Universal education, minimal learning

Tripura claims to have achieved the goal of universalisation of elementary education, with almost 100 per cent enrolment, 90 per cent retention and average attendance rates of 80 per cent for primary schools and 77 per cent for upper primary schools. Does that mean that on any random day, if you show up at an elementary school, you are going to find all the children in 6-14 years age group attending school?

Unlikely. A recently tabled CAG audit report that reviewed the performance of elementary education in the state during 2006-2011 shows that there is considerable mismatch between enrolment, attendance, etc. as enumerated in DISE (District Information System for Education) and actual percentages recorded in 60 schools where checks were carried out. On the day of inspection, average attendance was found to be 57 per cent. Not only is this significantly less than what DISE data claims, it was also less than the number present in the previous academic session's attendance registers.
Hidden behind the 'average' figures that paint a rosy picture of universalisation, retention and attendance are stark local variations. Thirty nine per cent of schools in Tripura show attendance rates below 50 per cent. In Dhalai district, with a high proportion of Scheduled Tribes, the attendance figures are quite worrisome.

 •  Focus on tribal education
 •  Tripura promotes Kok-Borok

But in case one thinks the joint inspection team merely compared statistics in registers and DISE - a very common perception about auditors - you are in for a surprise. CAG's performance audit report spans across 33 pages and tells us that audit teams also held long interviews with teachers to gauge the reasons for low attendance and were told that such low attendance was due to 'less awareness of parents'.

The audit teams attempted to probe the reasons for low attendance and their relationship to learning outcomes, by examining the data more finely. They found that only two schools reported more than 80 per cent attendance and 50 per cent of students securing more than 80 per cent marks. Another 13 schools reported attendance ranging between 50 to 80 per cent and 25 to 50 per cent of students securing more than 80 per cent marks. As many as 45 schools, on the other hand, (75 per cent of the number sampled) showed poor attendance figures and poor learning outcomes.

The auditors also observed that except two schools, all the others had received teaching grants, but during inspection they did not appear to be using the teaching aids in classrooms. Fourteen out of 60 sampled schools didn't receive the Teaching Learning Equipment they were supposed to get as per SSA norms during the last five years. In Dhalai district, most of the children in schools were first generation learners, but none of the schools had provided any special attention to teach slow/weak learners. Thirty four schools did not have a regular head teacher, which meant that teachers had to attend to tasks related to school management, affecting their teaching duties.

The problem of schools not having a regular head teacher is wide-spread. Of the 4386 schools in Tripura, 2810 (64 per cent) do not have regular head teachers. The state needs to urgently promote more teachers into higher positions of responsibility as head teachers. This should not be too difficult, since Tripura has very positive Pupil-Teacher Ratio (PTR) - in 2006 the state had a teacher for every 22 students and in 2011 it improved this ratio by having a teacher for every 18 students.

Impressive numbers on teacher recruitments also come along with poor school infrastructure, deficient training infrastructure, a depressingly low number of teacher educators, and uneven distribution of teachers. In many places, primary and upper primary schools are run in the same building, in morning and afternoon shifts. Thus, each of the schools on average functions for 22 hours a week for 100 to 284 days in an academic session. This is only half the time prescribed as working hours for teachers as per RTE norms viz. 45 hours a week (although the higher figure includes time that teachers have to spend in preparing for class as well).

While recruitment numbers are good, they are also highly uneven. The state has 11 schools where there is only one teacher for more than 100 students. There are also another 105 schools where there is one teacher for 50 to 100 students. Any intervention aiming to bring the PTR closer to the state average in these schools is constrained by policy hurdles. For instance, teachers recruited under SSA can't be transferred. Similarly as the Principal Secretary, Education suggested in a conference to discuss the audit findings, female teachers and teachers with health concerns can't be transferred either.

There is a need to identify schools/locations that have consistently reported adverse PTRs in the last ten years, and find the reasons that de-motivate teachers from accepting postings in these. That will help plan the incentives needed to overcome the hurdles.

Teacher quality remains an area of concern, despite continuous recruitment. As many as 71 per cent of the teachers do not possess the minimum qualifications mandated by the National Council of Teachers' Education. Only 22 per cent of the teachers are properly trained. Lack of Science and Maths teachers is a huge concern in many schools. 783 Upper Primary schools didn't have even a single Maths or Science teacher, and 1149 more didn't have a Maths teacher. In Dhalai, the shortage of teachers was particularly acute - Maths at 66 per cent, and Science at 50 per cent. This has affected learning outcomes in these subjects.

The state government has responded to the audit observations by stating that it is in the final stage of engaging 1000 Science teachers, but there is no word on addressing the shortage of Mathematics teachers. And even where there are teachers, problems eventually crop up; the poor training infrastructure and shortages of teacher educators deny a large number of teachers any in-service training to improve themselves.

On the whole, the education system in the State looks like one that is at best filling up numbers on a checklist, without much attention to any learning outcomes. And even this limited exercise appears incomplete in many places. One can only hope that this performance review triggers a discussion among educationists in the state, and an effort to address the bottlenecks to learning.

