Gharda libarary at Bandra in Mumbai.(Satish Bate/HT Photo)
I almost missed it. Walking down Hill Road, Bandra, where you can spend more in a restaurant than at the fashion stalls outside it, there are enough distractions. I nearly glossed over a billboard advertising a lecture that took place the day before.
But the venue seemed interesting – a library right on Hill Road, a few steps from Elco Arcade. You’re forgiven if you didn’t know about it either. The Bai Ratanbai Gharda Memorial Library is in the basement of Gharda House, a glass-fronted, nondescript building obscured by hawkers and kiosks.
THE PLACE
Walk in and you’ll realise it’s a treat for book lovers. The 10-year-old library is air-conditioned, spotless (none of the dustiness you’d associate with book collections), and contains more than 10,500 titles. Bharati Banerjee, the librarian, says between 600 and 800 new books are added annually.
There are thrillers, bestsellers, literary classics and the usual get-smart, grow-rich, expand-business books. But if you want to let your mind wander, this is the place. I found art and linguistics books (finally!), huge sections on medicine and world history (more than World Wars!), the complete Lonely Planet series (hurrah!), volumes of poetry and hard-to-find guides to world religion. There are biographies of everyone from Bill Clinton, Richard Wagner and Mao to Kiran Bedi, Nehru and Tilak.
THE MAN
The library has been set up by a man whose own story would make great reading. Dr Keki Gharda, 88-year-old scientist and Padma Shri, grew up in Bandra, attended St Stanislaus school down the street and is one of India’s brightest minds in chemistry.
He started off humbly, creating chemical reagents at home and supplying them to Elphinstone College, where he studied. His first job was manufacturing blue dyes in his 2,000 square-foot rented shed in Vakola in 1964. But something about an imported dye, phthalogen brilliant blue, popularly called German Blue, and used in school uniforms, gave him an idea. Gharda realised it was possible not only recreate the dye, but make it stronger. The new version came to be called Gharda Blue, and, if you’ll pardon the pun, fast caught on.
His company moved to agrochemicals in the 1970s, developing a faster, safer and cheaper way to produce a herbicide than a Swiss company. The method is now called the Indian Process – and the company is one of the largest producers of the chemical.
Think of him when you look at an Apple product. Gharda developed a polymer that keeps iPhones from overheating. Rare for a chemicals manufacturer, he’s not patented any of his unique processes, sharing it with the world.
The library honours his mother, who loved reading. It has 250 members, which is good news for you. The books you want will likely be available, you can browse in peace, and it’s a good reason to be distracted on Hill Road.
CHECK IT OUT
WHERE: Bai Ratanbai Gharda Memorial Library, Gharda House, Hill Road, near Elco Arcade, Bandra (W)
TIMINGS: Monday-Saturday 10 am to 8 pm.
MEMBERSHIP: Rs 1,000 annually (plus a refundable deposit of Rs 500). There are discounts for students and senior citizens.
Cuckoo Clocked: Can an app make you a better birder?
Cornell Lab’s Merlin app is coming to India. They’re crowdsourcing images from local birdwatchers, and everyone’s aflutter.
The Merlin Bird ID app has changed birding in North America in the four years since its launch, helping novices identify species in seconds, from a single photo.(Image Courtesy Cornell Lab)
In theory, it sounds perfect. You spot a bird in the wild (or on the windowsill of your concrete jungle), take a quick shot with your smartphone, and an app identifies the species in seconds with 90% accuracy.
For those who’ve used it, four-year-old Merlin Bird ID has revolutionised birdwatching. But the app, developed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Caltech, using crowdsourced photographs, is perhaps better known for how academia, machine learning and crowdsourced data can collaborate towards conservation. In North America, where it was launched, it’s allowed ordinary folks to identify birds without bulky field guides or long-drawn-out Google searches. Among established birdwatching groups, it’s cut down endless debates on which bird was spotted. Naturalists the world over have been using the data to understand migratory patterns, habitat changes and other avian issues.
In January, the Cornell Lab announced plans to extend the app for birds in India – a decision that is as exciting as it is daunting. India ranks among the world’s 12 megadiversity nations, with 1,266 or 13% of the world’s bird species. But for Merlin to identify Indian birds, it needs more than 500 reference photos for every species. Local birders have been urged to contribute their pictures to build the database.
Some birds like the bright blue verditer flycatcher are easy enough – contributions have already crossed 750. Others like the blue-yellow Banasura Laughingthrush are so rare, there are only seven pictures uploaded.
India’s birdwatching community is divided over the use of tech-driven tools like bird-identification apps. Some say it will popularise the hobby. Others fear it will become a distraction, reducing the activity to almost a game. (Pramod Thakur / HT File Photo)
SPREADING WINGS
Mohit Aggarwal, 31, a bank executive who has lived in several cities and is now based in Mumbai, has contributed over 100 images, most of rare species. “I’ve focused on filling the gaps left by other contributors,” says the birder.
