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GS Paper: GS2-13.Issues relating to development and management of Social Sector/Services relating to Health, Education, Human Resources.

  • India’s technical education: Issues and Suggestions

    Context

    This year, AICTE approved the closure of 63 engineering colleges across the country.

    Deterioration of quality

    • Tweaking with curriculum: Private entrepreneurs took the lead to meet the growing demand of the country in technical education in the mid-Eighties, but with little idea of the subject.
    • Subjects like materials, applied physics and thermodynamics which forms the building blocks of engineering became dispensable.
    • Because they were both tough to teach for the teachers and tough to pass for the students.
    • Expansion: This softening of subjects coupled with unfettered expansion in the early and mid-2000s, resulted in real dilution of the overall standards in the country.
    • Lack of adequate number of teachers, lack of quality in those available, inability of the management to make adequate investments in a dynamic environment, lack of employment opportunities, shelf life of skills coming down with every technology-related intervention and a constant experimentation with curriculum have all been the bane of quality in technical education.

    Issues

    • Engineering education suffers from regulatory gaps, poor infrastructure, lack of qualified faculty and the non-existent industry linkage that contributed to the abysmal employability of graduates from most of these institutes.
    • No linkage with Industry: Not a single industry body, be it CII, FICCI or ASSOCHAM has managed to effectively inform the education planners on the growth in different employment sectors.
    • No independent body to suggest AICTEC: The government also has not taken any tangible steps to set up an independent body to advise AICTE on this vital aspect.
    • Excessive changes: A constant fiddling with the curriculum, reducing total credits, giving multiple choices in the name of flexibility, dispensing with mathematics and physics at the qualification level, teaching in local languages may all be good arguments, but one must assess their utility and their effect on technical education in the long run.

    Way forward

    • Proactive: Rather than being reactive, institutions must proactively define the practicing elements of education.
    • Investment in teaching: The corrective measures for these shortfalls are technology intensive, are experiential, and need investments in teaching.
    • Quality assurance body: The ultimate measure of performance is embedded in quality assurance.
    • The need of the hour is to create a truly autonomous quality assurance body at an arms-length from the government, manned by eminent persons both from the industry as well as academia.

    Conclusion

    The education paradigm is staring at a large shift and technical education cannot remain immune to that change.

  • Who was Major Dhyan Chand?

    The PM has announced that the Rajiv Gandhi Khel Ratna Award will now be named after Major Dhyan Chand.

    Despite being a trillion population, what ails India’s limted success (not failure) at the Olympics in your opinion?

    [wpdiscuz-feedback id=”j4lq2ymhod” question=”What do you think?” opened=”1″]Spark the debate![/wpdiscuz-feedback]

    Who was Dhyan Chand?

    • Quite simply, he was the first superstar of hockey, considered a wizard or magician of the game.
    • He was the chief protagonist as India won three consecutive Olympic hockey gold medals — Amsterdam 1928, Los Angeles 1932, and Berlin 1936.
    • He is said to have wowed the watching public with his sublime skills, intricate dribbling and gluttonous scoring ability.
    • During those tournaments, there was no team that could compete with India — and most of the matches saw huge victory margins.
    • India beat hosts the Netherlands 3-0 in the 1928 final, the US were thrashed by a scarcely-believable margin of 24-1 in the 1932 gold medal match, while Germany went down 8-1 in the 1936 decider.
    • In all, Dhyan Chand played 12 Olympic matches, scoring 33 goals.

    Legends associated with Dhyan Chand

    • It is said that once his sublime skill and close control of the ball aroused such suspicion that his stick was broken to see whether there was a magnet inside.
    • During the 1936 Berlin Games, Adolf Hitler offered him German citizenship and the post of Colonel in his country’s Army, a proposition the Indian ace refused.

    Why does the name evoke such emotion?

    • Dhyan Chand played during India’s pre-independence years, when the local population was subjugated and made to feel inferior by the ruling British.
    • Hence, seeing an Indian dominating the Europeans in a sport invented by them evoked a lot of pride in them.
    • There has been a long-running campaign arguing that Dhyan Chand be posthumously awarded the Bharat Ratna, the country’s highest honour.
    • Before Independence and for some years after that, hockey was the only sport in which India consistently excelled at the international and Olympic stage.
    • In fact, starting from Amsterdam 1928, India won seven of the eight hockey gold medals at the Games.
    • Apart from K D Jadhav’s wrestling bronze at Helsinki 1952, India had to wait until Atlanta 1996 and tennis player Leander Paes for an Olympic medal in a sport other than hockey.

