Vocational Education in Singapore

I did a term paper (in two installments) on vocational education in India for my course on Social Policy Design last semester. Didn't get a great grade :-( but found it fascinating, and was considering working in that area after graduation.  The link below should show you the papers on Dropbox (let me know if it doesn't). There is a lot of dividends for the country and its people if we get vocational education right.  PM Modi is doing the right thing by placing a lot of emphasis on Skilling India.

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/07mha1qkofjmy15/AADQKHcjBXg5S8BJayx7sU8ha?dl=0

In India we have a huge problem with this perception of vocational education as infra-dig so we end up churning out huge quantities of unemployable B.As and B.Scs and B.Coms, while we suffer from a dearth of good technicians, plumbers etc. As as aside,

Singapore has an excellent vocational education system, one of the best in the world. They have an institution called the ITE (Institute of Technical Education), that serves people after 10th grade. They have several polytechnics (Temasek Poly, Ngee Ann Poly, Singapore Poly) that serve people after high school. One of the things that Singapore consciously did was to combat, quite successfully, the feeling that vocational education is a 2nd class or infra-dig option. Rather, it is portrayed as an option for people with different inclinations and different talents that the traditional intellect-based classroom education. They've 'signalled' this, by, among other things, funding their vocational education institutions very well and giving them a lot of facilities.

When Chandrababu Naidu visited Singapore recently, he checked out the ITE. These from the ITE website, ite.edu.sg :



His Excellency Mr Nara Chandrababu Naidu (centre in cream shirt), Honourable Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh, India, at the Precision Engineering Hub at ITE College Central, where Laser and Tooling Technology training and development for staff and students are carried out. Students gain hands-on experience by working on CNC Laser Cutting Machine, Bending Machine and Turret Punching Machine with the aid of specialised CAD/CAM software, to create a wide array of metallic products ranging from name cards, pens and serviette holders to pendants, lamp shades and wall décor




I visited the ITE too, photos below:

Rework The World

I went to the Rework the World conference, www.reworktheworld.org in early June, representing Arghyam. The conference was in Leksand, a lakeside resort a few hours north of Stockholm. The conference was a very good experience. The next and last edition of the conference , which is one of a series is going to be held in Alexandria , Egypt in 2012 and I heartily recommend that to any young person, though needless to say, it would be quite expensive.

As luck would have it, my passport was quite close to expiring and I needed to get it renewed. I had a difficult time getting the renewal done ; worth its own blog post!

I flew out of Delhi and back to Delhi which make the overall trip more strenuous.

The event was on youth and social entrepreneurship. It was co-organised by two interesting groups the Yes Foundation (one of whose key people is an Indian American, Poonam Ahluwalia), and the Tallberg Foundation, a wellknown think-tank in Sweden. The trip expenses were sponsored by the organisers which was really nice of them, though I think they were hoping I would play a more active role than I did.

From Stockholm Airport, I drove down to the conference location by car with Thomas Bjelkeman-Petersson of Akvo.org, who's visited us in India a few times. It was a great drive through open sparsely populated countryside. A very welcome break from the crush and the dirt of Bangalore and India which gets to me.

There was a huge amount of infectious energy in the gathering ; so many people, especially youth (1500+), all trying to make the world a better place, all over the world.

Lots of particulars that bear a passing comment but maybe in a later post.

Some videos below:
1.) The Max hamburger chain in Sweden now tracks the carbon footprint of each kind of burger and lets you know !



2.) There was a lot of great music at the event:

From a Water Portal event this weekend

Kannada song

Very cool traditional Kannada song that you may appreciate even if you don't know the language. Its from the Voices from the Waters film festival. Video was taken by me, which explains the bad quality ...

Persian Wheel / Water Wheel / Rahat

An ancient mechanism for getting water out of a well. The wheel in the picture is probably the last extant one in Karnataka.