He hopes the app will soothe the ruffled feathers of India’s birding community. “A unique sighting usually causes controversy,” he says. Older birdwatchers, who’ve been bird-spotting before digital cameras, tend to be dismissive, even disbelieving, of younger enthusiasts’ pictures, he says. “Photos offer proof that a certain bird has been in an unlikely region. When a picture is up for identification, you’re typically up against someone’s ego. Machine learning may be able to answer without bias.”
For Albin Jacob, 36, a software engineer from Bengaluru, contributing more than 3,000 pictures was a breeze. He’s photographed more than 800 species across India and is a reviewer for the India portal of Ebird, Cornell Lab’s massive crowdsourced database of bird observations.
“I’m excited that the app will be available for India,” he says.
AEON Learning offers online education platforms for working professionals encompassing both higher education and technology skill upgradation.
At a glance
Startup: AEON Learning
Founders: Karthik KS, Sankar Bora, Vikalp Jain and Rahul Jain
Year it was founded: 2013
Where it is based: Bengaluru
Sector: Edtech
Problem it solves: Provides online education
Funding raised: $6.5 million
In a fast-paced world where growth and development take place in a blink of an eye, keeping abreast with the goings-on in your industry becomes most crucial. Hence, online education has become one of the booming sectors in India. With the increasing internet penetration and the euphoria of Digital India, online education is expected to grow manifolds. It has witnessed a significant acceptance among working professionals in the last couple of years.
Contributing to the growth is a Bengaluru-based startup AEON Learning. It is an online education platform for busy young working professionals, encompassing both higher education and technology skill upgradation. AEON Learning, through its platforms Avagmah and Acadgild, helps professionals upgrade their skills and capabilities to remain relevant in today’s rapidly evolving employment market.
Founded by Karthik KS along with his friend Sankar Bora, in November 2013, Aeon eventually acquired Acadgild, another edtech company founded by Vikalp Jain and Rahul Jain in 2014. The duo later joined AEON after the acquisition. Vikalp is President at AEON Learning and Rahul Jain continues to be Head of Engineering.
From brick and mortar to online
Karthik, who has 23 years of experience in the education sector, says, “With millions of working professionals aspiring to compete with their global counterparts they need to continuously upgrade themselves. AEON Learning was started to meet this opportunity by helping reputed universities in delivering quality contemporary education via technology and internet.”
The Government of India had announced that it was targeting to increase the Gross Enrolment Ratio in Higher Education (GER) from 23 percent to 30 percent. “We knew that educating millions more of young Indians to achieve this number could not be done without using technology, as the existing brick-and-mortar education system was already over packed. The only clear solution to build scale and address the issue of quality was by implementing technology. That is when we knew we had this fantastic opportunity of powering existing universities to go online and use existing faculty to reach a larger base of students across geographies to help India reach its GER target,” Karthik explains.
AEON claims to have reached 22,000 students across 66 countries, with 20 percent business originating from the US.
Engagement-driven
Talking about the challenges while starting up, Karthik explains, “One of the key challenges we faced was that our solution was way ahead of the market. Our core offering then was for institutes and universities to offer their courses online. The online education industry in India was still in its infancy and the only popular medium for anyone who wanted to reskill themselves was through Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). The nature in which MOOCs were designed didn't really suit the Indian consumers as they are built on self-learning model and thus suffered high rate of students dropping out. Finding innovative, differentiated solutions to these problems became our main focus.”
Using technology as the core strength, the founders developed a learning platform that could replicate classroom learning in the digital world and further improve on it. Built on the principles of engagement, interaction and motivation, the core objective was to replicate the classroom environment.
The startup today offers student acquisition, engagement, retention, online content development, delivery of programmes, support, and analytics services, as well as programmes for marketing, finance, human resource management, and other related courses.
Avagmah partners with universities and offers access to quality education for working professionals. The universities use the Avagmah technology platform to help them reach out to a large audience through technology, with the platform enabling marketing, student counselling, enrolment, virtual classroom, student engagement, retention and more. Some of the universities and institutes on the platform include IIM Bangalore, Pondicherry University, NMIMS Mumbai, AIMA and Institute of Metro and Rail Technology (IMRT) among others.
Acadgild offers working professionals a platform to develop ready-to-deploy skills in new-age areas like programming, design and analytics. Acadgild’s hybrid education model brings together the intensity and rigour of the classroom with the convenience of technology, offering live sessions led by industry mentors. Acadgild offers relevant programmes like ones on data science, big data, blockchain, data analytics, and more.
AEON Learning has over 35+ corporate partners who have been upskilling and reskilling their employees on the platforms. Some of these partners include Infosys, Oracle, Cognizant, Abbott, MaxLife among others.
