B-schools at the crossroads

A barrelling economy. Emerging business models that have the international business community keenly watching. At least half a dozen sunrise sectors shooting off the charts. Fastclipping businesses chasing new markets both in India and overseas. Outside-in foreign interest scaling record highs.

The world of Indian business, it appears is in churn - in an enriching kind of way - like never before. That should be scintillating news for the aspiring managerial class. Especially the thousands waiting on the sidelines of India Inc. to dive into jobs that will bring them wealth and respect. Respect which can come through that muchchased stamp of an MBA, a Masters in business administration. A certificate from a business school, or B-school, that will fast-track them through the early decades of what is promised to be India's century.

Here's the list of top 30 B-Schools in India

Hold on. That is the 10,000-foot view. Closer to terra firma, it's a churn of a different kind. One that has business graduates wringing their hands dealing with what hirers call "employability" issues, B-schools changing themselves to reflect the rapidly morphing world of business, recruiters seeking custom-made programmes at management institutes to suit their workplaces and industries, and foreign B-schools gingerly feeling their way in the world's second-fastest growing major economy.

Welcome to the context in which Business Today presents its Best B-schools annual. As much as each of the above factors finds reflection in our rankings, put together with market researcher The Nielsen Co., sometimes it does not seem that way. That may sound confusing but is true.

Rankings reflect the perception of the target audience and the 2010 and 2009 surveys are the best examples of that. In a year of financial meltdown, the value proposition was the top factor at work. Amity Business School, which charged a modest Rs 4 lakh in fees compared with over Rs 10 lakh at the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) and other top tier B-schools, vaulted to the Top 10 list last year for the first time since our surveys began in 1998. It didn't seem to matter that Amity was perceived a clear rung below the aristocracy.

This year the tables have turned, and Amity has come in at No. 27 in the rankings. The snoot club is back in the velvet, thanks to the strength of the economic recovery. And yet, the haute table has its surprises: we have three new place-cards in the 2010 Top 10. The Faculty of Management Studies (FMS) of the University of Delhi has moved seven ranks to No. 4 from No. 11 last year. Sure, FMS is not expensive at all, charging just Rs 10,000 in annual tuition fees, but what about the Indian School of Business (ISB), Hyderabad, which costs nearly Rs 12 lakh for a one-year programme? ISB climbed to No. 7 in 2010 from No. 13 last year.

IIM Indore also makes its way back into the Top 10 after it fell to No. 12 last year. The upward march of these B-schools has pushed Symbiosis Institute of Business Management, Pune, and Jamnalal Bajaj Institute of Management Studies, Mumbai, to No. 13 and No. 14 respectively, from a high No. 4 and No. 5 last year.

IIM Ahmedabad stays overall leader of the Indian B-schools pack by a mile, a position it has maintained for the last eight years. What is the secret sauce that keeps the school ticking? Nose to the grindstone execution, says director Samir K. Barua. "The ability to do the basics of good academic processes right, day after day, year after year, is the reason why IIM-A continues to be able to deliver top quality education," he says.

That courses are delivered on schedule by a competent faculty and programmes are continually updated help, he adds. 'On schedule' and 'competent' could well be the key phrases that set IIM-A - and the top half of the pack - apart from the rest. Otherwise there is no dearth of courses and no shortage of programmes that are on offer from a motley bunch of institutes that range from the third rate to those bordering on the fraudulent. To understand the swirls and eddies that put B-school education at the crossroads in India today, some context is instructive.

As a nation, India produces the highest number of MBAs in the world. If you shrugged at that saying India has more than 1.1 billion people and producing 200,000 MBA graduates is not a big deal, think again. Some estimates put the number of newbie "managers" higher because there are scores of fly-by-night B-schools not certified by the All India Council for Technical Education, or AICTE, a statutory body governing technical and other higher education, or recognised by the University Grants Commission (UGC), which sets standards for university level education.

China has 200 B-schools. India 10 times that with some 2,000 government-certified B-schools awarding MBA degrees, or an equivalent and, often, more valuable diploma versions (like those given by the IIMs). Consulting group Technopak presents a more sophisticated look at the situation. India has nearly 100 management school seats per billion dollars of GDP, compared with about 11 in the US, 13 in Britain and some six in China.