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Shielding campuses from violence

For most belonging to India’s middle class, politics is a dirty word. Be it the everyday ups and downs at the workplace, or the insidious psychological maneuverings of participants in a reality show, nobody seems to think that “doing politics” (as such situations are often tagged) is essential, or can be a remotely positive preoccupation. Power is widely held as that which erodes a person of her morals and fellow-feeling, and yet is the ultimate intoxicant.

Indeed, in a country where representatives of power often come with the excess baggage of criminal records or proceed to get mired in endless cases of corruption, it is difficult for the average person to accept that politics is not an external entity that one may or may not allow into one’s life, but a precondition of society. Politics is the manner in which we engage with daily structures of power, such as the family, the workplace, the state and the society. It is embedded in our existence, and no amount of non-complicity in partisan politics can erase our identities as political animals.

The erstwhile decision of the Trinamool Congress government in West Bengal to put on hold elections in colleges across the state, and the spate of events that it unfurled, have given rise to debates regarding involvement of the student community in politics. Views exchanged across newspaper op-eds or television programs have brought to light numerous streams of thought, ranging from the assumption of political naivete of students on the one hand to the fundamental democratic right of political participation on the other. But why this debate now?

A sign outside the Union Room of a college in Kolkata. Pic: Ritaj Gupta

The context of such a decision had been a series of violent clashes that had taken place across various college campuses in the state, most notably the incident at Harimohan Ghose College on 12 February, 2013, in which a fight had broken out between miscreants from the local Congress and Trinamool Congress stables over the filing of nomination papers for the students’ union elections. Caught in the crossfire, sub-inspector Tapas Choudhury was shot dead, and this sparked off discussions about the violent turn that student politics had taken in the state. It was not long before it was found that the clash was, in reality, between local Trinamool Congress councillor Mohammad Iqbal and Congress leader Mokhtar who aimed to settle political scores through union elections at the college.

As the state sought to issue a blanket ban on college and university students’ union elections on 18 February, Education Minister Bratya Basu stated that this decision was not related to the Harimohan Ghose College incident, but rather the imminent state and other Board examinations, effectively denying the increase in violence within the precincts of colleges and universities under Trinamool rule.

Protesting against this crackdown on the political process within institutions, activists of the Left-backed Students Federation of India (SFI) started holding demonstrations. From one such gathering, a group of activists were arrested on 2 April and were being taken to the Presidency Jail under police supervision, when 22-year-old student activist Sudipto Gupta reportedly hit a lamppost and was grievously injured. Within hours, he succumbed to his injuries. The “collision” theory was rejected by many and suspicions were rife that the real cause of Sudipto’s death had been heavy lathi-charge by the police, who have been accused on more occasions than one of acting as agents of the state’s high-handedness.

The entire state went into shock over Sudipto’s death even as Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee dubbed this a “small incident.” The SFI, in retaliation, heckled the Chief Minister and her finance minister Amit Mitra in Delhi on 9 April in Delhi, unchaining a spate of violence from the Trinamool Chhatra Parishad front back in Bengal. While CPI (M) party offices were destroyed across the state, the most notable incident was the ransacking of the prestigious Presidency University and its historic Baker Laboratory the next day.

While campus politics in the state has in the past seen violence in many forms, the death of a peacefully protesting student leader in police custody, or the death of a policeman on duty during college union elections, or the ransacking of a foremost university constitutes events that have not been witnessed in recent times and which bring back memories of the turbulent student movements of the 70s.

 •  A shocking development
 •  Stemming campus violence

In this entire chain of events, what has emerged is a strengthening of public opinion in many quarters towards one of complete vilification of politics as an aspect of student life. Public pleas for depoliticisation of the student community and college campuses have started surfacing with more regularity and frequency than ever before.

Student Politics and Bengal

While student politics in Bengal has had a long legacy of clashes between different student organizations, it cannot be denied that the current regime has seen a marked increase in the entrance of anti-social elements into the precincts of college. Many, however, see this merely as a continuation of the lumpenisation of student politics that had started under the Congress government of the 1960s and had gathered strength over the long rule of the Left Front.

“There is an imagined sanity of student politics, a naivete of thought that assumes that college politics is dissociated from the general politics of the country”, says Upal Chakrabarti, assistant professor of Sociology at Presidency University and former student activist himself. According to him, the extent to which political parties involve themselves in deciding the fate of student unions across colleges and universities in West Bengal is acceptable per se, as there is a need to stop looking at student politics as an entity that is contained within the walls of the institutions alone. But what is unacceptable is the visible violence and narrow vote-garnering tactics that partisan politics brings into the ambit of educational institutions that is unacceptable.

Indeed, the incidents referred to above have all had direct supervision of ‘bigger’, mainstream politics, and cannot strictly be dubbed as reflections of the increase of violence within the student community alone. Those who feel that students should dissociate themselves from such politics largely predicate their opinion on the belief that student politics is suffering from a poverty of ethics; instead, they should perhaps read this upsurge in violence as part of a larger picture. One cannot view it as an isolated issue outside the presence of violence in the larger political setup and society as a whole. Earlier in February this year, the State Crime Records Bureau, in response to an RTI application filed by a resident, revealed that the state had seen 586 cases of political violence and 56 clashes between student groups between May 2011 and October 2011 - the first five months of the tenure of the present government. At least 926 political workers including 128 students had been injured in such conflict.

