Regulate fees of private schools: Knowledge panel

This may well ring the death knell for private schools across the country. The National Knowledge Commission (NKC), a body of high-profile experts and intellectuals who have the government's and PM's ear, has called for regulation of admission and fees in the thousands of private institutions, which form about 15% of the total schools in India.

The NKC recommendations call for an urgent look at "the monitoring of private schools, in terms of ensuring a transparent admissions process, regulation of fee structure, as well as setting minimum standards for quality of teaching and infrastructure."

The recommendations for school education were submitted to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and to the Planning Commission in the first week of February.

The report states that "private schools should become a subject of regulation and inspection within a set framework, which is universally applicable".

R Govinda, a senior professor at the National University of Education Planning and Administration supported this recommendation stating that it is essential to have "common standards" for all schools.

"Just because the government does not give grants to some schools, does not mean they keep themselves detached from those institutions. After all, every child belongs to this country," said another expert.

Across the country, several private schools have set up their own admission procedures and fees, and are not regulated. Also, several unrecognised private schools have also mushroomed.

The NKC also recommends that a testing body at the national level focus on "fixed infrastructural requirement, enrolment and attendance, as well as, outcome indicators like learning levels in language skills and numeracy."

This body will track both public and private schools and will monitor the "skills attained" rather than ask questions that place emphasis on "rote learning," the report suggests.

To also cut "the many distinctions" created by the current system, the Sam Pitroda-led commission has recommended that there be greater exchanges among schools.

"There is a need to constitute mechanisms of exchange and interactions between students and teachers of different schools. Schools should be allowed to be mentored by other schools to improve facilities and teaching methods."

The NKC panel which consulted 250 other experts for the school education recommendations, also suggests that secondary students be involved in a practical skill "requiring working with hands."

The NKC report states that schools set up Livelihood Centres to impart practical employable skills and provide career counselling.

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Wonder how regulation will seek to address the so called issues of infrastructure and quality. First, the Government should look within and keep its house in order. The plight of Government schools in terms of crumbling infrastructure, abysmal quality of teachers is well known.

The mushrooming of private schools across India is a response by the market forces to the failure of Government schools. The need for the day is to encourage more private schools. This will bring in more competition and keep the school managements on its toes. Today the demand for quality schools (by quality I mean better than Government schools) outstrips the supply and hence these schools are able to charge high fee. If the people in the country think that they are being overcharged they wouldn't be stepping over each other to get their kids into these schools. They are ready to pay in thousands and lakhs to get their kids into lower kindergartens.

Some of the best schools in the country are run by private institutions and have been surviving for years without much government support. They have involved the society (with a model as simple as regular parents meets) in their running than the Government. The best Government can do is to fund research into primary education India and bring out more models to address the concerns in spread and quality of education.

I believed that the National Knowledge Commission with well respected people like Sam Pitroda on their panel would come out with more practical solutions than the always available solution of “more regulation”.

...Vj

Army to raise 2 mountain units to counter Pak, China

High time that India responded to the dangers being posed by China on its Himalayan Borders. An army unit in itself will not be sufficient unless it is backed with the right infrastructure and the political will to tell China to mind their business. Lately, India's responses to Chinese incursions in North-Western and North-Eastern fronts have been silence to a timid cry at Beijing (which the Chinese deftly chose to ignore). Along with this plan hopefully India has other plans in store.....Vj


Army to raise 2 mountain units to counter Pak, China

NEW DELHI: The Army has launched preparations to raise two new mountain divisions, with around 15,000 soldiers each, which will be tailor-made for swift offensive operations in the mountains of north and North-East India.

The groundwork on the 'organizational structure' and 'equipment profile' of the two new proposed mountain divisions is already under way after the cabinet committee on security recently approved this plan, said sources.

The two new mountain divisions, to be raised at a cost of around Rs 650-700 crore each, will have 'integral tactical air mobility assets' in the shape of medium to heavy-lift helicopters.

They are also likely to be equipped with the new ultralight howitzers which the Army plans to induct in the near future. As first reported by TOI , the Army is hunting for 140 ultralight howitzers at a cost of around Rs 2,900 crore in the overall Rs 12,000-crore artillery modernization plan.

The approval for the new mountain divisions comes at a time when the Indian security establishment is warily watching the massive upgrade of Chinese military infrastructure along the 4,057-km Line of Actual Control (LAC) in all the three sectors — western (Ladakh), middle (Uttarakhand, Himachal) and eastern (Sikkim, Arunachal).