Technopak's estimate of 100 seats per billion dollars of national income in India is based on a conservative 120,000 "production capacity" of MBAs in India. Take that up to the more widely accepted 200,000 number, and it rises to 160 managers for each billion dollars of GDP. And there are no signs of slowing down. Experts reckon that between 150 and 200 new institutes apply to the AICTE for permission to set up B-schools every year.

To be sure, you don't need AICTE or UGC approval to set up a B-school or management institute but do need a green flag from them if you want to award a post graduate degree or tom-tom that your B-schools is "government recognised", a stamp that still is a big draw among management degree aspirants. "A number of institutes are set-up as study centres for distance education degrees. We estimate that capacity is growing up by over 20 per cent every year," says Bharat Gulia, a senior manager tracking education sector at audit and consultancy firm Ernst & Young. "Most B-schools are little more than finishing schools and, that too, poor at it."

The result is that thousands and thousands of business grads being produced are way behind on employability - or the ability to take managerial jobs without heavy doses of training. "While the top 30 to 35 schools churn out good or industry-ready talent, the others struggle to match up. We focus only on the top 25 to 30 schools to meet our staffing needs," says a spokesperson for Infosys Technologies. Preety Kumar, Partner at headhunter Amrop India, says she finds a lot of challenges around B-school grads. "I would any day hire an MA in Economics in place of an MBA who has unrealistic expectations vis-a-vis his skillset," she says.

All this makes for a sweet spot for Nishant Saxena. In an upcoming locality of Gurgaon, south-west of New Delhi, is a nondescript office of Elements Akademia, which runs a chain of finishing schools offering rigorous "employability" training. Among willing takers for its modules are Tier II and Tier III B-schools (Gyan Jyoti Institute of Management, Chandigarh, and Business School of Delhi, Greater Noida, to name two) that are mushrooming all over India.

Saxena, Founder of Elements Akademia and himself an IIM Lucknow alumnus, has not yet started to work with any of the top 50 B-schools in the BT-Nielsen rankings, but that may just be a matter of time - apart from the top four on our list this year, all others have scores below 1 on the zero to five Brand Equity Index that Nielsen, the world's biggest consumer measurement company, uses while arriving at the rankings. E&Y's Gulia predicts a shakeout among B-schools.

At the top B-schools, the challenges are different. In the aftermath of the slowdown - set off on Wall Street by greedy banks and greedier bankers in 2008 - when the ethics of individuals and compensation structures in organisations were put under the scanner, the one question that educators and employers asked was: is there a need to rethink business education? B-schools in the US and Europe have been introspecting on this deeply - Harvard Business School has instituted a Hippocratic Oath for students - and changing how they teach.

So are Indian management institutes. FMS has introduced new syllabus that teaches new modules on corporate social responsibility and ethics. What's taught as part of a course on ethics? Simply, what's the "right" way of doing business: how to replenish value that is extracted from society and how to see beyond just shareholder value. In Gurgaon, Management Development Institute has introduced compulsory papers on ethics and corporate social responsibility across its courses.

IIM Kozhikode has new modules on social transformation in India that talks about how villages work, how rural folk share resources. IIM-K, in fact, wants to be an equal opportunity institute through gender diversity and focus on the underprivileged. "IIMs can't be elitist; the idea is to globalise Indian thought," says Debashis Chatterjee, Director. These changes have a strong connect with B-school rankings. The institutes that make a successful transition meeting new management education needs will be the ones likely to retain or improve their standing. Sunil Rai, CEO of the 15-month-old Mumbai Business School, knows this well and is modelling the institute's programmes on medical colleges. His experience-based approach to B-school pedagogy is based on context of "where to apply, when to apply and how to apply" theoretical concepts in real-life situations, says Rai, former Joint Director at S.P. Jain Institute of Management & Research, Mumbai.

As business education matures in India and recruiters demand new skills, the gap between the top B-schools and those lower down will only widen. There will be a more cross-border selection by wealthy students as the fee differentials slim between Tier-I Indian B-schools and counterparts elsewhere and quality of exposure overseas attracts them.

