I have a Solution that will reduce pressure on IIT aspirants but do not know how to get this across to HRD Minister of India. Suggestions are welcome. - Ram Krishnaswamy

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Sunday, December 30, 2018

Kota suicides: NCPCR seeks report within seven days - Indian Express

Kota suicides: NCPCR seeks report within  seven days 

 India’s apex child rights’ body has sought a report from the district officials in Kota, Rajasthan, over the suicide of three students in four days.
Published: 28th December 2018 07:58 AM  |   Last Updated: 28th December 2018 07:58 AM  |  A+A-
death, murder,suicide
Image used for representational purpose.
Express News Service

NEW DELHI:  India’s apex child rights’ body has sought a report from the district officials in Kota, Rajasthan, over the suicide of three students in four days. The National Commission for Protection of Child Rights, in a letter written to Kota district magistrate Gaurav Goyal, said that the reports of child suicides are “worrisome” and said that the DM should send all details, along with action taken reports within a week.
“Also, inform the Commission about the total number of suicide (students) cases in 2018; and action was taken by the district administration to prevent such incidents,” the letter said. The three who ended their lives in the past few days had come there from various parts of the country and had been preparing for medical and engineering entrance exams. Kota is known as the coaching capital of India, home to over 40 prominent coaching institutes sees about 1.5-2 lakh new students flocking every year to prepare for competitive examinations such as NEET, JEE (Advanced) and JEE (Main). A report by the state government said that 19 students had killed themselves in the city so far —higher than seven last year.
A Tata Institute of Social Sciences study said self-harm, substance abuse, bullying, sexual experimentation and the possibility of pregnancy, sleep-related issues, loneliness, weight loss and anxiety are common among students in Kota.

NCPCR chairperson Priyank Kanoongo said that the Commission had tried to formulate guidelines for proper treatment and well-being children at coaching centres in the city but had its hands tied as the case is stuck in Jaipur High Court for last three years. “Most coaching centres have an atmosphere which is toxic to kids’ well being, and the industry needs to be regulated,” he said.

Thursday, December 27, 2018

IIT Aspirant Found Dead In Kota Hostel, Third Suicide In 5 Days - NDTV


The teen, preparing for the admission to premier Indian Institutes of Technology, was found hanging at his hostel room on Tuesday. The body was found by his cousin, who is also enrolled at a coaching centre, reported news agency ANI, quoting police sources.
All India | Edited by Anindita Sanyal | Updated: December 26, 2018 15:46 IST

Student Prepping For IIT In Kota Commits Suicide, Third Case In 5 Days



Kota student suicide: The 17-year-old hanged himself in his hostel room.

JAIPUR: 
HIGHLIGHTS
  1. The student was found hanging at his hostel room on Tuesday
  2. No suicide note has been found, police said
  3. Since 2011, more than 50 students have committed suicide in Kota

A 17-year-old has committed suicide in Rajasthan's Kota, known for its numerous coaching centres prepping students for the highly competitive entrance exams for engineering and medical institutes. This is the third suicide in the city over the last five days.
The teen, preparing for the admission to premier Indian Institutes of Technology, was found hanging at his hostel room on Tuesday. The body was found by his cousin, who is also enrolled at a coaching centre, reported news agency ANI, quoting police sources.

The boy's parents, who live in Bihar's Sivan, had asked his cousin to check on him when he did not respond to their phone calls.
No suicide note has been found, the police said. The body will be sent for postmortem examination once the family arrives.
On December 24, a medical aspirant from Kushinagar, Uttar Pradesh, allegedly committed suicide in her hostel room. No suicide note was found there either and the matter is being investigated.
A 16-year-old from Rajasthan's Bundi killed himself on December 22.

The suicides once again highlight the enormous pressure the students prepping for competitive exams are under; and Kota, a town 250 km from state capital Jaipur, once known for its crisp cotton sarees, has become the hub of coaching centres prepping aspirants.
Around 1.5 lakh students study in the 150-odd coaching centres of the city, enrolling in Class 11 and spending the next two years gathering knowhow.
Since 2011, more than 50 students have committed suicide in Kota.

To address the problem, a senior administrative official wrote an open letter to parents two years ago, asking them not to "force their expectations and dreams on their children".