China has established a robust network of road, rail and air links between its mainland and Tibet over the last few years, which makes it possible for it to rush a couple of army divisions near the border with India within a matter of days. The need to have additional specialised offensive mountain formations has been felt even on the front with Pakistan despite the fact that the 14 Corps, with around 50,000 troops, now guards the Ladakh region after the 1999 Kargil conflict.

"There was a move to establish an offensive corps in the mountains after Kargil. But the 14 Corps has limited offensive capabilities, roughly equivalent to that of any other corps in the mountains," said an officer.

The 1.13-million strong Army does have 10 mountain formations in a total of around 35 divisions. But in terms of being organized and equipped for "dispersed operations" in mountains, with adequate "fire-support elements", only six of them (Silchar, Dibrugrah, Bombdila, Rangia, Gangtok and Kalimpong) can be said to be true mountain formations. "The mountain divisions in J&K are more like standard infantry divisions," said another officer.

While the two new mountain divisions will be fully in place only by the middle of the next decade, the government has now finally kickstarted infrastructure development plans along the Indo-Chinese border. These plans include a 608-km road network project along LAC, which will have 27 road links along J&K, Himachal, Uttarakhand, Sikkim and Arunachal, as well as the overall 7,603-km Special Accelerated Road Development Programme for the entire North-East.

rajat.pandit@timesgroup.com

Will Yahoo! Feel the Love?

Steve Ballmer's $45 billion marriage proposal is fraught with risk. But Microsoft can't let Google go on unchecked

by Jay Greene

Steve Brodner

With the hefty premium included in its $44.6 billion bid for Yahoo! (YHOO), Microsoft (MSFT) looks well on its way to persuading shareholders in the Internet company to support its unsolicited offer. Yahoo employees, however, will be another matter. Not only has Microsoft been a frequent rival, but many Yahoo staffers view it as a lumbering giant that doesn't understand the Internet. "I see culture clash," says Norm Fjeldheim, chief information officer at wireless chipmaker Qualcomm (QCOM). "If I was Google, I'd be thrilled. I can steal a lot of the top talent out of Yahoo."

Microsoft CEO Steven Ballmer has an astonishingly difficult task in front of him. To make his historic bid for Yahoo pay off, Ballmer will have to overcome a series of high hurdles, from winning the approval of regulators, who have warred with Microsoft in the past, to retaining key talent in the wake of an unwelcome takeover. He'll need to sort through scads of overlapping businesses, shutting down some units and laying off staff. All the while, he and other top executives will have to make sure that the nitty-gritty of making the merger work doesn't distract them from keeping Microsoft's other businesses on track and watching out for the Next Big Thing. "It's a mess," says analyst Charlene Li of the market research firm Forrester Research (FORR).

The challenge is made all the more difficult because Microsoft and Yahoo would merge as two struggling rivals, trying to catch up in the online advertising business to an increasingly powerful Google (GOOG). That, some experts say, could be an indication of troubles ahead. "Virtually all the deals from Hell are done by companies that are collapsing into each other's arms like a defeated prizefighter," says Robert F. Bruner, dean of the Darden Graduate School of Business Administration at the University of Virginia and author of Deals from Hell, a book that examines failed mergers.

"The Single Biggest Threat"

The history of tech megadeals is littered with unfulfilled promise. AOL's $164 billion acquisition of Time Warner (TWX) is only the most notorious. There's also Lucent-Alcatel, Sprint-Nextel, Excite-@Home, and many more. Tech deals are particularly prone to failure because change comes so fast in the sector. Any distraction from a problematic deal, and you're left in the dust.

Of course, Ballmer knows the history and the challenges ahead. But Microsoft has few alternatives. Google is racing ahead in online advertising, and the surging ad business threatens the very foundation of Microsoft's empire. Computing is increasingly moving to the Web, challenging the relevance of Microsoft's core products, the Windows operating system and Office productivity software. "Google is the single biggest threat Microsoft has ever had," says David B. Yoffie, a Harvard Business School professor.

Ballmer argues that Microsoft, with Yahoo, can get the sort of scale in Web surfers and online advertisers it needs to compete with Google. The same goes for capital spending. Microsoft could boost the returns on the money it invests in computer server farms, for example, if its online audience more than doubles. "The ability to do more, that's fantastic," Ballmer said in an interview with BusinessWeek.

