Comment by Riaz Haq on February 19, 2017 at 8:46am

Capgemini #India chief says 65% of #Indian #IT employees not trainable. #software #computers http://ecoti.in/4ipkja via @economictimes

"I am not very pessimistic, but it is a challenging task and I tend to believe that 60-65 per cent of them are just not trainable," Capgemini India's chief executive Srinivas Kandula said here over the weekend. 

The domestic arm of the French IT major employs nearly one lakh engineers in the country. 

"A large number of them cannot be trained. Probably, India will witness the largest unemployment in the middle level to senior level," he said at the annual Nasscom le .. 

Read more at:
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/57232268.cms?utm_so...

Comment by Riaz Haq on March 12, 2017 at 5:21pm

Pakistan: The Invisible Sophistication by Kim Langren CEO of Spirit of Math schools in Canada

http://nation.com.pk/lahore/12-Mar-2017/pakistan-the-invisible-soph...

Out of the midst of the busy crowded room a small child placed herself directly in front of me, and with outmost confidence and determination she said “Miss I would like to show you what I can do with a SMART Board. Could you please come and see my display?” She then led me through the multitude of people to the back of the very large conference room where an interactive SMART Board resided.

Once there, she stood up straight and proudly explained what a person could do with the pictures on the board. This girl was no more than 5 or 6 years old, yet she spoke with a confidence, and a belief in herself, and in what she was doing, that is rarely found in adults, yet representative of the people of Pakistan wherever I travelled.

This was my second visit to Pakistan. I had arrived in Lahore the night before and I was immersed in a science and technology showcase in the Schools of Tomorrow conference organised by Beaconhouse. The show was an example of the innovation in education, and that spirit of innovation was replicated in every school system I visited.

This drive to do the best and to be at the forefront of educational ideas, whether or not it included technology, was central to the thinking throughout all the systems.

People are open to ideas, prepared to justify theirs and ready to change if needed. In fact, I would venture to state that these schools are ahead of the western schools in many of their ideas. Regardless of the socioeconomic status, or the job of a person, what came across was a very proud nation of people who are willing to work hard, aggressively striving to be the best in the world and to do what it takes.

As a foreigner from Canada, what struck me right away when landing was the intense dichotomy between a pioneering educated world and an innovative traditional world. The intense security, the helpful people, the incredible restaurants, food and fashion, the diversity of transportation from the use of donkeys and motorcycles, to the most recent luxury cars, the massive number of small retail businesses, the outdoor vendors, the contrast of extremely large homes to small hovels all illustrate this dichotomy.

To the newcomer, there is an appearance of chaos. However, once you integrate within the culture, talk to people, start to do business and take some time to watch how the world works, it is clear that there is an invisible sophistication that is weaving all this together. The complexity of the educated to the non-educated, the various robust cultures, the economic diversities, and the strong family dynamics are all working together in a very open manner.

In North America, where it is considered to be an advanced, sophisticated world, we have massive socioeconomic, educational and cultural diversities. Our sophistication is visible; our unsophistication is invisible. Every nation has a cluster of sophistication: enabling it to be visible helps people understand it and therefore strengthen it.

There is an intensive and massive growth happening at this time in Pakistan. There is a sophistication that can be maintained and there are also concerns including the lack of proper education for all people.

From my point of view, what Pakistan focuses on right now will have a profound effect on where it will end up. It is at a turning point.

Ensuring the entire population is well educated, having the ability to research, question and understand more will form the foundation for a nation of strong skills and values. The confidence and belief found in Pakistanis, as illustrated by the little girl in the conference, will lead the way to illuminate Pakistan’s rich sophisticated skills and culture.