Filmmaker Rangan Chakravarty, an SFI activist in his student years at Jadavpur University in the late 70s, admits to an erosion in political ethics within the larger party scenario, which had a direct effect on student politics of his time. “The politics lost its politics,” he says. Subhendu Dasgupta, former Professor of Calcutta University and also a student activist during his college years in the 60s, acknowledges the importance of partisan politics within the campus, but with the caveat that contemporary college politics and its closeness to mother parties is a nexus for producing cadres and garnering votes. “There is an absence of broader politics within the political programs of the parties themselves. The race for votes takes precedence and this obviously introduces lumpenism and muscle-flexing,” he states.

Aritra Bhaumick, an ex-student of Scottish Church College and an SFI activist, sums up the situation that contemporary student politics faces in Bengal. “We feel we are fighting to uphold an ideology, a class, but we end up promoting and serving selfish people and that is exactly the difference between how student politics should be and how it actually is.”

The assumption that while mainstream politics has irretrievably mired itself in violence, student politics has a responsibility to divorce itself from such a brand of realpolitik is an assumption whose practicality and advisability need to be thoroughly questioned. This is not to condone violence within the realm of student movements, but to acknowledge that it is impossible to strictly distinguish or distance student politics from larger political trends. Biman Bandopadhyay, the registrar of Bengal Engineering and Science University (BESU) and a student activist during his college years, raises some important questions that he thinks are coming out of the present scenario. “If young people are exposed to violence that is a part of everyday life at present, is it possible for them to remain completely outside of it? Furthermore, is it acceptable to argue for a ban on student elections and political participation based on the presence of violence in politics? This ultimately raises the question of whether students have a stake in societal change at all.”

While campus politics in the state has in the past seen violence in many forms, the death of a peacefully protesting student leader in police custody, or the death of a policeman on duty during college union elections, or the ransacking of a foremost university constitutes events that have not been witnessed in recent times and which bring back memories of the turbulent student movements of the 70s.

“Violence in college politics has been there for a while, but as far as I have seen, always as an ‘anticipation’ of sorts. Union elections would take place under police protection, and while clashes would happen, it was always under control,” says Atreyee Sengupta, ex-student of Comparative Literature from Jadavpur University and former member of Federation of Arts Students, an independent political organization. Alluding to the presence of violence on campuses during the Left Front rule, an ex-student of Maulana Azad College mentions that there was no visible sign of an opposition on campus when SFI controlled the union during her time. “The presence of local miscreants and the imminent threat of armed clashes were always there,” she mentions.

Violence, then, as an aspect of student politics in the state, needs to be seen within a historical continuum, and cannot be identified as a reason to dispel political participation from the sphere of education. Says a student activist from the International Relations department of Jadavpur University in the context of violence in union elections, “Shouldn't we be asking the questions then, are state assembly and panchayat elections devoid of violence? I don't think they are. But do you put a stop to them?”

To many students, the role that mass media is playing in this refashioning of student politics in the state as a realm of unbridled goondaism is becoming evident. Shabnam Banerjee, a student activist from Medical College, Kolkata, rightly observes, “The death of Sudipto Gupta had not happened in a clash between students at all. So why is it that the public debate that arose out of it in the media centered around whether students should be allowed to be a part of politics?”

For many like Shabnam, the conflation of student clashes and local gang skirmishes that is being highlighted in mass media representations is influencing the larger understanding of student politics and vilifying political participation in popular belief. Student movements have always played an important role in educating young people to become responsible and conscientious citizens and political beings, and public opinion against collegiate participation in political processes will effectively deny the very human predisposition towards politics, aiding the growth of a culture of uninformed consent.

View the original article here

Read More

Shielding campuses from violence

For most belonging to India’s middle class, politics is a dirty word. Be it the everyday ups and downs at the workplace, or the insidious psychological maneuverings of participants in a reality show, nobody seems to think that “doing politics” (as such situations are often tagged) is essential, or can be a remotely positive preoccupation. Power is widely held as that which erodes a person of her morals and fellow-feeling, and yet is the ultimate intoxicant.

Indeed, in a country where representatives of power often come with the excess baggage of criminal records or proceed to get mired in endless cases of corruption, it is difficult for the average person to accept that politics is not an external entity that one may or may not allow into one’s life, but a precondition of society. Politics is the manner in which we engage with daily structures of power, such as the family, the workplace, the state and the society. It is embedded in our existence, and no amount of non-complicity in partisan politics can erase our identities as political animals.

The erstwhile decision of the Trinamool Congress government in West Bengal to put on hold elections in colleges across the state, and the spate of events that it unfurled, have given rise to debates regarding involvement of the student community in politics. Views exchanged across newspaper op-eds or television programs have brought to light numerous streams of thought, ranging from the assumption of political naivete of students on the one hand to the fundamental democratic right of political participation on the other. But why this debate now?

A sign outside the Union Room of a college in Kolkata. Pic: Ritaj Gupta

The context of such a decision had been a series of violent clashes that had taken place across various college campuses in the state, most notably the incident at Harimohan Ghose College on 12 February, 2013, in which a fight had broken out between miscreants from the local Congress and Trinamool Congress stables over the filing of nomination papers for the students’ union elections. Caught in the crossfire, sub-inspector Tapas Choudhury was shot dead, and this sparked off discussions about the violent turn that student politics had taken in the state. It was not long before it was found that the clash was, in reality, between local Trinamool Congress councillor Mohammad Iqbal and Congress leader Mokhtar who aimed to settle political scores through union elections at the college.

