Innholdsfortegnelse for June 1, 2020 i India Today

The cover story this week is a subject very close to my heart—education. Thirty years ago, I founded an education trust and started a school because I thought my children, who went to a premium school in Delhi, received an education that laid no emphasis on developing the full potential of a child beyond an outdated syllabus, learnt by rote. The school we set up was focused on learning with understanding. It was a school where learning was fun, a school where children would not be afraid to ask questions, a school community that cared, a school where children could push the boundaries of current understanding and belief and in the process create new knowledge and new benchmarks in education. Our school is considered one of the top schools in…

A PAWAR SHOW After 55 days indoors, Nationalist Congress Party chief Sharad Pawar stepped out of his home in Mumbai on May 14. At a meeting with coalition partner and Maharashtra chief minister Uddhav Thackeray and chief secretary Ajoy Mehta, Pawar suggested that economic activity resume in non-containment zones. He also inspected a makeshift hospital at the Bandra-Kurla Complex. His appearance raised eyebrows not only because he is high-risk for COVID-19—he turns 80 this year—but also because it adds weight to rumours that he is the real power behind the CM’s seat. What is likely is that he made an appearance to lend support to the relatively inexperienced Thackeray. TWO BIRDS, ONE STONE? The Shivraj Singh Chouhan government recently set up a committee to review decisions taken by the Kamal…

Free rations/ allowance Free rations distributed to 16.5 million families in rural/ urban areas in April; Rs 353 crore goes toward disbursing Rs 1,000 each to urban labourers VAT increased Additional VAT on petrol (Rs 2/ L), diesel (Re 1/ L) and liquor (ranging from Rs 5 to Rs 400 per bottle) will generate an extra Rs 4,429 crore Covid Care Fund Created to arrange funds to fight the pandemic, it now has a Rs 300 crore corpus. Government departments, private organisations, MLAs and MPs have all contributed to it Insurance for Covid workers All state employees engaged in fighting the epidemic now have a cover of Rs 50 lakh Allowances slashed An April 25 order has frozen increments in DA, DRA (Dearness Relief Allowance) and six other allowances to…

Q. What do you think are the high points and shortcomings of the government’s financial stimulus? • D.K. JOSHI The Rs 20.9 lakh crore economic stimulus is purportedly to support India’s vulnerable population and businesses besides improving the growth potential via medium-term reforms. But, in fact, it is focused more on raising the ‘trend rate’ of growth than supporting the current cycle. It does not have enough to provide immediate relief to the millions affected by the pandemic. The design of the package is heavily influenced by the limited fiscal space available—and the actual fiscal hit is only about 10 per cent of the overall package. This situation needs generous fiscal support, as downside risks will dominate till a vaccine or reliable cure becomes available. On the positive side, agriculture…

✔ Allow innovative methods of teaching with the help of technology ✔ Enable students to learn at their own pace; allow them to access the best content prepared by the best teachers ✔ Extend reach to a large no. of students at the same time ✔ Relieve peer pressure because of the anonymity of virtual world, resulting in a stress-free learning environment ✔ Much more cost-effective than a regular on-campus degree…

Rs 992 CRORE Last month’s revised estimate for the cost, up about 19 per cent from Rs 776 crore, of a new Parliament building. The revised budget got the green light from the environment ministry last month, with the deadline for the triangular building set for 2022, in time for India’s 75th birthday Rs 229.75 CRORE Fee to be paid to Ahmedabad-based HCP Design to plan the redevelopment of Lutyens’ Delhi, including new Parliament building and govt offices Rs 448 CRORE What the government had budgeted to pay the winning bidders. Fee paid to planners typically amounts to 3-5 per cent of total costs Rs 1,000 CRORE Annual cost to the exchequer of renting offices outside Lutyens’ Delhi for govt ministries 15 ACRES Plot size of proposed new prime minister’s…

The obvious problem with recommending books during what is possibly the harshest lockdown in the world is that if you don’t have the book on your shelves, you cannot get it from a shop or order it online. So parents searching for something new to read to their small children during these inexorable weeks of government-mandated quality time must hope their neighbourhood has a book exchange or that bookshops in local markets that are not part of malls and can enforce social distancing will be allowed to open. Treat this, then, not so much as one more set of guidelines or instructions to follow—by now, we have all had enough of being told what to do—but as an argument for the solace that reading can provide to children who have…