What's more, the company is hoping to bring together Yahoo's research and development staff, who've done innovative work in online advertising auction theory and data-mining, with its own online lab. Microsoft expects to reap $1 billion in operating efficiencies by combining the 14,000-person Yahoo with the 80,000-employee Microsoft.

Dilemmas, Dilemmas

Looks great on paper. The reality, though, may be something else entirely. Start with efforts to meld or eliminate overlapping businesses. There are dozens of them, everything from news Web sites and Net portals to e-mail, instant messaging services, and online advertising technology. To achieve the projected cost savings, Microsoft will have to choose which businesses survive and which ones don't.

Ballmer says: "Yahoo, the brand, will live." But eventually he'll have to decide between Yahoo Mail and Microsoft's Hotmail, Yahoo Finance and MSN's finance site, and others. Inevitably, products will be jettisoned, managers will lose clout, and people will lose jobs. "They've really bitten off quite a bit," says Kevin Lee, executive chairman of Didit, a search marketing company that helps companies place ads on Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft Web sites.

One thorny call will concern Microsoft's adCenter and Yahoo's Project Panama, both technologies designed to help advertisers finely target online marketing. In a combined company, there's no reason for both to survive. And if you ask Tarek Najm, a distinguished engineer at Microsoft and adCenter's general manager, what Panama technology he'd like in his product, he's blunt. There isn't any. "We're the leaders in technology," Najm says. "Ours is better."

Layoffs Are Inevitable

Of course, getting to that $1 billion figure means cutting bodies, lots of them. "The cost structure of these companies is predominantly people," says Charles Di Bona, an analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. Who goes? It's impossible to know. But it won't just be lower-level staff. There's no reason to have two bosses for e-mail, instant messaging, and Web portals. Ballmer may have to chose between respected managers such as Brad Garlinghouse, the senior vice-president who runs those businesses at Yahoo, and Steve Berkowitz, the Microsoft senior vice-president with similar duties.

That sort of uncertainty can crush morale, something Yahoo has already been struggling with as its business has floundered. Some key employees have left in the past year, including sales boss Wenda Harris Millard, marketing chief Cammie Dunaway, and Yahoo Entertainment leader Vince Broady. Such defections are likely to mount if Microsoft takes over, even among the Yahoo engineers Microsoft badly needs to keep in order to compete with Google. "I just can't imagine most Yahoo employees wanting to stay on," says one former executive who left last year.

Much of Yahoo's appeal to employees has been its place in the Valley firmament as a Net icon. Being absorbed into Microsoft strips that away. "People at Yahoo have a little bit of that natural Silicon Valley hatred of Microsoft," says a former Yahoo vice-president who left last year. "Yahoo has always considered itself a bit of an upstart."

Microsoft may have little choice in bidding for Yahoo. If it wins, it'll have little room for error.

With Catherine Holahan, Robert D. Hof, and Steve Hamm

Nuclear Proliferation: Has Iran won?

Did the American intelligence report let out Iran way too easily. No. After the miscalculations in Iraq was very important for America and UN to work on concrete evidences (though elusive in world affairs) than on political considerations. In last one year, America's push for tougher measures against Iran was taking the shape of another politically motivated unwanted war. Now with this new revelation there is nothing to fear. In fact US will receive more support now for diplomatic measures against Iran's nuclear policies.

Does Iran require nuclear power for civilian purposes? Wonder why? With hydrocarbon reserves this is not the first thing that should be there on the Government's mind. Rather they should look towards the Sheikhs of UAE who are stimulating economic activity in their region by attracting talent and businesses with their extra petro dollars. Iran, which in the past has a better record in developing local human capital should try not to get distracted in showmanship and power politics.

The ayatollahs have wriggled off the nuclear hook, but there is a way to put them on again

WHO would have thought that a friendless theocracy with a Holocaust-denying president, which hangs teenagers in public and stones women to death, could run diplomatic circles around America and its European allies? But Iran is doing just that. And it is doing so largely because of an extraordinary own goal by America's spies, the team behind the duff intelligence that brought you the Iraq war.

It doesn't take a fevered brain to assume that if Iran's ayatollahs get their hands on the bomb, the world could be in for some nasty surprises. Iran's claim that its nuclear programme is entirely peaceful is widely disbelieved. That is why Russia and China joined America, Britain, France and Germany at the UN Security Council to try to stop Iran enriching uranium. Until two months ago they seemed ready to support a third and tougher sanctions resolution against Iran. But then America's spies spoke out, and since then five painstaking years of diplomacy have abruptly unravelled (see article).