Even today "getting an MBA in India does not mean that things are cheap," says David Wilson, President and CEO, GMAC, which conducts the Graduate Management Admission Test and counts over 30,000 applicants from India - more than three times the number in 2005. At over $40,000 for a programme "the fee in top-tier B-schools here is comparable to international education costs," he says.

For the larger population of B-school aspirants, the road ahead will mean taking a hard look at returns from their MBA investment. For working executives, it will be mean factoring in the opportunity cost of taking time off from work, even if it is for one year. The truly interested and ambitious manager-aspirant will ask ever tougher questions about the quality of faculty, international affiliations and even the industry-specific courses on offer.

Employability and potential prosperity will out-rank the temptation to go for a quick and easy piece of paper certifying nothing more than another frustrated job-seeker. When the hordes that knock on B-schools' doors begin to make more hardnosed choices, the air will look less turbid.

AMU organises valedictory function

he valedictory function of the 1^st Training of Trainers of UP under the auspices of Comprehensive Child Survival Programme supported by UNICEF and National Rural Health Mission organized by the Department of Pediatrics, Aligarh Muslim University was held today. AMU Registrar, Prof. V. K. Abdul Jaleel was the chief guest while Prof. S. Abrar Hasan, Dean, Faculty of Medicine and Prof. M. Ashraf Malik, Principal and Chief Medical Superintendent graced the programme as guests of honour.

Prof. Jaleel appreciated the efforts of Prof. S. Manazir Ali for bringing such a prestigious resource centre in Department of Pediatrics and congratulated the participants for completing training. He also distributed the certificates of participation to the participants.

There were six senior trainers from Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, Allahabad, Mirzapur and Agra while 25 participants were from Agra, Hathras, Bijnor, J. P. Nagar, Etawa, Firozabad, Lucknow, Kasganj, Rampur and Mahova.

Prof. S. Manazir Ali, Coordinator and Chairman, Department of Paediatrics gave the over view of department and highlighted the projects running in the Department from different funding agencies (UNICEF, NRHM, ICMR, WHO,) to provide better child health care. He pointed out that 22 Lakh children die under age of five years every year in India. It means more than 6000 children every day and more than 250 children every hour die in India. He also mentioned that malnutrition is more common in India than in Sub-Saharan Africa. One in dying every three malnourished children in the world lives in India.

Prof. S. Abrar Hasan and Prof. M. Ashraf Malik also addressed the valedictory function and appreciated the efforts of the Chairman, Department of Pediatric. Prof. Tabassum Shahab, Dr. Farzana Beig and Dr. Zeeba Zakaur Rab from Department of Pediatrics were also present.

The participant and trainers of the programme appreciated the venue of training, hospitality, food, accommodation, transport, clinical cases and beauty of the University.

Could Peak Oil Save The Human Species?

Nobody likes to hear a bleak diagnosis. But without a proper diagnosis, if you have a serious illness, your chances of survival become vanishingly small.

Enter Guy McPherson, conservation biologist, climate scientist and blogger, who despite his gloomy outlook about the prospects for industrial civilization--he thinks it could disappear within his lifetime--regards himself as an optimist. Why? Because back in 2002 after he finished editing a book on global climate change, he concluded that "we had set events in motion that would cause our own extinction, probably by 2030."

But, then he discovered the concept of peak oil and realized that "its consequences might bring the industrial economy to an overdue close, just in time." That development would make it possible for humans to persist on the planet for a considerably longer time by saving the life support systems of the Earth essential to both humans and the other species which humans rely on. Peak oil became a cause for optimism rather than pessimism.

I asked McPherson, who gave a talk this weekend near where I live, what would change his mind about the trajectory of industrial civilization. He answered that the discovery of a miraculous, cheap, easily scalable new energy source would probably allow our current arrangements to persist for a while longer. But such a development would be a death sentence for the human race since it would lead to the total destruction of the life support systems we rely on, systems which are only seriously crippled now. It would result in further population overshoot, resource depletion including that of soil and water, and further destruction of species we rely on for our well-being.

He likened what we are doing now to constructing an extra floor on the top of a 30-story brick structure using bricks pulled from the lower floors. We are engaging in the "world's largest game of Jenga" with the building blocks of our existence.

