CBSE topper leads high-scorer club with 1 mark short of 500

CBSE topper leads high-scorer club with 1 mark short of 500

Arts Rubs Shoulders With Science, Comm In Top Bracket

Jhimli.Mukherjeepandey@timesgroup.com

Kolkata:31.07.2021 

One mark short of 500, Archisman Bandyopadhyay from South Point High School is perhaps the highest scorer of CBSE XII this year in the country. This is the second time this year that Bengal witnessed such an achievement; the first was a few days ago when the Higher Secondary results were declared and Rumana Sultana from Kandi in Murshidabad stopped short of the perfect score by just a mark.

South Point, celebrating Archisman’s achievement, will soon see him off as he leaves for the US to study mathematics as his intended major at the College of Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota. He bagged admission to six reputable US universities but chose this campus because of its high global rank.

“I want to remain in the academics and pursue mathematics in higher studies,” he said.

Not too far behind was Megha Abedin, who topped DPS Ruby Park with 99.2%. It was an especially proud moment for her because she is from the humanities stream and scored much higher than the rest of the neartop scores from the science stream. “I want to stay back in Kolkata and study history in either Presidency or JU and then prepare for my civil services exams,” she said.

Nearly 47% candidates from DPS Ruby Park have scored above 90%. Abedin’s high score was shared by Lokesh Somani from the commerce stream at Birla High School and Sanchit Mukherjee from the science stream at BDM International School. Commerce students have reportedly fared better than those from the two other streams at Birla High School. “I am looking forward to studying economics honours at Delhi University, if I get a seat there. The experience of studying in Delhi will give me added confidence. The application process will start from August 2,” Lokesh said. With 56 boys placed above 95%, the school is overjoyed.

Ritu Kulshreshtha has topped her school, Shri Shikshayatan, scoring 99% in science. “My dream is to study computer science engineering at IIT Kharagpur. I have written the JEE Mains and I hope to be able to sit for the JEE Advanced, too,” she said.

Many schools are happy that while it is traditionally believed the toppers are mostly from science or commerce, several from humanities this year have bagged the top slot. Ronjinee Chattopadhyay from the humanities stream at BDM International has scored 99%. “I want to study sociology and will apply at Jadavpur University, Presidency and St Xavier’s College. I don’t want to leave the city just yet. I am not sure about what I wish to do after graduation and I hope the next three years will help me firm up my plans,” she said.

At Lakshmipat Singhania Academy, too, humanities pipped commerce and science this time, as Sakshi Singhania topped the school with 98.4%. The school has 49 students in the 95-plus category.

Delhi HC gives FB, WhatsApp till Aug 27 to respond to CCI

Delhi HC gives FB, WhatsApp till Aug 27 to respond to CCI

New Delhi:31.07.2021 

The Delhi high court said on Friday it will hear on August 27 the appeals filed by Facebook and WhatsApp against the Competition Commission of India’s (CCI's) probe into the instant messaging app’s new privacy policy.

A bench comprising Chief Justice D N Patel and Justice Jyoti Singh listed the matter for August after additional solicitor general Balbir Singh, representing CCI, sought some time to respond to the pleas. Senior advocate Harish Salve, representing WhatsApp, contended that if the CCI wants time, the petitioners have no objection as long as the commission does not insist on filing a reply to its June 4 notice by August 5 asking it to furnish certain information in relation to the probe.

WhatsApp and Facebook, also represented by senior advocate Mukul Rohatgi, have challenged the CCI’s June 4 and 8 notices, respectively. TNN

Door-to-door vax drive for aged starts, 37 get the shots at home

Door-to-door vax drive for aged starts, 37 get the shots at home

Sumitra.DebRoy@timesgroup.com

Mumbai:31.07.2021 

An 83-year-old Meera Barve broke into a smile when the nurse injected her with the vaccine on Friday. Since the pandemic broke out in 2020, the octogenarian has met her daughter, who lives 200kms away in Dapoli, just twice. The last time a few months ago, she sat at arm’s length wearing a mask. “I was eager to get vaccinated,” said Barve, hoping to meet her daughter more often now.

