Of 'Rajya' In Rajya Sabha Into A Farce?
Sunday, May 29, 2016
Pay Money To Get Rid Of Your Sins? 'Religion In India Has Become A Profitable & Secure Business Without Any Loss'
Friday, May 27, 2016
NEET Ordinance Compounds Problems For Medical Aspirants In Telangana
Thursday, May 26, 2016
For 'Make In India' To Work, India First Needs To Become Globally Competitive
Tuesday, May 17, 2016
Why The Side Effects Of NEET Are Much More Damaging Than The Disease It Claims To Cure?
By M H AHSSAN | INNLIVE
The common entrance exam may spell doom for the majority of medical aspirants and state boards.
The Supreme Court of India has revived the spectre of a common entrance examination for all medical colleges. Ostensibly, the National Eligibility Entrance Test is aimed at creating a level playing field. However, many fear that the effect will be exactly the opposite, as demonstrated by widespread protests, rail-rokos and even clashes with police across many non-Hindi states including Assam, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Kerala, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, among others. There has been vehement opposition from students, doctors (especially rural doctors associations and state units of the Indian Medical Association), parents, non-commercial educationists, political parties and even social justice organisations. The governments of non-Hindi states have also opposed the move.
The overarching fear is that NEET will provide a huge advantage to students of Delhi-headquartered boards such as the Central Board of Secondary Education. Students from these boards also tend to be more urban, upper caste, rich and less likely to be from non-Hindi states, apart from the principal language of non-Hindi states not being their first language.
In short, they will be unrepresentative in a way that will deepen already existing inequities which exist along various axes of class, caste, language, location and rootedness, among others. In addition, many fear that the common medical entrance exam will destroy prestigious state boards as we know them.
Debunking myths:
While the NEET judgement was in response to admission-related corruption in private institutions, other reasons have also been offered in its support. There is a belief in some quarters that a common exam will provide relief to students appearing for multiple entrance tests and that supervision by the Medical Council of India and CBSE will curtail corruption in admission tests. And then there is the purported desirability of a common syllabus, which will ensure that physicians of similar pedigree are produced all around (this a ridiculous idea, since medical entrance exams do not make doctors, rather it's the MBBS exams after admission that do).
However, these arguments, do not hold water.
Firstly, most major states were already conducting their own medical entrance exam. Private medical colleges are not located in the air, but on the soil of these states. A simple solution would have been to admit students on the basis of the already-existing state medical entrance exam. States such as West Bengal, among others, have been conducting transparent medical entrance exams for nearly four decades. It is beyond comprehension why corruption in some places was used as an excuse to change admission policies everywhere.
Capitation fee corruption involving the management quota of private institutions is a headache only for people who can pay in tens of lakhs and even crores – in short, not even 5% of the students who take medical entrance exams. It is a problem of the upper middle class and the super-rich, which obscenely fancies itself as the “common man”.
Numbers tell a story:
As for relief to students who take multiple exams, a reality check is in order. Who exactly are these students and what percentage do they comprise of all medical entrance test takers across all states? It is astonishing that no such data has ever been presented – likely because anecdotal experiences suggest that this is a very small proportion of students.
Let us take some statistics into consideration. Across multiple All India Institutes of Medical Science, the common entrance test attracted about one lakh students last year. This figure is under 10% of the medical college admission seekers across all states. In Maharashtra alone, about four lakh students took theCommon Entrance Test exam this year. And when we compare the number of all Class 12 science students across all states, irrespective of entrance-takers, the percentage becomes negligible.
Even among that small minority, CBSE-like central board students are hugely over-represented in this multiple entrance test-taking class. The fact that the NEET judgement might imply science syllabus changes across many boards tells us how the stupendous majority is being victimised and marginalised for the convenience of a tiny minority.
Quality queries:
Among the major characteristics of this minority mentioned earlier, what stands out is the board – CBSE.
It is the CBSE syllabus that will be followed for NEET. Is this the largest board in the Indian Union? No. The Maharashtra state board alone has more Class 12 students than the all-India strength of the CBSE. If that statistic comes as a surprise, we need to seriously question our sense of standard and get out of our metro-centric, Anglo-Hindi bubbles.
Is CBSE the “best” board in some academic sense? Hardly so. Are Class 12 students studying science in the CBSE syllabus uniquely equipped with an understanding that is unparalleled by the state boards? Or in other words, if the state boards are being forced to emulate the CBSE (in the name of aligning syllabi), is it something worth emulating?
Following rigorous research (published in Current Science, 2009) that reviewed the comparative performance of students from different boards, Anil Kumar and Dibakar Chatterjee of the Indian Institute of Science showed that when it comes to science proficiency, CBSE is not numero uno.
West Bengal board students did better than CBSE students in all four science subjects – physics, chemistry, biology and mathematics. Andhra Pradesh does better than CBSE in mathematics and physics. By the same metric, Maharashtra is hardly the worst performing state, as it was in the NEET that was held in 2013 before it was scrapped.
