General Awareness

GENDER/ HEALTH/ EDUCATION - January 2019

Jan 2019

Jul 22, 2019

India enters 37-year period of demographic dividend

Since 2018, India's working-age population (people between 15 and 64 years of age) has grown larger than the dependant population — children aged 14 or below as well as people above 65 years of age.
This bulge in the working-age population is going to last till 2055, or 37 years from its beginning.
Many Asian economies — Japan, China, South Korea — were able to use this 'demographic dividend', defined by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) as the growth potential that results from shifts in a population's age structure.
This transition happens largely because of a decrease in the total fertility rate (TFR, which is the number of births per woman) after the increase in life expectancy gets stabilised.
Japan was among the first major economies to experience rapid growth because of changing population structure. The country's demographic-dividend phase started in 1964 and ended in 2004.
China entered this stage in 1994 — 16 years after Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms started in December 1978.
Although its growth accelerated immediately after the reforms, the years of demographic dividend helped sustain this rate for a very long period.
In the 16 years between 1978 and 1994 (post-reform, pre-dividend) China saw eight years of double-digit growth. In the 18 years since 1994 there have been only two years when China could not cross the 8% growth mark.
Analysing the demographic dividend data for two of the four Asian tiger economies shows similar patterns.

Jul 21, 2019

No. of Girls Migrating for Edu Rising much Faster than Boys

Many more girls are moving out of their states in search of education than in the past and the pace at which this is changing is most rapid in the states generally viewed as backward.
This heartening trend emerges from the just-released census 2011 data.
While the number of boys migrating across states for education in the nine years preceding the census grew by 13% compared to the nine years before the 2001 census, the jump for girls was four times higher at 52%.
As a result, girls went from being over a third the number of boys who migrated out of their state for education in 1992-2001 to almost half the number of boys by the 2011 census, which recorded a total of 5.4 million migrating for education within India.
This change in the gender skew was highest in states such as Bihar, Odisha, MP, Rajasthan and UP.
Though not as dramatic an increase as that for education, women migrating for work or employment increased by 31% compared to just 10% for men.
However, their share in the total number of people migrating for work, over six million, was just 12% in 2011, a marginal increase from 10% in 2001.
In Delhi, the number of girls doing so increased by more than one and a half times from less than 9,000 to almost 23,000.
Big states, which saw a similar, though not as dramatic, a jump were West Bengal, UP and Haryana.
In Bihar, Odisha and MP, the number of girls migrating out of the state for education almost doubled in 2011 over the 2001 numbers.
In Rajasthan, it jumped by 82% and in UP by 78%. In both censuses, Kerala was the only state with more girls than boys migrating for education with the skew increasing in 2011.
Among larger states, in Punjab and TN, girls were over 82% and 74% of the number of boys leaving for education.
Bihar was at the bottom, where girls were just 23% of the number of boys leaving. In Rajasthan and UP too this proportion was low, about 36% and 39%, respectively.
Women's share in those migrating for work was lowest in Bihar & UP, just over 7% in 2011.

Jul 20, 2019

Ramanujan College Offers 6-month Course in Happiness

In order to tackle rising stress among students, Delhi University's Ramanujan College is offering a free six-month certificate course for students on happiness.
The course will be provided by the college's School of Happiness, which was inaugurated in 2018.
The course, open to all DU students, will have candidates participating in community service, yoga and meditation, and activities which would improve their personality, life skills and communication skills.
Students would also be introduced to "glimpses of our vedas and spirituality".
The college had kept little syllabus workload so that it would not cause an additional burden. Students will also get relaxation in attendance for regular classes.
Though the course is free, the college may charge a nominal amount for transportation while organising outdoor activities.

US Town Becomes Gender Neutral

The US city of Berkeley has officially gotten rid of all of its "manholes", "policewomen" and "firemen" — well, so to speak.
According to an ordinance adopted by local authorities in the northern California city, all such commonly used words in city documents are now banned and must be replaced by more gender-neutral alternatives.
As such, common words such as "bondsman" will be replaced by the non-gendered term "bonds-person", "manhole" becomes "maintenance hole" and a "pregnant woman" will now be referred to as a "pregnant employee".