    Why is the renaming of the award significant?

    • The eight gold medals in hockey have often been termed as the millstone around the necks of the subsequent generation of players.
    • The modern game is an altogether different sport from the one played in Dhyan Chand’s era.
    • The Europeans and Australians have become much more proficient over the decades, while the change of surface has put a premium on fitness, speed, stamina, and physical strength.
    • India had not managed to get into the top four at the Olympics since the boycott-affected Moscow Games in 1980.
    • The later generations may have felt out of touch with the golden years, about which one could only read in books or listen to in tales of the protagonists and those who witnessed the heroics.

  • [pib] SATYAM Programme

    The Ministry of Science & Technology (MoST) is implementing the Science and Technology of Yoga and Meditation (SATYAM) Programme to explore the effect of yoga and meditation as add on therapy to fight COVID-19.

    SATYAM Programme

    • The MoST is implementing SATYAM Programme since the year 2015-16 to promote scientific research in the field of yoga and meditation in order to understand its role in human wellbeing.
    • Its main objective is encouraging scientists, clinicians and experienced practitioners of yoga and meditation, with a proven track record, to submit concept notes.

    Themes covered:

    • Investigations on the effect of Yoga and Meditation on physical and mental health and well being.
    • Investigations on the effect of Yoga and Meditation on the body, brain, and mind in terms of basic processes and mechanisms.

    Focus on COVID

    It shall focus on three dimensions of COVID related illness:

    • Mental Stress
    • Respiratory
    • Immune system

  • What is Academic Bank of Credit?

    On the first anniversary of the National Education Policy (NEP), the Centre plans to officially roll out some initiatives promised in the policy, such as the Academic Bank of Credit

    Academic Bank of Credit

    • Academic Bank of Credit referred to as ABC is a virtual storehouse that will keep records of academic credits secured by a student.
    • It is drafted on the lines of the National Academic Depository.
    • It will function as a commercial bank where students will be the customers and ABC will offer several services to these students.
    • Students will have to open an Academic Bank Account and every account holder would be provided with a unique id and Standard Operating Procedure (SOP).
    • The academic accounts of students will have credits awarded by higher education Institutes to students for the courses they are pursuing.
    • However, ABC will not accept any credit course document directly from the students, and its institutes that will make the deposits in students’ accounts.

    Functions of ABCs

    • ABC will be responsible for opening, closing, and validating the academic accounts of students.
    • It will also perform tasks including credit verification, credit accumulation, credit transfer/redemption of students, and promotion of the ABC among the stakeholders.
    • The courses will also include online and distance mode courses offered through National Schemes like SWAYAM, NPTEL, V-Lab, etc.
    • The validity of these academic credits earned by students will be up to seven years. The validity can also vary based on the subject or discipline. Students can redeem these credits.
    • For instance, if a student has accumulated 100 credits which is equivalent to say one year and they decide to drop out.
    • Once they decide to rejoin they can redeem this credit and seek admission directly in the second year at any university. The validity will be up to seven years, hence, students will have to rejoin within seven years.

    Benefits for students

    • The participating HEIs in the ABC scheme will enable students to build their degrees as per their choices.
    • As per UGC guidelines, the higher education institutes will have to allow students to acquire credits 50-70% of credits assigned to a degree from any institute.
    • Students, depending upon their needs can take this opportunity.
    • UGC will ensure that students secured the minimum credits to be secured in the core subject area.

  • PM-CARES Fund should cover COVID orphaned children: SC

    The Supreme Court has clarified that welfare schemes such as the PM CARES Fund should cover both children, who became orphans during the Covid-19 pandemic and those, who became orphans due to Covid-19.

    What is PM-CARES Fund?

    • The Prime Minister’s Citizen Assistance and Relief in Emergency Situations Fund (PM CARES Fund) was created on 28 March 2020 following the COVID-19 pandemic in India.
    • The fund will be used for combat, containment, and relief efforts against the coronavirus outbreak and similar pandemic-like situations in the future.
    • The PM is the chairman of the trust. Members will include the defense, home, and finance ministers.
    • The fund will also enable micro-donations. The minimum donation accepted for the PM CARES Fund is ₹10.
    • The donations will be tax-exempt and fall under corporate social responsibility.