Comment by Riaz Haq on March 22, 2017 at 7:41am

#India's #software engineers cheapest but of poor quality. #SiliconValley most expensive. #bangalore https://qz.com/938495/bengaluru-indias-silicon-valley-offers-the-ch... …

Bengaluru’s startup ecosystem is what it is because of its engineers.
With an average annual salary of $8,600, engineers in India’s tech hub cost 13 times less than their Silicon Valley counterparts, according to the 2017 Global Startup Ecosystem Report released on March 14. The city is home to the world’s cheapest crop of engineers, with the average annual pay of a resident software engineer falling well below the global figure of $49,000.
And companies, Indian and otherwise, choose to work out of Bengaluru because it is the most cost-efficient.

Not only has the tech center nurtured startups like Flipkart and Big Basket, it is also home to big foreign firms like Uber and Amazon.

However, the city’s talent pool poses challenges in access and quality. For the most part, “engineers haven’t been hired very quickly, experience is average, and visa success is low,” the report says. “The quality and professionalism of resources is also questionable in many cases,” Abhimanyu Godara, founder of US-based chatbot startup Bottr.me, which has a development team in Bangalore, said in the report.
The city, home to between 1,800 and 2,300 active startups, also has the youngest tech talent among all startup ecosystems.
Overall, Bengaluru bagged the 20th spot out of 55 cities when evaluated on parameters such as performance, funding, market research, talent, and startup experience by research firm Startup Genome and the Global Entrepreneurship Network. Despite dropping five ranks from last year, it remains India’s favorite tech hub.

Comment by Riaz Haq on February 13, 2020 at 12:28pm

#Pakistan ASER 2019: Learning levels in #language and #arithmetic have shown improvement from 13% to 17% for grade 5 students. But children continue to struggle at lower levels to grasp foundational skills in basic #literacy and #numeracy. #education https://tribune.com.pk/story/2154226/1-pakistan-primary-students-st...

At least 59% of children from grade-V can read a grade-II story text in their respective medium of education such as Urdu, Sindhi and Pashto. However, in English, only 55% of the surveyed grade-V students could read sentences meant for students of second grade.

Arithmetic learning levels have also improved since 2018, the report said, adding, now 57% of students of grade-V can do a two-digit division, pegged at second-grade curriculum. New questions on time recognition along with word problems on addition and multiplication were also added for the first time in the survey.

At least 60% of children in grade-V can recognise time correctly, 60% can solve addition word problems and 53% can solve a multiplication word problem, the ASER survey said.

Private sector schools report better learning outcomes and boys outperform girls. In comparison, the learning levels in urban areas were considerably higher than rural areas across all three competencies.

However, the report said, that only 55% of the surveyed grade-V students can read sentences from a grade-II English textbook.

Despite the recent focus of the federal and provincial governments on enrolment drives to implement Article 25-A of the Constitution — which requires the provision of universal elementary education — 17% of children between the ages of six and 16 remain out-of-school, the survey said.

In contrast, a survey in 20 urban centres across Pakistan reveals that only 6% of children were out-of-school. With 40% of the population residing in urban areas, this presents an important opportunity to accelerate universal access for the urban five-16-year-olds, whilst simultaneously focusing on rural areas, the report suggested

Education targets can be met through extraordinary resolve and actions by the state to guarantee a constitutionally fundamental right, it said.

Teacher competencies

The ASER report highlights teachers’ attendance in government and private schools stood the same at 89% closing the gap, on the day of the survey. Whilst private school teachers were reported to have better qualifications at graduate levels — 40% compared to 33% in government schools.

However, for MA, MSc and other post-graduate qualifications, a larger percentage of public sector teachers had higher qualification than their private school counterparts.

Multi-grade classrooms highlight teacher shortages, it said.

ASER 2019, rural findings reveal that 46% of government and 26% of private schools impart multi-grade teaching at grade two. In grade-VIII, multi-grade teaching stood at 18% in both government and private schools. A teacher taking classes of multiple grades in government middle schools has risen from 5% in 2018 to 18% in 2019.