Tellingly, neither West Bengal nor Andhra Pradesh were top performing states in NEET. Independent, non-CBSE excellence has thus become an albatross around their neck. The CBSE syllabus “pattern” has become the standard, even though research shows it isn’t the best.
Clear hierarchy:
On corruption and the Medical Council of India, the less said the better. Its former chief Ketan Desai was charged with accepting a bribe for granting affiliation to a private medical college. Last year, the CBSE-organised All India Pre-Medical Test was cancelled because of widespread cheating.
When a body such as the Ketan Desai-tainted MCI approaches the Supreme Court to fight corruption, and the Supreme Court employs the cheating scam-tainted CBSE to ensure a fair and free examination, we have to understand the deeper games being played.
CBSE schools are naturally very excitedabout NEET as it hands their students a huge and undeserved competitive advantage over the stupendous majority. After the NEET judgement, we are sure to see a mushrooming of CBSE schools everywhere and an exodus from state boards of the class who can pay for such private CBSE schools.
There is already a surge in the business of CBSE syllabus-based coaching institutes – all of this is big and often corrupt business, but that doesn’t seem to matter.
Therein lies the danger, where the Supreme Court ruling is already creating a caste system between boards and forcing everyone else to align with the Centre, which isn’t necessarily the best as described earlier.
Reducing importance:
Framed from Delhi, after “consultation”, the CBSE-based NEET syllabus favours those who have undergone their schooling and training in the CBSE/Indian School Certificate framework, the syllabus being a vital component of that framework.
State boards with syllabi that differ considerably from the CBSE are at an unfair disadvantage – they have to change or perish, for absolutely no fault of their own.
The viability or “worth” of a board of education’s science syllabus then is not in how well it teaches the subject to the students but incredibly, by how well it has adapted (or not) the basic framework of a Delhi-based board's syllabus. This will reduce the importance of the Class 12 exam, and we will increasingly see coaching institutes operating under the legal shell of a school.
The schools affiliated to the state boards will rapidly become low-grade holding pens for the rural and the poor, while the urban middle class will detach itself from them – taking educational apartheid to another level. By completely disregarding the percentile obtained in Class 12 board exams, multiple choice question-solving is privileged over detailed concept development, something boards such as the ones in West Bengal and Tamil Nadu have been historically proud of and is evident in the over-representation of these boards among faculty members of science institutions, where the CBSE “advantage” evaporates. We cannot even fathom the damage that this development will do to science education.
Explicit bias:
This Delhi-headquartered board and Anglo-Hindi bias in so-called “all India” medical entrances is not new. Central board students (comprising less than 10% of Class 12 students) have till now enjoyed a de-facto 15% reservation in all medical colleges, as the syllabus of the AIPMT exam (held in Hindi and English only, though no MBBS courses are taught in Hindi) through which these seats were filled, was modeled on the CBSE syllabus and conducted by the CBSE.
So much so, that in West Bengal, students coming through this “all-India” were from Hindi belt central board schools almost to the last man and in West Bengal were referred to simply as "CBSEs" or "Delhi boards".
Such a naked violation of the principle of natural justice and fairness went unchallenged as the positive beneficiaries of this provision constituted the unofficial first-class citizens of the Indian Union – typically well-to-do, urban, largely upper-caste Hindu males from Hindi-speaking areas studying in Delhi-headquartered school boards.
Since Hindi areas have much fewer medical colleges per capita, the AIPMT is a system to lodge North Indian students in South and East India in disproportionately high numbers, under the innocuous dissent-stopping fig leaf of "all-India".
The NEET seeks to create a hugely expanded version of this unjust dominance over all seats of all medical colleges in the Indian Union. Given the explicit bias, it is pertinent to ask to which board do the grandsons and granddaughters of the Supreme Court judges belong?
To which board do the sons and daughters of the lawyers defending the NEET, the functionaries of CBSE and the MCI head office, belong? Does this class more closely match the social profile of people studying in central boards or state boards? What is the definition of conflict of interest in such cases?
The Supreme Court ruling of holding a test under CBSE syllabus thus violates the fundamental legal principle of fairness. A state board student in a non-Hindi state will have to compete against a CBSE student who has studied for 12 years of incremental science syllabus learning. For example, in Tamil Nadu, the biology syllabus is about 70% different from that of the CBSE. Can a state be forced to change its board syllabus to align with central syllabus or otherwise risk playing in an unfair non-level playing field? It makes a mockery of the federal structure of the Constitution of India.
Saturday, May 14, 2016
With A Speech Every 45.6 Hours, Has Modi Exhausted His Talk-Time?
Thursday, February 04, 2016
Kapus In Andhra Are Agitating For Reservations Can Their Leaders Really Help Them?