Founder backgrounds
The firm currently has a team size of 140 people.
Karthik KS, 52, completed his engineering from NIT Kurukshetra and Management from Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, New Delhi. Previously, he had started 24x7 Learning, an edtech company offering e-learning solutions to corporates, and prior to that he was managing Microland’s education division – MicroUniv.
Vikalp Jain, 43, is Co-founder and President, who completed his B Tech from IIT Bombay. Prior to AEON Learning, Vikalp co-founded MOZVO, a social movie rating site, and was the CTO of FlipClass.
Sankar Bora, 40, who is Co-founder and Chief Operating Officer at AEON, is a B Tech from NIT Kozhikode, and was the co-founder of Myntra.
Rahul Jain, 35, is Co-Founder and Head of Engineering at AEON. Prior to joining Acadgild, he co-founded MOZVO and had worked with Deloitte, Infosys and others. Rahul comes with a technology experience of over a decade and completed his B Tech from NIT Warangal.
AEON Learning’s revenue is from the students enrolling on the platforms, and each student paying the programme fee for their chosen course.
For the FY16-17 it clocked revenues of Rs 13.65 crore and claims to grew at 2.5x over the previous year. “By FY18-19, we are expecting to grow by 4.5x,” says Karthik.
This year, AEON Learning raised a funding round of $3.2 million from Ranjan Pai led MEMG Family Office LLP.
Till date, it has cumulatively secured $6.5 million from marquee investors like Vinod Dham, Kris Gopalakrishnan, Atul Nishar, MEMG Family Office LLP, Lionrock Capital, Zodius Capital and Jupiter Capital and Promoters Meena and Ganesh Krishnan.
Market landscape
According to a KPMG-Google report released in May 2017, the online higher education market is expected to touch $1.96 billion by 2021. Re-skilling and online certification courses currently account for a majority (38 percent) of the online higher education market, the report added. There has also been a surge in investments in the online education sector, with online skill training startups shifting focus from a university-based curriculum to a more industry-oriented training approach.
Besides AEON Learning, there are also Simplilearn and SchoolGuru in the similar space in India, while globally, companies like 2U (a listed company with a market cap of $3.3 billion), General Assembly and bloc.io are present.
Talking about its differentiator, Karthik says, “We are the only edtech firm in India that offers both short-term training programmes and long-term higher education degree programmes. Our student experience with real-time live lectures, discussion forums, projects, assignments, quizzes and vast learning resources help students get a better than classroom experience on the cloud, while providing personal attention from our mentors.”
For the future, Karthik says, “AEON’s presence has already reached over 66 countries and we plan to focus on key markets like the US and Southeast Asia. Within India we are present in 150+ towns and cities with plans to expand our dominant presence in South India to the North and West regions.”
Source: Your Story.com (accessed on 9 April, 2018)
Javadekar announces April 18 as launch date for Study in India programme
HRD minster said that if six lakh Indians are going out to pursue higher education, the new mission for Study in India programme is to bring 10 lakh foreign students into the country.
Union HRD Minister Prakash Javadekar plans to launch the programme along with Sushma Swaraj on April 18. (PTI)
To increase the inflow of foreign students to Indian universities, the union human resource development (HRD) minister Prakash Javadekar, on Friday, announced April 18 as the launch date of the Study in India programme.
He was speaking as chief guest at the inaugural function of the international conference on Internationalisation at Home (IaH), via video conference. It had been organised by Symbiosis International (Deemed University) (SIU) and Association of Indian Universities (AIU).
“In the first phase of the initiative, we will be introducing it in 30 countries which can later be expanded to 60 more. Although, currently, we have only 160 institutes under our wing, as far as this programme is concerned, in the future however, we want to take it further to more than 1,000 institutions to provide wider choices for the foreign students. The main objective here is to transform India into an education hub,” said Javadekar.
He stated that almost six lakh Indian students leave the country every year to study abroad, while only about 40,000 foreign students come to India to pursue higher education. “We need to change that scenario and boost internationalisation in India. With time, due to its affordable and reliable medical treatment system, India has become a popular choice for westerners, especially for patients from the US, where medical treatment is very expensive.”
Further, he said, “The situation is same in case of undergraduate education there, and we need to utilise it, by making India a hub for quality and affordable education. So if six lakh Indians are going out, the mission for Study in India programme is to bring 10 lakh students into the country.” Javadekar plans to launch the programme along with Sushma Swaraj on April 18.
Speaking about the importance of higher education in India and the many challenges and opportunities, the minister said that the government’s first priority is to nurture the school system and improve teaching and learning processes, particularly in schools and colleges in rural India.
While, professor PB Sharma, president of Association of Indian Universities, was present as the guest of honour at the ceremony, other dignitaries included Symbiosis International chancellor SB Mujumdar, pro-chancellor Vidya Yeravdekar, vice-chancellor Rajani Gupte, along with vice-chancellors of other prominent institutes.