Private schools lose students

The ASER rural results over the years highlight a decline in the number of children going to private sector schools. Around 23% of children up to 16-years-of-age were enrolled in the private sector in 2019, compared with 30% in 2014. The shift to government schools has increased the enrolment share from 70% in 2014, to 77% in 2019.

This edge must be maintained with persistent state actions for quality facilities, the report stated.

Early Childhood Education (ECE) has been historically tracked by ASER Pakistan. From 2014 when ECE enrolment stood at 39%, it has not registered significant improvement (39% in 2019), although ECE was critical for foundational learning readiness in literacy and numeracy.

Comment by Riaz Haq on March 3, 2021 at 6:51pm

#Russian #engineering students outperform #Indian students while performing lower than #Chinese students on Supertest that evaluates performance of engineering students. #US students outperform students from all of these countries. #STEM https://phys.org/news/2021-03-supertest-students-russia-india-china... via @physorg_com

The Supertest showed that at the start of their studies, Russian students perform lower than Chinese students in mathematics and physics, but higher than students from India in mathematics. After two years of study, the gap between Russian and Chinese students narrows, while Indian students catch up with Russian students in mathematics.

-------

The Supertest was initiated by Stanford University, HSE University Moscow, the Educational Testing Service (ETS), and partner universities in China and India. The study authors include Prashant Loyalka, an associate professor at Stanford University and a leading researcher at the HSE International Laboratory for Evaluating Practices and Innovations in Education; Igor Chirikov a senior researcher at the Center for Studies in Higher Education at UC Berkeley and an affiliated researcher of the HSE Institute of Education; and Elena Kardanova and Denis Federyakin , leading researchers at the Centre for Psychometrics and Measurements in Education at the HSE.

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A group of researchers representing four countries summed up the results of a large-scale study of the academic performance of engineering students in Russia, China, India, and the United States. Supertest is the first study to track the progress of students in computer science and electrical engineering over the course of their studies with regard to their abilities in physics, mathematics and critical thinking and compare the results among four countries. The article about study in Nature Human Behavior.

-----------------

More than 30,000 undergraduate students participated in the study. The researchers collected a sample of students from elite and large universities, roughly equal in number for each country. In Russia, the sample included students from six Project 5-100 universities and 28 other universities. Their skill development was measured three times: upon entering university, at the end of their second year, and at the end of their studies.

The task of the specialists of the HSE Centre for Psychometrics and Measurements in Education was to develop tests that had questions that would be neutral for students of different countries and would yield adequately comparable results across different countries. "Over the course of analyzing the test results, we have proven that we were able to achieve both tasks," said Centre Director Elena Kardanova. "Testing in different countries was conducted in accordance with the same rules, with the assistance of specially trained examiners. All students were offered the same incentives to participate. We additionally tested the sensitivity of the results to possible differences in student motivation."

Comment by Riaz Haq on March 6, 2021 at 7:19am

India's re-entry to PISA triggers mixed response

https://www.devex.com/news/india-s-re-entry-to-pisa-triggers-mixed-...


Anit Mukherjee, a policy fellow focusing on education at the Center for Global Development, told Devex that by having Kendriya Vidyalayas and Navodaya Vidyalayas schools take part in the test, the government is trying to have more control over the sample in the hopes of getting a better score. However, he said this is not unusual and that other countries have done the same.

“Learning outcome measurement across the world against a global benchmark is good … I would rather have India going to PISA in some way which is acceptable to both the government in India and OECD than to sit outside, otherwise we don’t have any comparator,” he said.

But even with its best government schools being tested, India is still likely to come near the bottom of the PISA table, according to Jishnu Das, education economist at the World Bank's Development Research Group. This won’t come as a surprise to the government, which is already aware of declining education scores over the past decade thanks to school assessments conducted by education research nonprofit ACER India, he said.

As a result, PISA may have limited value as the test has been most effective when its results have surprised a government — with “PISA shock” forcing them to institute education reforms, he said. This happened in Germany in 2001 and in Peru in 2012.