The intelligence debacle over Iraq has made spies anxious about how their findings are used. That may be why they and the White House felt it right to admit, in a National Intelligence Estimate in December, that they now think Iran halted clandestine work on nuclear warheads five years ago. As it happens, this belief is not yet shared by Israel or some of America's European allies, who see the same data. But no matter: the headline was enough to pull the rug from under the diplomacy. In Berlin last month, the Russians and Chinese made it clear that if there is a third resolution, it will be a mild slap on the wrist, not another turn of the economic screw.

At the same time, Iran is finding an ally in the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Its director-general, Mohamed ElBaradei, is a Nobel peace-prize winner who is crusading to confound those he calls “the crazies” in Washington by helping Iran to set its nuclear house in order, receive a clean bill of health and so avert the possibility of another disastrous war.

Honest spies, a peace-loving nuclear watchdog. What can be wrong with that? Nothing: unless the honesty of the spies is deliberately misconstrued and the watchdog fails to do its actual job of sniffing out the details of Iran's nuclear activities.

Thanks for letting us off

Beaming like cats at the cream, a posse of Iranians went to January's World Economic Forum in Davos claiming a double vindication. Had not America itself now said that Iran had no weapons programme? Was not Iran about to give the IAEA the answers it needed to “close” its file? In circumstances like these, purred Iran's foreign minister, there was no case for new sanctions, not even the light slap Russia and China prefer.

Yet Iran's argument is a travesty. Although the National Intelligence Estimate does say that Iran probably stopped work on a nuclear warhead in 2003, it also says that Iran was indeed doing such work until then, and nobody knows how far it got. The UN sanctions are anyway aimed not at any warhead Iran may or may not be building in secret, but at what it is doing in full daylight, in defiance of UN resolutions, to enrich uranium and produce plutonium. We need this for electricity, says Iran. But it could fuel a bomb. And once a country can produce such fuel, putting it in a warhead is relatively easy.

Some countries, it is true, are allowed to enrich uranium without any fuss. The reason for depriving Iran of what it calls this “right” is a history of deception that led the IAEA to declare it out of compliance with its nuclear safeguards. So it is essential that Mr ElBaradei's desire to end this confrontation does not now tempt him to gloss over the many unanswered questions. With a lame duck in the White House and sanctions unravelling, Iran really would be home free then.

Would it be so tragic if a tricky Iran were to slip the net of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty? North Korea quit the treaty and carried out a bomb test in 2006. Israel never joined, saying coyly only that it won't be the first to “introduce” nuclear weapons into the region—but won't be the second either. India and Pakistan, two other outsiders, have already strutted their stuff. Why should one more gate-crasher spoil the party?

One obvious danger is that a nuclear-armed Iran, or one suspected of being able to weaponise at will, could set off a chain reaction that turns Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria, even Turkey rapidly nuclear too. America and the Soviet Union, with mostly only their own cold war to worry about, had plenty of brushes with catastrophe. Multiplying Middle Eastern nuclear rivalries would drive up exponentially the risk that someone could miscalculate—with dreadful consequences.

Time for Plan B

For some this threat alone justifies hitting Iran's nuclear sites before it can build the bomb they fear it is after. But if Iran is bent on having a bomb, deterrence is better. Mr Bush has already said that America will keep Israel from harm. By extending its security umbrella to Saudi Arabia and Egypt, America might stifle further rivalry before the region goes critical.

Much better, however, to avoid a nuclear Iran altogether. Mr Bush says diplomacy can still do this. It is hard to see how. But he does have one card up his sleeve: the offer of a grand bargain to address the gamut of differences between America and Iran, from the future of Iraq to the Middle East peace process. So far Iran's leaders have brushed aside America's offer of talks “anytime, anywhere” and about “anything” by pointing to the condition attached: that Iran first suspend its uranium enrichment. Strangely enough, the best way to put pressure on Iran's rulers now is for America to drop that rider.

There would need to be a time limit or Iran could simply enrich on regardless, with what looked like the world's blessing. Similarly Russia and China would need to agree to much tougher sanctions to help concentrate minds. Iran's leaders may still say no. But the ayatollahs would have to explain to ordinary Iranians why they should pay such a high price in prosperity forgone for making a fetish out of not talking, and out of technologies that aren't even needed to keep the lights on. If Iran's leaders cannot be persuaded any other way, perhaps they can be embarrassed out of their bomb plans.