As the state sought to issue a blanket ban on college and university students’ union elections on 18 February, Education Minister Bratya Basu stated that this decision was not related to the Harimohan Ghose College incident, but rather the imminent state and other Board examinations, effectively denying the increase in violence within the precincts of colleges and universities under Trinamool rule.

Protesting against this crackdown on the political process within institutions, activists of the Left-backed Students Federation of India (SFI) started holding demonstrations. From one such gathering, a group of activists were arrested on 2 April and were being taken to the Presidency Jail under police supervision, when 22-year-old student activist Sudipto Gupta reportedly hit a lamppost and was grievously injured. Within hours, he succumbed to his injuries. The “collision” theory was rejected by many and suspicions were rife that the real cause of Sudipto’s death had been heavy lathi-charge by the police, who have been accused on more occasions than one of acting as agents of the state’s high-handedness.

The entire state went into shock over Sudipto’s death even as Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee dubbed this a “small incident.” The SFI, in retaliation, heckled the Chief Minister and her finance minister Amit Mitra in Delhi on 9 April in Delhi, unchaining a spate of violence from the Trinamool Chhatra Parishad front back in Bengal. While CPI (M) party offices were destroyed across the state, the most notable incident was the ransacking of the prestigious Presidency University and its historic Baker Laboratory the next day.

While campus politics in the state has in the past seen violence in many forms, the death of a peacefully protesting student leader in police custody, or the death of a policeman on duty during college union elections, or the ransacking of a foremost university constitutes events that have not been witnessed in recent times and which bring back memories of the turbulent student movements of the 70s.

 •  A shocking development
 •  Stemming campus violence

In this entire chain of events, what has emerged is a strengthening of public opinion in many quarters towards one of complete vilification of politics as an aspect of student life. Public pleas for depoliticisation of the student community and college campuses have started surfacing with more regularity and frequency than ever before.

Student Politics and Bengal

While student politics in Bengal has had a long legacy of clashes between different student organizations, it cannot be denied that the current regime has seen a marked increase in the entrance of anti-social elements into the precincts of college. Many, however, see this merely as a continuation of the lumpenisation of student politics that had started under the Congress government of the 1960s and had gathered strength over the long rule of the Left Front.

“There is an imagined sanity of student politics, a naivete of thought that assumes that college politics is dissociated from the general politics of the country”, says Upal Chakrabarti, assistant professor of Sociology at Presidency University and former student activist himself. According to him, the extent to which political parties involve themselves in deciding the fate of student unions across colleges and universities in West Bengal is acceptable per se, as there is a need to stop looking at student politics as an entity that is contained within the walls of the institutions alone. But what is unacceptable is the visible violence and narrow vote-garnering tactics that partisan politics brings into the ambit of educational institutions that is unacceptable.

Indeed, the incidents referred to above have all had direct supervision of ‘bigger’, mainstream politics, and cannot strictly be dubbed as reflections of the increase of violence within the student community alone. Those who feel that students should dissociate themselves from such politics largely predicate their opinion on the belief that student politics is suffering from a poverty of ethics; instead, they should perhaps read this upsurge in violence as part of a larger picture. One cannot view it as an isolated issue outside the presence of violence in the larger political setup and society as a whole. Earlier in February this year, the State Crime Records Bureau, in response to an RTI application filed by a resident, revealed that the state had seen 586 cases of political violence and 56 clashes between student groups between May 2011 and October 2011 - the first five months of the tenure of the present government. At least 926 political workers including 128 students had been injured in such conflict.

Filmmaker Rangan Chakravarty, an SFI activist in his student years at Jadavpur University in the late 70s, admits to an erosion in political ethics within the larger party scenario, which had a direct effect on student politics of his time. “The politics lost its politics,” he says. Subhendu Dasgupta, former Professor of Calcutta University and also a student activist during his college years in the 60s, acknowledges the importance of partisan politics within the campus, but with the caveat that contemporary college politics and its closeness to mother parties is a nexus for producing cadres and garnering votes. “There is an absence of broader politics within the political programs of the parties themselves. The race for votes takes precedence and this obviously introduces lumpenism and muscle-flexing,” he states.

Aritra Bhaumick, an ex-student of Scottish Church College and an SFI activist, sums up the situation that contemporary student politics faces in Bengal. “We feel we are fighting to uphold an ideology, a class, but we end up promoting and serving selfish people and that is exactly the difference between how student politics should be and how it actually is.”

The assumption that while mainstream politics has irretrievably mired itself in violence, student politics has a responsibility to divorce itself from such a brand of realpolitik is an assumption whose practicality and advisability need to be thoroughly questioned. This is not to condone violence within the realm of student movements, but to acknowledge that it is impossible to strictly distinguish or distance student politics from larger political trends. Biman Bandopadhyay, the registrar of Bengal Engineering and Science University (BESU) and a student activist during his college years, raises some important questions that he thinks are coming out of the present scenario. “If young people are exposed to violence that is a part of everyday life at present, is it possible for them to remain completely outside of it? Furthermore, is it acceptable to argue for a ban on student elections and political participation based on the presence of violence in politics? This ultimately raises the question of whether students have a stake in societal change at all.”