“PISA made a big difference in Germany, it really woke them up, but ... India is not going to be shocked when it comes near the bottom,” Das said. He added that “these international things cause some embarrassment in international circles but they [don’t] impact the discussion in India at all.”

A better method would be to apply PISA in each Indian state and rank them against each other, which would create more “debate and discussion,” he suggested.

India’s decision to rejoin a prestigious global education ranking has been welcomed by education experts as a positive signal, but some questioned whether the move will bring about meaningful reform.

In January, the Indian government announced its plan to rejoin the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, after a 10-year absence. The country dropped out of the ranking, run by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, in 2009 after being placed 72nd out of 74 nations.

India was competing against high-income OECD member countries but also non-OECD countries including Brazil, China, Thailand, Indonesia, and Vietnam. The government claimed the test was unfair because it had not been sufficiently adapted to the Indian context.

OECD and India have now agreed to try again and a group of 15-year-olds from schools across Chandigarh, the capital of the northern Indian states of Punjab and Haryana, will be evaluated by PISA examiners in 2021. India wants pupils from its system of central government schools, known as Kendriya Vidyalayas and Navodaya Vidyalayas, to take the test.

The government has said that participating in PISA will help to assess the health of its education system, motivate schools and states to do better, and improve learning levels across the country. The test will also move India away from rote learning toward more “competency-based examination reforms,” according to a press release issued for the official signing ceremony last month.

Comment by Riaz Haq on April 18, 2023 at 11:45am

Worthless Degrees Are Creating an Unemployable Generation in #India. Businesses have difficulty recruiting because of the poor #quality of #education. This has kept #unemployment at a high level of over 7%.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-04-17/india-s-worthles...

Business is booming in India’s $117 billion education industry and new colleges are popping up at breakneck speed. Yet thousands of young Indians are finding themselves graduating with limited or no skills, undercutting the economy at a pivotal moment of growth.

Desperate to get ahead, some of these young people are paying for two or three degrees in the hopes of finally landing a job. They are drawn to colleges popping up inside small apartment buildings or inside shops in marketplaces. Highways are lined with billboards for institutions promising job placements.

Around the world, students are increasingly considering the return on degree versus cost. Higher education has often sparked controversy globally, including in the US, where for-profit institutions have faced government scrutiny. Yet the complexities of education in India are clearly visible.

It has the world’s largest population by some estimates, and the government regularly highlights the benefits of having more young people than any other country. According to a study by talent assessment firm Wheebox, half of all graduates in India are unemployed in the future due to problems in the education system.

Many businesses say they have difficulty recruiting because of the mixed quality of education. This has kept unemployment at a high level of over 7%, even though India is the fastest growing major economy in the world. Education is also becoming a big issue for Prime Minister Narendra Modi as he tries to attract foreign manufacturers and investors from China. Modi vowed to create lakhs of jobs in his campaign speeches, and the issue is likely to be hotly debated in the 2024 national elections.

“We face a challenge in hiring as the specific skill sets required by the industry are not readily available in the market,” said Yashwinder Patial, Director, Human Resources, MG Motor India.

The complications of the country’s education boom are visible in cities like Bhopal, a metropolis of about 2.6 million in central India. Huge hoardings of private colleges are ubiquitous, promising degrees and jobs to young people. One such advertisement said, “Regular classes and better placements: We need to say more.”

It is difficult to resist such promises for millions of young men and women dreaming of a better life in India’s dismal job scenario. Higher degrees, once accessible only to the wealthy, hold a special hold for young people from middle- and low-income families in India. Students interviewed by Bloomberg cited a variety of reasons for investing in more education, ranging from attempting to boost their social status to improving their marriage prospects to applying for government jobs, for which applicants are required to pay. Degree certificate is required.