THE BOOK IS ALL THE MORE RELEVANT IN THE LOCKED DOWN 2020 WORLD, WHERE OUR EXTENDED DIGITAL PRESENCE WILL BE MINED Did you play Pokémon GO, the 2016 mobile game that drove a billion users outdoors? It used GPS and augmented reality to locate, capture, battle and train digital critters that appeared in your environment via your phone screen. It got fully-grown adults to spend real money on lucky eggs and virtual incense, and it also got them out into a real world overlaid with fabricated rewards. It gently hoarded Pokémon-hunting players to eat, drink and buy in restaurants, bars and shops that paid to play. It drove user behaviour. By early 2019, the game had a billion downloads and $3 billion in revenue. You didn’t play Pokémon? Nor did…

While the country’s attention has been focused on the struggle to contain the COVID-19 virus, incidents on the India-China border have thrown the more familiar challenge of safeguarding our extended frontiers. On May 5 and 9, there were clashes between Indian and Chinese patrols in the Sikkim and Ladakh sectors respectively, which fortunately did not go beyond fisticuffs and pushing and shoving. They were defused through the intervention of military officers as per the bilateral consultative mechanism set up in the wake of the face-off in 2017 at Doklam, which is at the trijunction of the borders of India, Bhutan and China. There have been subsequent reports of another stand-off in the Galwan area in Ladakh, the scene of similar tensions a few years ago. In their public statements, the…

Some 1.5 million migrant workers back in UP, 500,000 more expected by May 31. Shelter homes and quarantine facilities are needed at the block level. Also, MNREGA work has started in rural areas but these workers do not have job cards so they are not eligible There are 918 private and 717 government community kitchens working in the state. Food is distributed free to 1.02 million people every day. They will need to double this by May 31 UP government says it is providing free rations to migrant labour, but there must be a special drive to make ration cards for them State government has appointed nodal officers for every district and for every state (repatriation), but there are constant complaints that they are inaccessible COVID-19 test facilities are available…

CONTENT CREATORS MOOCS The Massive Open Online Courses, popularly known as MOOCs, are created by national and international educational institutes, providing openly accessible study material and degrees to students. The Union HRD ministry, too, has launched several MOOCs. Some of the top-rated MOOCs in India include Coursera, NPTEL, Edx, Udemy and WizIQ EDTECHS Various EdTech companies provide high-quality, interactive study material, rich in video and graphics, helping students understand concepts easily. However, these come for a fee. Among the prominent names are BYJU’S, Unacademy, Khan Academy, Shaw Academy, GradeUp and Board Infinity…

✘ Virtual learning and teaching require time and practice ✘ In the absence of physical connect, free-flowing conversations and debates are precluded ✘ Depends on availability of internet, electricity and digital device; students from economically weak backgrounds and in remote areas often have none of the three ✘ The home environment can cause distractions to both students and teachers ✘ Over-exposure to a mobile or computer screen can result in physical and mental trauma…

The redevelopment of New Delhi’s power corridor, as envisioned by Ahmedabadbased architect Bimal Patel, involves significant material and symbolic changes. The historic Parliament building is to be paired with a triangular twin, the Central Secretariat buildings on Raisina Hill will be turned into museums while new ministerial office buildings will line both sides of Rajpath. The existing National Museum and IGNCA buildings are among the many structures slated for demolition. Significant aspects of this layout may well be reworked however…

It’s a day after ‘Bois Locker Room’ made headlines in India, and Jameela Jamil is fulminating on the phone from LA. “I can’t believe more celebrities aren’t speaking out about it, in India and outside,” says the 34-year-old actor and activist. She heard about the social media episode—a disturbing incident in which teenagers shared explicit photos of minors and discussed raping girls—after being inundated with messages from her South Asian Instagram and Twitter followers. “It was being flagged for me by thousands of girls and boys… because no one with influence was talking about it.” Jamil, the half-Indian, half-Pakistani, British-born-and-raised, US-based actor, is a bona fide global celebrity and among the growing number of South Asian faces in Hollywood. “I would say I’m more of an activist than an actor,”…

EXCUSE ME, IS THIS INDIA? by Anushka Ravishankar (Author); Anita Leutwiler (Illustrator) TARA BOOKS ₹200; 24 pages Anushka Ravishankar is, arguably, the best-known contemporary Indian children’s writer. Hemmed in by the lockdown, perhaps this dream-trip through ‘India’ will remind children that we are free to wander anywhere in our imaginations. “Oh, don’t you know?” Ravishankar writes, “It doesn’t matter where you are / But where you want to go.” HAROUN AND THE SEA OF STORIES by Salman Rushdie PUFFIN ₹299 (Kindle); 221 pages Perhaps we fill find many contemporary resonances in this fantastical tale of a storyteller and his son restoring “the saddest of cities” to its former ebullience. Allusiveanddazzling, Haroun..., written while Rushdie was in hiding because of the Ayatollah’s fatwa, is a defence of chatter, of unfettered speech.…

