No moral policing if willingly converted: HC

 No moral policing if willingly converted: HC

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Ashutosh.Shukla@timesgroup.com

31.01.2022

Bhopal/Jabalpur: The Madhya Pradesh high court has ruled that no “moral policing” can be allowed when two adults decide to live together by way of marriage or a live-in relationship of their own will.

With this, the bench of Justice Nandita Dubey rejected the argument of the counsel for the MP government that under the provisions of Freedom of Religion Act, 2021, conversion for the sake of marriage is not legal; and marriage so performed is le-gally null and void and the girl should be sent to Nari Niketan for 'rehabilitation'.

The decision came in response to a habeas corpus petition filed by Guljar Ahmed, who had married a Hindu girl, Arti Sahu, who converted to Islam but was then taken away by her parents to her hometown, Varanasi. Justice Dubey directed police to hand the woman back to the petitioner, as she wished, and see to it that they reach home safely and are not threatened thereafter by her parents.

‘Ensure that corpus & petitioner are not threatened’

Guljar Khan had filed a habeas corpus petition, saying he and Arti had married in Maharashtra and she had willingly converted to Islam, but her parents had taken her away by force and have illegally detained her. On the orders of the judge, the 19-year-old woman was produced in court through video conferencing. In her statement, she told the court that she had willingly married Khan and converted to Islam. She said her parents and grandparents had forcibly taken her away to Banaras, where she was beaten up and threatened constantly to give a statement against her husband. The court pointed out that she has categorically stated she was not forced into conversion and whatever she has done was as per her own wishes. The judge noted that the government counsel had vehemently argued that any marriage performed in contravention to section 3 of the Freedom of Religion Act, 2021, shall be deemed null and void. The government counsel said that the Act provides that no person shall convert for the purpose of marriage and any conversion in contravention of this shall be deemed null and void.

The court, however, pointed out that the petitioner and his wife are adults. “Be that as it may, the petitioner and the corpus (woman) are major. No moral policing can be allowed in such matters where two major persons are willing to stay together whether by way of marriage or in a live-in relationship, when the party to that arrangement is doing it willingly and not forced into it,” Justice Dubey said.

“The corpus before this court has clearly stated that she has married the petitioner and wants to stay with him. She is a major and her age is not disputed by any of the parties. The Constitution gives the right to every major citizen of this country to live her or his life as per her or his own wishes. Under the circumstances, the objection raised by the counsel for the state and her prayer to send the corpus to Nari Niketan is rejected,” the judge ordered.

“The police authorities are also directed to see that in future, the corpus and petitioner are not threatened by the parents of the corpus,” the court said.TNN

Many colleges defer opening, wait for outstation students to return

 Many colleges defer opening, wait for outstation students to return

Some To Resume Offline Mode Today

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SruthySusan.Ullas@timesgroup.com

31.01.2022

Bengaluru: While the government announced reopening of schools and colleges from Monday, many institutions in the city are planning to defer resuming offline classes by a week to allow time to outstation students to return.

On Saturday, the government announced resumption of offline classes from Monday. Many colleges immediately informed students about the development and asked them to plan their journey while giving them a week’s time to get back on campus. “We have already told them to be prepared to come. We will give only a week’s buffer time after the government declaration,” said Fr Abraham V, vice-chancellor, Christ (deemed to be university).

Until then, many colleges plan to continue with the blended mode. “While local students can come to campuses for clarifications or other academic activities, outstation students can report back by next Monday. Until then, the blended mode will continue,” said Raghu R, spokesperson of Mount Carmel College. In an intimation to its students, Maharani Cluster University too said it will reopen on Friday to give sufficient time to outstation students to book return tickets to Bengaluru.

However, some other institutions like Sheshadripuram Degree College, where locals comprise a majority of the students, will start offline classes from Monday itself. “We’ll decide on a blended approach depending on how it progresses,” said HN Meera, principal.