    Why cover orphaned children?

    • Over 75,000 children have been orphaned, abandoned, or have lost a parent during the COVID pandemic.
    • It is feared that many of them may become victims of human trafficking rackets or descend into crime.

    Under the scrutiny of the court

    • The Supreme Court has endorsed the PM CARES Fund as a “public charitable trust” to which donors contribute voluntarily.
    • The court said that PM-CARES is “not open” for a PIL petitioner to question the “wisdom” that created the fund in an hour of need.
    • The court dismissed the idea that the PM CARES was constituted to “circumvent” the National Disaster Response Fund (NDRF).

  • Organ Transplantation in India

    The Government of India is implementing National Organ Transplant Programme (NOTP) to promote organ donation and transplantation across all States/Union Territories (UTs).

    National Organ Transplant Programme (NOTP)

    • In 2019, the GoI implemented the NOTP for promoting deceased organ donation.
    • Organ donation in India is regulated by the Transplantation of Human Organs and Tissues Act, 1994.

    Types of Organ Donations

    • The law allows both deceased and living donors to donate their organs.
    • It also identifies brain death as a form of death.
    • Living donors must be over 18 years of age and are limited to donating only to their immediate blood relatives or, in some special cases, out of affection and attachment towards the recipient.

    (1) Deceased donors:

    • They may donate six life-saving organs: kidneys, liver, heart, lungs, pancreas, and intestine.
    • Uterus transplant is also performed, but it is not regarded as a life-saving organ.
    • Organs and tissues from a person declared legally dead can be donated after consent from the family has been obtained.
    • Brainstem death is also recognized as a form of death in India, as in many other countries.
    • After a natural cardiac death, organs that can be donated are cornea, bone, skin, and blood vessels, whereas after brainstem death about 37 different organs and tissues can be donated, including the above six life-saving organs

    (2) Living donors:

    They are permitted to donate the following:

    • one of their kidneys
    • portion of pancreas
    • part of the liver

    Features of the NOTP

    • Under the NOTP a National Level Tissue Bank (Biomaterial Centre) for storing tissues has been established at National Organ and Tissue Transplant Organization (NOTTO), New Delhi.
    • Further, under the NOTP, a provision has also been made for providing financial support to the States for setting up of Bio- material centre.
    • As of now a Regional Bio-material centre has been established at Regional Organ and Tissue Transplant Organization (ROTTO), Chennai, Tamil Nadu.

    More moves for facilitation:  Green Corridors

    • Studies have suggested that the chances of transplantation being successful are enhanced by reducing the time delay between harvest and transplant of the organ.
    • Therefore, the transportation of the organ is a critical factor. For this purpose, “green corridors” have been created in many parts of India.
    • A “green corridor” refers to a route that is cleared out for an ambulance carrying the harvested organs to ensure its delivery at the destination in the shortest time possible.

    About NOTTO

    National Organ and Tissue Transplant Organization (NOTTO) is a national level organization set up under the Directorate General of Health Services, Ministry of Health and Family Welfare.

    1. National Human Organ and Tissue Removal and Storage Network
    2. National Biomaterial Centre (National Tissue Bank)

    [I] National Human Organ and Tissue Removal and Storage Network

    • This has been mandated as per the Transplantation of Human Organs (Amendment) Act 2011.
    • The network will be established initially for Delhi and gradually expanded to include other States and Regions of the country.
    • Thus, this division of the NOTTO is the nodal networking agency for Delhi and shall network for Procurement Allocation and Distribution of Organs and Tissues in Delhi.
    • It functions as apex centre for All India activities of coordination and networking for procurement and distribution of Organs and Tissues and registry of Organs and Tissues Donation and Transplantation in the country.

    [II] National Biomaterial Centre (National Tissue Bank)

    • The Transplantation of Human Organs (Amendment) Act 2011 has included the component of tissue donation and registration of tissue Banks.
    • It becomes imperative under the changed circumstances to establish National level Tissue Bank to fulfill the demands of tissue transplantation including activities for procurement, storage and fulfil distribution of biomaterials.
    • The main thrust & objective of establishing the centre is to fill up the gap between ‘Demand’ and ‘Supply’ as well as ‘Quality Assurance’ in the availability of various tissues.

