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PANTNAGAR, India — The Nagla elementary school in this north Indian town looks like many other rundown government schools. Sweater-clad children sit on burlap sheets laid in rows on cold concrete floors. Lunch is prepared out back on a fire of burning twigs and branches.

But the classrooms of Nagla are a laboratory for an educational approach unusual for an Indian public school. Rather than being drilled and tested on reproducing passages from textbooks, students write their own stories. And they pursue independent projects — as when fifth-grade students recently interviewed organizers of religious festivals and then made written and oral presentations.

Nagla and 1,500 other schools in this Indian state, Uttarakhand, are part of a five-year-old project to improve Indian primary education that is being paid for by one of the country’s richest men, Azim H. Premji, chairman of the information technology giant Wipro. Education experts at his Azim Premji Foundation are helping to train new teachers and guide current teachers in overhauling the way students are taught and tested at government schools.

Indian education has often been criticized for focusing on rote learning rather than problem solving. Experts say the curriculum in most schools is outdated and disconnected from the actual world.

Randeep Kaur, education adviser at Plan India, a New Delhi-based children’s organization, said most Indian students learned only with the aim of scoring marks but never with the intention of understanding and enhancing their knowledge. “How many of them (students) can actually make use of what they had learned?” she asked.

The new program of study, called the CBSE-i will put less emphasis on methods such as memorization and greater focus on developing analytical and communication skills.

NEW DELHI — India introduced a cheap tablet computer Wednesday, saying it would deliver modern technology to the countryside to help lift villagers out of poverty.

Developer Datawind is selling the tablets to the government for about $45 each, and subsidies will reduce that to $35 for students and teachers.

“This is not just for us. This is for all of you who are disempowered,” he said. “This is for all those who live on the fringes of society.”Despite a burgeoning tech industry and decades of robust economic growth, there are still hundreds of thousands of Indians with no electricity, let alone access to computers and information that could help farmers improve yields, business startups reach clients, or students qualify for university.

In Bihar, one of India's poorest and most populous states, half of the women and a quarter of the men are illiterate, and about 90% of its 104 million inhabitants live in rural areas. Life here is particularly difficult for girls, and one of the greatest hindrances to their development is the simple journey to school. For many, the trip is long, expensive and dangerous.But here, in rural Bihar, we recently saw that a two-wheeled solution to the problem has been found.Three years ago the state's new chief minister Nitish Kumar adopted a "gender agenda" and set about redressing his state's endemic gender imbalances in an attempt to boost development in one of India's most backward states. His vision was to bring a sense of independence and purpose to his state's young women, and the flagship initiative of this agenda is the Mukhyamantri Balika Cycle Yojna, a project that gives schoolgirls 2,000 rupees (about £25) to purchase a bicycle.

871,000 schoolgirls have taken to the saddle as a result of the scheme. The number of girls dropping out of school has fallen and the number of girls enrolling has risen from 160,000 in 2006-2007 to 490,000 now.

Girls like Pinki Kumari (15), a student from the high school in Desari, previously had 14km round trip each day. When she got back home, she would have to help her mother with daily chores. "At the end of the day, it became tiring and attending school became a ritual. I hardly got any time to study,"

Open defecation—humans defecating outside—is the ugly stepsister of clean water scarcity, which we commemorate on World Water Day. Two-and-half billion people lack access to even simple pit toilets, which is three times as many people as lack access to clean drinking water and results in two million preventable deaths per year, mostly of children under five from intestinal diseases.

Jack Sim, the self-described “evangelist of toilets,” from the World Toilet Organization, theorizes that’s because “every politician wants to be photographed standing next to a new well, but no one wants to be photographed standing next to a new toilet.” And without some portion of the powers that be to drive a story, coverage becomes scarce.

India has the largest number of open defecators in the world, over 600 million of them. At a certain level, this fact is inescapable. Within a hundred yards of our five star hotel in New Delhi, we could find expanses of human feces—we could find them because we could smell them. Touring Delhi slum clusters with local activists, we traversed neighborhoods where 5,000 people share 20 public toilets, which is nearly the same as having no toilets, resulting in even vaster expanses of human feces. But in urban areas, open defecation can also be invisible in the way poor people can quickly become invisible.