Speaking as the keynote speaker, porofessor Hans de Wit, director of Centre for International Higher Education (CIHE), Lynch School of Education, Boston College, said, “Internationalisation is not about recruiting international students for money, or a means to move up in rankings but to improve the quality of education, research, and contribute to the society. The future in this respect, is for the world to become one whole family.”
India should neither adopt easternisation nor westernisation, but internationalisation by combining eastern wisdom and western dynamism,” said chancellor SB Mujumdar.
Anita Patankar, deputy director, Symbiosis Centre for International Education; Vidya Yeravdekar, pro-chancellor, SIU; Hans de Wit, director, Centre for International Higher Education (CIHE), Lynch School of Education, Boston College; SB Mujumdar, chancellor, SIU; PB Sharma, president, AIU and Rajani Gupte, vice-chancellor, SIU, were present at the inaugural function of the international conference on Internationalisation at Home (IaH).
Indian academia must be a wellspring of ideas, not a morass of regurgitated views
The new rules approved by the University Grants Commission (UGC) say that researchers will lose their registration and teachers their jobs if found guilty of plagiarising. There will be graded punishment for offenders. This essential move should have come much earlier to ensure that Indian academia is a wellspring of fresh ideas rather than a morass of regurgitated thoughts. Plagiarism — the practice of taking someone else’s work or ideas and passing them off as one’s own (read cheating) — has been gnawing away at India’s academia for years; even top academicians have been caught at it. For example, Pondicherry University vice-chancellor Chandra Krishnamurthy quit in 2016 after a prolonged stand-off with the ministry of human resource development, following allegation that she plagiarised large parts of one of her books. Appa Rao Podile, vicechancellor of the University of Hyderabad, was accused of plagiarising from not one, but three scientific papers.
In India, plagiarism flourishes for several reasons. It is almost ingrained in the system, starting from school where students are not taught to think or check on sources, but learn by rote from whatever notes they get their hands on. Few schools go out of their way to inculcate in students the moral integrity that treats plagiarism as a serious, scornful offence. To many students (and teachers), the Internet is a vast reservoir of knowledge and information into which they can dip at will. There are two flawed assumptions about the Internet: that it is always free (and free to draw upon), always accurate; and that there is no need to attribute sources to stuff taken from it.
There is no real action against people indulging in the malpractice. Guidelines on research misconduct don’t have any time frames for the closure of such cases. Institutions of higher education, which should push students to strive for originality, actually don’t want to rock the boat and punish those who indulge in plagiarism. The new rules should change that.
However, it has made installation of vending and crushing machines necessary at starred hotels, malls, tourist places and public places across the state.
The government has decided to lift the plastic ban on small PET and PETE bottles with capacity of less than half litre. (HT File (Representational Image))
In a relief to people, the government has decided to lift the plastic ban on small PET and PETE bottles with capacity of less than half litre.
However, it has made installation of vending and crushing machines necessary at starred hotels, malls, tourist places and public places across the state.
This means that all starred hotels will have to install crushing machines for using PET and PETE bottles in bulk. Similarly, it will be mandatory for big malls to have vending machines for collecting used plastic bottles under the depository buyback scheme.
The manufacturers of PET bottles will also have to install vending and crushing machines at tourist and public places, senior officials from the state environment department said. However, people will have to pay Rs2 extra for using each small PET and PETE bottles having capacity of less than half litre under the depository buyback scheme.
The money would be refunded to the consumer in case he or she returns the plastic bottle to the shopkeeper or to the vending machine.
Furthermore, the state has also decided to give extension of another two months to people for disposing of the banned plastic items. Thus, implementing authorities cannot start any punitive action against the offenders till June 23. The notification to this effect is likely to be issued by Thursday, officials said.
According to the Maharashtra Plastic and Thermocol Products (Manufacture, Usage, Sale, Transport, Handling and Storage) Notification, 2018 on March 23, the government had banned manufacture, usage, storage, distribution, wholesale or retail sale, import and transportation of all kinds of plastic bags (with or without handle), single use disposable items made of plastic and thermocol — dish, cups, plates, glasses, fork, bowls, forks, spoons, straw, containers, non-woven polypropylene bags, pouches to store liquid, plastic to wrap or store products and packaging of food items and small PET and PETE bottles having capacity of less than half litre, across the state.
The state government also declared a fine of Rs5,000 and Rs10,000 respectively for first and second time offence. A third-time offender will be fined Rs25,000 and three months imprisonment. “The manufacturers, distributors, hotels and malls owners have to set up complete system of recollection and recycling of bottles in the next three months failing which the government may reconsider its decision,” said a senior official. They will have to ensure that the buyback scheme is working effectively through shopkeepers and vending machine across the state, he added.