He says the emerging collapse of our modern living arrangements is not a recent phenomenon, but actually an ongoing process. He traces it back to the oil crises of the 1970s which were the beginning of the end. The key metric in his view is a peak in per capita oil consumption in 1979. McPherson says he would not be surprised if the endgame for industrial civilization plays out very quickly given the long period of stress both human society and the biosphere have been under for the last generation.

As a response he suggests focusing on four things: water, food, maintaining proper body temperature, and community. Water and food are obvious needs, but many of us don't think about whether the climate we live in will allow us to maintain proper body temperature. We have central heating and air conditioning to help us with that. But when such amenities are not available, the climate where we live will become crucial to our well-being and comfort.

By community he means building ties of mutual support with one's neighbors. "There ain't no lone rangers in collapse," McPherson explained. "If you look for ways to serve your community, you've got a good life ahead." His model is Monticello (minus the slaves) where "agriculture was the center of commerce and therefore the center of life."

As part of his own preparations he lives on land at moderate elevation with deep soils and easily accessible water. He grows food and raises goats for milk. The area is already populated by what he calls "life-loving economic doomers" who do not need to be convinced that industrial civilization is coming to an end. Mutual assistance is a way of life. Practical concerns trump philosophical and religious differences.

To do all this McPherson left his position as a tenured professor. He says at the beginning he knew practically nothing about how to provide the necessities for himself. "I could barely distinguish between a zucchini and a screwdriver," he explained. Now, he's milking goats, making cheese, growing vegetables and performing myriad our tasks necessary to a more localized existence, one that does not rely so heavily on the far-flung logistical networks of the globalized economy.

He doesn't call what he's doing "sustainable," a term which, he said, has even been co-opted by Wal-Mart. Instead, he refers to it as "durable," meaning he is trying to build a way of life that will outlive industrial civilization. He said his cosseted existence as an academic did little to prepare him for what he is doing now. But precisely because of this he is convinced that "if I can do this, anyone can do this."

And, in the manner of a principled prophet on a lonely mission, he soldiers on each day trying to help others build a durable way of life before it's too late.

The Truth Will Set U.S. Free: Breaking Israel 's Stranglehold Over American Foreign Policy

If Israel 's stranglehold over U.S. foreign policy is to be broken, Americans will need to be informed about the harm that Washington 's unconditional support for the Jewish state is doing to American interests, say leading analysts of U.S.-Israeli relations.

According to John J. Mearsheimer , co-author of The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy , “The only plausible way to weaken the lobby's influence on U.S. foreign policy is for prominent policymakers and opinion-makers to speak openly about the damage the special relationship is doing to the American national interest.” 

“Plenty of people in the United States , especially inside the Beltway, know that Israel is an albatross around America 's neck,” says Mearsheimer, the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago . “But they are afraid to stand up and say that for fear that the lobby will attack them and damage their careers.” 

“Hopefully, some of them will develop a backbone,” he adds. 

Philip Giraldi , executive director of the Council for the National Interest , believes that Tel Aviv's stranglehold over Washington can be broken “only by directly challenging the power of the Israel lobby and the false narrative about how it is of value to the United States .”  

Giraldi, a contributing editor to The American Conservative , says that “it must be done from the bottom up as Israel cannot be challenged in the mainstream media, Congress, and in the White House .” 

“ The American people must learn that Israel is and always has been a strategic liability that has done immense damage to the United States and its worldwide interests,” concludes the former CIA officer. 

If there is to be an end to Israel's decades-long “sway over Congress and intimidating presidents,” says Jeffrey Blankfort, a prominent Jewish American critic of Israel and its American lobby, “it will require appeals and actions beginning on a local level that inform the American people not so much about what Israel has done to the Palestinians but what its unregistered agents in the U.S., euphemistically described as ‘lobbyists,' have done to destroy what little is left of American democracy and the attendant costs in flesh and blood, as well as its tax dollars.” 

A long-time pro-Palestinian activist noted for his trenchant critique of Noam Chomsky , Blankfort attributes the failure of such efforts to get off the ground to “the continued unwillingness of the leading figures of the Palestinian solidarity movement in the U.S. to acknowledge the invidious power of the Zionist Lobby,” who, following Chomsky's anti-imperialist analysis, prefer to “place the primary responsibility for Israel's crimes and U.S. Middle East policies at Washington's doorstep.” 