Twenty-five-year-old Tanmay Mandal, a Bhopal resident, paid $4,000 for a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering. He was convinced that a degree was a path to a good job and a better lifestyle. He was not bothered by the high fees for his family, whose monthly income is only $420. Despite the cost, Mandal says he learned almost nothing about construction from teachers who appeared to have insufficient training themselves. He could not answer technical questions in job interview and is unemployed for the last three years.

Mandal said, ‘I wish I had studied in a better college.’ “Many of my friends are also sitting idle without jobs,” Mandal said. He still hasn’t given up. Even though he did not find his final degree useful, he wants to avoid the stigma of being unemployed and sitting idle. So, he has signed up for a master’s degree in another private institution as he believes that more degrees can at least raise his social status.

Comment by Riaz Haq on April 18, 2023 at 11:45am

Worthless Degrees Are Creating an Unemployable Generation in India


https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-04-17/india-s-worthles...


There is a bustling market place in the heart of Bhopal with training institutes for civil services, engineering and management. The students said that they had enrolled for these courses to upgrade their skills and boost their career opportunities after regular degree, as they did not get jobs of their choice.

A Bhopal educational institution in particular hit the headlines in recent years because it was involved in a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court of India. In 2019, the Supreme Court barred the Bhopal-based RKDF Medical College Hospital and Research Center from admitting new students for two years for allegedly using fake patients to meet the requirements of the medical college. The college initially argued in court that the patients were genuine, but later apologized after an investigative panel found that the alleged patients were not in fact sick.

“We have noticed a disturbing trend of some medical colleges in projecting bogus faculty and patients to obtain permission for admission of students,” the court said in its judgement. The medical college did not respond to a request for comment.

The Medical School is part of the RKDF Group, a well-known name in Central India with a wide network of colleges in fields ranging from Engineering to Medicine and Management. The group faced another controversy last year. In May last year, police in the southern city of Hyderabad arrested the vice-chancellor of the RKDF group’s Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan University as well as his predecessor for their alleged involvement in awarding fake degrees. Still, a flood of students could be seen in many RKDF institutes in Bhopal. One branch had posters of their “bright stars”—students who got jobs after graduation.

SRK University and RKDF University of RKDF Group did not respond to multiple requests for comment. On its website, the group says that it provides quality education by imparting teaching and practical skills while striving to provide robust infrastructure and facilities.

Elsewhere in Bhopal, another college was functioning in a small residential building. One of the students who studied there said that it was easy to secure admission and get a degree without attending classes.

India’s education industry is projected to reach $225 billion by 2025 from $117 billion in 2020, according to the India Brand Equity Foundation, a government trust. This is still very small compared to the US education industry, where spending is estimated to exceed $1 trillion. In India, public spending on education has remained stagnant at around 2.9% of GDP, well short of the 6% target set in the government’s new education policy.

The problems at the colleges have spread across the country, with a range of institutions in different states under official scrutiny. In some parts of India, students have gone on hunger strike to protest against the lack of teachers and facilities in their institutions. In January, charges were filed against the Himachal Pradesh-based Manav Bharti University and its promoters for allegedly selling fake degrees, according to a press release from the Enforcement Directorate. Manav Bharati University did not respond to a request for comment.

While institutes promote campus placements for students, many are not able to deliver on this promise. In 2017, an institute in the eastern state of Odisha offered fake job offers during campus placements, prompting students to protest.

Anil Swaroop, former secretary of school education, estimated in a 2018 article that of the 16,000 colleges offering bachelor’s qualifications for teachers, a sizeable number exist only in name.

Comment by Riaz Haq on April 18, 2023 at 11:48am

Worthless Degrees Are Creating an Unemployable Generation in India


https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-04-17/india-s-worthles...



Anil Swaroop, former secretary of school education, estimated in a 2018 article that of the 16,000 colleges offering bachelor’s qualifications for teachers, a sizeable number exist only in name.