While campus politics in the state has in the past seen violence in many forms, the death of a peacefully protesting student leader in police custody, or the death of a policeman on duty during college union elections, or the ransacking of a foremost university constitutes events that have not been witnessed in recent times and which bring back memories of the turbulent student movements of the 70s.

“Violence in college politics has been there for a while, but as far as I have seen, always as an ‘anticipation’ of sorts. Union elections would take place under police protection, and while clashes would happen, it was always under control,” says Atreyee Sengupta, ex-student of Comparative Literature from Jadavpur University and former member of Federation of Arts Students, an independent political organization. Alluding to the presence of violence on campuses during the Left Front rule, an ex-student of Maulana Azad College mentions that there was no visible sign of an opposition on campus when SFI controlled the union during her time. “The presence of local miscreants and the imminent threat of armed clashes were always there,” she mentions.

Violence, then, as an aspect of student politics in the state, needs to be seen within a historical continuum, and cannot be identified as a reason to dispel political participation from the sphere of education. Says a student activist from the International Relations department of Jadavpur University in the context of violence in union elections, “Shouldn't we be asking the questions then, are state assembly and panchayat elections devoid of violence? I don't think they are. But do you put a stop to them?”

To many students, the role that mass media is playing in this refashioning of student politics in the state as a realm of unbridled goondaism is becoming evident. Shabnam Banerjee, a student activist from Medical College, Kolkata, rightly observes, “The death of Sudipto Gupta had not happened in a clash between students at all. So why is it that the public debate that arose out of it in the media centered around whether students should be allowed to be a part of politics?”

For many like Shabnam, the conflation of student clashes and local gang skirmishes that is being highlighted in mass media representations is influencing the larger understanding of student politics and vilifying political participation in popular belief. Student movements have always played an important role in educating young people to become responsible and conscientious citizens and political beings, and public opinion against collegiate participation in political processes will effectively deny the very human predisposition towards politics, aiding the growth of a culture of uninformed consent.

View the original article here

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Liqvid e-Learning seeks up to $10 million venture capital funding

Liqvid e-Learning seeks up to $10 million venture capital funding - Economic Times You are here: Home>Collections>Venture CapitalLiqvid e-Learning seeks up to $10 million venture capital fundingBiswarup Gooptu, ET Bureau Jan 21, 2014, 04.42AM ISTTags:venture capital funding|Liqvid e-Learning|educational software(Liqvid e-Learning is seeking…)

NEW DELHI: Educational software maker Liqvid e-Learning Services is seeking a second round of equity funding and has begun talks with a number of venture capital funds as investors show renewed interest in India's education services sector.

Liqvid, whose flagship product is the customised English language learning software EnglishEdge, is looking to raise up to $10 million (Rs 61.5 crore), and has held earlystage discussions with Matrix Partners India and Nexus Venture Partners, among others, according to people with direct knowledge of the negotiations.

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A successful deal could value the company at about $50 million (Rs 307.4 crore). The company expects to use the funding to expand into international markets, including South-East Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America as well as build its mobile business.

Vivek Agarwal, cofounder and chief executive of Liqvid declined to comment on the proposed deal.

A spokeswoman for Nexus Venture Partners said the fund had not invested in Liqvid while Matrix Partners India did not respond to email queries on the deal.

In August 2012, the Noida-based company raised $3 million (Rs 18.4 crore) from a unit of one of Japan's largest investor firms, SBI Holdings. However, it could not be ascertained if SBI Holdings, which manages assets exceeding $3 billion (Rs 18,444 crore), will participate in this latest round.

The negotiations, if successful, will see venture capital make a comeback to the country's e-learning space. Barring British media group Pearson's 100% takeover of consumer internet services firm TutorVista last year, there have been few exits from the sector for investors.

"There has been a slowdown in the space, because there have been only a few large players that have emerged. Barring TutorVista, which catered to the US market, the others have found it hard to scale," said Raja Lahiri, partner at Grant Thornton India.

Participation by venture capital in India's broader education space also took a sharp plunge in 2013 when investments dropped to $13 million (Rs 79.9 crore) compared with $77 million (Rs 473.4 crore) invested in 2012, according to research firm Venture Intelligence. "The (e-learning) companies cannot focus simply on the domestic market, because it's not big enough for them to scale up," said Lahiri.

Founded in 2002, Liqvid, which has already made a foray into US and Singapore, caters to the consumer as well as enterprise markets. It counts the various Indian Institutes of Technologies, British Council, Cairn Energy and the Essar Group among its clientele.