    The centre will take care of the following Tissue allografts:

    1. Bone and bone products
    2. Skin graft
    3. Cornea
    4. Heart valves and vessels

  • A cardinal omission in the COVID-19 package

    Context

    On July 8, 2021, the Union government announced the “India COVID-19 Emergency Response and Health Systems Preparedness Package: Phase II”. But it lacks provision for the medical workforce.

    Objectives of the package

    • The stated purpose of the package is to boost health infrastructure and prepare for a possible third wave of COVID-19.
    • There is plan to increase COVID-19 beds, improve the oxygen availability and supply, create buffer stocks of essential medicines; purchase equipment and strengthen paediatric beds.

    What is lacking in the package?

    • Workforce shortage: The package barely has any attention on improving the availability of health human resources.
    • As reported in rural health statistics and the national health profile there are vacancies for staff in government health facilities, which range from 30% to 80% depending upon the sub-group of medical officers, specialist doctors to nurses, laboratory technicians, pharmacists and radiographers, amongst others.
    • Interstate variation: In addition, there are wide inter-State variations, with States that have poor health indicators with the highest vacancies.

    Way forward

    • Package for filling the existing vacancies: The COVID-19 package II needs to be urgently supplemented by another plan and a similar financial package (with shared Union and State government funding) to fill the existing vacancies of health staff at all levels. 
    • An objective approach to assess the mid-term health human resource needs could be the Indian Public Health Standards (IPHS).
    • IPHS prescribes the human resources and infrastructure needed to make various types of government health facilities functional.
    • The pandemic should be used as an opportunity to prepare India’s health system for the future.
    • Scrutiny of the progress on policy decision: The progress on key policy decisions, for the last few years, to strengthen India’s health system, including those in India’s national health policy of 2017, need to be objectively scrutinised.
    • These two sets of policy decisions should be reviewed and progress monitored, through a meeting of the Central Council of Health and Family Welfare, of which the Health Ministers of the States are members.

    Conclusion

    India’s health system will not benefit from ad hoc and a patchwork of one or other small packages. It essentially needs some transformational changes.

  • How China eliminated malaria and the road ahead for India

    Recently, El Salvador and China were declared malaria-free by the WHO.

    What is Malaria?

    • Malaria is a disease caused by a parasite called plasmodium vivax, p. filarium.
    • The parasite is spread to humans through the bites of infected mosquitoes.
    • People who have malaria usually feel very sick with a high fever and shaking chills.
    • While the disease is uncommon in temperate climates, malaria is still common in tropical and subtropical countries.

    How many countries have successfully eliminated malaria?

    • Since 1900, 127 countries have registered malaria elimination. This is definitely not an easy task.
    • It needs proper planning and a strategic action plan based on the local situations.
    • All these countries followed the existing tools and strategies to achieve the malaria elimination goal.
    • The main focus was on surveillance.
    How did China eliminate malaria?
    • China followed some specific strategies, namely strong surveillance following the ‘1-3-7’system: malaria diagnosis within 1 day, 3 days for case investigation and by day 7 for public health responses.
    • Molecular Malaria Surveillance for drug resistance and genome-based approaches to distinguish between indigenous and imported cases was conducted.
    • All borders to the neighboring countries were thoroughly screened to prevent the entry of unwanted malaria into the country.

    What is the current scenario of malaria in India?

    • As per the Global Malaria Report 2020 by the World Health Organization (WHO) India shared 2% of the total global malaria cases in 2019.
    • India has a great history of malaria control.
    • The highest incidence of malaria occurred in the 1950s, with an estimated 75 million cases with 0.8 million deaths per year.
    • The launch of National Malaria Control Programme in 1953 and the National Malaria Eradication Programme in 1958 made it possible to bring down malaria cases to 100,000 with no reported deaths by 1961.
    • This is a great achievement been made so far.

    Unexpected resurgence

    • But from a nearing stage of elimination, malaria resurged to approximately 6.4 million cases in 1976.
    • Since then, confirmed cases have decreased to 1.6 million cases, approximately 1100 deaths in 2009 to less than 0.4 million cases and below 80 deaths in 2019.
    • India accounted for 88% of malaria cases and 86% of all malaria deaths in the WHO South-East Asia Region in 2019.
    • It is the only country outside Africa among the world’s 11 `high burden to high impact’ countries.

    Road ahead for India

    Collaboration:

    • India is a signatory to National Framework for Malaria Elimination (NFME) 2016-2030 aiming for malaria elimination by 2030.
    • This framework has been outlined with a vision to eliminate the disease from the country which would contribute to improved health with quality of life and poverty alleviation.
    • China collaborated with Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA for Molecular Malaria Surveillance.
    • In India, there are very dedicated expert scientists who can take up such assignments.

