Page 28 - EW September 2024

Education News

THEY SAID IT

“Every day when I pick up the newspaper
there is some incident... Some women have
been assaulted. It could be a college student,
a child, or a middle-aged lady. (There must
be) something wrong with Indian men if we
can’t address this problem... This goes back
forever but is now talked about since the
Nirbhaya tragedy of 2012 and now the R G
Kar Hospital rape and murder of 2024.”
Shashi Tharoor, Congress MP, on rising sexual
violence against women countrywide (August 31,
Deccan Herald)
Doctors protest: pent-up anger
“The size of the civil service is quite small by
ceived 87,010 admission applications from school-leavers international standards, and its composition
in Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka, Assam, Bihar, and needs considerable change – there are too
Maharashtra for pursuing undergrad courses. The high- many clerical and administrative staff, and
ranked Jadavpur University has 112 foreign students from
18 countries and Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata too few technocratic experts, teachers and
has 92 from Bangladesh and Nepal. Academics in Kolkata health workers.”
say this inflow could dry up. Moreover, the state’s worsen- Ajay Chhibber, co-author Unshackling India, on why
ing law and order may well spur an increase in the num- India’s needs major administrative reforms (Business
ber of students leaving to study in other states or abroad. Standard, September 5)
According to official sources (Union ministry of external
affairs), more than 60,000 students from Kolkata have “While a four-medal haul in Rio was India’s
ventured to study abroad since 2016. best at the time, they captured 19 medals
With chief minister Mamata Banerjee concurrently in at the deferred 2020 Tokyo Paralymics and
charge of the home ministry which supervises law and have gone past the 20-medal mark in Paris,
order, and health and family welfare portfolios (supervis- winning more golds than the total tally in
ing hospitals), the ruling TMC government has suffered Rio.”
severe damage as also Banerjee’s relationship with civil
society organisations, women’s rights groups, and the Deepti Patwardhan, sportswriter, on the dream run of
bhadralok (refined middle class) who constitute her sup- Indian para athletes at the Paris Paralympics 2024
(Mint, September 7)
port base.
Indeed Banerjee, now serving her third term as chief
minister, has never faced such intense public outrage and “Consider this: India has won just 41 medals
anger. Political pundits in Kolkata believe that the rape- at the Olympics since 1900. China, on the
murder of the young doctor has catalysed pent-up public other hand, clinched 91 medals in Paris
anger against the state’s steady descent into rampant alone. India spends roughly $5 million on
corruption, nepotism, and lawlessness since Banerjee its athletes. The United States spends $200
led TMC to a landslide electoral victory in the legislative million and China $350 million.”
assembly election of 2011 following 34 years of uninter- Vishal Menon in an essay titled ‘India’s Olympic-sized
rupted rule of the CPM (Communist Party-Marxist)-led ambition’ (Business Standard, September 7)
Left Front government which precipitated massive capital
flight and de-industrialised West Bengal. With the state’s
next legislative assembly election due in 2026, the RG Kar “Our present education system is what it
Hospital rape-murder of the woman doctor working over- is, but it cannot take us to 2047. We need
time in the public interest and the TMC government’s a tsunami of upskilling and uplearning by
incompetent response to it may mark the beginning of using the power of the digital and online
the end of TMC’s disappointing 13-year rule over West space that can solve things at scale…”
Bengal. Ronnie Screwvala, co-founder upGrad and Swades
Baishali Mukherjee (Kolkata) Foundation (Business Today, September 15)

28 EDUCATIONWORLD SEPTEMBER 2024