VisionIAS
09:11
Thursday, September 03, 2020
Insights IAS Editorial August 2020 PDF
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08:38
Insights IAS Editorial August 2020 PDF
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Insights IAS Current Affairs August 2020 Hindi PDF
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08:35
Insights IAS Current Affairs August 2020 Hindi PDF
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VISION IAS NEWS TODAY AUGUST 2020: Daily Current Affairs Compilation PDF
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08:33
VISION IAS NEWS TODAY AUGUST 2020: Daily Current Affairs Compilation PDF
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GS SCORE Current Affairs September 2020 Week 1 PDF Download
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08:15
GS SCORE Current Affairs September 2020 Week 1 PDF Download
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Wednesday, September 02, 2020
Daily Current Affairs, 02nd September 2020
VisionIAS
22:12
1) Union Cabinet approves “Mission Karmayogi” NPCSCB
•Mission Karmayogi has been launched to prepare the Indian Civil Servant for the future by making him more creative, constructive, imaginative, innovative, proactive, professional, progressive, energetic, enabling, transparent and technology-enabled. Through this, the civil servant will be empowered with specific role-competencies, and will also be able to ensure efficient service delivery of the highest quality standards.
The National Programme for Civil Services Capacity Building (NPCSCB) will be launched with the following institutional framework:
•Prime Minister’s Public Human Resources (HR) Council
•Capacity Building Commission
•Special Purpose Vehicle for owning and operating the digital assets and the technological platform for online training
•Coordination Unit headed by the Cabinet Secretary
It will lay the foundations for capacity building for Civil Servants. An Integrated Government Online Training “iGOTKarmayogiPlatform” would be set up to deliver the programme. The platform will brings the scale as well as state-of-the-art infrastructure to enhance the capacities of over two crore officials in India.
2) Government of India Blocks 118 Mobile Apps
•118 mobile apps have been blocked by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology by invoking it’s power under section 69A of the Information Technology Act read with the relevant provisions of the Information Technology (Procedure and Safeguards for Blocking of Access of Information by Public) Rules 2009.
3) Union Cabinet approves J&K official languages Bill 2020
•The J&K official languages Bill 2020 will be introduced in Parliament in the upcoming Monsoon Session. This bill will include Dogri, Hindi and Kashmiri as officials languages of the Union Territory.
4) Mustapha Adib becomes new Prime Minister of Lebanon
•Days after the blast, the government of Prime Minister Hassan Diab, a self-styled technocrat, stepped down. President Michel Aoun asked Lebanon’s ambassador to Germany Mr Adib to form a new government after he secured 90 votes in the 128-member Parliament.
5) Aveek Sarkar becomes new Chairman of Press Trust of India
•Aveek Sarkar was the founding Managing Director of Penguin India, the Indian counterpart of Penguin Books, the founding Editor of Business Standard and also the pivotal figure behind the acquisition of STAR News by the ABP Group in 2003.
6) CFI to host first-ever Cycling Summit in 2021
•The Cycling Summit 2021 will be hosted in Delhi, Mumbai, and Bangalore and is expected to be a unique confluence of cycling enthusiasts, renowned athletes, and businesses from all over the country.
•The Cycling Summit 2021 will consist of cyclists, athletes, fitness and sports enthusiasts, cycling coaches, health and nutrition experts, and influencers. There will also be indigenous and global brands that cater to the needs of health, fitness and cycling enthusiasts. The summit is estimated to attract around 25,000 people in each city.
7) Pramod Chandra Mody gets 6-month extension as CBDT Chairman
•PC Mody, a 1982 batch Indian Revenue Service (Income Tax cadre) officer, was appointed the CBDT chief in February 2019. He was in August last year re-appointed on the post for one year, till August 31, 2020, beyond the date of his superannuation on August 31, 2019.
8) Hemant Khatri becomes new CMD of Hindustan Shipyard Limited
•Hemant Khatri was appointed as the CMD of HSL was approved by the Appointments Committee of the Cabinet(ACC) on 27th May 2020 with effective from 1st September 2020 till 31st July 2025 the date of his superannuation or until further orders.
9) A book title “The Big Thoughts of Little Luv” authored by Karan Johar
•The book narrates the story of the twins Luv and Kusha and features the challenges faced by the parents and the difference imposed between the boys and girls by the parents while raising them. Karan Johar released his autobiography titled “An Unsuitable Boy” in 2017.
10) ICICI Prudential Life launched voice chatbot “LiGo” on Google Assistant
SSC CHSL 2018 Marks Released
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21:40
SSC CHSL 2018 Marks Released
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The HINDU Notes – 02nd September 2020
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21:26
📰 Disruption and chalking out a new idea for education
In the aftermath of the pandemic’s deep impact in India, ‘Acadonomics’ is a concept whose time may have come
•When the novel coronavirus first made headlines at the beginning of the year, few in the comity of nations would have thought even in their wildest dreams that it was going to have so much of an impact that not even a single sphere of life would be left unaffected.
