Worst Education System in Indian

In the 17th century, South Asia controlled 25% of the worl’d economy. By the time theBritish left in 1947, it was less than 1%. A couple of articles in the Wall Street journal,plus a others in the US and European media are challenging the rumors and innuendo about India–and scratching the surface of the thin veneer—discovering chaos, malaise and total pandemonium in the education system which is supposed to be fueling its growth. Dramatic charts describe the lack of increase in portion of world trade.

According to the Hindu “India will take over China in terms of population by 2025, an analysis of the provisional Census, 2011 data suggests…Analysing the provisional Census, 2011 data, Management Institute of Population and Development has quoted thePopulation Reference Bureau‘s 2010 estimates which says that India had 1189 million people whereas China’s has 1338 million. Nearly 27 million children are born every year in India and only 16 million in China.” ..“One fails to understand why some experts and policy makers have stated that India’s population is its strength”

Doubts are beginning about India and if it can ever compete with the major economies of the world. Dr. Parag Khanna (born 1977 in Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh, India) is an Indian American author and international relations expert. Mr. Paragh Khanna says that India has missed the boat of becoming a World Power soon, and China has left the penury stricken island of poverty in Asia (Bharat) in the dust. India is the poorest country in Asia, and in terms of GNP, the poorest in South Asia. More than 150 million Dalits live is abject destituteness. India has more poor than Sub-Saharan Africa and Americas together. It will take more than three centuries to pull these poor out of a sub-human existence.

What is known in academic circles is not so well known on the street. Bharati universities are not competitive and India is no where in the recently released world university rankings. Some of the worlds best benchmarking institutions rank world universities. The three rankings are:

1. Times Higher Education World University Rankings
2. Academic Ranking of World Universities compiled by Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and
3. QS World University Rankings — are just out, but none of the Indian varsities have made it to the top 100.

The best ranking are Times Higher Education World University Rankings and Academic Ranking of World Universities. In both of these India finds no place in the top 200.  Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore and Turkey get decent ranks in between the two rankings.. America dominates all the three rankings. The QS rankings are a bit more generous towards Bharat. The QS rankings have China, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Israel, Taiwan and even Thailand ahead of India with much heralded IIT- Bombay in the ignominious 187th position.

At a time when it is PC to eulogize Bharat and India is being hyped as a future knowledge economy. International benchmarking in education important for India? The fact remains that its not emperical evdience but word of mouth that is portraying the stories about Indian education. We have 50,000 alumni across the worldseem to be saying things that do not stand the test of time or tide. “Hard to get into a university” is falsly understood as a signal of high academic standards. That is certinaly not true. “Hard to get in” simply is a matter of supply and demand.

Indian universities are not open to international benchmarking. When srutinized they dont’ stack up to international standards.

Geeta Anand is not the only one that is describes the rising doubt Bharat Inc. rise

• Mr. Singh and several other engineering graduates said they learned quickly that they needn’t bother to go to some classes. “The faculty take it very casually, and the students take it very casually, like they’ve all agreed not to be bothered too much,” Mr. Singh says. He says he routinely missed a couple of days of classes a week, and it took just three or four days of cramming from the textbook at the end of the semester to pass the exams.
• Others said cheating, often in collaboration with test graders, is rampant. Deepak Sharma, 26, failed several exams when he was enrolled at a top engineering college outside of Delhi, until he finally figured out the trick: Writing his mobile number on the exam paper.
• That’s what he did for a theory-of-computation exam, and shortly after, he says the examiner called him and offered to pass him and his friends if they paid 10,000 rupees each, about $250. He and four friends pulled together the money, and they all passed the test.
• “I feel almost 99% certain that if I didn’t pay the money, I would have failed the exam again,” says Mr. Sharma.

