Education - Current Affairs for January, 2017

Union Cabinet has approved the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Bill, 2017.

Under this, the IIMs will be declared as Institutions of National Importance.

It will also enable IIMs to grant degrees rather than diplomas to their students.

At present IIMs are not authorised to award degrees as they registered as societies.

Hence, they are awarding Post Graduate Diploma and Fellow Programme in Management.

Key features of the Bill

- Allow IIMs to grant degrees to their students.

- Grant complete autonomy to IIMs, combined with adequate accountability.

- Coordination Forum of IIMs as an advisory body will be established.

- Board of an IIM will drive the management of the institution.

- It will select Chairperson and Director of IIM.

- Board will have greater participation of experts and alumni.

- It will also include women and members from Scheduled Castes/Tribes.

- Periodic review of the performance of IIM will be conducted by independent agencies and their results will be placed in public domain.

- The Annual Report of the IIMs will be placed in the Parliament and CAG (Comptroller and auditor general of India) will audit their accounts.

About IIMs

• Indian Institutes of Managements (IIMs) are the country’s premier management institutions.
• They are imparting best quality education in management.
• They are recognized as world-class management Institutions and Centres of Excellence.
• All IIMs are separate autonomous bodies registered under the Societies Act.
• This makes them ineligible to award degrees.
• These awards are treated as equivalent to MBAs and PhD, respectively, but their equivalence is not universally acceptable.

Inspite of freebies like books, bikes and uniforms, along with enrollment scholarships, MP is among top three states in the country with the least number of school going girls.

As per the Annual Status of Education Report 2016, in some states, proportion of out of school girls aged 11-14 remains more than 8 percent.

These include Uttar Pradesh (9.9%), Rajasthan (9.7%) and MP (8.5%).

Report was released by Pratham Education Foundation.

Proportion of out of school girls in MP was at 6.2% during 2014.

This has now increased to 8.5%.

There are currently 122 lakh schools in MP.

Status report also revealed the condition of poor quality of education and infrastructure in the state.

Education status report also found 2.9% girls in 7-10 years of age were not enrolled in schools. 29% girls in the age group of 15-16 years were out of schools during 2016.

2.9% of the students of class eight in state failed to even read letters while 13.5% of them were able to read standard-one level text.

64.3% students of class eight could read letters meant for class-II but not above.

6.7% of class-five and 1.6% students of class-eight of the state have even failed to recognise the digit - one to nine.

Similarly, 8.1% students of class-eight even fail to read English capital letters.

This percentage is 18.4 for class-five students.

Now, more students of these classes are attending coaching as this percentage of those not attending coaching has now reduced to 64.6%.

This Pratham Education Foundation report also revealed that the fraction of ‘out-of-school’ children (age 6-14) has increased between 2014 and 2016.

These include MP (from 3.4% to 4.4%), Chhattisgarh (from 2% to 2.8%), and Uttar Pradesh (from 4.9% to 5.3%).

In nine states, the level of English reading of private schools has also improved.

These are Himachal Pradesh, Punjab, Assam, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana.

ASER Survey: Know More

• Survey was completed in a period of 100-days and with help of about 150-master trainers, who further trained other partners at district level.
• The sample size is bigger than the NSSO.
• Foundation has been conducting this survey every year since 2005, except 2015.

Hindi professors have written to PM Narendra Modi requesting not to add dialects of Hindi such as Bhojpuri and Rajasthani in the 8th schedule as full fledged Indian languages.

Rajasthani would be added to 8th schedule, according to an announcement by Union Minister Arjun Ram Meghwal.

In December 2016, Bihar CM Nitish Kumar raised a similar demand for Bhojpuri.

Eighth schedule means independence in the identity of the language. Hindi's prime strength is its large number of speakers.

Dialects being recognised as separate languages will lessen the force of Hindi. In fact, there will be no Hindi language if key dialects are recognised as separate languages.

About the 8th Schedule

• This lists the official languages recognised by the Constitution
• Contains a list of 22 Scheduled languages.
• Initially, there were 14 languages only; 8 were added by amendments.
• These include:

• Apart from these, the languages include: