Jaunpur emerging as education hub in UP

Broken roads and power cuts have failed to deter people in their drive for education in this eastern Uttar Pradesh district. They have set up more than 30 schools and technical institutes for youth of the area. If you drive between Imran Ganj to Guraini in the Shahganj sub-division of the district, a distance of some 10 km, you can count about 40 schools and technical institutes. Only about 10 of them are government-run or aided.

The area covers some 60 villages, with a population of over 100,000. From primary schools to degree colleges, Islamic madrassas to computer and mobile phone repairing centres, the area offers a wide choice to parents anxious about their children’s education.

Beginning from scratch
Mirza Azfar Baig, Manager of the Mirza Anwar Baig Educational Society, remembers that earlier it was too hard to even open a school. “When we started, there was nothing but forest and some barren land. It was hard to run a school as there was lack of transportation and educational awareness,” Mr Baig said.

The Mirza Anwar Baig Educational Society was established in 1962 and runs three institutes – Abdul Aziz Ansari Degree College, Mirza Anwar Baig Intermediate College and Maulana Azad Taleemi Markaz (Islamic madrassa), where about 5,000 students are enrolled.

Ms Geeta Maurya, headmistress of R.K Convent School in Khetasarai town, thinks that it is a sign of progress that people are now eager to give their kids good education. “This is a good thing that there are enough schools. If we have more schools then the student-teacher ratio will be better,” says Ms Maurya.

Not only this, girls of the area are ahead of boys when it comes to education. “Awareness and interest towards education is more common among girls. We provide education to both and in the graduation level, girls’ ratio is 60 per cent more than boys,” Mr Baig said.

“Girl students are more interested and enthusiastic about education. It is a new trend in our rural belt and definitely guarantor of a better future. Educated girls can solve lots of problems like health and hygiene and they may also help their children to have a bright future,” added Ms Maurya.

Mr Farhan Ahmad, trainer of mobile operating classes in Faizan Mobile Centre, says that there is only need to encourage the youngsters. “This area has enough talent and students are very fond of technical education but we lag behind because of the scarcity of proper facilities. We have electricity only for 10 hours a day with a very low voltage,” Mr Ahmad said.

Source: The Hindu Business Line, January 10, 2011

We need to encourage research for development: Infosys Co-Chairman

Three years ago, Infosys decided to felicitate outstanding researchers in various fields by setting up the Infosys Science Foundation, a not-for-profit trust. Infosys’ Executive Co-Chairman S. Gopalakrishnan speaks to Bibhu Ranjan Mishra about the reasons behind instituting the awards and also about technologies that are expected to steer the IT industry forward. Edited excerpts:

How successful you have been in meeting your objectives of promoting researches in the country?
Our objective was to recognize people of Indian origin doing researches relevant to India, and recognize them. This will encourage more people to do researches and enhance the quality of researches in India. We believe that as India looks at growth and development, invention and innovation coming out of researches will have a very important role to play.

There is a popular belief that since the IT industry hires graduates in large scale, students want to join the industry instead of pursuing higher studies and do research. What is your view on that?
I don’t believe the IT industry is responsible for not encouraging higher studies and research. We need world-class industry and for that we need to pay more to get good employees. Other disciplines have also started compensating people well. We need to create an environment where there are enough people who can go into other disciplines of engineering. We need to encourage people to do research rather than saying that the IT industry needs to reduce the salary of employees. Our initial focus was to establish this industry in India and scale it up.

What role do you think various fields of science will play in propelling the growth of IT industry?
Most of these fields are interrelated. If you look at the chip itself, which is a hardware, you will find that we all use it as the basis for building this industry. A lot of researches have happened in terms of increasing the number of processing units which are embedded into the chip; then we have gone into multi-core architecture. These innovations in chip technology are driven by basic and material sciences. Future opportunities like quantum computing and nano-material are heavily dependent on the other streams of sciences. When you look at algorithms, they come from applied mathematics and statistics. I see the need for creating an inter-disciplinary approach now to solve real-world problems in areas of healthcare, sustainability, education and poverty.

What are the technologies which have really been the backbone of the IT industry?
In my view, there are seven innovations which gave a boost to the proliferation of communication and networks. The first among them is the TCP/IP standard, which created a universal network and a universal way to address every element that is connected to the network. The introduction of personal computers was the second milestone as that democratized computing. People who have created them are those who are now creating content and contributing to the explosive growth of the internet that we see today. The other areas which gave a boost to communication networks are worldwide web, fiber optics, mobile phones, application architecture and search engine.

What are the emerging areas of opportunities for the industry?
There are a lot of new things that will have an impact on the industry. Internet is not only connecting the devices and appliances, it is also connecting people. In the next few years, we will have an explosive growth of connecting devices. Some people even say that 50-60 billion devices will be connected. The second area is explosion of data on the internet. People will require services to make use of the data after analyzing it and to store it. With the emergence of cloud computing, we are going through a phase where computing on-premise will actually become a back-up to computing from the grid or cloud. That transition will happen over the next 5-10 years, and that again will provide significant opportunities for us to re-look at how we deploy applications and do computing. We also expect the ‘voice’ to play a major role in the proliferation of internet.

Source: Business Standard, January 10, 2012

Infosys prize conferred on six researchers from 5 science streams

Six researchers from five science streams were honoured with the Infosys Prize-2011 by the former President, A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, in Bangalore on Monday. Eminent personalities, including Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, attended the function. The prize, into its third year, carries a cash component of Rs. 5 million, a gold medallion and a citation. The jury that selected the winners includes renowned academics, including Dr. Sen.

‘Research culture’
“Research culture in academics and research institutions is the crying need. I feel the prize winners should be deployed in some of the universities in India,” Dr. Kalam said, after giving away the awards. Outlining the challenges before the country, he said attention should be paid to provision of drinking water, agriculture, access to green energy, healthcare and balancing of greenhouse gases. The country could become a global leader in science only when the spirit of science was inculcated in classrooms, syllabus and teachers. Research in basic science, he said, was vital to facing global competition.

The prize winners are Kalyanmoy Deb, Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology-Kanpur (Engineering and Computer Science); Imran Siddiqi, Scientist, Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Hyderabad (Life Sciences); Kannan Soundarajan, Director, Mathematics Research Centre, Stanford University, U.S. (Mathematical Sciences); Sriram Ramaswamy, Professor, Centre for Condensed Matter Theory, Indian Institute of Science-Bangalore (Physical Sciences); Raghuram G. Rajan, Charles M. Harper Faculty Fellow at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business (Social Sciences-Economics); and Pratap Bhanu Mehta, President and Chief Executive of the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi (Social Sciences-Political Science and International Relations).

Except Dr. Rajan, whose wife Radhika Puri received the award, all other winners were present. He could not attend the function because of his academic engagements. T.V. Mohandas Pai, president of the Board of Trustees of Infosys Science Foundation, said a new award category in humanities would be introduced from 2012. It would cover philosophy, history, archaeology, linguistics and literary sciences. Chairman Emeritus of Infosys Ltd. N.R. Narayana Murthy, Executive Co-Chairman Krish Gopalkrishnan, Co-Chairman K.V. Kamat and Unique Identification Authority of India Chairman Nandan Nilakeni were present.

Source: The Hindu, January 10, 2012