Paul Beckett of the WSJ has described the rising doubts about Bharat’s supposed rise in the global economy

• In India, Doubts Gather Over Rising Giant’s Course. Paul Beckett
• ..the mood in the planet’s most-populous democracy has soured badly—to the point where even some of India’s richest people have begun to complain that things are seriously amiss.
• Flawed Miracle: The Journal is examining the threats to, and limits of, India’s economic ascent.
• In India, Doubts Gather Over Rising Giant’s Course. WSJ

Bhaskar of DNA India says the following:

• Both the Confederation of Indian Industry and the Boston Consulting Group estimate that India would face a “talent gap” of more than 5 million by 2012, as existing educational institutions do not impart employable skills. Just 20% of the engineering graduates are unemployable. A McKinsey report finds only 25% engineers, 15% finance graduates and less than 10% of the other graduates to be employable.
• It is even more alarming when one takes into account that graduates comprise only 3.5% of India’s population — this includes graduates in all streams such as arts, commerce, science, engineering, and medicine. If 90% of the graduates are unemployable, it means that barely 0.5% of India’s population comprises employable graduates.
• E-convergence Technologies Limited (ETL), a private sector company…found that 65% of the students failed in Mathematics, while 75% failed in English. Almost all the students were from Classes V and VI (10-11 year-old children). That this could happen with privately managed, English medium schools in one of India’s prime cities is a good indicator of how low standards have fallen.

Similar surveys carried out in 1977 by Aikara (and published in the India Education Report of the Oxford University Press) indicated that ‘backward’ states like Bihar had fewer students performing poorly than ‘progressive’ states like Maharashtra and Gujarat.The Pakistani Universities on the list are Agha Khan Univeristy, ZA Bhutto Institute of Science and Technology, and Ghulam Ishaq Khan University among others.Shaheed Zulfikar Ali Bhutto Ins of Sci and Tech is ranked 40th among the Top 45 Asian MBA Programs, Lahore Univ of Mgt is ranked 23rd in the Asiaweek’s MBA Business Schools Ranking.According to the 2009 Web Popularity Ranking, the Top 10 universities in Pakistan are as follows:

1 Lahore University of Management Sciences
2 University of the Punjab Lahore
3 University of Karachi
4 Jamia’h NED Baraey Engineering aur Technology
5 Shaheed Zulfikar Ali Bhutto Institute of Science & Technology
6 National University of Computer & Emerging Sciences (FAST)

7 Sir Syed University of Engineering & Technology
8 Aga Khan University
9 Institute of Business Management
10 University of Central Punjab

The Higher Education Commission (HEC) of Pakistan has released its university rankings for Pakistan. Following is the top 10 ranking of general universities in Pakistan:

1. Quad-i-Azam, Islamabad
2. Punjab, Lahore
3. Karachi
4. Peshawar
5. Bahouddin Zakariya, Multan
5. Government College Lahore
7. Isra, Hyderabad
8. International Islamic, Islamabad
9. Sindh, Jamshoro
10. Hamdard, Karachi
University of Agriculture (UAF), Faisalabad is ranked top for Agriculture / Veterinary.
Lahore Uni. of Management Sciences (LUMS), Lahore ranked first for Business / I.T.
Pakistan Institute of Engg. and Applied Sciences, Islamabad is the best institute for Engineering.
National College of Arts, Lahore is top for Art / Design.
Aga Khan University, Karachi is top for Health Sciences.

Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar

Highlights of Tendulkar's Test career

• Highest number of Test centuries (39), overtaking Sunil Gavaskar's record (34) on 10 December 2005 vs Sri Lanka in Delhi
• Fastest to score 10,000 runs in Test cricket history. He holds this record along with Brian Lara. Both of them achieved this feat in 195 innings.
• 4th highest tally of runs in Test cricket (10,668)
• Career Average 55.70 - highest average among those who have scored over 10,000 Test runs
• Second Indian to make over 10,000 runs in Test matches

Highlights of Tendulkar's ODI (One Day Internationals) career

• Highest ODI run-scorer in the world with 16,007 aggregate ODI runs (as of 05-Feb-2008)
• 41 ODI centuries - highest in the world
• Played most number of ODIs (409) (as of 05-Feb-2008)
• Played most number of consecutive ODI matches (185 matches from Sharjah, 1989/90 to Sharjah, 1997/98)
• Most Man of the Match (53!) awards
• Appeared on the most grounds (90 different grounds)
• Most ODI runs by any batsman in any given calendar year - 1,894 ODI runs in 1998
• Most Centuries by a player in one year - 9 ODI centuries in 1998
• Most centuries vs. Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, Sri Lanka and Zimbabwe.
• Holds the record for scoring 1,000 ODI runs in a calendar year. He has done it six times - 1994, 1996, 1997, 1998, 2000 and 2003.
• First and the fastest cricketer to cross 10,000-run mark, 11,000-run mark, 12,000-run mark, 13,000 run-mark and 14,000 run-mark in ODIs. The only player to have scored over 16,000 runs till-date
• Only cricketer to cross 14,000-run mark in ODIs
• One of only six players to pass 10,000 runs in ODIs (Sanath Jayasuriya, Sourav Ganguly, Rahul Dravid, Brian Lara, and Inzamam ul Haq are the others)
• Highest individual score among Indian batsmen (186* against New Zealand at Hyderabad in 1999)

