Dr. Andrew H. Wallace

Dr. Andrew H. Wallace, professor emeritus of mathematics at Penn and former chair of the mathematics department (1968-71), passed away January 18 in Chania, Crete, Greece. He was 81.Born and raised in Edinburgh, Scotland, he graduated in 1946 with an MA in mathematics and physics from Edinburgh University. He earned his PhD in mathematics from St. Andrews University in 1949.After immigrating to the US in 1959, he served as professor and chair of the mathematics department at Indiana University. He then came to Penn in 1965 and stayed until his retirement in 1986. his mathematical work was mainly concentrated in topology where he produced fundamental results reported on principally in his series of papers entitled “Modifications and Cobounding Manifolds.” Here, he essentially settled in dimensions 5 and higher, the basic open problem regarding these geometric objects, though he did not push his results to an explicit statement of the solution.Dr. Wallace’s work in the topology of three dimensional spaces was groundbreaking and remains frequently cited and used to the present day.

Padma Awards

The President of India has approved the names of the 135 persons for conferment of the Padma Awards-2008. The list has 13 Padma Vibhushan awardees, 35 Padma Bhushan and 71 Padma Shri winners.The Padma Vibhushan winners are Asha Bhosle (Art), Justice (Dr.) A.S Anand, PN Dhar, foreign minister Pranab Mukherjee (all three for public affairs), Dr E Sreedharan, and Dr Rajendra Kumar Pachauri for science and engineering, Late Mr Edmund Hillary (Posthumous), Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar, Viswanathan Anand (all three for sports), Lakshmi Narayan Mittal, N R Narayana Murthy, PRS Oberoi, Ratan Naval Tata (all four for trade and industry).The list of Padma Bhushan awardees has five from the field of art. These are Amarnath Sehgal (Posthumous), Ustad Asad Ali Khan, P Susheela, Ustad Rahim Fahimuddin Dagar and Prof. Sushil Kumar Saxena. For civil service the awardees are Chandrshekhar Dasgupta, K Padmanabhiah and V Ramachandran.There are nine winners in the field of Literature and Education. These are Prof Brijinder Nath Goswamy, Prof Ji Xianlin (China), Prof Kaushik Basu (USA), Prof. (Smt.) Padma Desai (USA), Ravindra Kelekar, Dr (Smt.) Shayama Chona, Shri Lal Shukla, Dr Srinivasa SR Varadhan, Prof TK Oommen and Prof (Dr) Jagjit Singh Chopra. Prof Nirmal Kumar Ganguly has got it for medicine while Mian Bashir Ahmed, Lord Meghnad Desai, Late Yuli Mikhailovitch Vorontsov (Posthumous) have got Padma Bhushan for public affairs. Prof Asis Datta, Prof. Sukh Dev have got it for science and engineering.Indian born astronaut Sunita Williams has got it for astronautics.Vasant Gowarikar, DR Mehta, Dominique Lapierre (France), Dr (Ms.) Inderjit Kaur have got it for social work. Suresh Kumar Neotia, Baba Neelkanth Kalyani, K. V. Kamath, Shiv Nadar and Vikram Pandit have got it for Trade and Industry.The Padma Shri award list has 71 names. The list consists of Gangadhar Pradhan, Mikhailovich Pechinkov (Russia), Pandit Gokulotsavji Maharaj, Hans Raj Hans, Dr.(Smt.) Helen Giri, Jatin Goswami, Jawahar Wattal, John Martin Nelson, Jonnalagadda Gurappa Chetty, Kekoo M. Gandhy, Madhuri Dixit, Mangala Prasad Mohanty, Manoj Night Shyamalan, Meenakshi Chitharanjan, Moozhikkulam Kochukuttan Chakyar, P.K. Narayanan Nambiar, Pratap Pawar (UK), Sabitri Heisnam, Sentila T. Yanger, Dr. Sirkazhi G. Sivachidambaram, Tom Alter and Prof. Yella Venkateswara Rao have got it for Art.Barkha Dutt, Rajdeep Dilip Sardesai and Vinod Dua have got it for Journalism.
