Archive for February 28th, 2007
Dear Honorable Union HRD Minister, Government of India, Mr Singh,
With reference to the news report published in Hindustan Times on 26th Feb 2007,
Reference:
http://digpatra.googlepages.com/20070227_HT_IIT.pdf
…
The argument made by HRD ministry saying “presence of 12 centrally funded educational institutes and announced NISER forbid Orissa to get a new IIT†is also equally baseless. If it would have been the case than Andhra Pradesh has 31 such centrally funded institutions including HRD ministry sponsored central university Hyderabad and beside many DRDO
laboratories, still the HRD ministry has proposed new IIT and is also considering for two new IIEST in the state. Additionally other central institutes like IIPH and NIPER are being established in Andhra Pradesh.
Reference:
http://digpatra.googlepages.com/20070227_state_wise_national_lab_ins.pdf
Continue Reading February 28th, 2007
The following is from the 2007-08 budget speech:
Means-Cum-Merit Scholarships
20. While the SSA has improved the enrolment ratio in schools to 96 per cent, the drop out ratio continues to be high. The critical year appears to be transition from class VIII to class IX. In order to arrest the drop out ratio and encourage students to continue their education beyond class VIII, I propose to introduce a National Means-cum-Merit Scholarship Scheme. Selection will be made through a national test from among students who have passed class VIII. Each student will be given Rs.6,000 per year for study in classes IX, X, XI and XII. I propose that 100,000 scholarships may be awarded every year. In order to fund this programme, I intend to create a corpus fund of Rs.750 crore this year, and add a like amount to the fund every year over the next three years. Accordingly, a sum of Rs.750 crore will be placed with the State Bank of India, and the yield from the fund will be used for awarding the scholarships.
I like the above provision, especially the number of scholarships and the “means” aspect of it. What exactly the “means” cut-off would be remains to be seen. If this scholarship allows poor motivated students to chose the school of their choice then it will be similar to the voucher system used in Michigan. One worry is that the poor students will use the scholarship money for their family expenses and not for their educational expenses. I would also suggest that the number of scholarships be increased by at least 10% every year and the corresponding amout added to the corpus every year. Besides, private donations to the corpus should be encouraged and as the corpus grows the number of scholarships should grow.
February 28th, 2007
In the 2007-08 budget there is no line item budget for NISER. Thats probably because NISER is yet to be approved by the cabinet. However, there is a significant increase in the budget of Institute of Physics and in page 5 item 9.04 it is mentioned that “the responsibility of setting up NISER at Bhubaneswar is entrusted to IOP.”
IOP’s budget (item 9.04, page 1) in 2006-07 was 4.96+9 = 13.6 crores. Its budget in 2007-08 is 32.75 + 7 = 39.5 crores. It can be safely assumed that a major chunk of the additional 25.9 crores is towards the NISER expenses. (Note that there are huge increases in the budget of couple of other institutes too. This includes Harish Chandra Research Institute, Allahabad and Institute of Plasma research, Gandhinagar.)
In the 2006-07 budget for IISERs in Pune and Kolkata (item 70) there was a total of 50 crores which was revised to 20 crores. This line item does not have numbers for 2007-08. There is another line item (item 76) on IISER with 125 crores for the 5 IISERs: the established ones in Pune and Kolkata and the 3 proposed IISERs in Bhopal, Trivendrum and Mohali, Punjab.
Thus the budget meant for NISER compares favourably with the IISER budgets.
February 28th, 2007