Some other colleges plan to resume on-campus classes gradually. “Our end-semester exams will start on Tuesday and we will reopen for second and third years then. First-year students will continue with online classes as we don’t want a huge rush on campus,” said Paul Newman, principal of St Joseph’s Evening College. “Offline classes in the day college are likely by April as we wait for Covid cases to drop substantially,” he added.

Jyoti Nivas College too plans to continue with online classes. While the government order on reopening of classes has still not been issued, Bengaluru City University said it will issue an order on Monday morning.

Bangalore University said while on-campus classes for second-year students will start from Monday, first-year classes are likely to begin by next week, by when admissions will be complete.

Time to reopen schools and address the learning losses

 Time to reopen schools and address the learning losses

Young students have forgotten writing notes, numeracy skills, reading abilities and tables

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Sonal.Srivastava@timesgroup.com

31-01-2022

Intermittent school closures have caused an almost insurmountable learning loss among students. Data from various factsheets, reports and surveys present a grim picture of how students from classes I-XII were affected by the pandemicrelated school closures. Children have lost writing, reading and numeracy skills; many young students in under-resourced schools have trouble recognising alphabets, while many others have forgotten tables beyond those of 2 and 3.

Educators say that the time is ripe for the reopening of schools, to begin catch-up programmes and remedial classes to bridge the learning gap. They point out that large-scale vaccination programmes and strict following of Covid protocols can help in keeping children in schools.

According to a factsheet released by UNESCO, “more than 616 million students remain affected by full or partial school closures. Many have lost basic numeracy and literacy skills and learning loss due to school closures have left up to 70% of 10-year-old children unable to read or understand a simple text, up from 53% pre-pandemic in lowand middle-income countries. ”

Boston Consulting Group (BCG), a global consulting firm, and Teach for India, a fellowship that helps under-resourced schools, compared how other countries and some Indian states have dealt with continuingeducation through Covid; their findings are compiled in a report titled ‘India Needs To Learn -A Case for Keeping Schools Open. ’ The report reveals that while schools were mostly shut in 2020 (first half), many countries kept schools largely open through subsequent waves. In 2021, many countries including Japan, South Africa, US, UK, and Portugal had schools operational in-person for large parts of the year. In fact, many countries such as France, Canada and UK prioritised keeping schools open vis-a-vis malls, shops, and gyms. In late December 2021, 70% districts in India had less than 25 daily cases. However, with the approaching third wave, most states imposed state-wide school closures.

The Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2021 for Chhattisgarh says that in the pre-Covid -19 period basic learning outcomes in the state were promising, but Covid-19 caused schools to shut for in-person classes, leading to a drastic drop in children's foundational reading and arithmetic levels in primary classes. The report is based on a survey of 46,021 children in the age category of 3-16 years in 33,432 households across 28 districts of Chhattisgarh.

Recently, findings of a parliamentary committee highlighted the disproportionate impact of Covid on the education of girls. Education ministry submitted that “school closures in India have affected 320 million children enrolled from pre-primary to tertiary levels of education. It has been estimated that of these, about 158 million are female students. ”

Back on track

Educators say that children have forgotten how to write descriptive answers and it will take years of hard work to get them back on track. “They find it difficult to write answers for subjective type questions. Students in junior classes will still be able to bridge the learning

gap, but those in class XI and XII, who have spent the past two years attending online classes from home will face the heat. They will be entering the university system with a weak foundation. Schools will have to revise the curriculum from the previous grade for which they mostly attended classes online,” says Sridhar G, founder, Chethana PU College, a pre-university college in Bengaluru, affiliated to Karnataka Pre-University Education Board. An IIT-Kharagpur gra-duate and a PhD from Johns Hopkins, Sridhar G says that focussing on STEM education can help the country shed covid-induced shackles. Mona Lisa Bal, chairperson, KIIT International School, Bhubaneswar, adds, “We are waiting for official notification to reopen, but once the schools reopen, we will go slow in completing the syllabus. We will be conducting remediation classes to bridge gaps we come acrossthroughassessment. There have been no lab classes and the writing, reading, and numeracy skills have suffered a lot. It will be achallenge for schools to keep them away from gadgets when they return to schools. ”

