Ground Reality

  For an agriculture labor cum daily wage construction worker, it was a great day when he managed to improve education facilities in his alma mater in a mofussil corner of southern Karnataka in recent past .  In his school’s modernized building, a mothers’ conclave was held to felicitate them as they are the first teachers of kids, and their dedicated efforts in grooming kids cannot be measured by any yardsticks. For Nagappa Veerappa of Bakkannanavar of village called Devagiri in Haveri Taluka / District of Karnataka, a great dream has come true. Born to a poor family, he, throughout his student life, worked as an agriculture labor, building construction worker, a security guard and so on to meet my daily expenses and completed my Master of Library & Information Science and Ph.D. in 1997 and 2009 respectively. Currently, he works with Tata Consultancy Services, Bangalore. Fired by zeal to impart the skills to students, he always envisioned scope for school improv...

Carrying forward his agenda of turning country’s universities into temples of excellence, Eminent Academician and newly appointed  President of the Association of Universities (AIU) Prof PB Sharma has embarked on a massive exercise of interacting with Vice chancellors of various educational bodies to  redraw contours of action plans to accomplish the cherished goal. A simpleton by nature, Dr Sharma who himself is the VC of an International level Private University in Gurugram, says he will work in close tandem with VCs to transform India’s Higher education to serve the cause of high employ-ability, continued contribution to the new knowledge creation, advancing frontiers of Knowledge, engaging into technology incubation, innovations and new product its development creating startups and new age enterprises in plenty. Focused on his vision, Dr.Sharma told this blogger that they would strive hard to achieve these goals with sincere committing to solving pressing pro...

   Unbridled mushrooming of engineering colleges like “Chemist shops” is despairingly blighting national goal of producing engineers of excellence and quality in India, reveals a well-researched book- “Path to Excellence” by academician Pritam B sharma who calls for a thorough review of the policy before it is too late. Driven by a quest to increase the Gross Enrolment Ratio (GER), the regulatory system in the country allowed “mushrooming” of engineering and technology colleges and deemed universities, thinking that the engineering colleges are like chemist shops required in every nook and corner of the nation, the book mentions. They overlooked that the engineering institutions are required to attract best of talent both in students as well in its faculty community …. “But for the crazy policy makers and regulators responsible for assuring quality this was not the agenda as they primarily focused on achieving an accelerated increase in GER from almost 9% in ...