Tendulkar's World Cup History & Records

• Most runs (1,732 at an average of 59.72) in World Cup Cricket History
• 673 runs in 2003 Cricket World Cup, highest by any player in a single Cricket World Cup
• Player Of The World Cup Tournament in the 2003 Cricket World Cup.

 When Sachin Tendulkar made his Test debut against Pakistan in Karachi in 1989, it was clear to me and a lot of my team-mates that he is destined for great things. The reason for this assessment is simple, as even at that young age of 16 years he had shown against us that he had plenty of guts and courage and was hungry to succeed at the top level.

His career over the last 21 years and his 50th Test hundred only confirms the volume of talent he has and his dedication and commitment to Indian cricket.

- Congratulate Tendulkar on his 50th Test ton

Yet, I really don't know what this fuss is about Sachin becoming the first man in cricket history to score 50 Test centuries.

Watching him all these years I have no doubt left in my mind he is the best batsman in the history of the game.

When Sir Donald Bradman was playing people used to say no one can match his records; when Sunil Gavaskar scored 34 centuries people said no one could break his record. But, in the case of Sachin's feat of 50 Test centuries, I really don't see anyone breaking that record for a long time.

 The way he is going at 37, he seems likely to soon become the first batsman in history to also score 100 international hundreds. That is a record one can only dream about.

For me and Waqar Younis, our biggest regret remains that for 10-long years, between 1989 and 1999, their were no bilateral Test matches between Pakistan and India, and we never got a chance to bowl against him.

Yes, we did play a couple of One-day matches on mostly flat pitches against him, but the real battle between bat and ball comes in Test matches and that sadly was not available to us although at that time we were ranked as the best opening bowling pair in international cricket.

I will always regret the missed opportunities, because I can recall clearly the first time we played against him. It was in 1989 and India was coming to Pakistan and there was a lot of media hype about this teenage batsman who had set a new World school record with Vinod Kambli.

AND ABOVE MOMENT IS BECAUSE OF HIM ONLY

Facebook is taking major steps to ensure that its News Feeds contain more actual news.

The social media giant is hiring someone to build relationships with reporters and news organizations. The new hire also will help organize journalism-focused events, the first of which will take place this month at Facebook's headquarters in Palo Alto, California.

Vadim Lavrusik will start as journalist program manager for Facebook, based in New York, April 25. He leaves Mashable, the tech-news site where he was a community manager. (Mashable is a CNN.com content partner.)

In his new job, Lavrusik will be responsible for advocating for the use of Facebook as a reporting and promotional tool. He will also maintain the recently launched Journalists on Facebook page.

With more than half a billion users, Facebook is nearly ubiquitous as a way for keeping in touch with friends and family. However, the site has lagged behind competitors like Twitter and Tumblr in widespread adoption by reporters as a productivity or newsgathering tool.

"A lot of journalists don't have a professional presence on Facebook yet," Lavrusik said. "They think it's another thing they have to add to their workloads. ... It can actually make your job easier."

Lavrusik, a Belarus native, caught the eye of Facebook executives with his blog posts about the practical applications for using the giant social network in reporting. For example, he urges the use of Facebook as a sort of new-age White Pages, helping reporters get in contact with sources.

Before Mashable, Lavrusik interned at the New York Times as a social media producer. He also teaches a graduate-school journalism class about social media at Columbia University.

"The goal is to build programs that bridge the gap between journalists and Facebook," Lavrusik said. "Twitter is very public. It's an informational platform. It's easy to see the application for news."

Lavrusik will help educate about and carry out Facebook's new newsy mission, which some people close to the company say is a case of Twitter envy. (Last fall, Facebook's offer of $2 billion to acquire Twitter was spurned, according to a Fortune report.) Journalists very quickly took to Twitter and, in doing so, helped promote it to their readers and viewers.