Prof. Amitabh Mattoo, Balasubramanian Sivanthi Adithan, Bholabhai Patel, Dr. (Smt.) Bina Agarwal, Prof. (Dr.) K.S. Nisar Ahmed, Dr. (Smt.) M. Leelavathy, Dr. Nirupam Bajpai, Dr. Srinivas Udgata, Prof. Sukhadeo Thorat, Shri Surjya Kanta Hazarika, Dr. Vellayani Arjunan and Mohammad Yousuf Taing have won it for Literature and Education.Haji Kaleem Ullah Khan has got Padma Shri for Mango Plantation and Grafting.Dr. A. Jayanta Kumar Singh, Prof. (Dr.) Arjunan Rajasekaran, Prof. (Dr.) C.U. Velmurugendran, Dr. Deepak Sehgal, Prof. (Dr.) Dinesh K. Bhargava, Dr. Indu Bhushan Sinha, Dr. Keiki R. Mehta, Dr. (Smt.) Malvika Sabharwal, Dr. Mohan Chandra Pant, Dr. Rakesh Kumar Jain, Dr. Raman Kapur, Dr. Randhir Sud, Dr. Shyam Narayan Arya, Prof. (Dr.) Surendra Singh Yadav, Dr. Tatyarao Pundlikrao Lahane and Dr. Tony Fernandez have got it for medicine.Colette Mathur has got it for public affairs. She is from Switzerland.Bhavarlal Hiralal Jain, Dr. Joseph H. Hulse (Canada), Prof Kasturi Lal Chopra, Dr. Sant Singh Virmani (USA) have got it for science and engineering. Kailash Chandra Agrawal, Sister Karuna Mary Braganza, Dr. (Smt.) Kshama Metre, Dr. Kutikuppala Surya Rao, Madan Mohan Sabharwal, Dr. (Ms.) Sheela Barthakur, V.R. Gowrishankar, Vikramjit Singh Sahney and Yousaf Ali Musaliamveettil Abdul Kader of UAE have been awarded the Padma Shri for social work.Baichung Bhutia and Bula Chowdhury Chakraborty have got it for sports.Dr. Amit Mitra has got it for trade and industry.The government has once again skipped conferring the Bharat Ratna for the seventh time in a row. The last time it was given was in 2001 when it was conferred filmdom's golden voice Lata Mangeshkar and Shehnai maestro Ustad Bismillah Khan. Apart from Sreedharan, honours list includes educationist Shyama Chona, Prof Asis Datta, journalists Rajdeep Sardesai, Barkha Dutt and Vinod Dua have been honoured. Veteran commentator Jasdev Singh, retired IAS officer and government's interlocutor in the Naga peace process K Padmanabhaiah, US astronaut of Indian origin Sunita Williams and French co-author of "City of Joy" and social activist Dominique Lapierre are among those awarded Padma Bhushan for their contributions. Noted sociologist T K Oomen has been awarded a Padma Shri. Apart from Madhuri Dixit, veteran actor and theatre personality Tom Alter has been given a Padma Shri. In 2007, 121 Padma awards were announced — of these, 10 Padma Vibhushans, 32 Padma Bhushans and 79 Padma Shris.

TCS asked 500 staffs to leave for poor performance

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has asked around 500 people to leave the company after the second annual appraisal it carries out, citing performance-related issues. By the end of the financial year, this number could go up to 600. The employees who were asked to leave are mostly those with 2-3 years of experience and do not include trainees because they have less than a year’s experience.Last week, TCS was in the news for cutting down the variable pay of employees for slippages in internal growth targets — a move that will save it about Rs 83 crore.An official statement from the company termed it a routine exercise carried out bi-annually to weed out non-performers.source--Economic times

Six-year D. Pharm course in the offing

Kakatiya University will introduce Doctor of Pharmacy, a six-year course, from the next academic year. The new course will comprise more clinical aspects to make the candidates on par with doctors.This will enable the pharmacy profession more supportive to doctors and it will result in improvement of the over-all healthcare system.The existing pharmacy colleges offering B.Pharm courses and having necessary infrastructure and tieup with a hospital are eligible to have the new course.