Children from lower-income groups and under-resourced schools have not been able to attend online classes at all in some cases. “Schools must start with proper safety and Covid protocols. Students from lower-income families do not have enough smartphones, on average there are three-four children in a family, in different grades with varied class timings. It gets to be very difficult for their parents to provide them with a smartphone or a laptop each. Most children, who before the pandemic began, could recite tables up to 20, today cannot go beyond the tables of 2 and 3,” says Vatsala Prabhakar, principal, Gandhi Adarsh Vidyalaya, Agra, to highlight the seriousness of the situation.

How four-year graduation with focus on research helps

 How four-year graduation with focus on research helps

After the four-year research, students can take direct admission in PhD

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c-Puniti.Pandey@timesgroup.com

31.01.2022

With the introduction of the four-year research programme in the National Education Policy 2020 students now have an option to choose between the four years and the five-year master's degree.

“The four-year research programme provides more options to the students as they can notonly takeup highereducation abroad but also explore more careeropportunities,” says Manoj Sinha, principal, Aryabhatta College, University of Delhi.

As per the NEP 2020, the students will be awarded a degree of an honours in the discipline with research if they complete the four-year programme in Sciences, Arts or Commerce. The students will be required to complete a thesis or an interns-hip in their final year to complete the research programme.

To provide in-depth knowledge in a subject to create more knowledgeable professionals, Shiv Nadar University is launching academic specialisations to their existing BSc (Research) degree in Chemistry. In the new academic year, the students will have the option to choose from Chemical Biology, Computational Chemistry, Materials Chemistry.

“We admit students from all the Chemistry streamsPCM (Physics-Chemistry-Mathematics) or PCB (Physics-Chemistry-Biology. Since the BSc students were already aligning themselves with an elective that would offer specialisation in a subject, we have now laun-ched a full-time specialisation course. The specialisation programmes willprovide anoption to all our students to enhance their knowledge and understanding,” says Parthapratim Munshi, professor and head, Department of Chemistry, School ofNatural Sciences,Shiv Nadar University, Delhi-NCR.

The programme will initially focus on students acquiring foundation and introductory modules. From the second year onwards, the students will opt for specialisations, which will be introduced by hierarchical additions of modules.

The course structure of the programme includes Chemical Principles, Basic Organic Chemistry, Inorganic Chemistry, Physical Methods in Chemistry, Molecular modelling, Chemical Equilibrium, Electrochemistry, Coordination Chemistry, Chemical Binding, Molecular Spectroscopy, Heterocyclic Chemistry among others.

Highlighting the benefits of four-year research programme over the master's degree, he adds, “ The four-year research programme allows students to have additional capabilities through industry exposure. At the end of the four-year programme, many students come up with co-authored research papers for publishing. Also, many of our four year research programme students have performed better than the 3+2 master degree students. At the Green and Sustainable Chemistry Conference held at IIT Kanpur in 2019, students with the research programme fared better than the students with the master's degree. ”

Students with visual impairment have a right to learn

 Students with visual impairment have a right to learn

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Rajlakshmi.Ghosh@timesgroup.com

31.01.2022

The University Grants Commission (UGC) has asked all its affiliated colleges and universities to integrate suitable educational resources and infrastructure for visually impaired students. “In pandemic times, the challenges are more acute, as the online learning systems across HEIs do not adequately support students with visual disabilities in getting information, access to virtual classroom facilities and participation in assessment. As inclusive education has been highlighted in NEP 2020, the UGC directive could not have come at a better time,” says Himangshu Das, director, National Institute for the Empowerment of Persons with Visual Disabilities (NIEPVD) & Pandit Deendayal Upadhyaya National Institute for Persons with Physical Disabilities (PDU-NIPPD).

