India's new Rupee symbol : An amalgamation of old & new ?

For those who've not seen the news - India now has an official Rupee symbol (see below)

I like the look.
Excellent combination of the Devanagiri "Ra" and the English "R". During the release there was apparently a point made about how it represents the Tricolour + Ashoka Chakra ?

Now, that is one bit that I cannot see ?

In any event, it will probably take some time to catch up on official usage - but, given the timing, I think it'll certainly catch on very quickly.

Activity based learning as part of SSA : Chennai's focus + time to debate

I think there was a co-incidence of sorts on this topic. Just yesterday, as part of the Sikshana Outreach program @ Kanakapura, we were discussing this with some NGO's out of Chennai ....
ABL is the structure that essentially came out of Rishi Valley (and earlier from Neel Bagh) - not that I knew of this much earlier, I've read and learnt about this recently.

Why is this relevant ?
Simply because, yesterday I was surprised at the numbers that was being talked about at Tamilnadu's ranking in the ASER tests. I would have expected them to be in the top 10 if not the top 5. However, I was told that they are probably not even in the top 25 !!??


I think I'll have to look at ASER results and match that with the ABL results that gets published to find out where the difference is.... some work for the coming weeks.




NEWS ARTICLE from yesterdays HINDU - what a co-incidence !


Sibal to visit activity-based learning schools
Special Correspondent CHENNAI: Union Human Resource Development Minister Kapil Sibal will visit activity-based learning (ABL) schools in the State next week.
In the wake of the commendations the implementation of the ABL scheme has received across the country, the Ministry had conveyed to the State Education Department that Mr. Sibal wanted to extensively spend time on July 14 to learn how the implementation in Tamil Nadu differed from those in other States. The idea was to involve the Human Resource Ministry and prepare a compendium of best practices that could later be implemented across the country.
State Education Minister Thangam Thennarasu confirmed that Mr. Sibal had expressed desire to visit the schools. “We are lucky to have a dedicated team of officers and teachers who have spared no efforts to implement both activity-based learning and the active learning methodology (ALM). It is a recognition of their efforts.”
The ABL and ALM are being implemented by the School Education Department as part of the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA), a nationwide effort to improve capabilities of all children through provision of community-owned quality education in a mission mode.
The broad aim of SSA is to provide useful and relevant elementary education to all children in the 6 to 14 age group by 2010 and to bridge social, regional and gender gaps, with the active participation of the community in the management of schools.
The SSA wing of Tamil Nadu carried forward the ABL of the primary classes into middle school or upper primary — classes 6,7, 8 through the ALM.
In 2007, 10,000 middle schools across Tamil Nadu underwent a dramatic refreshing learning process, empowering the learner to break into knowledge systems effectively, whether in the textbook or in the world around. This came as a relevant ‘chapter two' to the implementation of the ABL in nearly 40,000 schools prior to that.

Should Justice Hegde get into politics himself or How do we break the cycle ?

I have been following the back-and-forth on Justice Santosh Hegde's resignation from the Lokaykta offices with growing pessimism. Here was a man who was willing to bell the cat (so to speak) and instead of empowering his team, we are now faced with the possibility of his office turning to be an insipid "reporting" tool !

How do we break this impasse ?

Reminds me of a time when we (as a Nation) went about asking for electoral reforms and lauded the changes brought in by the election commission. Until then, we (or atleast I) thought that Election commission was just a bureaucratic organization with no "teeth". Today, I'd give them their due credit for cleaning up (with substantial success) things like electoral rolls, ensuring adherence to the code-of-conduct etc.

During one of the meetings that I attended with Justice Hegde, he was categorical that he did not want a political office. My thinking today is - maybe he should stand for one !
Maybe, an electoral mandate will FORCE the elected individuals to wake up and act on a specific mandate.

Alternatively, if he is still not willing to get into the political arena and fight an election, maybe, as individuals and citizens can elect him as an extra constitutional watchdog ?

As a democracy, the voice of the citizens should formulate our policies - should it not ?