Frank Nelson Cole Prize

Professor Manjul Bhargava received the Frank Nelson Cole Prize in Number Theory for his work on composition laws and his contributions to the work of renowned mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss. He has previously been awarded the Clay Mathematics Institute’s Research Award and the SASTRA Ramanujan Prize. In 2002, Bhargava was named one of Popular Science’s “Brilliant 10.Manjul Bhargava, the youngest full professor at Princeton, has made phenomenal contributions to number theory, notably by his discovery of higher order composition laws. These appeared in a Ph.D thesis, written under the direction of Professor Andrew Wiles of Princeton University and published in the `Annals of Mathematics.Bhargava created a whole new area of research in a classical topic that had seen very little activity since the time of Gauss.

TCS variable pay cut

On January 30, India’s largest software company Tata Consultancy Company (TCS) has announced to cut the variable component of its employee and on an average, the cut will affect the employee’s salary by anywhere between 1.5 – two per cent less this month and onwards. Though 1.5 – two per cent cut does not look very huge in the industry, which is suffering, but getting less salary is certainly pinching the employee. But it appears that the company may not have any other choice keeping in view that they have maintained the same level of salary despite appreciation of rupee since last one year.THE STRENGTHENING of rupee, imminent recession in US, sub prime mortgagee crisis in US and its worldwide coupling effect - it seems that everything is going against Indian software industry. On one side, due to slowdown in US economy and effect of sub prime crisis in US as well as in Europe, search of new clients and increasing the contracted rates are becoming tough for software companies.

Scholarships for minority community children

Two-and-a-half million schoolchildren from India's minority communities will get scholarships for the next five years, with a cabinet panel earmarking more than Rs.18 billion for this. The decision of the cabinet committee on economic affairs (CCEA) would benefit students of Class I to X studying in government or aided private schools. Thirty percent of the scholarships have been earmarked for girl students.The government has also identified 90 districts across the country with a concentration of the minorities and has initiated moves to upgrade the basic infrastructure in these areas.

Eight Indian Americans reach Intel science talent finals

Eight Indian American high school students, five of them girls, have been named among 40 finalists for the Intel Science Talent Search 2008 contest.Avanthi Raghavan, Shravani Mikkilineni, Hamsa Sridhar, Shivani Sud, Isha Jain, Vinay Venkatesh Ramasesh, Ashok Chandran and Ayon Sen get at least $5,000 in scholarships and a laptop. They will next compete for 10 scholarships - including the top award of $100,000 - in March in Washington, DC.The eight talented students were selected Wednesday from over 1,600 individual entrants for the nationwide competition, often called the "junior Nobel prize", administered annually by the Washington based Society for Science & the Public.The project Ashok Chandran, 17, of Nesconset, New York, submitted for the competition, studied the link between smoking and breast cancer. He tested the hypothesis that nicotine would alter mammary cell gene expression, creating a cellular environment akin to that of a breast cancer cell.Isha Himani Jain, 17, of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, has identified a cellular mechanism underlying bone growth spurts in zebra fish, similar to the way children's bones grow. She had also won, in October, a $100,000 scholarship topping the Siemens Competition in Math, Science and Technology for the same study, which has been published in a journal.Avanthi Raghavan, 17, of Orlando, Florida, submitted a project studying the mechanisms of protein transport critical to the survival and virulence of the malaria parasite, which accounts for over two million deaths every year.The project of Shivani Sud, 17, of Durham, North Carolina, focuses on identifying stage II colon cancer patients at high risk of recurrence and the best therapeutic agents for treating their tumours.Hamsa Sridhar, 18, of Kings Park, New York, developed a low cost optical tweezers system that uses laser light to trap and suspend microscopic particles.Ayon Sen, 17, of Austin, Texas, investigated the natural processes by which the ocean transports heat. He developed a MATLAB software interface for deep-water ocean current velocity data and integrated it with surface water velocity data from satellite altimeters.Vinay Venkatesh Ramasesh, 18, of Fort Worth, Texas, submitted a chemistry project involving algorithms to accurately determine molecular thermodynamic properties of large molecules, such as proteins.
Shravani Mikkilineni, 17, of Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, studied the computation of continued fraction expansions of the square roots of positive integers.