Challenges one too many

“We have around 200 students pursuing graduation, out of which around 20 visually challenged students are in need of laptops for online education. Plans are on for the distribution of suitable electronic devices, training, oral examination for visually impaired (VI) students,” says A Chidambaram,co-ordinator for Higher Education for Personswith Special Needs (HEPSN), an enabling unit of Pondicherry University (PU) which is headed and executed by visually and physically challenged faculty members.

“Access to information has ₹always been a major problem for the visually challenged in India,” says Muttayya Koganuramath, director, Basava International Information Centre, Basava Samithi, Bengaluru, whose published paper on ‘Learning Resource Centre forthe Visually Challenged Students’, underlines the need for such centres in every HEI for equitable access in education, research, training and employment

Man caught with 830g ‘whale vomit’

 Man caught with 830g ‘whale vomit’

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TIMES NEWS NETWORK

31.01.2022


Rajkot: A man from Khambhaliya town of Devbhumi Dwarka district was arrested with 830g of whale vomit estimated to be worth Rs 1 crore.
Sale of sperm whale puke is deemed as illegal under the Wildlife Protection Act. It is mostly used in the fragrance industry to make perfumes as well as making aphrodisiacs.

The arrested person Bhaveshgiri Goswami, 32, was caught from Patel Colony in Jamnagar following specific information about his location. Police got information on that he had come to sell whale vomit.
The seized material was sent to the Forensic Science Laboratory for further investigation.

"We are yet to lodge an FIR and invoke the relevant sections against the arrested man. We will do this after the FSL report," said sources in the B-division police sta-tion.

Special Operations Group (SOG) inspector SS Ninama said that Goswami had confessed to getting the whale vomit from the sea coast.
Also called ambergris, the vomi t is a waxy substance that comes out of the sperm whale's digestive system. It's valued at anything from Rs 1 crore to Rs 2 crore per kilogramme depending o n its purity. The trade and possession of ambergris is banned in India and many othe r countries as well.

 PROTEST AGAINST BJMC HOD

Medical students threaten to boycott OPDs from February 1

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TIMES NEWS NETWORK

31.01.2022

Ahmedabad: The protest at BJ Medical College and Civil Hospital against Dr Kamlesh Upadhyay, professor and head of the department (HoD) of medicine, for the alleged “illtreatment” meted out to final year MBBS students, entered its nineteenth day on Sunday.

The students have now threatened to boycott Out Patient Department (OPD) duties from February 1. But they will serve in the emergency and attend to Covid patients, they said. The protest intensified on Sunday after students and the JDA alleged that Dr Upadhyay has threatened to “fail students if protests are not withdrawn. ”

The medical students have even raised their ante against the state-appointed two-member committee investigating the matter, alleging partisan attitude. They further alleged that Dr Upadhyay was influencing the probe since he is treating a close family member of a senior IAS official in the health department.

Last month, the Junior  Doctors’ Association (JDA) of BJ Medical College and Civil Hospital had approached the anti-ragging committee of the college, seeking action against Dr Upadhyay.

“Dr Upadhyay had been adamant in not sending the internal marks of undergraduate students to Gujarat University (GU) and it was after a string of sit-out protests that the department had sent the marks on January 24. Why is Dr Upadhayay playing with our careers?” questioned JDA president Oman Prajapati.

The JDA in its petition has also alleged that since the pandemic Dr Upadhyay had been avoiding Covid duties and that even his elevation as HoD of medicine was being internally challenged as he was only the fifth senior among other eligible doctors for that post.

“We feel that an impartial inquiry against an individual like Dr Upadhyay, who wields such influence, is a distant possibility. It is this lack of faith that led us all to embark on this protest,” says Prajapati.

The JDA has also claimed that Dr Upadhyay had threatened postgraduate and undergraduate medical students, telling them that he would not send their marks to GU if ward duties were not adhered to.

“How can students who are attending to Covid patients be asked to visit other wards during the first, second and the third wave? Is that not putting other patients at risk of an infection,” asks Prajapati.