body{margin:0px;}google_ad_client=\"ca-pub-8415620659137418\";google_ad_slot=\"3278470286\";google_ad_width=\"640\";google_ad_height=\"110\";google_ad_channel=\"9126527482,1000001862,1000000195\";google_adtest=\"off\";google_safe=\"high\";google_hints=\"venture capital tutorvista e-learning\";google_max_num_ads=\"2\";google_override_format=true;google_page_url=\"http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2014-01-21/news/46411340_1_matrix-partners-india-nexus-venture-partners-sbi-holdings\";");document.close();})();' frameborder="0" scrolling="no" width="640" height="110">FEATURED ARTICLESBig Bazaar leases 50 trucks to sell products during the 3-day Republic Day saleHow Akshai Varde has made Vardenchi Motorcycles a Rs 1 crore remodelling businessLal Bahadur Shastri's grandson Adarsh Shastri leaves job at Apple to join AAPMore:Lal Bahadur Shastri's grandson Adarsh Shastri leaves job at Apple to join AAPLimited offer: SpiceJet, IndiGo cut fares by 50%; Air India, Jet, GoAir may followIncome Tax department puts HRA exemption under scannerAAP finally asks Somnath Bharti to mind his languageWant to withdraw from your provident fund account? Here's how!Google maps find alien 'spaceship' on Moon? body{margin:0px;}google_ad_client=\"ca-pub-8415620659137418\";google_ad_slot=\"4755203488\";google_ad_width=\"300\";google_ad_height=\"250\";google_ad_channel=\"9126527482,1000001862,1000000195\";google_adtest=\"off\";google_safe=\"high\";google_hints=\"venture capital tutorvista e-learning\";google_max_num_ads=\"4\";google_override_format=true;google_page_url=\"http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2014-01-21/news/46411340_1_matrix-partners-india-nexus-venture-partners-sbi-holdings\";");document.close();})();' frameborder="0" scrolling="no" width="300" height="250"> RELATED ARTICLESVenture capital firm Kalaari closes $150 million...
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February 7, 2012IN-DEPTH COVERAGEVenture CapitalE-learningTutorvista© 2014 Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd. All rights reservedIndex by Keyword|Index by Datewww.economictimes.comFeedback|Privacy Policy|Terms of Use|Advertise with us document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + (document.location.protocol == "https:" ? "https://sb" : "http://b") + ".scorecardresearch.com/beacon.js' %3E%3C/script%3E")); COMSCORE.beacon({ c1:2, c2:6036484, c3:"", c4:"", c5:"", c6:"", c15:"" });

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Ashish Nanda’s global blueprint for IIM-Ahmedabad

Kala Vijayraghavan & Rica Bhattacharyya, ET Bureau Jan 21, 2014, 04.23AM IST

In early-2013, AM Naik, Chairman of Larsen & Toubro, took a private plane to Boston to convince a professor at Harvard University to take the reins of IIM-Ahmedabad. Naik, chair of the IIM-A board, could have called, but he wanted to personally tell Ashish Nanda why India's premier business school wanted him. "I wanted to look you in the eye and talk to you across the table to convince you," Naik had told Nanda.

Naik and a few others had done exactly that a few months back, when Nanda was in Ahmedabad to attend the 30th reunion of his IIM batch. Nanda returned, flattered and unsure. "How nice of them to consider me," he told Shubha, his wife. "I will send in my thanks and regrets."

Shubha, a practising dentist and a professor at Tufts Dental School, saw something else. "I thought it would be great for Ashish to take up the offer with a sense of adventure," she says. "And he did not need much convincing. Every time he spoke of his reunion, there was a sparkle in his eyes. Eventually, it was truly the spirit of learning, contributing and adventure that got him to return to India."

In September 2013, the 53-year-old returned to India and his alma mater, after more than 20 years. In the institute's 52-year history, Nanda was the first director to be hired from an overseas institute, and he came in with a mandate to take IIM-A to the next level—coveted by students and academics, sought by industry and respected by global peers. "I believe in global benchmarks," says Naik, who pushed Nanda's case with his colleagues and the government. "IIM-A, being a premier institute in India, needed new leadership to make it a truly global management institute that encourages diversity, thought leadership and research."

The breadth of that assignment is matched by the superlatives rolled out for him by those who have worked with Nanda: scholar, teacher, researcher, manager of academic programmes, global thinker...and, they add, pretty good in all those roles. Four months into his IIM-A assignment, an appointment offers a clue of what could follow in Nanda's fiveyear tenure.

Sharon Barnhardt worked on Wall Street, before doing her PHD in public policy at Harvard. In August, she joined the public systems group at IIM-A as fulltime faculty. "Ashish Nanda perfectly understands what makes research faculty tick because he's a great researcher," she says. "Ashish also understands how important it is to bring up the infrastructure and research environment of the institute to global standards in order to attract faculty and people from outside."

Academic Connect

Be it people appointments, orientation shifts or directional turns, 'global' is a refrain while discussing Nanda. It's for good reason, says Nitin Nohria, dean of Harvard Business School who has known Nanda personally for 20 years, and has taught and researched with him.

  Nohria cites the experience of an executive program they took together for a company that was struggling with a range of issues related to its globalisation. "We had developed a case study for the company, and it brought to the surface a range of tensions as the discussion unfolded," he recalls. "Ashish used the teaching process to help the participants navigate these tensions and recommit to a shared strategic vision."

Nanda will need to draw on such skills to balance a key challenge: adding new faculty while managing the old guard. During Nanda's days as student at IIM-A, between 1981 and 1983, the institute had about 400 students and a faculty of about 80—a teacher-student ratio of 1:5. Today, with about 1,000 students and a faculty of 90, that ratio has declined to 1:11.

Nanda wants to correct that ratio, but he wants to do it while improving quality: though a mix of young and old, Indian and global. IIM-A is looking to hire more professors in their early-30s at entry-level positions, like Barnhardt, and experienced faculty at senior levels. "They are bright academics who are intrigued by the idea of working and research in India, and want to build specialisation in the Indian setting," says Nanda.