Barve was among 14 bedridden inmates at the Home for the Aged in Jogeshwari (east) to be inoculated on day 1 of the door-to-door immunisation drive. A total of 37 people from K east ward, including slums in Chakala and Sakinaka, were vaccinated by members from NGO Project Mumbai and civic teams who criss-crossed the city’s second most populated ward in an ambulance. All recipients had to produce a fitness certificate and a consent letter.

The drive started with Daya Joshi (79), a resident of Vijay Nagar in Andheri E, who has been rendered immobile by her heart condition, diabetes and weakness. Her son, Dr Nitin Joshi, said everyone in their house was fully vaccinated except her. “It’s a great initiative and people should sign up without fear,” he said.

Friday’s drive will be reviewed to start it across Maharashtra. For now, producing a fitness certificate and ensuring the presence of a doctor for the 30-minute observation period appear to be the biggest hindrances, said Suresh Kakani, additional municipal commissioner. While over 200 requests for home vaccination have come from K east, barely 25-30 were able to arrange a fitness certificate, said Dr Urmila Patil, ward’s medical officer of health.

Under the guidelines, those interested in home vaccination must also provide a consent letter. Dr Niranjan Wagh, who runs the Jogeshwari home along with wife Sumangala, a nurse, said barring a few inmates, almost all families have given their consent for vaccination. “Since the pandemic started, we have cut down physical visits from relatives. We hope with vaccination things will be closer to normalcy,” he said.

At least a dozen vaccinations were carried out in slum colonies inside Sakinaka, Chakala and MIDC, said Shishir Joshi, founder of Project Mumbai. Of the four vials opened, barely a few doses were wasted, said Joshi, as they had micro-mapped the ward to save travel time. “We are calling people beforehand and asking them to keep documents ready. From Monday, we intend to vaccinate 50-75 people daily,” he said.

TIMES VIEW: Door-todoor vaccination is a great initiative to take immunisation to the last person in the community. However, some of the requirements such as a fitness certificate or a physician's letter endorsing the health condition of a bed-ridden person may be challenging to obtain. The state and the BMC must be open to tweak the norms based on feedback and experiences emerging from the real world.

Upset over scaling down of marks to reference year: CBSE XII high scorers

Upset over scaling down of marks to reference year: CBSE XII high scorers

Sandhya Nair & Hemali Chhapia TNN

Mumbai:31.07.2021  

CBSE on Friday announced Class XII results of close to 13 lakh students, much to the disappointment of high scorers who said their marks were scaled down. The all-India success rate was 99.37% and Maharashtra’s 99.41%. Despite their disappointment, there was an 81% jump in 95%-plus scorers to 70,004 students across the country from 38,686 last year, which itself was a 55% increase from 2019.

A labourer’s daughter, Ansuiya, a Humanities student of Vidya Gyan Bulandshahr, a free residential school by the Shiv Nadar Foundation for economically underprivileged meritorious students from rural Uttar Pradesh, emerged the topper with the perfect 100%. Ansuiya aspires to be an IAS officer.

The results of 65,184 students, including from around 1,050 new schools, are under process and will be declared by August 5. A number of schools in Mumbai, too, did not get their results on Friday. In all, 58 Kendriya Vidyalaya schools of Mumbai had a total of 4,234 candidates in Class XII—their success rate was 99.98%, up from the previous year’s 94.9%.

While girls did better than boys by 0.5%, transgender students had a 100% success rate this year compared with 66.7% last year and 83.3% in 2019.

Thiruvananthapuram region continued to top among the 16 regions in the country with 99.89%. Pune region carved out last year maintained its 10th position this year too. Till 2019, Maharashtra was in the Chennai region.

Principals told TOI about having to scale down marks of high scorers. “High scorers felt they could have done better in a written exam. Above-average students benefited the most with the marking system adopted by the board,” said one.