“To call such so-called degrees useless would be an understatement,” said Anil Sadgopal, former dean of education at Delhi University and former member of the Central Advisory Board of Education that guides the federal government. “When lakhs of youth become unemployed every year, the whole society becomes unstable.”

All this is a challenge for big business. A study by HR firm SHL found that only 3.8% of engineers have the skills needed to be employed in software-related jobs in start-ups.

“The experience everyone has in the IT industry is that graduates need training,” said Mohandas Pai, former chief financial officer and board member of Infosys Ltd. and co-founder of private equity firm Aarin Capital. Pai, one of the Manipal Education and Medical Group companies, “trains a lot of people for banking. They are not job ready, they need to be trained.”

Even though companies are looking to recruit in areas such as electric vehicle manufacturing, artificial intelligence and human-machine interfaces, smaller Indian universities still teach older material such as the basics of the internal combustion engine, Patial said. “There’s a gap between what the industry is seeing and the curriculum they’ve gone through.”

India has regulatory bodies and professional councils to regulate its educational institutions. While the government has announced plans for a single agency to replace all existing regulators, it is still at the planning stage. The Education Department did not respond to a request for comment.

The Modi administration is also trying to address the shortcomings of the education sector in its new education policy of 2020, committed to improving the quality of its institutions. It has also started the process of allowing leading foreign universities to set up campuses in the country and award degrees.

Meanwhile, finding work remains a challenge for this generation. According to the World Bank, unemployment is a ticking time bomb as nearly a third of the country’s youth are not working, studying or undergoing training. Some are getting involved in crime and violence. Last year, angry youths facing bleak job prospects blocked rail traffic and highways, even setting some trains on fire.

Pankaj Tiwari, 28, says he paid Rs 100,000 for a master’s degree in digital communication because he wanted a job and a higher status in society. It was a huge outlay for his family, which has an annual income of Rs 400,000. Though his college had promised campus placements, no company turned up and he is still unemployed after four years.

“Had I gotten some training and skills in college, I might have been in a different situation. Now I feel like I wasted my time.’ “I have obtained certificates only on paper, but they are of no use.”

Comment by Riaz Haq on April 30, 2023 at 7:44am

Scientists in India protest move to drop Darwinian evolution from textbooks

https://www.science.org/content/article/scientists-india-protest-mo...

Decision marks troubling rejection of science, critics say

Scientists in India are protesting a decision to remove discussion of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution from textbooks used by millions of students in ninth and 10th grades. More than 4000 researchers and others have so far signed an open letter asking officials to restore the material.

The removal makes “a travesty of the notion of a well-rounded secondary education,” says evolutionary biologist Amitabh Joshi of the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research. Other researchers fear it signals a growing embrace of pseudoscience by Indian officials.

The Breakthrough Science Society, a nonprofit group, launched the open letter on 20 April after learning that the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), an autonomous government organization that sets curricula and publishes textbooks for India’s 256 million primary and secondary students, had made the move as part of a “content rationalization” process. NCERT first removed discussion of Darwinian evolution from the textbooks at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in order to streamline online classes, the society says. (Last year, NCERT issued a document that said it wanted to avoid content that was “irrelevant” in the “present context.”)

NCERT officials declined to answer questions about the decision to make the removal permanent. They referred ScienceInsider to India’s Ministry of Education, which had not provided comment as this story went to press.

“The country’s scientific community is seriously dismayed to see that the theory of biological evolution … has been dropped,” the Breakthrough Science Society said in a statement. “Students will remain seriously handicapped in their thought processes if deprived of exposure to this fundamental discovery of science.”

One major concern, Joshi says, is that most Indian students will get no exposure to the concept of evolution if it is dropped from the ninth and 10th grade curriculum, because they do not go on to study biology in later grades. “Evolution is perhaps the most important part of biology that all educated citizens should be aware of,” Joshi says. “It speaks directly to who we are, as humans, and our position within the living world.”

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