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IIM-Bangalore is India's No. 1 in business management research: Stanford Study

BANGALORE: A Stanford study of Indian universities, colleges and institutes puts the Indian Institute of Management-Bangalore (IIM-B) on top in the Business and Management Research category. Four other Bangalore institutes figure in the list.

The study was done by Prof Sharique Hasan of Stanford University's Graduate School of Business.

He based the rankings of Indian institutes on productivity in social science research. The universities were ranked in these categories: sociology, demography and family studies, economics, psychology, and business and management.

The grading is based on the number of peer-reviewed articles produced by an institute and the number of citations these articles received. IIT-Delhi, IIM-Calcutta and Indian School of Business follow IIM-B in the top league.

While the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) is ranked No. 10, the Indian Statistical Institute, Bangalore, is at No. 27.

The Institute of Social and Economic Change and National Institute of Advanced Studies, both from Bangalore, are ranked 16th and 31st in the Sociology, Demography and Family Studies category.

Prof Devanath Tirupati, director in charge, IIM-B, said: "The survey certainly reflects IIM-B's higher priority to research."

"The survey presents a comprehensive picture of where social science researchers in India are publishing. IIM-B's lead over others, within the Business and Management Research category, is an interesting quantification of the research being carried out in a wide number of areas within the institute," said Arnab Mukherji, assistant professor at IIM-B.

According to the researcher, raw data includes any article published in one of the 3,015 social science journals indexed by ISI. The author should be affiliated to a university or institute located in India, and should have published the article between 2000 and 2010.

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CAT 2013: IIM Indore sending scores of 700 students for verification and validation in batches

Shreya Biswas, ET Bureau Jan 24, 2014, 03.04PM IST

KOLKATA: Common Admission Test (CAT) scores of nearly 700 examinees for admission into the country's management institutes are being sent for verification and validation to Prometric, which conducts the tests, even as protests against a discrepancy in scores gain steam across the country.

Candidates across Indore, Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai and Ranchi are preparing to file public interest litigations against the scores. They have already met the CAT convenor in Indore and some 20 CAT takers protested at IIM Ranchi on Monday.

A few days ago, MBA aspirants filed an online petition calling for a revaluation of scores, which they believe have discrepancies because of a skewed normalisation process. The country's premier management institutes, the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs), released the scores on January 14.

IIM aspirants' petition filed by Abhishek Leel and signed by 5000 candidates, addressed to IIM Indore on online forum Change.org, said many test takers got unexpectedly low scores in two sections, particularly in verbal ability. Some candidates found they secured more than 90 percentile in the quantitative aptitude section, but only around 30 percentile in the verbal ability section.

The petition also claims there are people who have regularly been scoring over 95 percentile for the past three years in CAT, but this year, their score has not even crossed 80 percentile. This would waste a full year for them as 80 percentile is not enough for admission to any institute.

CAT 2013 convenor, Rohit Kapoor, however, insists that the results are in order. "Though there is no provision for such verification and validation of scores, we are doing it only to help examines," he says. He also refuted the claim that 5,000 candidates have signed the online petition, claiming that the number of cases received through emails with unique registration numbers is 700.

Candidates also point to a case where a candidate has got an overall score of 55 percentile despite not attempting a single question which means that over 50per cent of CAT candidates have scored in the negative.

The way it works is, for 30 questions, each correct answer fetches a candidate three marks while an incorrect answer gets him or her -1. The raw scores are then normalised -- equated from different papers of various difficulty level based on a formula.

Kapoor says this is possible. "CAT was quite tough this year because we wanted only good people to come into the system. There were lot of complaints from people over the past few years that the difficulty level has gone down, so we worked on that," he says.

But Abhijeet Chandak, a CAT 2013 candidate, refutes this claim. "This time, I was much more confident that I will go past 90 in verbal ability and logical reasoning as the paper was not that difficult," says Chandak, a graduate engineer trainee in Gammon who scored 92.90 percentile in verbal ability and logical reasoning (VA & LR, section-II) in 2011 and 98.71 percentile in 2012 but his score dropped to 30.36 percentile in 2013.

  Kapoor, however, says in mock tests, the candidate pool is limited and question samples are fixed, whereas CAT is conducted over multiple days, with multiple sets of question papers. "To be fair to everybody, no one knows which question will come when," he says, adding, "Students are saying there is a calculation error but a computerised algorithm can't be wrong."

"It may be possible theoretically that over 50per cent candidates get scores in the negative. This can only happen if the difficulty level has gone up drastically this year," says Gautam Puri, co founder, Career Launcher, who has been taking the tests himself -- a common practice amongst caching institutes. But the normalisation process needs to be explained more clearly, he says.

Historically, CAT has had five to six errors in papers every year for the past 10 to 15 years, "which they have never accepted except in 2006," says Puri. "In GMAT, a test similar to CAT, you know at the end of the paper how many answers are right and how many wrong, while in CAT you can only know how many you have attempted," he says.

Prometric too denies any anomalies in the results. "For CAT 2013, we have conducted additional quality control to verify that 100per cent of our reporting is accurate and our methodology is fair, reliable and determines the right scores according to candidate performance," says Soumitra Roy, general manager, Prometric India.