Responding to the lack of computer training in Mukteshwar’s schools, Veena Sethi, a retired Delhi University professor, set up two used personal computers in the basement of her home with the aim of bringing the basics of computing to school children.

UDAAN, however, moved on. A partnership with Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University made it possible for the NGO to introduce the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) programme in selected schools in Mukteshwar in May 2010. OLPC’s stated mission is to provide a means for learning, self-expression, and exploration to some two billion children in developing countries with little or no access to education.

"The XO machine is ideal for children in remote places where the classroom may be no more than the shade of a tree," explains Satish Jha, who heads OLPC in India. The XO laptop’s wireless connectivity and free, open-source "Sugar" operating system allows children to reshape, reinvent, and reapply both software and content. "The laptops grow with the children," Jha said.

According to top officials of the state education department, government is all set to effect thorough changes in the curriculum of primary and upper primary education in accordance with the Right to Education Act (RTE). Instead of the current curriculum which focuses more on writing answers, the new syllabus will focus more on activity-based learning.Outdated subjects and chapters will be removed and more informative and knowledgeable ones will be added.

Almost 350 teachers from all over the state will be trained and eventually will be given the responsibility of suggesting changes

MUMBAI: Becoming a primary school teacher will get tougher. Beginning from next academic year (2012-2013), the state government is making passing graduation compulsory for those aspiring to be educators.

Admitting that with change in education system such as virtual classes, e-library, internet learning and other hi-tech education methods, it is a need of the hour to change the decade old rules and qualification needed to take up the job of required a teacher. But, the minister refused to reveal details of the department plans on the issue.

Some teachers have supported the move, while few have objected it. "Raising the qualification limit for becoming a primary schoolteacher will not help in improving the quality of education. There is need to change their mindset of teachers in view of Right To Eductaion (RTE)," said Ramesh Joshi, who heads Brihanmumbai Mahapalika Shikshak Sabha, the largest BMC teachers` union.

PANAJI: Lawmakers and parents in Goa are debating whether English or mother tongue Konkani should be the medium of instruction (MOI) in schools up to Class 8.

"The poor are sending their children to English medium schools because they believe that English will propel them to excel in their studies. Why, even the Chinese are learning English. Parents whose students are studying in (English medium) schools run by the Archdiocese (Church) are agitated. Why is the government disbursing grants only to Konkani/Marathi schools?" Godinho said.

As per the education department's policy, schools with English as MOI - which includes several privately-run educational institutions and other schools run by the church in Goa - are not entitled to government funding.

HYDERABAD: State schools will see a role reversal in their classrooms soon. Starting this academic year, students will be asked to evaluate the performance of teachers.

The evaluation sheet will have questions on teachers ranging from their teaching skills to their attendance and also whether they are approachable. It will also evaluate the approach adopted by the teachers in class, especially towards students who are poor performers.

Officials said that the teachers will be evaluated on a ten point scale. "We thought of a new evaluation process as the department felt that teachers should be accountable to students. The process will be introduced in classes V to X and we are even thinking of extending it to junior colleges that fall under the school education department," said a senior official.

The Thai government has embarked on an ambitious nationwide programme to teach English at least once a week in all state schools as part of the new 2012 English Speaking Year project.The initiative is intended to ease Thailand's entry into the Asean community in 2015, when southeast Asia becomes one economic zone and a universal language is required for communication and business.The project will focus on speaking English rather than studying its grammar, with teachers provided training through media modules and partnerships with foreign institutions, including English-language schools, according to Thailand's education ministry.

While the ministry aims to incentivise teachers to create an "English corner" in classrooms containing English-language newspapers, books and CDs, the programme is in no way mandatory and will rely instead on a system of rewards. Those who embrace the project may receive a scholarship to travel abroad or be given extra credit at the end of term, Sasithara said.

Native speakers will have a role to play in the project, said Sasithara, who expects to start recruiting teachers from Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the UK and US, as well as from countries where a high level of English is spoken, such as Singapore, the Philippines and India.