5.6cr Indians Live Outside their State of Birth

More than 5.6 crore Indians lived in states other than the ones they were born in, newly released census data for 2011 shows.
While UP, Bihar, Rajasthan and MP had the highest 'outmigration', Maharashtra, Delhi and Gujarat saw the largest 'in-migration'.
Among larger states, Bihar had the lowest number of people migrating into the state with most of the 10 lakh plus migrants coming from Jharkhand and UP.
In the case of UP, which had just over 40 lakh in-migrants compared to almost 1.3 crore out-migrants, a lot of the in-migration could also be due to people from all of India flocking to the NCR cities of Noida and Ghaziabad. In Haryana too, Gurgaon and Faridabad could account for a sizeable chunk of the 37 lakh in-migrants.
Though the thumb rule is states with a high level of development have lesser out-migration and than people flocking in, more people left Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh than West Bengal or Assam.Uttarakhand, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand had more in-migration than out-migration. People born in UP constituted the largest chunk (45%) of Delhi's migrant population followed by MP (41%), Maharashtra (31%), and Gujarat (24%).
Contrary to the popular perception of Biharis moving in droves to Punjab, Haryana, Delhi or Mumbai, migrants from Bihar moved more towards the east.
People born in Bihar constituted 62% of migrants in Jharkhand, 47% in West Bengal, 31% in Assam and other north-eastern states compared to just 18% in Delhi and 6% in Maharashtra.
In most southern states, people from neighbouring states constituted the bulk of the migrant population. In Kerala, Bengalis, who constituted 5% of the migrant population were the only significant non-southern chunk, with Tamils (53.2%) and Kannadigas (16.4%) being the most numerous among nonlocals.
Similarly, in Punjab, Himachal, Uttarakhand and Haryana, people from neighbouring states account for most of the migrant population, though natives of UP and Bihar, too, have a sizeable presence in these states.
Rajasthanis mostly moved to Gujarat, MP and Haryana.
They, however, constitute the biggest chunk of those from the North (5%), among migrants in Tamil Nadu and other southern states like Andhra and Karnataka.

Jul 19, 2019

IIT Madras Launches techMBA Programme

Indian Institute of Technology Madras is launching a first-of-its-kind programme, techMBA, for its undergraduate (UG) students from all the engineering streams.
The students taking techMBA programme will be awarded two degrees, Engineering UG degree (B.Tech.) and Master's degree in Management (MBA).
The programme would be a part of the Five-Year Inter-Disciplinary Dual Degree (IDDD) programmes and is conceptualised by the Department of Management Studies (DOMS), IIT Madras.
The Institute is introducing the programme from the Academic Year 2019-20 and it would have an intake of 25-30 students.
Department of Management Studies would offer the foundational techMBA courses during the third and fourth years of all UG programs.
The eligibility criteria for opting for the courses in the fifth year are CGPA, departmental aptitude test and/or personal interview.

Jul 17, 2019

AIDS Deaths Down

The United Nations said that the number of deaths due to HIV decreased to 770,000 in 2018, which is about 33% less than the year 2010.
However, the United Nations warned that global efforts to eradicate this disease are being blocked because financing is going down.
UNAIDS said in its annual report that according to an estimate, about 3.79 million people are currently infected with HIV. Of these, 2.33 million people have access to 'anti retroviral therapy'.
In the mid-1990s, AIDS took the form of a severe epidemic. Since then, keeping in view the progress made in prevention of this disease, it has been reported in the report that in the year 2017, 8,00,000 people were killed by this disease, which decreased to 770,000 in 2018.

TN to Host 1st Global School Debate tournament

An international debating tournament for school children would be held in Chennai from July 18 to July 21, 2019.
As many as 15 teams from various countries would participate in the first-ever international event, called "Mini Worlds", which is being organised by the Indian Schools Debating Society (ISDS). The tournament would be held in the format followed by World Schools Debating Championships.
According to an ISDS communiqué, the event would be represented by teams from The Netherlands, England, Wales, Ireland, Mexico, Nigeria, Australia and New Zealand, Sri Lanka, South Korea and Hong Kong. Three teams will represent India.

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