-The Business Standard No movement yet on quality control in higher education The state of professional higher education in India is abysmal. Consider engineering. All told, there are 1.5 million engineering seats in the country. Almost a third of these are unfilled, so about a million engineers are produced every year. Yet, barely 10 per cent of them are readily employable. About a quarter don’t know enough English to make sense...

Universities should not have to bow to research institutes, writes Debashis Gangopadhyay. Basic Sciences versus Applied Sciences Undermining humanities studies in schools will lead to a large number of science graduates in the market. This is a boon for multinational companies as profits will escalate — the cost of labour being lower. However, the danger to profits persist from another aspect. Students who study science out of their love for a subject are...

-Outlook Anyone with internet access can get an education—from the best in their fields The Supreme Court last week allowed online counselling for admission to undergraduate courses in medical colleges. Under the scheme, students applying for all-India seats in medical colleges would be able to receive counselling in choosing their colleges online. While this is but a small development, for just a section of seats in medical colleges across India, coming...

-Open the Magazine   Villagers saw him cleaning his undergarments stained with goat blood and thought he had a sexual disease. But Arunachalam Muruganantham was only trying to make a smart, cheap sanitary pad for his wife I am perhaps the only man to have ever worn a sanitary napkin. I am the only man who understands what a woman endures during those days. The wetness. The discomfort. The constant fear of stains....

The decision to reform the IIT selection process from next year by introducing a weightage for candidates’ Class XII board marks appears headed for a court battle. Alumni association members from the IITs of Delhi, Kanpur and Kharagpur met here today and decided to move “various high courts” within a week against the IIT Council’s “unilateral” decision that overruled objections from several IIT senates. IIT teachers and senates have cited how the...