CBSE to provide counselling

The CBSE will be providing counselling services through multiple modes of communication including telephone, newspapers and internet.For students facing exam blues this season, relief is just a click or phone-call away.The CBSE will be providing counselling services through multiple modes of communication including telephone, newspapers and internet.The CBSE has been providing counselling services to students for the past ten years and introduced multiple modes of communication this year to maximise its reach.The programme which is aimed at helping students and parents overcome anxiety and exam-related stress, opens its first phase of counselling services from February 1 to March 31 this year.Apart from tele-counselling through Interactive Voice Response System, on-line counselling and question-answer through newspaper columns will function as additional modes of communication for students.

Online Test Portal “Successrunway.com”

Bangalore based premier training organisation BASE and ExcelSoft, an e-learning solutions company announced the launch of http://www.successrunway.com, a portal offering online test series for students aspiring to get into professional institutes like IITs, NITs and engineering colleges. The portal presents tests and assessments that help students prepare better for these exams. SuccessRunway will offer students a VLE (Virtual Learning Environment) featuring the Online Test Series to prepare for the IIT-JEE, AIEEE and the Karnataka CET and COMEDK examinations. The tests can be taken at a cyber café, at home or any place with a broadband Internet connection.Students can take 5 tests on the pattern of the competitive examination so that they become familiar with a wide variety of questions. Feedback is available immediately on answering the test. “The unique feature of the portal’s online Test Series is that it provides pedagogically strong near-classroom learning experience.Established in 1991, BASE is a premier educational services company with training centres in Bangalore and Mysore. Started by a prominent team of academics, BASE’s mission is to mould meritorious students into true winners. Apart from providing training services, BASE also offers academic support to a large number of institutions across Karnataka.

David Mumford

Brown University mathematician David Mumford has won the 2008 Wolf Foundation Prize in Mathematics for groundbreaking theoretical work in algebraic geometry. The Wolf Prize is one of the most prestigious honors in mathematics.