•Now, six months into the pandemic, not only has there been a colossal loss of life and economic damage the world over, but COVID-19, as it has come to be called, is leaving a lasting impression on education. This in turn is bound to have a telling impact on generations to come, forgetting for a second the extent to which the current graduating classes are in a state of limbo. In a larger perspective it has also raised the spectre of educational institutions shuttering their doors completely or taking unprecedented steps that have invariably affected jobs and livelihoods.
A comparison with the West
•Shifting gears in an academic setting is not easy whether one is talking about institutions in the developed West or the developing nations. Economics has always been a part of academics; it is only in the present circumstances that it has become all the more apparent as to how management, especially in private institutions, is going to meet demands on the one hand and availability of resources on the other. If one may call this new phenomenon “acadonomics”, it would imply a careful allocation of resources keeping in mind the transient nature of the issue of how long it is going to take to come back to the steady state of affairs that it once was. ‘Acadonomics’ will also involve seeing the economics of moving on to an online mode of the teaching-learning process, whether it is going to be a temporary phenomenon, something of a mix to be offered or a permanent alternative to the current scheme of things that has come to stay for the short and the medium terms.
•The academic choices, or in some instances, luxuries, are not the same for all countries across the world. For instance in the United States, long considered as the Mecca of Higher Education, the elite private and state subsidised universities have endowments that can be used for a range of academic activities — from giving out fellowships to subsidising tuition fees. Harvard University, for example, is said to have an endowment of close to $40 billion, and the top 10 have a cushion of anywhere between $10 billion to $40 billion. By contrast, private academic institutions in India which are not-for-profit do not have any such buffers; and, none of the institutions in this country possesses big corpuses from alumni or industry; their survival for the most part is on the annual income that comes from tuition and the assortment of other fees collected.
Private education
•In the way they are set up, private institutions in India are hardly in a position to meet an eventuality such as COVID-19, something that comes by lightning speed and leaves a trail of destruction that would take many, many years to rectify. In an educational set-up in India, nothing can be reduced — the norms cannot be lowered nor can the infrastructure be dismantled. The status quo with respect to fixed costs remains the same, with some marginal adjustments possibly in costs of electricity, water and deferments in salaries. For the most part, the fixed and operational costs remain the same, and infrastructure once created cannot be shrunk.
•The downside to self-financed institutions is that in the time of the pandemic and loss of jobs, students plead inability to pay the requisite fee (and in many instances, the hostel fee as well) thereby placing additional burden on the management which feels already stretched because of existing commitments that would include paying off interest on the money borrowed for improving infrastructure on their campuses.
Dual mode of learning
•The spike in cost for persisting with a dual mode of the teaching-learning process is going to be quite prohibitive for the next few years. First, the scaling of operations that would include the dual modes of online and offline is going to be expensive due to a dual mode of educational delivery. To rub salt into the wound, the new social distancing norms would lead to the enforcement of smaller class sizes, thereby increasing the effective teaching load and multiplicity of efforts. Second, the online teaching mode brings with it increased costs of IT infrastructure such as network bandwidth, servers, cloud resources and software licensing fees. Third, online teaching means new hiring in the IT sector and increased costs due to engagements with Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs, and other online platforms. Fourth, online teaching means setting up multiple studios and educational technology centres which translate into investments in high technology. Fifth, creation of virtual laboratories across all domains of studies and examination centres, etc. would add to the woes in terms of already depleted finances. Finally, it is a wrong perception that all faculty members are adept in online teaching — style and delivery go far beyond donning a jacket, having adequate personal grooming and rattling off from a teleprompter. Therefore, additional funds have to be allocated to train faculty for online teaching.
Possible reforms
•In these difficult times, the onus is on the Centre and State governments to provide soft loans to students to stay with the educational course. For professional and non-professional courses, the natural tendency for students would be to opt for online courses as they could cut back and save on hostel, mess and travel costs. At the same time students looking at online instruction would be disinclined to pay the same fee charged for offline instruction which means that some institutions may well have to shut down due to their inability to meet costs. Therefore, owing to ‘acadonomics’, the consequences can be quite dire with a potential to cause irreparable and long-term harm to the younger generations of students as well as institutions. At this point of time it would seem prudent for the government and regulatory bodies to not interfere in the fee structure, and, for the future, even consider a measure of higher degree of financial autonomy. One would agree that in the long run, technology can flatten the cost due to economies of scale, but in a shorter frame of time of three to five years, the cost of education is likely to go up.
•It may be an exaggeration to say that in India, education and the financial models are inverted as opposed to many others: there is good quality private school education but one that is fairly expensive; but good quality higher education is subsidised in relation to their direct costs. While replicating any western model in India may not be wholly appropriate, it is high time institutions in India are allowed to create coffers or corpuses for a rainy day. Or, perhaps, educational institutions could come to be treated like any other corporate body, with an allowable small margin of profit. The corporate model addresses not just financial sustainability but also a professional governance structure that would entail better accountability and holistic education. ‘Acadonomics’ of the future will not only decide the fate of the academic sector in India but also its quality, ranking, research, innovation potential and its collective impact on our country’s economy.
📰 A ‘new’ democracy?
