The ET says that the Indian education market is thriving and likely to be valued at Rs 6,00,000 crores by 2015. They expect more private investment in the sector.
Our education sector is either poor-quality-but-cheap or poor-quality-and expensive. Very few institutions are good-quality-cheap or good-quality-expensive. Private investors seem to have got many things right , but when it comes to education, few seem to know what is required.
In Hyderabad, the crucial 'Junior College' segment is crucial because most, if not all children wish to join the IITs and prepare for it primarily in the 11th and 12th years of education.
There were two major players in in this--a group called Sri Chaitanya and another called Narayana. These made it impossible for other smaller fries to sustain themselves in this sector. Most others sold out to them and last year the two giant businesses merged  to form a giant conglomerate owning almost all the junior colleges in Hyderabad and much of AP. For them it is exactly like poultry farming..........they sort students into those expected to get into IITs, those likely to get 95% marks in the board exam, those expected to get 70-60% and so on. These are placed in different locations and treated differently. No one actually gets educated in the sense of being really exposed to different ideas and thoughts, but that's beside the point.
Now, as businesses, these are extremely successful. They make a lot of money for the promoters and investors. So this is how the 6,00,000 crore industry looks like.....efficiently managed, like the hi-tech poultry businesses with children huddled into caged tenements masquerading as schools.

Auto woes

A few days back, my nephew came to visit us from Chennai. He said that after a PIL filed by a lawyer, all autos in Madras now charge reasonably and go by the meter.........(maybe they have also become polite!!!). I am likely to go to Chennai next month and that would be a cause for celebration. I have forgotten that it was once, decades ago, possible to travel by auto in Madras without my blood pressure shooting up.
But perhaps the malady will now be transferred to Delhi...........The new government in Delhi has decided that auto drivers that fleece passengers cannot be challaned by Delhi Police.....the understaffed Delhi transport authority will take over.  In other words, field day for Delhi auto drivers!

Miracle!!

"Dehydrated Water 
Unlike traditional water bottling facilities who bottle water only from one specific region, we have designed an innovative blending system that harnesses and compresses the benefits of waters ranging from the French Alps to the Rocky Mountains.  Our 27-step process bonds the molecules and rigorously blends the waters together.  It then secretes the water molecules and harvests them for the final stage.  Once ready, the substance is introduced to the environment and the excess vapors are released.  The remaining substance is pure, natural, dehydrated water."

Someone has actually  sold it, bought it and reviewed it.

http://midwaypersonal.blogspot.in/2011/03/amazing-amazonmust-buy.html 

School Science Fair

After a couple of weeks of  very hard work, the science exhibition at the school got done. The 5th class children had done some charts........leaves, flowers and fruits in and around their campus. The 6th and 7th had a little more ambitious projects. Of these, a few worked quite hard while some children expected me to do it all for them and thought they just had to stand there and talk a bit. Of the few good ones was this 5th class boy who did some work for ALL the projects. He helped build the clay mountain with hidden  funnel and tube for the hydel plant, he built the  volcano with a hidden bottle for the soda volcano, he made a car with a cardboard carton for a balloon driven car,  he helped me with the solar oven and with my first unsuccessful biogas plant. I was very impressed with this little boy. There were others who did well too. One project that I did not even have to touch was the "Braino"....made totally by a 6th class  boy.  I just had to explain how the connections were to be made. After a couple of false starts, he got it right.
There was this girl who had heard about chromatography  and insisted on doing it. I tried to discourage it since I did not feel I could explain to them the principle behind it well enough for a 6th class child to understand. Finally, I used a strip of paper kitchen towel and separated green ink using water as mobile phase. The girl who had made a model of a solar oven and the boy who had made a model hydel did an excellent job of explaining what  their model was about.
My saviours in this whole episode were two young women who were studying for their MPharm. They had a break while they were waiting for some company to organise their internship. They helped me with some of the work, specially in view of my miserably inadequate Telugu, they could translate  what I said to make the younger kids understand.

Dropping out of MOOCs

I am the kind of person who works very hard when compelled to - I need deadlines or some such pressure to work hard. But, if someone told me that there was this rewarding work that  I could do if I wished to, it would never get done.
So, when I registered for a couple of Coursera courses, I told myself that I must see these through and prove to myself that I can motivate myself without external pressures. Guess what- I haven't completed the courses. No surprise.
But it is almost everyone- not just me. There is a  90% dropout by one estimate.  
"Some users -- including stay-at-home parents or retirees -- may sign up for the same reason they do a Sunday crossword puzzle, said Yvonne Belanger, the head of assessment and planning for the Center for Instructional Technology at Duke University.

“They have nothing more than, ‘This is a good way to spend my free time – it’s better than television,' ” she said.

But I swear my reason for enrolling is not the same as that common to the retirees mentioned here.

I was really interested in the courses, but somehow day to day chores always go up on my list of priorities.

“Emerging data ... show that massive open online courses (MOOCs) have relatively few active users, that user ‘engagement’ falls off dramatically especially after the first 1-2 weeks of a course, and that few users persist to the course end,” a summary of the study reads.

Tykrograma

As I had mentioned before, I go to this school in a neighbouring village  where, at present, I am trying to set up a 'Science Exhibition" for the 5th, 6th and 7th class children. I was reading the Environmental Studies text for the 5th class. It is surprisingly  broad in its coverage and goes further than the cliches... it gives anecdotal write ups about a shepherd in Palamuru, a cotton farmer, a poultry farmer and their problems. Then, there is a chapter on nutrition  and food pyramid, on our body, forest and tribal life, transport, one on safety and first aid, one on child labour. Then it covers the atmosphere,  energy sources,some basic geography and a bit of history etc.......There are some good things about it, and some deficiencies. The good thing is, it sensitises urban children to lives they otherwise do not get to even see. The bad thing is that it  takes on too many things and does not do justice. I think I learnt considerably more geography than this.
One other thing is that the publishers and editors have no concern for language. It is in English meant for English medium schools. At the age of 10 or 11, if they read a book with grammatical errors, they are going to learn just that. Language skill needs to be nurtured right from the beginning. After learning to say "he tell to me" and "he enquired me" till the age of 15, the child cannot suddenly change.
Lastly, there is a page that says
"I am an earthworm. I make the soil fertile......."
"I am a snake. I help farmers by swallowing rats......"
and
"I am tykrograma. The scientists from I C A R created me. My life span is only one week. I destroy the eggs of enemy insects that infect crops..."
I have looked up Google search, and ICAR website. I cannot find out what tykrograma is. I am curious.

PS:  The NBAII lists biopesticides.............There I found  Trichogramma australicum , T Brasiliensis etc. which act against sugarcane borer. I am relieved, but what about the generations of children who are looking for the mysterious tykograma?

Outsourced!

 Why are Americans complaining  about their jobs being outsourced? Look at our police...THEY have outsourced their jobs and are quite happy to do so.  If someone is robbed at an ATM, the ATM people should deal with it...so if there is a mugging or murder outside your house, you are at fault....why did you not post a security guard outside your gate? That's why Tehelka has not filed a police complaint yet. They are still looking for the agency that rape investigations are outsourced to.