IIT aspirant found hanging in hostel room in Kota, 3rd suicide in 4 days - Hindustan Times

IIT aspirant found hanging in hostel room in Kota, 3rd suicide in 4 days

As many as 19 students have committed suicide in Kota this year. Another 17-year-old student, who was preparing for the entrance exam, too, was found hanging from the ceiling fan of her hostel room on Monday.

INDIA Updated: Dec 25, 2018 23:24 IST
HT Correspondent
HT Correspondent 
Hindustan Times, Kota
Kota suicide,suicide,Kota
A student from Bihar’s Sivan district, who was preparing for the IIT-JEE examination at a coaching academy in Rajasthan’s Kota, hanged himself in his hostel room on Tuesday morning.(PTI/Representative Image)
A 17-year-old student preparing for the entrance exam for admission to premier Indian Institutes of Technology was found hanging at his hostel room in Rajasthan’s private coaching hub of Kota on Tuesday. This is the third such case in Kota since Saturday and has again highlighted issues like stress and parental pressure that have been blamed for a spate of student suicides in Kota since 2013.
Rajasthan Police’s assistant sub-inspector Ramswaroop said 17-year-old’s cousin, who is also enrolled at a Kota private coaching centre, found him hanging from the ceiling fan of his room. Singh’s parents in Bihar’s Sivan had asked the cousin to check on the teenager after he did not respond to their phone calls.
Police said the boy’s body had been sent for a post-mortem, which will be conducted upon the arrival of his parents. Police added that no suicide note was found.
As many as 19 students have committed suicide in Kota this year. Another 17-year-old student, who was preparing for the entrance exam, too, was found hanging from the ceiling fan of her hostel room on Monday. She was from Kushinagar in Uttar Pradesh.
According to Kota district administration data, 58 students enrolled at private coaching centres in Kota committed suicide between 2013 and 2017. In 2017, there was a dip in the suicides, which were down to seven compared to 17 in 2016 and 16 in 2015. The current year is turning out to be the worst in terms of student suicides in the last half-a-decade.
A Tata Institute of Social Sciences report blamed study stress, parental pressure, depression, homesickness, love affairs, liquor or drug abuse and emotional issues for the suicides

Friday, December 21, 2018

An IIT Teacher's Assessment Of Kota And Other Coaching Classes - NDTV

Published: December 19, 2018 17:18 IST

With all the hype and media coverage that surrounds the entrance examination, the IIT JEE (or JEE Advanced), and the IITs themselves, the JEE has become the most suitable candidate for coaching that focuses on how to "crack" the examination. 

It is a widely-held belief that it is impossible to do well in the JEE without coaching, especially given the deficiencies of learning inside schools. Thus, there exists a large market, of the order of many lakhs, for JEE coaching.

So much is the aspirational hype that surrounds the JEE that children enroll for coaching class "packages" (worth a few lakhs per annum, at least) from Class 6 or 8 onwards. 

For many decades, the IITs were attractive because the BTech degree was a passport to the West (the US in particular); now, the attraction is apparently humongous pay packages ("1 cr+") that graduating students receive. The truth is that it is very few students, and only in a few engineering disciplines, that receive such offers; these too are mostly for overseas locations (e.g. a USD 150,000 offer in the US or in Europe); the average package is typically around Rs.10 lakhs, and many packages are less than this. 

Flattering and thoughtless media coverage creates a belief that lots and lots of students receive astronomical salaries. Continuous harping on these gigantic packages serves to obscure not just the much lower average figure but also the fact that there exist packages which are significantly even lower, and that these form the bulk of typical packages on offer. Yet, the IITs subtly connive in the creation of this "humongous package" myth - mostly by omitting to emphasize the truth to the public.

This generates the mass selling of the IIT dream (even to those who have no chance). Coaching classes sell their wares with evangelical zeal, a marketing blitz full of loud advertisements featuring their "toppers" and achievers. Unrealistic dreams and aspirations are sold to gullible parents. It is amazing that the aura surrounding the JEE blinds parents to a realistic assessment of their children's "exam taking" capabilities and, more importantly, aptitudes. It is heartrending to hear parents animatedly discuss to which IIT their child will go - as if admission is already guaranteed by the heady promises of the coaching class.

And so lakhs of aspirants enroll for coaching, in their own towns or boarding style classes away from home (of which Kota in Rajasthan has emerged as the most famous). 

This is even more insidious than it seems on a broader level - the definition of "academic success" is now defined socially in a very narrow, monopolistic manner by the JEE and this is propagated, marketed and guarded fiercely by the coaches. And why not? The money keeps rolling in. 

A typical description from someone who went to Kota says, "Every person you meet wants money from you. Hostel owners are the best example. It's business. Everything is business. Your future too is a source for generating money. You are nothing more than a profit-generating machine.They'll play with your mind and make money. They'll fool your parents too."

The innumerable blogs that coaching students write describe a grim Dickensian reality. A glimpse of this wretched life can be seen in the TV show "Lakhon Mein Ek" (on Amazon Prime). Hordes of students, many with no interest or aptitude for math or science, are crammed into small spaces, with a daily grind stretching to 16 hours of single-minded "studying". They are immersed in the tremendous stress of competition and keeping up with peers, battling the stigma of being left out of "elite" sections, and the mental torture of odious comparisons with toppers: "No one is gonna pay attention on you unless you're a topper or you commit suicide", says a student in an anonymous post on Quora.

Coaching classes are unregulated, which means that administrators and teachers can indulge in all kinds of discrimination in the name of "brilliance" (or lack of it) - performance-shaming, scolding, taunting - all adding up to feelings of inadequacy and worthlessness. And finally, the relentless bearing of the burden of expectations of parents, of the fear of letting them down, accompanied by the awareness of the debt that their families may have incurred to finance this ultimate liberation. Even those who stay in their home towns and are not boarders are subject to the stresses of performance and competition.

Unfortunately, parents realize the cruelty of the coaching experience only after the damage has been done to the minds and bodies of their children. 

The District Collector of Kota, reacting to so many student suicides, wrote a letter to parents in 2016, "Another [student in a suicide note] requests her parents to allow her younger sister to do what she likes and not what they like...One tells candidly that he was manipulated to study science which was not his taste...Many simply write in fewer lines that they could not fulfil the expectations of their parents...Rather few say they were not really capable of doing what is being asked for by them...All of them thought that Death was a much peaceful and effortless action than going through this dilemma of artificially doing what parents want them to do..." Some of these students, "damaged" in various ways, finally end up in the IITs, and this has consequences. 

Government agencies have been expressing their "concerns" about coaching for a long time now, with promises to curb this "menace" but nothing has really happened: a nexus of business and political actors ensures that things chug along merrily. Apart from the occasional denouncing of coaching classes by politicians, most "policy" initiatives end up legitimizing the "idea of coaching" and attempt to provide "affordable", ham-handed (and naive) solutions like providing old question papers on websites (so that people will not go for coaching but study from these), initiatives with fancy digital acronyms (IIT-PAL), and setting up of government-sponsored coaching centers for the "poor". 

Who would want to use these facilities (except as occasional supplementary material) compared to the "real" coaching classes? And so what we have is public policy trying to make coaching affordable, but no attempts in improving school education. It is as if policy-makers have forgotten that the entrance examination became a thing because school/board examinations did not have enough integrity and rigor.

There has also been lot of talk, and some clumsy attempts, of making board examinations great again, in a bid to "counter" the significance of entrance examinations. 

Some years ago, the HRD Ministry "decided" that board marks should be given weightage in making the JEE merit list and it resulted in weird situations; no one knew how to compare examination scores across different boards, yet things were rammed through. And of course, everyone conveniently forgot to remember that there is so much cheating that goes on in board examinations, further compounded by mysterious moderation policies and marks inflation, that these should never be brought into making ranked lists. However, this led to schools and coaching classes being squeezed into a bear hug to give birth to an innovation called "integrated schools".

We now have all varieties of fusion between regular schools and coaching classes, from being identical (pretending to be a school to the boards and faking attendance, while actually doing just coaching for competitive examinations), to sharing infrastructure and teachers, offering expensive "combo" deals (Rs.4 lakhs for Class 11/12 if only school is opted for, and Rs.8 lakhs with coaching included, less Rs.1 lakh discount). No one bats an eyelid anymore. This is the new normal. Even prestigious, elite schools are now a part of this "rate race" to be most "integrated" with the most successful coaching company/brand. It also shows how markets adapt to confound policy measures that are hostile to their enterprise. The symbiosis is just lovely - with "great" teachers from coaching classes now becoming "available" to schools and school teachers getting a chance to earn more money by being a part of coaching, and school managements not having to hire any more "regular" teachers.

Welcome to the backdoor privatization of schools and the subversion of all fee regulatory norms!

(Anurag Mehra is a Professor of Chemical Engineering and Associate Faculty at the Center for Policy Studies, at IIT Bombay.)


Disclaimer: The opinions expressed within this article are the personal opinions of the author. The facts and opinions appearing in the article do not reflect the views of NDTV and NDTV does not assume any responsibility or liability for the same.

Friday, December 7, 2018

IIT professor kills self - The Hindu


SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT
CHENNAI , DECEMBER 06, 2018 02:05 IST


A 45-year-old professor from the Indian Instititute of Technology (IIT-M) allegedly ended her life by consuming poison on Tuesday night. She died in the hospital early on Wednesday morning. The victim Aditi Simha, 45, was an assistant professor in the Physics department. Police claim that she had completed her Ph.D from Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru.

As she was separated from her husband Murali, she lived alone. On Tuesday night, as her mother was not able to reach Aditi, she requested her friend to check on her. Aditi was found unconscious and was rushed to a private hospital. She was admitted in a critical condition and on Wednesday morning was declared dead. “She was in depression. We are investigating the case,” said a senior police officer.


Assistance for overcoming suicidal thoughts is available on the State’s helpline 104 and Sneha’s suicide prevention helpline 044-24640050.

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


Chennai: A woman professor of IIT-Madras ended her life by consuming poison yesterday. She passed away at a private hostel early this morning.
According to the police, the victim was identified as Dr Aditi Simha (45), an assistant professor in the Department of Physics. She had done her Ph.D from IISc, Bengaluru.
She lived alone in a house on IIT-M campus and often visited her mother who lives in Bengaluru. Her mother Neelima told police that she had spoken to Aditi at 11 am yesterday and her calls had gone unanswered after that. She asked her colleague to find out what happened.
Aditi’s friend found her unconscious and she was rushed to Apollo Hospitals, Greams Road, at 8 pm.
When the police reached the hospital at 10 pm, they were told that she was critical and in an unconscious state.
Aditi had consumed Abrus precatorius (Rosary Pea) which she picked from the campus and ground into a paste.
She passed away in the hospital at 4 am. The police said Aditi was battling depression. She had married Murali five years ago and the duo separated after two years.
However, the Kotturpuram police, who have registered a case, are yet to ascertain the actual cause for her suicide.
If anyone is in mental distress or have suicidal thoughts, call 104 of the State Health Department’s helpline or call Sneha Suicide Prevention Centre at 2464 0050.

Tuesday, December 4, 2018

The problem of burning out by Dr.Kannan Moudgalya IITB Prof - The Hindu

EDUCATION

The problem of burning out

New approach: Perhaps, it is time for a change.
New approach: Perhaps, it is time for a change.  
MORE-IN

With some planning and restructuring, school time can be freed up for pursuing creative and innovative projects rather than preparing exclusively for JEE

Over 10 lakh students attempt JEE (Joint Entrance Exam) every year. Only if one manages to get the top 3,000 to 5,000 ranks, (0.01% of the total students) will one be able to get a popular branch in the top five to six IITs. Thus, most students, however good they are, will not make it. Three to four lakh students also drop one year to prepare exclusively for JEE.
Most good students in top schools have stopped attending Class XI and XII, as they seriously study for JEE, to the exclusion of everything else. We are thus producing a unidimensional work force. In addition, most undergraduates in every engineering college are burnt out.
Lateral entry
I propose a solution to the JEE issue through an exclusive lateral entry approach into IITs. This will result in the following benefits:
1. Postponement of JEE advanced preparation to colleges, leaving school students alone.
2. Ensuring that IITs conduct their own admission exams, thereby ensuring fairness.
3. Keeping the number of B.Tech graduates through IITs small, only twice of what they produce now.
4. Ensuring that only those who like engineering get into IITs.
I propose that B.Tech admissions into IITs happen in the third year, after students spend two years in engineering colleges. After getting admission into IITs, these students may complete the education of III and IV years, and graduate with a B.Tech degree. It may be a joint degree with the institution that trained them in the first two years of B.Tech.
The entrance exam will be based on the first two years of engineering and science courses that one normally undergoes at the IITs. The syllabus for these exams will be based on the excellent NPTEL (National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning) video courses, freely available to all. If NPTEL videos can be dubbed into all 22 Indian languages, quality study material will be within the reach of motivated students, rich or poor, urban or rural.
The IITs may also mandate that all students who aspire to join the B.Tech course must know how to write at least one working computer programme. Although I mentioned only the IITs, other top institutions such as BITS Pilani and ICT (formerly UDCT) can be included in the above indicated mentoring list. Colleges that routinely send many of its students to the IITs can themselves move over to this mentoring group.
As the portion for the exams is clearly defined, students will know what to study. Help can be given by the IITs to help clear doubts of students. IIT Bombay has successfully been running a programme ‘Ask a Question’ through which its professors have been answering students’ questions.
This activity, spearheaded by the best teachers from all established institutions, can provide free of cost, the extra help a bright student needs, to make the cut.
Joint mentoring
Many of the heads of departments at IIT Bombay gave their personal view that students selected in the manner proposed in this article will do at least as well as the current students.
The IITs can be encouraged to closely work with colleges that send their best students: teacher training, joint guidance of students, joint master’s degree, applying for project grants, and so on. These colleges may also get higher ranking in accreditation and NIRF (National Institutional Ranking Framework) evaluations.
JEE Main will be conducted more or less in the same manner as we do now. Once all top level colleges and the IITs are selected to do the mentoring work, there could be 100 to 200 comparable colleges at the next level, with a total of about 50,000 seats. It should be easy for a good school student to get into any of these seats without extraordinary preparation. It will also be possible for a student to pick and choose a branch of his/her choice.
JEE Main may be kept comparatively simple; as not much distinction needs to be made amongst these 50,000 students. It would then be possible to reduce the syllabus of Class XI and XII, which the government has been trying to do for quite some time. School students will get a lot of free time, to play, create art forms, participate in social work, prepare for science olympiads, and so on.
The science departments of the IITs, freed from the teaching load, can work with smart school students, desirous of carrying out science research. It will also not be necessary for school students to drop a year to prepare for the JEE Main.
The writer is a professor of chemical engineering at IIT Bombay.

Couple takes anti-suicide message to city schools By Rahi Ga - Mumbai Mirror



Read more at:

https://mumbaimirror.indiatimes.com/mumbai/other/couple-takes-anti-suicide-message-to-city-schools/articleshow/66889717.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst

The Monk who used his IIT degree for Environmental Transformation



Rahul Singh Tuesday, November 13th 2018


“When you are in the field of spirituality, you think you can advise anyone on any topic. We listened to experts in hydrogeological survey and Soil Biotechnology”. This was the greatest takeaway for me from the session titled “Sustainability from the Inside out” hosted in October in Singapore by Artha Forum – the fact that knowledge makes you humble. Thanks to Rajeev Srivastava and Suman Chaki’s kind invitations, every time I walk into Tanglin Club for an Artha session, I come out more knowledgeable if not wiser than I walk in.

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Gauranga Das Ji opened the session by humorously recalling an incident when he was delivering a lecture at MIT and the host quizzed him on his “strange” appearance (of a monk) which was very unlike of an engineer. The witty IIT Bombay alumnus, in a comical comeback, replied, “I am a Vedic psychiatrist”. This psychiatrist forayed into the alleys of Vedas after a drenching revelation. While a student at IIT, one of his classmates tried to commit suicide because he had failed to secure a gold medal for the first time in his life and only managed to bag a silver. Yet there were other of his friends who had failed in 4-5 subjects but yet were happily strolling on the campus. This made Gauranga Das Ji ponder deeper, “Certainly it is not achievement that makes you happy or unhappy. It must be something more”. He soon realized that it was indeed expectations attached to those achievements that define whether you are happy. Very similar to my own equation, Gauranga Das Ji came up with the equation Stress = Expectations – Reality. My own equation is summed here as Happiness = Attainment – Desire.


Graphic courtesy: Artha Forum

Gauranga Das Ji went on to explain how Gita is nothing but a discourse by Krishna to soothe stress and depression of Arjuna. Coming back to the suicides, Gauranga Das Ji mentioned that in India there are 371 suicides per day and a large part of it is due to stress in education. He lamented that contrary to the etymology of the word education which comes from the Latin word Educari meaning to bring out what is within, education today is very information-driven where students are being “educated” to fulfill someone else’s dream. Narrating the story of a five star Mumbai named Hotel President and a roadside dhaba opposite it quite cheekily named Hotel Vice President, Gauranga Das Ji talked about dealing with a world of comparisons and how his brainchild Govardhan Eco village is an experiment in harmonising emotions, environment and economy.
Gauranga Das Ji mentioned that what he noted is that while city has prosperity, it also had stress. This lead him to ideate the concept of Govardhan Eco village with the blessing of Radhanath Swami. I had the good fortune of meeting Radhanath Swami and I can safely say that he is one of the most mesmerizing orators I know. To this date, Radhanath Swami’s unveiling of the story of O Hare and Easy Ted, at RELC in Singapore, remains one of the most powerful narrations in ethics I have ever heard.

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Gauranga Das Ji’s mention of city having prosperity but also stress, reminded me of my conversation with the person seated next to me a few weeks back - Subba, a retired banker who now runs a wellness and yoga center. Incidentally, Subba is an alumnus of same B school as me IIM Bangalore and I had the good fortune of listening to Subba about a couple of years back in the very same room at yet another Artha Forum gathering when Bhakti Charu Swami Ji was visiting Singapore. Little did I then know that a few years later in the very same room I would be listening to Subba’s cousin – Gauranga Das Ji! The conversation I had with Subba was about a person in Ukraine during my recent visit who was lamenting that he would love to travel to far off places such as Singapore but doesn’t have the money to do so. I told him, “Well you have a choice. You can live relatively stress free for 50 weeks in Ukraine and be sad for 2 weeks of not being able to afford to go to Singapore or you can live in stress in Singapore for 50 weeks so that you can enough money for 2 weeks of holiday in Ukraine”. Gauranga Das Ji seems to have solved this puzzle.




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Gauranga Das Ji has successfully married city comforts within a village with a wellness program for stress free living. What started in 2005 with 5 humans and 8 cattle today is a 250 human and 100 cattle thriving economy. Gauranga Das Ji mentioned that there are 29 agro climatic zones in the world and India is blessed to have 21 of them. Yet due to modern linear (as opposed to cyclical) consumption model, India today is the 4th largest contributor of Carbon Dioxide after China, USA and EU. He went on to explain what he meant by cyclical i.e. where waste from one system is input for the next system. The example he gave was that of a cow which feeds grass and cow dung is a natural fertilizer for grass. The same cyclical concept has been incorporated into everything that Govardhan Eco village does whose aim is to create living spaces not buildings. This is achieved by using natural elements such as mud for building walls, energy from sun, fuel from cow dung and modern technology such as plastic pyrolysis plant, solid biotechnology plant for food waste management.
Listening to presentation, I recalled how in my ancestral village people used to actually live in houses made of mud, used cow dung as fuel and water was harvested right from ponds. This made me wonder why despite knowing this, we are not able to implement what Govardhan Eco village has managed to do in practice. To this question, Gauranga Das Ji replied that, “India liberated Lakshmi (Wealth) in 1991 but Saraswati (knowledge) is still not liberated. India is the only country where you cannot do a PhD in religion.” Gauranga Das Ji explained that this was due to a British-era rule which forbids any religious study or dissemination of religion in the formal education system.