"I feel lucky that we just have such a lead and such an advantage of being part of newsrooms already," said Robin Sloan, a member of Twitter's three-person media-partnerships team. "It's a luxury. We get to go into newsrooms, and, literally, on every other monitor, people are running TweetDeck or logged into Twitter.com."

Facebook also has a group specializing in media partnerships, which Lavrusik will be working closely with, a company spokeswoman said. But that group mainly focuses on business-development initiatives, Lavrusik said. Those programs help news organizations implement tools such as the Like button and the new Facebook-powered commenting system, which are designed to help create more links between news sites and Facebook's network.

Twitter's media-partnership team helps teach and field questions from reporters about how to use its service in their work, said Sloan, who joined Twitter from Current TV last year. That's on top of all the partnerships that the group cultivates with news-agency marketers, award-show promoters, sports and entertainment networks and others that fall under the all-encompassing "media" umbrella.

"Even before there was anybody working on media partnerships at Twitter, journalists were just using it like crazy," Sloan said. "The kind of work that journalists and news organizations do on Twitter is really the work that they've always done and are good at."

Sloan doesn't believe that Facebook's growing focus on the news industry is at odds with his team's efforts. Reporters, he said, "need all the tools that they can get. So we're just trying to make Twitter as useful and powerful as we can and fill in that part of the puzzle."

Mark Coatney, Tumblr's media evangelist and a former journalist, concurs, saying that each is used differently. Neither Facebook nor Twitter "is really designed to be a content delivery platform" but is instead used to link to or find articles, he said. "From a branding perspective, a page on Facebook will always look like Facebook."

Tumblr, a smaller but growing social network with 16.8 million blogs, hired Coatney as a media evangelist last year. The former Newsweek editor's job offer came the same day the Washington Post Co. put his magazine company up for sale, he said.

During Coatney's short tenure, Tumblr has achieved a sort of Facebook or Twitter status with reporters; his job mostly entails brainstorming ideas for how Tumblr can be employed uniquely. His journalism outreach may have even spurred reporters to write about Tumblr more often.

"The story ideas have moved from, 'Hey, what is this thing?' to, 'Here's some cool things that are being done on Tumblr,' " Coatney said.

Encouraging cultural influencers such as journalists to use social networks provides value to these companies and also to the reporters who get a new arsenal of tools, said Dan Gillmor, a digital-media professor and director for the Knight Center at Arizona State University.

"I don't know if it will cause people to write about them more, but it's obviously a smart thing for these companies to be evangelizing journalists," Gillmor said. "The more people who use these platforms for their work, the better it is for the platforms."

(WIRED) -- The BlackBerry PlayBook tablet is a good-looking piece of hardware.

Like the proto-humans in "2001: A Space Odyssey," you'll be eager to touch the monolithic object's black, buttonless visage. But once you do, things get a little more complicated.

The PlayBook's design exudes the same sense of finely honed "business chic" that Research in Motion has perfected in itsBlackBerry smartphones.

But the PlayBook's software suffers from several missteps and oversights, especially in the drought of useful apps -- the very things that have made tablets such a hit -- and the lackluster performance of Adobe's Flash player.

At a svelte 7.6 inches by 5.1 inches, the PlayBook is about the size of Samsung's Galaxy Tab, and considerably smaller than theMotorola Xoom and Apple iPad 2.

That may prove bothersome if you prefer watching videos and gaming on a larger screen. But in a trade-off for the small screen size, the PlayBook makes gains in portability.

At just under a pound, long reading sessions don't cause as much fatigue as they do with larger tablets, and the rubberized backing adds a pleasing tooth to the grip. You won't be worried about dropping it on the floor of the bus.

RIM is banking that those who bemoan the loss of screen real estate will use the tablet as a media hub for larger devices. You can drag and drop media files from your desktop to the PlayBook the same way you'd move files to a USB flash drive. You can also transfer files wirelessly over your local network.

Once the PlayBook is loaded up with movies, use the HDMI-out to connect the tablet to a television and watch everything in full 1080p on a 16:9 wide screen. On both the big screen as well as the PlayBook, videos look damn good.

And they sound good, too. The PlayBook's two speakers flank the screen's face horizontally, projecting sound outward toward your ears. The quality is surprisingly clear for the size of the speakers. There's no tinniness or distortion, even with the volume cranked.