“So the first steps,” Blankfort suggests, “may be to publicly challenge these figures while at the same time moving past them and addressing the American people directly.” 

No American President will ever have enough latitude to resolve the conflict in Palestine “unless and until enough Americans are informed enough to make their democracy work,” according to Alan Hart, former Middle East Chief Correspondent for Britain 's Independent Television News. 

“In other words,” explains Hart, who was also a BBC Panorama presenter specializing in the Middle East, “if President Obama or any of his successors is ever going to be free to confront and defeat the Zionist lobby's stooges in Congress and the mainstream media, there has got to be created a constituency of understanding about why it is not in America's own best interests to go on supporting Zionism 's monster child right or wrong.”

The essence of the problem, Hart argues in the three-volume American edition of his bookZionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews , is that “Americans have been conditioned, brainwashed, to believe a version of history, Zionism's version, which is a pack of propaganda lies.”

Jeff Gates, former counsel to the U.S. Senate Committee on Finance, believes that “transparency, accountability and better design” are required to break Israel 's hold on American foreign policy. 

“At present, the American public is ignorant of Israel 's all-pervasive influence. Its control includes the media-enabled deployment of fixed intelligence to induce this nation to war for Greater Israel ,” says Gates, author of Guilt By Association: How Deception and Self-Deceit Took America to War . 

“We will know that accountability is underway when we see federal grand juries convened to consider charges against Israel 's agents, assets and sayanim (volunteers). When a jury brings in the first verdict for treason, Americans will know that the rule of law is being restored. We will know that a solution is within sight when the many appendages of its lobby are required to register as foreign agents.”

The Collapse Of Western Morality

Yes, I know, as many readers will be quick to inform me, the West never had any morality. Nevertheless things have gotten worse.

In hopes that I will be permitted to make a point, permit me to acknowledge that the US dropped nuclear bombs on two Japanese cities, fire-bombed Tokyo, that Great Britain and the US fire-bombed Dresden and a number of other German cities, expending more destructive force, according to some historians, against the civilian German population than against the German armies, that President Grant and his Civil War war criminals, Generals Sherman and Sheridan, committed genocide against the Plains Indians, that the US today enables Israel’s genocidal policies against the Palestinians, policies that one Israeli official has compared to 19th century US genocidal policies against the American Indians, that the US in the new 21st century invaded Iraq and Afghanistan on contrived pretenses, murdering countless numbers of civilians, and that British prime minister Tony Blair lent the British army to his American masters, as did other NATO countries, all of whom find themselves committing war crimes under the Nuremberg standard in lands in which they have no national interests, but for which they receive an American pay check.

I don’t mean these few examples to be exhaustive. I know the list goes on and on. Still, despite the long list of horrors, moral degradation is reaching new lows. The US now routinely tortures prisoners, despite its strict illegality under US and international law, and a recent poll shows that the percentage of Americans who approve of torture is rising. Indeed, it is quite high, though still just below a majority.

And we have what appears to be a new thrill: American soldiers using the cover of war to murder civilians. Recently American troops were arrested for murdering Afghan civilians for fun and collecting trophies such as fingers and skulls.

This revelation came on the heels of Pfc. Bradley Manning’s alleged leak of a US Army video of US soldiers in helicopters and their controllers thousands of miles away having fun with joy sticks murdering members of the press and Afghan civilians. Manning is cursed with a moral conscience that has been discarded by his government and his military, and Manning has been arrested for obeying the law and reporting a war crime to the American people.

US Rep. Mike Rogers, a Republican, of course, from Michigan, who is on the House Subcommittee on Terrorism, has called for Manning’s execution. According to US Rep. Rogers it is an act of treason to report an American war crime.

In other words, to obey the law constitutes “treason to America.”

US Rep. Rogers said that America’s wars are being undermined by “a culture of disclosure” and that this “serious and growing problem” could only be stopped by the execution of Manning.

If Rep. Rogers is representative of Michigan, then Michigan is a state that we don’t need.

The US government, a font of imperial hubris, does not believe that any act it commits, no matter how vile, can possibly be a war crime. One million dead Iraqis, a ruined country, and four million displaced Iraqis are all justified, because the “threatened” US Superpower had to protect itself from nonexistent weapons of mass destruction that the US government knew for a fact were not in Iraq and could not have been a threat to the US if they were in Iraq.

When other countries attempt to enforce the international laws that the Americans established in order to execute Germans defeated in World War II, the US government goes to work and blocks the attempt. A year ago on October 8, the Spanish Senate, obeying its American master, limited Spain’s laws of universal jurisdiction in order to sink a legitimate war crimes case brought against George W. Bush, Barack H. Obama, Tony Blair,and Gordon Brown.

The West includes Israel, and there the horror stories are 60 years long. Moreover, if you mention any of them you are declared to be an anti-semite. I only mention them in order to prove that I am not anti-American, anti-British, and anti-NATO, but am simply against war crimes. It was the distinguished Zionist Jewish Judge, Goldstone, who produced the UN report indicating that Israel committed war crimes when it attacked the civilian population and civilian infrastructure of Gaza. For his efforts, Israel declared the Zionist Goldstone to be “a self-hating Jew,” and the US Congress, on instruction from the Israel Lobby, voted to disregard the Goldstone Report to the UN.

As the Israeli official said, we are only doing to the Palestinians what the Americans did to the American Indians.

The Israeli army uses female soldiers to sit before video screens and to fire by remote control machine guns from towers to murder Palestinians who come to tend their fields within 1500 meters of the inclosed perimeter of Ghetto Gaza. There is no indication that these Israeli women are bothered by gunning down young children and old people who come to tend to their fields.

If the crimes were limited to war and the theft of lands, perhaps we could say it is a case of jingoism sidetracking traditional morality, otherwise still in effect.

Alas, the collapse of morality is too widespread. Some sports teams now have a win-at-all-cost attitude that involves plans to injure the star players of the opposing teams. To avoid all these controversies, let’s go to Formula One racing where 200 mph speeds are routine.

Prior to 1988, 22 years ago, track deaths were due to driver error, car failure, and poorly designed tracks compromised with safety hazards. World Champion Jackie Stewart did much to improve the safety of tracks, both for drivers and spectators. But in 1988 everything changed. Top driver Ayrton Senna nudged another top driver Alain Prost toward a pit wall at 190 mph. According to AutoWeek (August 30, 2010), nothing like this had been seen before. “Officials did not punish Senna’s move that day in Portugal, and so a significant shift in racing began.” What the great racing driver Stirling Moss called “dirty driving” became the norm.

Nigel Roebuck in AutoWeek reports that in 1996 World Champion Damon Hill said that Senna’s win-at-all-cost tactic “was responsible for fundamental change in the ethics of the sport.” Drivers began using “terrorist tactics on the track.” Damon Hill said that “the views that I’d gleaned from being around my dad [twice world champion Graham Hill] and people like him, I soon had to abandon,” because you realized that no penalty was forthcoming against the guy who tried to kill you in order that he could win.

When asked about the ethics of modern Formula One racing, American World Champion Phil Hill said: “Doing that sort of stuff in my day was just unthinkable. For one thing, we believed certain tactics were unacceptable.”

In today’s Western moral climate, driving another talented driver into the wall at 200 mph is just part of winning. Michael Schumacher, born in January 1969, is a seven times World Champion, an unequaled record. On August 1 at the Hungarian Grand Prix, AutoWeek Reports that Schumacher tried to drive his former Ferrari teammate, Rubens Barrichello, into the wall at 200 mph speeds.

Confronted with his attempted act of murder, Schumacher said: “This is Formula One. Everyone knows I don’t give presents.”

Neither does the US government, nor state and local governments, nor the UK government, nor the EU.

The deformation of the police, which many Americans, in their untutored existence as naive believers in “law and order,” still think are “on their side,” has taken on new dimensions with the police militarized to fight “terrorists” and “domestic extremists.”

The police have been off the leash since the civilian police boards were nixed by the conservatives. Kids as young as 6 years old have been handcuffed and carted off to jail for school infractions that may or may not have occurred. So have moms with a car full of children (see, for example, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AaSLERx0VM ).

