General Awareness

GENDER/ HEALTH/ EDUCATION - July 2019

Jul 2019

Jul 25, 2019

CBSE to Regulate Admissions to Class IX and XI

The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) will regulate admissions to classes 9 and 11 in all its affiliated schools across the country from 2020. This will be the first time that the board will be playing a direct role in school admissions.
Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) have been formulated for admissions in these classes under which the board will itself approve the admission requests.
Currently, schools conduct admission to classes 9 and 11 on the basis of their own rules.
There are close to 20,000 CBSEaffiliated schools that offer education up to class 10, of these 12,000 run classes up to class 12.
The board had written to all its affiliated schools asking them to strictly abide by the SOPs, failing which strict action will be taken against them.
The board has described 11 categories under which admission can be sought in these two classes. These include transfer of parents, shifting of family, shifting of hostel, re-admission in other school after failing in these two classes, better education, long distance, medical condition, change of education board, among others.
The CBSE has also added new clauses for admission under these categories. For instance, if a student wants to take admission in any of these two classes in another school citing "better education" facilities, the parents will have to submit the results of last five years of both the schools (in which the ward is currently studying and the one in which admission is sought) along with the application.
They will also have to submit the qualification and teaching experience of the staff members of both the schools with the CBSE.
As per the CBSE, the decision of formulating the SOPs was taken to "streamline" the process and to make sure that only "genuine students" get admissions.
The board has also asked the schools to fix the deadline for admissions in these classes.
The board has further asked the schools not to give admissions to any student coming from any unaffiliated school in these classes.

Data Collection for 5th Health Survey

India has started collecting data for the 5th National Family Health Survey (NFHS) that provides information on population, health and nutrition for the entire country.
All household members will be considered for certain biomarkers such as determining haemoglobin levels. Earlier it was 15 plus. Apart from that, there is no substantial shift in the questionnaire.
The survey was to begin last year as after the NFHS-4 results were out for the year 2015-16, the government had decided to conduct the survey every three years instead of the previously followed pattern of 10 years.
Special arrangements have been made for the first time to avoid discrepancies while collecting data.
The Indian Council of Medical Research, in partnership with Population Council of India, launched the National Data Quality Forum.

Jul 23, 2019

No. of Indian Men Migrating for Marriage Doubles in a Decade

The number of men migrating for marriage more than doubled between the 2001 and 2011 censuses compared to a 33% rise in the number of women doing so. The most number of men migrating for matrimony are in the north-east and south India.
The data for migration in the nine years preceding the last two censuses was analyzed. In almost all states, the proportion of men migrating for marriage increased, with Meghalaya, TN, Mizoram, Kerala, Assam, Manipur, Karnataka and AP recording the highest figures.
These states had the highest proportion in the 2001 census too, but have seen further increases. Karnataka showed the biggest growth with the number almost tripling by 2011.
States with the lowest proportion of men migrating were Haryana, Punjab, Rajasthan and MP, with the number of men being less than 2% of the women moving to get married.
Interestingly, some of these states also saw the highest increase. In Rajasthan, the number of men migrating for marriage has more than trebled and in Delhi and UP it has increased by more than two and a half times.
In the southern and north-eastern states, the trend was significantly stronger in rural areas.
Out of 146 million male migrants, just 5.3 million (4%) migrated for marriage.

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.

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