India is referred to as “mitr rashtra” (friendly country) in public statements by Nepali leaders, and the sheer size and scale of India-Nepal ties have few parallels. However, this ‘closeness’ also makes us the play board for domestic politics in Nepal with anti-India positioning paying rich political dividends. Providing space for regional and even global geopolitics vis-à-vis India, particularly with China but also with others in South Asia and beyond, are also part of the playlist in Nepal. As the world and, indeed, India and Nepal grapple with the coronavirus pandemic and extraordinarily difficult economic times ahead, the latter has sought to rewrite its geography by releasing a new map that shows certain Indian areas in Nepal. The reasons appear to lie in its domestic politics and the influencing power…

Agloom has set in upon the staff of King Edward Memorial (KEM) Hospital, the biggest municipality-run hospital in central Mumbai’s Parel area. Everyone associated with the hospital looks dejected. Around 1,000 resident doctors work without adequate food, nurses fear for their safety as they file in, all norms of social distancing ignored, into packed buses meant to ferry them to their homes. Relatives of the COVID-19 patients admitted in the 3,000-bed hospital are terrified, some of them clueless about how to cremate the infected bodies of their loved ones. KEM is just the tip of iceberg that is Mumbai’s overburdened health system. A video that went viral in the first week of May exposed the ill-preparedness of another large civic facility in the city—the Lokmanya Tilak Municipal General Hospital, popularly…

Considerable planning and recalibration will be necessary in the post-Covid time when students will be able to return to the physical school campus. We will need to re-evaluate every school activity and make changes where necessary. We will perhaps emerge with a whole new set of systems, which will then be the ‘new normal’. The human mind is remarkably inventive, and the online quizzes, debates, symposiums and joint projects children have been doing from their homes are becoming very popular. Our student body has shown the way in many of these initiatives. In the previous year, the highlight of the last day of school before we closed for summer was an inter-house music competition. We did the same this year, except that this time the competition was online. It was…

➲ With 451 million monthly active internet users in 2019, India is second only to China in terms of internet users, but that amounts to only 36 per cent of the Indian population, says a report by the Internet and Mobile Association of India ➲ Only 8 per cent of all households with members aged between five and 24 have both a computer and an internet connection, according to the 2017-2018 National Sample Survey report on education ➲ 55,000 villages in India did not have mobile network coverage, according to a 2018 NITI Aayog report ➲ India’s Bharat Net project aims to provide broadband to 250,000 gram panchayats by 2021. Till February 2020, cable has been laid in 146,717 (59 per cent) gram panchayats of which 134,248 (53 per cent)…

“WE ARE TURNING OVER A FORTRESS TO THE PEOPLE” Tasked with the redevelopment of the capital’s central vista, architect and urban planner Bimal Patel insists his vision will “break down walls” and promote smarter government functioning. His critics, he warns, may be using the project as a “football to hit the government with”. Kai Friese interviewed the architect in February. Excerpts: Q. We’ve seen a lot of bird’s eye views of the central vista, but everyone is curious to know what your redevelopment will look like from the PoV of a citizen on Rajpath. When you’re standing on Rajpath, you’re going to see nothing. And that’s the big point. Presently, if you stand on Rajpath, there is an avenue of trees that blocks the view at the back. They will…

Neeraj Kabi is happy to wait. Six years after he decided to become an actor, he got his first film, Shesha Drushti (1997). “I thought the doors into the industry of Bombay have opened,” says Kabi. “Nothing happened.” His breakthrough would take another 15 years to come. In Anand Gandhi’s National Award-winning debut Ship of Theseus (2012), Kabi shone as a Jain monk whose principles are tested. The actor has been landing acting gigs consistently since then, but there’s something that still eludes him. “I have been looking forward to many great mainstream films coming my way,” says Kabi. Rajkumar Hirani, Anubhav Sinha, Zoya Akhtar, Abhishek Chaubey, Anurag Kashyap are all filmmakers he would like to collaborate with. Until those opportunities come his way, Kabi is satisfied with web shows—SacredGames(2018-),TheFinalCall…