Anyone who googles videos of US police gratuitous brutality will call up tens of thousands of examples, and this is after laws that make filming police brutality a felony. A year or two ago such a search would call up hundreds of thousands of videos.

In one of the most recent of the numerous daily acts of gratuitous police abuse of citizens, an 84-year-old man had his neck broken because he objected to a night time towing of his car. The goon cop body-slammed the 84-year old and broke his neck. The Orlando, Florida, police department says that the old man was a “threat” to the well-armed much younger police goon, because the old man clenched his fist.

Americans will be the first people sent straight to Hell while thinking that they are the salt of the earth. The Americans have even devised a title for themselves to rival that of the Israelis’ self-designation as “God’s Chosen People.” The Americans call themselves “the indispensable people.”

CBSE to introduce psychological aptitude test

In order to assess the ability of students, the CBSE will introduce a psychological aptitude test for class X on the lines of similar exams held in other parts of the world. CBSE will hold this exam under Students Global Aptitude Index (SGAI).

CBSE''s SGAI incharge Rama Sharma said, "The exam will be held for class X and the first paper might be on January 15, 2011. The interested students have to pay Rs 100 to appear in the exam.

" The main aim of holding the exam is to know about the students'' interest, their psychology and their skill levels, Sharma said. This exam is based on a scientific index which will tell about the interest of students.

On the basis of findings of the test, the students can choose the subject of their interest in class XI, Sharma said, adding that such exams take place at school levels in US and UK. With this exam, the students would be able to self-assess and teachers can make positive communication with them, Sharma said. The written exam, which will be held for two or two-and-a-half hours, will assess the student''s scientific, numeric, social, behavioural, art aptitude and personality.

Several workshops regarding the exam has been held in Delhi, Bhopal, Bhubneshwar, Hyderabad, Chandigarh and Mumbai. On the basis of workshops, response has been demanded from schools.

Some-rivers-stable-after-zero-rains-butYamuna-still-on-swell

Zero rains in Uttaranchal hills on Sunday helped to stabilise the rising water levels of Gang Naher and Kosi rivers which have wreaked havoc in west UP, much to the relief of lakhs of people affected by flood. However, the unrelenting Yamuna continued to swell on Sunday. Meanwhile, the rising water levels of Kalandri hit the outermost boundary walls of Taj Mahal in Agra after submerging the entire lush green landscape of Mehtab Bagh. A masterpiece of the Mughal era, Mehtab Bagh too draws large number of tourists from India and abroad. 

Farrukhabad continued to be the worst-hit district in the state as the rising water levels of the Ganga left the authorities with no option but to rope-in the army for the relief and rescue operations on Sunday. Some areas of Kanpur have also been marooned by the increasing levels of the Ganga. 

At some places, flood waters have submerged roads in five feet deep waters in Kasganj Nibiya village of Patiyali. The rising flood waters entered the main hall of Kailash Mandir early on Sunday evening. The district administration has opened a relief camp on ITI Baljkeshwar campus due to continued discharge from Okhla, Gokul and Tajewala dams. 

In Mathura, flood waters entered the villages of Shergarh, Nauhjheel, Baldeo and its adjoining villages apart from the Parikrama Marg, Jaisinghpura and Khadar localities. After submerging the entire staircase of Bangalighat, flood waters have even spilled onto the main road. 

As much as two to three feet of flood waters have engulfed the Gopi Udhav Samwad Sthal, Lalbabu Mandir, Radhawallabh Mandir and Katyani Mandir in Gyangudri area of Vrindavan. 

The raging rivers on Sunday claimed two more lives. A woman Karamwati (35) drowned after slipping into the deep waters in Mathura while a youth drowned in Farrukhabad after slipping into a well. 

Meanwhile, the state government on Saturday evening claimed to have engaged 240 motorised and manually steered boats along with scores of men from the Provincial Armed Constabulary (PAC) and National Disaster Relief Force (NDRF). A total of 8108 people were attended to by doctors at various relief camps. Senior minister Naseemuddin Siddiqui surveyed the flood-hit areas on Sunday as well and held meetings with senior district officials. He issued directions to step up relief and rescue operations in areas where they were found to be lagging.