India in world mathematics -M.S. RAGHUNATHAN

“The intellectual potentialities of the Indian nation are unlimited and not many years would perhaps be needed before India can take a worthy place in world mathematics.Those are the words of A. Weil, one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century, written in 1936. Weil was not a man to be easily impressed; and his assessment of our capabilities were based not just on our record in ancient and medieval history and the achievements of the towering figure of Srinivasa Ramanujan but took into account contemporary Indian perfomance. Colonial rule was not the ideal environment for that favourable prognosis to be realised; yet we made some modest progress.At the dawn of freedom there were in the country a dozen or so mathematicians of high calibre still active. And fully realising our potential was surely a tiny part of our pledge in our “tryst with destiny.”On the eve of Independence there was notable mathematical research activity in some of our university departments; those of Allahabad, Calcutta and Madras were in the lead, work emerging from these centres receiving some international acclaim. The Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) in Calcutta had acquired a big reputation in Statistics.
During the first decade after Independence, even as these institutions continued with their good work, a new arrival on the scene, the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) was making impressive progress.The 1960s saw the coming of age of Indian mathematics. India has since made some very substantial contributions to mathematics. People working in the country have made fundamental contributions to certain areas of mathematics, notably Algebra, Algebraic Geometry, Lie Theory, Number Theory, Probability Theory and Statistics — contributions that are milestones in these subjects. There have been interesting contributions to other areas too, but their impact has not been as impressive.A major mathematical event, the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM), has been taking place once every four years since 1900 (with breaks during the World War years) with ever increasing international participation. The meet is built around prestigious invited lectures numbering about 200: some 20 “plenary” one-hour lectures are meant for the general mathematical audience and are given by eminent figures who have had a big influence on the evolution of different mathematical areas. The remaining, more specialised, talks of 50 minutes duration are given by other outstanding contributors to diverse fields in mathematics. (The numbers mentioned are those in recent congresses; they were much smaller earlier on.) It is at these Congresses that the Fields Medal, the most prestigious international award for mathematics, is given.Some idea of the Indian impact on the world of mathematics may be gleaned from the fact that since 1954, in every Congress except in 1966 and 1986 there has been at least one invited talk by an Indian working in India; and all these talks have been in areas mentioned above. There have been two plenary talks by Indians but both were by non-residents. However, on the whole there have been far fewer talks by non-resident Indians than by those working in India.The Fields Medal, by far the most prestigious award for mathematical achievement, is awarded at the International Congresses. This prize has so far eluded India but there are instances of people coming close to it. (The medal is awarded only to mathematicians under 40 and its monetary value is a pittance in comparison with the Nobel prize). Several Indian mathematicians have, however, received the Third World Academy Mathematics Prize (awarded every year since 1980), an award for excellence in mathematical research in the developing countries. M.S. Narasimhan (who retired from the TIFR in 1992) received the King Faisal Prize for Mathematics in 2006. This is an international prize given for outstanding work in the different sciences, and mathematics gets its turn once in four years. All the recipients before Dr. Narasimhan were Westerners. Also in 2006, C.S. Seshadri, who is Director, Chennai Mathematics Institute, was awrded the ICTP Prize for mathematics, yet another prestigious award for scientists from the Third World. The same year, Manindra Agarwal of the Indian Institute of Technology and two of his erstwhile students, Neeraj Kayal and Nitin Saxena, bagged the Godel Prize for outstanding work in Theoretical Computer Science (done in 2002). A (woman) mathematician, R. Sujatha of the TIFR, was awarded (again in 2006) another international prize meant for mathematical achievements in the Third World, the Ramanuajan Prize instituted jointly by the International Centre for Theoretical Physics and the Niels Henrik Abel Memorial Fund. The Abel Memorial Fund also