CBSE examination head Sanyam Bharadwaj told TOI, “I know a lot of heads of schools had to scale down their results to be in line with their best reference year. I also feel schools have done a lot of hard work. But our decision was appropriate and the performance of schools across India has improved.”

Schools were given a reference year— 2018, 2019 or 2020—to evaluate students. “We had an extremely bright student in the subject ‘entrepreneurship’. Last year, our reference year, there was no top scorer for entrepreneurship, so this year’s student lost marks,” said a principal.

Nikita Bajaj, principal of R N Podar School, said, “Scaling down the results to bring them on par with the reference year was tough for teachers as we had some exceptionally bright students. For instance, while our reference year was 2018, it was when we also shifted from elective English to core English. So, we felt students would have done better if we had our own reference year for that subject.” Her school had 207 candidates or 44% students with over 90%.

Across Ryan Group of Schools,144 students or 28% of the total strength across Mumbai and Navi Mumbai scored over 90%.

Some said it was the best solution considering the pandemic. “If continued performance of a child over three academic sessions is brought into the mainstream, students will give a more focused and improved performance instead of waiting for one exam,” said Madhu Singh, principal, Billabong High International School, Malad. In Mumbai, eight schools’ results were not declared, including four new ones. Schools awaiting results include Kendriya Vidyalaya in Powai, Somaiya School, New Bombay City School, Radcliffe School, Kharghar, and Datta Meghe World Academy.

(With inputs by B B Nayak)

Cancelled, rescheduled flights put US-bound students in a fix

Cancelled, rescheduled flights put US-bound students in a fix

Manju.V@timesgroup.com

Mumbai:31.07.2021 

Indian students with a valid visa can fly to the US to join their universities in August, but in the past few weeks, many have found their flights either cancelled or rescheduled. Air India sources said it’s collateral damage brought on by the continued restrictions on other categories of US-bound travellers from India.

On May 4, the US banned entry to some categories of non-immigrant travellers from India. “The flyers expected the US to relax these restrictions as Covid cases have gone down. So, they booked US flight tickets. But the restrictions haven’t been lifted yet, so this category of flyers have been cancelling their tickets,’’ said an Air India source. “A number of our fully-booked US flights now have many empty seats and so we were forced to cancel, reschedule. The students booked on these flights took the collateral damage,” the source added.

Two weeks ago, Ajay Anand (name changed on request), bought a Rs 70,000 return ticket from the Air India website for travel on the August 10 Delhi-NewYork flight. This week, the airline website said his booking had changed and directed him to their call centre. “I made multiple calls to the AI call centre, was put on hold for over three hours, but still couldn’t get my ticket rescheduled. So I cancelled the AI ticket and bought a return ticket to New York on a United flight for Rs 1.50 lakh, which transits through Frankfurt,’’ he said.

With transit hubs like Dubai and London shut for Indians, the options for US travel have narrowed down and fares have jumped. An AI spokesperson said after the May 4 US Presidential Proclamation restricting air traffic from India, some AI flights to the US had to be curtailed or rescheduled. “These were effected well in advance.” He said flight frequency will be more from 7 August. Efforts are being made to accommodate as many flyers as possible, he added.

TESTING TIMES

Air India sources said it’s collateral damage brought on by the continued restrictions on other categories of US-bound travellers from India

Got your Covid jab? Now convince others to do so

A SHOT OF HOPE

Got your Covid jab? Now convince others to do so

Experts say people refusing to get vaccinated are a risk to those who have taken their shots, and to economic recovery

TIMES NEWS NETWORK

31.07.2021 

How can we stop another Covid wave if people refuse to get vaccinated? America faces this question now as its weekly cases have increased fourfold since June. Most Americans who wanted to get vaccinated are vaccinated, but the rest are proving hard to convince. America is facing a “pandemic of the unvaccinated”.

India could find itself in the same spot a few months down. That’s why Prime Minister Modi spoke about vaccine hesitancy in his Mann ki Baat on June 27. “Trust science, not rumours, and trust our scientists who have worked day and night to develop these vaccines,” he told the nation.