 

All you wanted to know about the Persian wheel here:

 

http://www.indiawaterportal.org/blog/2008/01/22/all-you-wanted-to-know-about-the-persian-wheel/ 

 

Ask A Water Question

 

Announcing

The Schools Water Portal: http://schools.indiawaterportal.org 

 

Check it out and please tell teachers you know, especially social studies and environment teachers

 

Best wishes,

Vijay Krishna

Manager, India Water Portal

Ask A Water Question

 

Photos from Bhuj, Kutch

Lots of photos without captions ; comment if anything interests you and you want to learn more

Bhuj-Personal

Jimmy Wales and Sue Gardner ..

of Wikipedia and Wikimedia Foundation fame were in the Arghyam office today for a bunch of presentations from various organisations that Rohini's associated with..

photos :

http://www.flickr.com/photos/charmermrk/sets/72157611140868917/

Mark Charmer tweets about the meeting here -- http://twitter.com/charmermark , you might have to do some detective work to find it. If you see this post after 14th Dec don't bother, it would be lost in his outpouring of tweets.

And here's a little something:
http://movementbureau.blogs.com/projects/2008/12/indian-traffic-is-there-a-subtle-system.html

We win a award !!

Check out :
http://www.indiawaterportal.org/blog/2008/10/21/water-portal-wins-a-manthan-award/

"Voices from the Waters"

The Second International Film Festival on Water.

Website: http://www.voicesfromthewaters.com

A tonne of films with a water theme -- probably the most extensive collection in the world of this sort. if anything the problem is finding what films you want to see in the bewildering range of films on offer. My suggestion: just pick a day and go.


There hasn't been enough publicity on this so please forward to more people.

Details at www.voicesfromthewaters.com

Getting serious

At a recent conference I got serious about video and here are the results:











There's more of my stuff under indiawaterportal username on YouTube, for those strangely fascinated by the above.

Meanwhile Vishwanath, the renaissance man, is upping the bar on Arghyam amateur video (and ecological living) drastically:



Many more under 'zenrainman'

===================

Muchos good fundas in your comment Sunil (Suneil?). I don't have any answer to your question. Generally India is not on the cutting edge of renewable technology (Suzlon an exception ?), so maybe people are waiting for the technology to reach maturity ?

Taking stock

A gamut of emotions and directions have been happening as I disengage from work and look to what I will do going forward.

There are a few things that hit me now and then with a painful intensity -- stuff that I have wanted to do for a long time and have not done and now I want to fulfil that desire. Travel, playing games like squash/tennis are examples. There is a sense of freedom, from the forthcoming stepping off the conveyor belt and a chance to think and do other things. I find my mind wandering, intensively following up some idea until I can reach some kind of rationalization or understanding about it, and whether it has any relevance to me. For eg. at various points in the last few weeks I spent a few (or more) hours thinking fairly obsessively about things ranging from:
- hunger. Not in a conceptual way but just how it might be ended in India and what are the issues around there. There is a lot of stuff on the web that I brooded about for a while like writings by Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen, the public distribution system in India, the Right to Food coalition. You can google any of these.
- this blog. Its becoming somewhat painful at the moment as I keep thinking of whatever I do and whether its bloggable, and how to increase site traffic and make money from the ads. Currently it seems that practically I can make at most $10/- a month from the ads, which is a letdown :-). Oh well. If I can make enough to cover my broadband cost perhaps that's a nice target to aim for. On that note I spent some time looking up 'click fraud' which is worth a small blog entry at some point perhaps. Basically the whole internet ad system could be resting on fairly shaky foundations since its so easy to do a 'fake' click on an ad ie. somebody clicking with some specific agenda in mind (eg. to make money on their own site) rather than out of a genuine interest to see what's the ad about.
-- other moneymaking ideas. To my own surprise I find that my mind is veering more towards money-making schemes than to service ideas which was what the 'sabbatical' was about in the first place. I dunno what to do about it :-), except follow it through and see where it takes me. I won't judge myself as money-minded or a hypocrite quite yet :-)
-- work has been predictably pretty hard, but one soldiers on with the guilty knowledge that one is not going to be there to face any consequences anyway.

Enough navel gazing.