provides funds for the Abel Prize which rewards mathematical achievement on a scale similar to that of the Nobel. This year’s prize went to S.R.S. Varadhan, of Indian origin. Dr. Varadhan’s formative years were spent atthe Indian Statistical Institute in Calcutta. Another indication of the high levels achieved by Indian mathematics is that three Indian mathematicians working in India have been elected Fellows of the Royal Society of London. Two non-residents (Dr. Varadhan and Dr. Harish-Chandra) and Srinivasa Ramnaujan are the only other Indian mathematicians who have been conferred this privilege.The last two paragraphs briefly outlined the high points of Indian achievement in mathematics. These peaks, however, do not by any means tell the whole story: except the Godel Prize, all the other achievements came from the TIFR and the ISI. In fact, the TIFR accounts for by far the larger share. The general level of mathematics outside a handful of institutions of higher learning leaves much to be desired. One finds at most university departments neither good quality research nor superior scholarship.The present situation is indeed depressing; and in many ways things are on a further decline. There has been a steady loss of interest in the pursuit of mathematics (in fact of all the basic sciences) among the young over the last three decades. This is largely due to socio-economic factors. Till recently, career options for mathematics graduates was essentially limited to the academic profession. The academic profession is of course not attractive in terms of emoluments: a fresh management graduate enters his or her career at a salary which is often higher than what the academic retires on.Unattractive economic status is of course nothing new to the academic profession, but it no longer commands the respect it used to in an earlier era. ”Midnight’s Children” seem to have had a definite advantage over their children in the matter of the quality of their teachers.
Despite all this, some talented youngsters will still pursue mathematics, but most of them seek to do it in Europe or the United States. One reason is that the academic in the West has a much better socio-economic standing; a second reason is the sorry state of most of our institutions of higher learning — an eager student cannot get exposure to truly exciting mathematics except in a handful of places. And even these, while being good, are no match for a Harvard or a Princeton. On top of that, many Western universities are actively canvassing to get Indian students enrolled in their graduate schools.Higher education in the country has come to mean, especially in the context of economic liberalisation, education that leads to big emoluments. The policies of the state are in tune with this perception. Most of the state support for higher education is de facto a subsidy for producing (managerial) human resources for business and industry. Scant attention is paid to promoting learning for its own sake: higher studies that do not cater to commerce get short shrift.For example, State governments have not allowed universities to fill sanctioned positions in their science or humanities departments, by withholding the needed financial support.Mathematics has always played an important role in diverse human endeavours. Physics has had over the centuries a symbiotic relationship with mathematics; so also technology, especially since the Industrial Revolution. Biology and medicine, as also the social sciences, which were relatively impervious to advanced mathematics till a hundred years ago, are now benefiting immensely from highly sophisticated mathematical intervention. In the last few decades the world of finance has turned to higher mathematics for help: Wall Street employs mathematics Ph.Ds routinely.In such a context, it is important that we make an all-out effort to improve the state of mathematics in the country. And any improvement of the general scenario is possible only if we have good mathematics teachers at all levels. And to secure that, it is imperative that the teaching profession be made socio-economically attractive.In sum, the mathematical scene is a mixed bag. We have, on the one hand, an impressive record on the frontiers of mathematics even as the standards in the mathematical community at large are far from satisfactory: we are yet to claim our “worthy place in world mathematics.There is, however, room for some cautious optimism about the future. The Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, which accounts for most of our peak achievements, continues to perform at a superior level; that institute has set up a centre in Bangalore where areas like Differential Equations are pursued with vigour. The Indian Statistical Institute has established branches in Delhi and Bangalore; these, along with the headquarters in Kolkata, are lively centres producing excellent work.The government has set up two research institutions along the lines of the TIFR, one in Chennai and one in Allahabad, both of which are contributing to enhancing the quality of our mathematics. The Indian Institute of Science has in recent years assembled an excellent, youthful faculty in mathematics, making its future very promising. The IITs are making serious efforts to raise the standards of research and scholarship in mathematics.Some university departments are also trying to do this, but their meagre financial resources make the task very difficult.In the recent past there have been two initiatives at providing excellent undergraduate education in mathematics. One was the creation of the Chennai Mathematics Institute where undergraduate students are taught by active, front-ranking researchers. The Indian Statistical Institute in Bangalore is running such a teaching programme. Both institutions have met with considerable success in producing scholars well poised to embark on a career in mathematics. In the last couple of years the government has set up two “Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research” with the same aims and one hopes that these efforts will also succeed.On the whole, our nurture of the potential has been less than satisfactory. We need to make greater efforts in that direction. The diamond jubilee of India’s Independence is a good occasion to reiterate the resolve to do that.