Rahul Singh with Engineer turned Monk Gauranga Das Ji (right). Photo courtesy: Rahul Singh
He contrasted this with USA where there are currently 1963 religious academic institutions as per American Academy of Religion (AAR). He said that currently in the world there are 31% Christians, 23% Muslims, 15% Hindus and 16% Agnostic (which he said can go nowhere and everywhere depending on the individual). I guess I belong this Nowhere and Everywhere category.  He mentioned this to point out that ironically India is the only country where you cannot do a PhD in Hinduism despite being home to the largest population of Hindus. True to the theme of Artha i.e. Ancient Wisdom Modern Business, Gauranga Das Ji talked about Bhaktivedanta Vidyapitha which in collaboration with Mumbai University is able to award 8 PhDs in ancient Indian knowledge.  Gauranga Das Ji emphasized the importance of bringing back what we had lost. Not just in knowledge but also economy. He quote celebrated Belgian historian Paul Bairoch’s analysis of decline of Indian wealth. In 1500 AD India has 28% of world’s GDP and it has been a downhill since then with 16% in 1800AD and 1% in 1900AD. At the time of independence in 1947, India was 3% of World’s GDP. Gauranga Das Ji attributed this to systematic suppression of Indian knowledge during the British Raj.




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My final takeaway was the some people neither know nor do, some know but don’t do and some know and do. Gauranga Das Ji in his own words had renounced his engineering education at IIT Bombay where he was from 1989 to 1993 in an era when India was unshackling the fetters of license raj to move towards market economy. But divinity had other plans for him – Years later this monk who had sold his IIT degree, found himself in shoes of an engineer yet again and went on to create United Nation’s award winning eco friendly village using the very knowledge that most Indians know but do not act upon!

The global contribution to world's GDP by major economies from 1 CE to 2003 CE. Graphic courtesy: Angus Maddison's estimates


Author

Rahul Singh – Contributor
A banker by day and writer by night, multifaceted Rahul is an expert at Connecting the Dots – be it Ideas, Insights or Individuals. A Singapore Government scholar at NTU and an MBA from IIM Bangalore, Rahul is the Secretary for IIMB Alumni Association, Singapore. He is passionate about education, poverty alleviation, technology, cross-cultural understanding and philosophy. Rahul has hosted several high profile events, advised IIMs on their International strategy and has been solicited by India’s Planning Commission ‘NITI Aayog’ on several projects. His strategy case studies have been published in an MBA textbook used by many American B-schools.

Mumbai: IIT-B Professors Share Experiences To Help Students To Cope With Stress - MId Day


Nov 11, 2018, 08:10 IST | Pallavi Smart

Institute gets professors to share experiences at IIT to help students cope with stress

Prof Soumya Mukherji chatted up with students at a session in Oct

What does it take to tick at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay? Possibly, just a heart-to-heart conversation between teachers and students. Or at least, that's what the academic council of the institute thinks so. In a novel attempt to reduce stress levels of students, the council has begun organising informal chat sessions between professors and students from IIT-B. The idea is to get the professors to talk about how they coped with the pressures they faced while preparing for the exams.

The new initiative, which kick-started in the last week of October, will be held once every semester, and will be scheduled just before the examinations, when stress levels among students are at their peak.

Sharing the stress
Adarsh Kumar, head of the academic council's Students' Support Group, which launched the initiative, said, "A lot of students are reeling under academic pressure."

Exam stress among IITians has been a pressing issue for a long time now. In September, Jaideep Swain, an MTech student at IIT-B, had committed suicide inside a hotel room. Back in 2015, Jitesh Sharma, a third year chemical engineering student, killed himself, while his examinations were on. 

There have also been a few suicide attempts within the campus. Apart from this, instances of talented students leaving the course abruptly, has also been a cause of worry. All of this compelled the council to look into the issue and find ways to alleviate the stress levels.

While IIT-B conducts regular workshops by experts and counsellors, the informal sessions between the students and teachers was seen as a good starting point to have difficult conversations. "When students discuss their problems with their professors, they are able to cope better," said Kumar. "The students can draw on their professors' life experiences, and understand how to move forward, especially when they are struggling during exams or need career advice," he added.

Sound advice
The first session in the series was held on October 25 with Prof Soumya Mukherji, who has been serving as dean of student affairs for almost three years now. Around 90 students attended the session. "We had planned a few questions to begin the session, but the students were more than enthusiastic to understand the professor's life on campus as a student," said Kumar. Appreciating the initiative, Prof Mukherji, said, "The point is to make these students realise that even their professors have gone through the same s**t and so, academic stress is completely manageable."


A student, who attended the session, said, "It's a different feeling, when someone who has gone through the same situation, tells you that everything is going to be all right."