SPECIAL REPORT Unlike the Patel agitation in Gujarat, the projected leaders of Kapus in Andhra are spent forces who have already betrayed their cause years ago.
Eerily resembling the Patel agitation for Backward Class (BC) status in Gujarat, a massive stir has been created with the same demand by the Kapus in Andhra Pradesh. Though there are similarities between the two demands, the socio-political differences are aplenty. While Patels are well-entrenched in the political class and have independently led the state of Gujarat, for the Kapus, the political throne in Andhra has remained out of reach.
Friday, October 02, 2015
Special Report: Indian Doctors Are Shamelessly Lying On Women To Perform Unwarranted Hysterectomies
In Chapla Naik, a tiny village in Karnataka’s Kalaburgi district close to the state border with Telangana, two women died this year.
Arati (name changed) died of pancreatic cancer. Sumana bai (name changed) died of sepsis in her abdomen. What the two women had in common with each other—and with many other women in the village—is that they were aged less than 30, and they had recently undergone hysterectomies.
Tuesday, September 22, 2015
'Justice Denied Is Justice Denied': Two Major Reasons Show Enormity Of Crisis Of India's Justice System
There are more than 2.7 crore cases pending in district courts across the country and 60% of them are more than two years old.
Will you stand in a queue that is likely to take 466 years to clear up? That’s how much time it will take the Delhi High Court to clear up its backlog of pending cases. Unfortunately, the situation is not so much better in lower level courts across the country where millions of cases are awaiting trial.
Special Report: Why India’s $168 Billion Mega River-Linking Project Is A Disaster-In-Waiting?
Thirty-three years after it was first envisioned, India's incredibly reckless river-linking project is finally underway. India’s incredibly ambitious – and some say, incredibly reckless – Rs 11 lakh crore project to interlink its rivers is finally underway.
On September 16, the Godavari and Krishna rivers – the second and the fourth longest rivers in the country – were linked through a canal in Andhra Pradesh. The project was completed at a cost of Rs 1,300 crore.
Friday, September 11, 2015
Focus: 'Nicky Joseph' Now As 'Aeysha Jabeen' - An ISIS Recruiter Extradicted in Dubai, Arrested in Hyderabad
An Indian woman allegedly involved in recruiting people for the dreaded Islamic State terror outfit was on Friday deported by UAE and subsequently arrested in Hyderabad.
A 37-year-old Afsha Jabeen alias 'Nicky Joseph' hails from Hyderabad but had been portraying herself as a British national while luring youth for IS through social media, officials said. She was deported along with husband and children.
Tuesday, September 08, 2015
Exclusive: 'Lack Of Sleep And Poor Working Conditions' Makes 'Police Stressed' Reveal INNLIVE Study
A lack sleep, irregular meals, low incomes and poor working conditions are some of the reasons attributed to higher stress levels among police personnel, according to a study conducted by INNLIVE research wing.
The study, which interviewed over 300 constables, inspectors and police personnel of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh, has outlined that inspectors have the highest level of stress followed by officers and constables.
During the study, the policemen describe their job as “unlimited and unpredictable” with “insufficient sleep hours and irregular meals” which render their lifestyle extremely exhausting and unpredictable.
The study was recently published in Indian Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine. It pointed out that around 90 per cent of the police personnel were under stress to due high levels of accountability and political interference, 80 per cent of them were stressed due to long and odd work hours, frequent transfers and postings, 70 per cent of them due to change in priorities, due to political shakiness, difficulty in sanctioning of leaves, role conflict between “being family person” versus “police person,” adjusting with seniors and not being able to spend time with their family.
“A major source of stress was factors such as frequent transfers, slow promotions, fear of suspension and punishment, difficulty in getting leave sanctions, insufficient staff and dis-satisfactory work distribution. Although constables were found to experience overall stress lesser than inspectors and officers, they were significantly most stressed up in the areas of environmental stress, travelling away from the organisation and work overload,” the study said.
“As many as 80 per cent of the constables felt that at their office the working conditions were very unpleasant due to the absence of indispensable facilities like proper toilets, drinking water and refreshment. They were most stressed in this area with 70 per cent of them feeling strained while commuting their workplace against 30 per cent of inspectors and 10 per cent of officers. They had to use their own conveyance like bicycles or motorcycles for official purposes for which they were not given allowances promptly,” it said.
In addition, to these findings the qualitative analysis revealed that constables felt more hassled than the inspectors and officers due to low salary structure, lack of housing and medical facilities and their inability to fulfill the demands of their families.
Moreover, there were more than 50 per cent of constables who sense their work hours as very long, they had to go for two work shifts consecutively and they were unable to spend time with their families. “They also face difficulty in adjusting with their bosses who were usually inspectors. They often feel that they were punished by their seniors without any proper inquiry and did not have any platform where they can express themselves,” the study said.