M.S. Raghunathan, a Fellow of the Royal Society, is DAE Homi Bhabha Professor. He was formerly Professor of Eminence, TIFR. from-HINDU

New Institutes

The Centre had proposed three new IITs, 20 Indian Institutes of Information Technology, five Indian Institutes of Management, three IISERs and four Schools of Planning in the 11th Five-Year-Plan. Last year the Union HRD ministry decided to set up IITs in Bihar and Rajasthan and IISERs in Pune and Calcutta.

IIT site

State government had finalized Bihta, a small township west to Patna as the site. But when the Central team came to inspect the area, it found that the place has a water-logging problem.Four months have passed since then but the Union human resources development ministry is yet to hear from the Bihar government.Apart from Bihar, an IIT is going to be opened in Medak in Andhra Pradesh while the site for Rajasthan has also not been finalized.With two states still to take any decision, the HRD ministry has sought clearance of the Expenditure Finance Committee for the IITs, a necessary step before the project gets moving.

Batch of '82 gives Rs 4 cr to IIT-B

The batch of 1982 of the Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay handed over a cheque of Rs 4 crore to the premier engineering institute. The money will be used to bring in more talent into the faculty. With the interest earned on the corpus, every year 25 incoming faculty members at IIT-B will be offered a bonus of Rs 1 lakh for three years.The batch, having decided to raise Rs 6 crore in all, plans to mobilise the remaining Rs 2 crore and give it to IIT-B for its Legacy Project in 2008. Each year, the Legacy Project sees alumni celebrating its silver jubilee reunion by pledging to take up a project for the institute.This initiative was announced earlier this year at a New York alumni meet when director Ashok Misra and senior faculty members including Deepak Phatak, professor at IIT's Kanwal Rekhi School of Information Technology, visited the US to whip up enthusiasm among NRI ex-students for the ongoing IIT-B golden jubilee celebrations.

IIT Kharagpur launches new course

IIT Kharagpur will be the first in the country to open a School of Entrepreneurship, the first batch for which will be inducted latest by 2009. The institute is also investing Rs 396 crore in six new projects, including an increasing intake of students up to 24,000 to 30,000 in phases in the next 10 years. Faculty is also being recruited to cope with the influx of both undergraduate and postgraduate students. All IITs are increasing their intake capacity in line with the Central government's policy of upgrading these centres of excellence. Fifty per cent of the investment going into the School of Entrepreneurship is being borne by Mr Vinod Gupta, an alumnus of the IIT. Initially, 30 students will be taken in

World University Rankings

For the first time, no Indian university figures in Britain’s most authoritative league table of the world’s top 200 universities while China is in with six universities revealing a wide gap in higher educational standards between the two competing Asian giants.Other Asian countries with world-class universities are Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea.The Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), which figured regularly in all the previous rankings, since The Times Higher – Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) World University Rankings which began three years ago, have fallen off the map this year partly because of a change in evaluation norms.For this year’s survey, individual IITs were assessed, and not the “IIT system as a whole.” And none of the seven IITs was considered good enough to find a place among the top-ranking world universities.By way of consolation, however, IIT Delhi and IIT Mumbai find mention among the world’s top 50 technology institutions, with the former at 37 and latter at 33 — both way behind China’s Tsinghua University, placed at 16.The six Chinese universities included among the world’s Top 200 are Peking University, Tsinghua University (also listed among the 50 best technology institutions), Fudan University, Nanjing University, the University of Science and Technology of China and Shanghai Jiao Tong University. The survey, which covers 28 countries, confirms the English-speaking world’s dominance in higher education with America and Britain leading the pack. Harvard University tops the league table followed by Cambridge and Oxford at second and third positions respectively. The top 10 universities are all either in U.S. or Britain. FROM-HINDU

DU start course on banking

Delhi University (DU) in collaboration with ICICI Bank is going to start a three-month-long certificate course on banking.The course titled as "Foundation on Banking", would be launched by the Commerce department of the varsity which has recently entered into a partnership with ICICI Bank.The course would be open to those candidates who have secured 50 per cent or more marks in aggregate in their B Com degree.

Earn while they learn

There is a good news for the students of Delhi University as the varsity management is mulling "earn while they learn" programme for its students.undergraduate and postgraduate students will be provided part time jobs within the university set-up while they pursue their studies. They will be given employment for 25 to 30 hours per month.There is a need for students to understand work culture and professionalism while pursuing their academic life.At the same time, this will reduce the monetary burden on their parents, he said, adding that the programme would also protect students from indulging into non-social activities as they won't have leisure time for them.

Patna IIT

Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar expressed hope that the proposed Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Patna, may become functional from the next academic year.Although the building for the Institute was yet to come up, the state government was prepared to provide an alternative building to make the IIT functional from the next academic year. State government was in the process of acquiring 500 acres of land near Bihta, about 30 kms from the state capital, for setting up of the institute.