The good news is that vaccine hesitancy is not a very big problem in India. The Economist says it has declined from about 35% in December to just over 20% now. It’s a lot better than the US, where 30% still answer “no” or “don’t know” to the question, “Would you get a Covid-19 vaccine?”

But even 20% hesitancy could be too much with a variant like Delta that hops from one person to six, on average. Last year, with a slower virus, scientists thought vaccinating 60% of the population could get us to herd immunity. Now nobody knows.

“The unvaccinated will set the country on fire over and over again… And they will not be the only ones who are singed,” Apoorva Mandavilli writes in The New York Times. She’s talking about America, but the warning applies everywhere.

The problem with Delta is that it can “break through” the protection vaccines provide. Such breakthrough infections are mostly mild “but some may prompt illness in vaccinated people serious enough to lay them up in bed, miss work – and put their children or older relatives at risk,” Mandavilli says. Some might end up with ‘long Covid’.

So, as long as we have “hardline refuseniks” – as the Economist calls them – getting back to normal will be difficult. And that means businesses will suffer and there will be costs for the economy.

Reasons for vaccine hesitancy

A recent IMF paper says people mostly refuse to take vaccines believing they are unsafe. The second main reason is faith (or lack of it) in the government. Those who “strongly believe the government will provide them with an effective vaccine are almost 50 percentage points more likely to take the vaccine than those who do not.”

But there are other reasons too. For example, do you regard Covid as a dangerous new disease or, like Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro, “a little flu”? If people around you – your friends and family – say vaccines are unsafe, their belief will rub off on you. Then, you will start sharing negative information about vaccines yourself.

David Robson, author of ‘The Intelligence Trap: Why Smart People Do Dumb Things,’ writes in a BBC article it’s wrong to assume every vaccine-hesitant person is an anti-vaxxer. “They are simply undecided about their choice to take the injection.”

For example, the hesitation may arise from difficulty in getting an appointment or the distance to a vaccination centre, or the waiting time at the centre. Robson says this might have been the problem in Germany, “which has a very complicated system to identify who is eligible to receive the vaccine at any one time.”

The IMF paper also says, “Having easy access to a vaccination site increases the chances that a person gets the vaccine by 4 to 12 percentage points.”

Don’t insult the hesitant

Dr Deepti Gurdasani, a London-based public health expert and epidemiologist, tells CNN the main thing for overcoming vaccine hesitancy is “to actually understand the reasons and address them rather than dismissing people as either ignorant or selfish.”

Gretchen Chapman, a professor of social and decision sciences at Carnegie Mellon, tells The Washington Post: “Don’t make assumptions about what the barrier is. Listen to them and hear where they are. There could be a reason that surprises you.”

If people are hesitant because they see vaccines as an inconvenience, incentives might work. If they have doubts about a vaccine’s efficacy and safety, you could remind them of the greater risk from Covid. But opposition rooted in ideology or politics can be hard to overcome.

Visit ToiShotofHope.com to learn more

TN cluster infections up, a cause for worry

TN cluster infections up, a cause for worry

TIMES NEWS NETWORK

Chennai:31.07.2021 

Fresh cases that were declining across Tamil Nadu for more than two months have started to rise marginally over the last two days. They rose by 100 cases to 1,859 on Thursday. On Friday, the state reported 1,947 new cases. Coimbatore, where industries are back to working at full strength, and Chennai are seeing small clusters that are contributing to the rise in cases.

This has not come as a surprise to the state health department, which expected the decline in cases to slow two weeks after lockdown relaxations. A week after every phase of unlocking, the rate of fall declined. “Any spike in cases is a cause of concern, particularly with neighbouring Kerala reporting high numbers,” said health minister Ma Subramanian. In February 2021, when the epidemic wave was receding, similar clusters — hostels, hotels, and family reunions — marked the beginning of the deadly wave.

On Friday, Coimbatore crossed the 200-mark. “We have now identified two areas — Sulur and Karamadai — which are beginning to see an increase in cases,” Coimbatore deputy director of public health Dr Senthil Kumar said. The challenge now is to ensure the curve does not go up again.