As per IIM direction, it was the company's job to heighten the exam's difficulty, he says, adding, "As a consequence, only the best performing test takers earned the highest scores."

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iProf Learning Solutions raises $9 million in series B round of funding

iProf Learning Solutions raises $9 million in series B round of funding - Economic Times You are here: Home>Collections>New DelhiiProf Learning Solutions raises $9 million in series B round of fundingBiswarup Gooptu, ET Bureau Jan 24, 2014, 08.04AM ISTTags:venture capital|risk|Product Life Cycle|Norwest Venture Partners|net worth|markets|iProf Learning Solutions|Insurability|IDG Ventures India|Hobsons|endorsements|e-learning(“Through this investment,…)

NEW DELHI: iProf Learning Solutions has raised $9 million (Rs. 55 crore) from a consortium of investors, led by global education research and technology company Hobsons, the Noida-based e-learning company announced on Thursday.

Proceeds from the series B round of financing, in which iProf's existing backers, early-to-mid stage venture capital firms IDG Ventures India and Norwest Venture Partners, also participated, will be used by the company to finance acquisitions, expand its network and consolidate its position as a market leader. The stake diluted by the company's founder was, however, not disclosed. Hobsons is the US-based education services and technology unit of diversified media conglomerate Daily Mail and General Trust.

body{margin:0px;}google_ad_client=\"ca-pub-8415620659137418\";google_ad_slot=\"3278470286\";google_ad_width=\"640\";google_ad_height=\"160\";google_ad_channel=\"9126527482,1000001856,1000000195\";google_adtest=\"off\";google_safe=\"high\";google_hints=\"new delhi\";google_max_num_ads=\"4\";google_override_format=true;google_page_url=\"http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2014-01-24/news/46562990_1_solutions-series-b-round-funding\";");document.close();})();' frameborder="0" scrolling="no" width="640" height="160">

"Through this investment, we will continue to expand our geographical footprint in South Asia while exploring opportunities to contribute to new K-12 solutions that will help students in India achieve their post-secondary goals," said Craig Heldman, chief executive of Hobsons. iProf has, till date, raised a total of $15 million (Rs. 92.9 crore) across two rounds from its venture capital investors. In 2011, the company raised Rs. 22 crore from IDG Ventures India and Norwest Venture Partners.

"iProf has created a business model which works for education technology companies in India and neighbouring markets. The combination of online and offline, with lessons/contents delivered on tablets and smart phones is gaining acceptance," said Mohan Kumar, executive director at Norwest Venture Partners.

Founded in 2010 by IIT Mumbai and IIM Ahmedabad alumnus Sanjay Purohit, iProf Learning provides both online and offline - through tablets, personal computers and mobile - mode of content delivery to students, using Learning Management System at its back end.

"iProf is essential to the Indian education growth story as it is the future of learning in India and worldwide," said Sudhir Sethi, founder chairman and managing director of IDG Ventures.

Risk capital has once again turned its eye on the Indian e-learning space. Earlier this week, ET had reported that LIQVID e-Learning was in talks to raise up to $10 million to fund its expansion plans among others. In 2013, British media company Pearson Plc. completed its acquisition of Bangalore-based education services company TutorVista, providing a handsome exit for the latter's investors Sequoia Capital and Lightspeed Ventures.

body{margin:0px;}google_ad_client=\"ca-pub-8415620659137418\";google_ad_slot=\"3278470286\";google_ad_width=\"640\";google_ad_height=\"110\";google_ad_channel=\"9126527482,1000001856,1000000195\";google_adtest=\"off\";google_safe=\"high\";google_hints=\"new delhi\";google_max_num_ads=\"2\";google_override_format=true;google_page_url=\"http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2014-01-24/news/46562990_1_solutions-series-b-round-funding\";");document.close();})();' frameborder="0" scrolling="no" width="640" height="110">FEATURED ARTICLESBig Bazaar leases 50 trucks to sell products during the 3-day Republic Day saleHow Akshai Varde has made Vardenchi Motorcycles a Rs 1 crore remodelling businessLal Bahadur Shastri's grandson Adarsh Shastri leaves job at Apple to join AAPMore:Lal Bahadur Shastri's grandson Adarsh Shastri leaves job at Apple to join AAPLimited offer: SpiceJet, IndiGo cut fares by 50%; Air India, Jet, GoAir may followIncome Tax department puts HRA exemption under scannerAAP finally asks Somnath Bharti to mind his languageWant to withdraw from your provident fund account? Here's how!Google maps find alien 'spaceship' on Moon? body{margin:0px;}google_ad_client=\"ca-pub-8415620659137418\";google_ad_slot=\"4755203488\";google_ad_width=\"300\";google_ad_height=\"250\";google_ad_channel=\"9126527482,1000001856,1000000195\";google_adtest=\"off\";google_safe=\"high\";google_hints=\"new delhi\";google_max_num_ads=\"4\";google_override_format=true;google_page_url=\"http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2014-01-24/news/46562990_1_solutions-series-b-round-funding\";");document.close();})();' frameborder="0" scrolling="no" width="300" height="250"> RELATED ARTICLESAujas Networks raises undisclosed Series B round of funding
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