    Diagnosis:

    • India stands at a very crucial stage. The present challenge is the detection of asymptomatic cases in most endemic areas.
    • Molecular Malaria Surveillance must be used to find out the drug-resistant variants and genetic-relatedness studies to find out the imported or indigenous cases.
    • The surveillance must be strengthened and using smart digital surveillance devices would be an important step. Real-time and organic surveillance is needed even in remote areas.

    Monitoring:

    • The results of each malaria case can be registered in a central dashboard at the National Vector Borne Disease Control Programme, as it is done for COVID-19 cases by Indian Council of Medical Research.
    • All intervention activities must strictly be monitored.
    • Vector biology, site of an actual vector mosquito bite, host shifting behaviour, feeding time, feeding behaviour and insecticide resistance studies need to be carried out to support the elimination efforts.

  • Issues with school enrolment in India

    Context

    Proportion of children attending the government schools has been on the decline. This has several implications.

    Issues with school education in India

    • A quality, free and regular school education represents our most potent infrastructure of opportunity, a fundamental duty of the state.
    • Meritocracy represents the idea that people should advance based on their talents and efforts.
    • But India’s meritocracy is sabotaged by flailing government schools.
    • The proportion of India’s children attending a government school has now declined to 45 per cent.
    • This number is 85 per cent in America, 90 per cent in England, and 95 per cent in Japan.
    • India’s 100 per cent plus school enrolment masks challenges; a huge dropout ratio and poor learning outcomes.
    • We have too many schools and 4 lakh have less than 50 students (70 per cent of schools in Rajasthan, Karnataka, J&K, and Uttarakhand).
    • China has similar total student numbers with 30 per cent of our school numbers.

    It is not Government Vs. Private schools

    • Demand for better government schools is not an argument against private schools.
    • Because, without this market response to demand, the post-1947 policy errors in primary education would have been catastrophic for India’s human capital.

    Way forward

    • We need the difficult reforms of governance, performance management, and English instruction.
    • Governance must shift from control of resources to learning outcomes; learning design, responsiveness, teacher management, community relationships, integrity, fair decision making, and financial sustainability.
    • Performance management, currently equated with teacher attendance, needs evaluation of scores, skills, competence and classroom management. Scores need continuous assessments or end-of-year exams.
    • The new world of work redefines employability to include the 3Rs of reading, writing, and arithmetic and a fourth R of relationships.
    • India’s farm to non-farm transition is not happening to factories but to sales and customer services which need 4R competency and English awareness.
    • English instruction is about bilingualism, higher education pathways, and employability.
    • Employment outcomes are 50 per cent higher for kids with English familiarity because of higher geographic mobility, sector mobility, role eligibility, and entrance exam ease.
    • India’s constitution wrote Education Policy into Lists I (Centre), II (State), and III (concurrent jurisdiction); this fragmentation needs revisiting because it tends to concentrate decisions that should be made locally in Delhi or state capitals.

    Conclusion

    Government needs urgent measure to addreess the issues which has bearing on its future.

  • [pib] NIPUN Bharat Programme

    Union Minister for Education has launched a National Initiative for Proficiency in Reading with Understanding and Numeracy (NIPUN Bharat).

    NIPUN Bharat

    • This scheme aims for ensuring that every child in the country necessarily attains foundational literacy.
    • It has been launched under the aegis of the centrally sponsored scheme of Samagra Shiksha.
    • It would cover the learning needs of children in the age group of 3 to 9 years.
    • The unique feature is that the goals of the Mission are set in the form of Lakshya Soochi or Targets for Foundational Literacy and Numeracy.
    • The Lakshyas are based on the learning outcomes developed by the NCERT and international research and ORF studies.

    Envisaged outcomes

    • Foundational skills enable to keep children in class thereby reducing the dropouts and improve transition rate from primary to upper primary and secondary stages.
    • Activity-based learning and a conducive learning environment will improve the quality of education.
    • Innovative pedagogies such as toy-based and experiential learning will be used in classroom transactions thereby making learning a joyful and engaging activity.
    • Intensive capacity building of teachers
    • Since almost every child attends early grades, therefore, focus at that stage will also benefit the socio-economic disadvantageous group thus ensuring access to equitable and inclusive quality education.