There are no buttons on the face, but there are four along the top edge: a Play/Pause button, a two-way volume rocker and a Power button. They're unobtrusive, though sometimes to a fault. It takes a noticeable amount of effort to push in the Power button, which is frustrating if you want to turn the screen on or off quickly.

In the absence of a Home button, there's a new UI convention to learn: You touch the frame along the bottom of the screen and swipe up when you want to return to the home screen. Touch sensitivity is very responsive, and the swipe controls work great.

Taking a note from Palm's webOS, RIM brings multitasking to its QNX-based BlackBerry Tablet OS, letting you switch back and forth between simultaneously running apps.

By swiping a finger to the side of the screen, you can jump from the YouTube video you were watching back to a paused game of Tetris, without having to return to the home screen.

Also cool: the ability to multitask with apps running on a peripheral display. When the PlayBook is hooked up to an HDTV, you can watch video at 1080p on the big screen while browsing the web on the PlayBook. Or, you can show a presentation on a projector while swiping through your speaking notes on the tablet.

Be forewarned of resource hoggery, though. Try running too many apps at once, and a low-memory notification will pop up in the left-hand corner telling you to cool it. The PlayBook comes loaded with 1 GB of RAM to protect against this, though on occasion when I ignored the warning long enough, my browser crashed.

Move closer to the software level and things get even stickier.

Any tablet debuting more than a year after the Apple's market-dominating iPad needs an edge. For the PlayBook, that edge is support for Adobe Flash, a feature that the iPad is famously lacking. RIM says it took over two years of working with Adobe to bring Flash to its tablet.

Two years may not have been enough. During a round of "Plants vs. Zombies," gameplay bogged down whenever the animation got intense. Every time I tried to access a Flash game on Facebook, the browser crashed. Yes, every single time. Say goodbye to your well-tended crops, Farmvillians.

RIM delivered several software updates during our tests, showing that the company is still ironing out bugs. Flash stability increased with each update, and may well be even more stable by the time the PlayBook ships on April 19.

But the fact that a marquee feature is strapped with such stability problems so close to the ship date is troubling.

Another glaring flaw is the PlayBook's complete lack of native e-mail, contacts and calendar apps. Want those apps? Log on to your Gmail account with the browser.

BlackBerry smartphone owners can access e-mail on the PlayBook after installing RIM's Bridge app, which connects the phone to the tablet by Bluetooth, but we weren't able to test this feature.

If you don't have a BlackBerry phone, you're out of luck until summer, when RIM says a future software update will bring native clients to the PlayBook.

Also worth considering is the relatively paltry selection on BlackBerry's App World, which contains roughly 3,000 apps. By comparison, Apple and Google's app inventories number in the hundreds of thousands.

And some of the biggest apps -- Facebook, a Gmail client, Twitter, Angry Birds -- are conspicuously absent. Clicking on the Facebook "app" icon on the desktop brings up a web browser and loads the Facebook website.

RIM has announced that an Android app player will be available on the PlayBook, which should bolster the number of available apps. But any Android apps ported to the PlayBook must be vetted by RIM before they can make it into the store.

Under casual use conditions, the PlayBook's battery held up for close to eight hours, which is on par with both generations of the iPad. With heavy use of Flash-based sites (when they functioned) and 1080p video-watching, the PlayBook's battery hung in there for an impressive 5½ hours.

It's important to note that this is a Wi-Fi only version of the PlayBook, and that the battery life may be different once RIM releases the promised 4G versions of the PlayBook for the big three U.S. carriers. Expect those to roll out beginning this summer, though no pricing details have been released on the 4G models yet.

The bottom line: It's a well-constructed device with great media-viewing capabilities, solid hardware specs and a price on par with the current tablet market. But with serious gaps in key areas like app selection and Flash stability, you may want to think twice before picking one up.

WIRED Sexy design appeals to the Mies in you. Media is a joy with a brilliant display, great sound and an HDMI output. Two cameras: one on the front, a better one on the back.

Supports tethering to BlackBerry phones. Comes with office-productivity apps that can read and edit MS Office files. App multitasking is innovative and intuitive. Runs Flash, sorta.

TIRED RIM's WebKit-based browser is about as stable as your bipolar uncle. No native e-mail, calendar or contacts apps. App ecosystem is lacking. You'll need to install a driver before you can connect it to your PC or Mac. Runs Flash, sorta.