OrissaMatters

Suchismita Pattanayak

India is a democracy. Democracy depends upon informed participation of citizens in control and management of the affairs the nation. For informed participation it is essential that the citizens should be able to receive, perceive, interpret and share information. Audio reception of information would not help; because there could be such information, which should need juxtaposition with related information and with relevant documents as otherwise the same information may mislead. Newspapers and journals, which are important sources of information are usually available in print ad one must be able to read in order to receive information through the print media. Another important source of is the internet through which news portals are available. But again, to receive information through the news portals, one is to read. Indian constitution has made provisions for statutory audit of government expenditures so that the peoples can be informed of how the administration executes its responsibilities. The statutory audits are conducted by the Chief Accountant General and the reports thereof are placed before the Parliament and the respective Assemblies and then the citizenry is expected to watch the official actions on these reports. But to do this the audit reports and action taken reports are to be read. In order to help people receive whatever information they need to evaluate official action in depth, Right to Information Act has been framed and enforced in India. But to know as to which would be helpful information in this regards and to know as to what information emanates, one is to read. On the other hand, watching administration is not the whole thing in life of a person and in life of a nation. People must know the history of their land to understand how the society has evolved so that a better society may be built up. They are to read history. The same is in respect of tradition and culture and literature and Laws. The same is also applicable to areas of industry and agriculture, trade and commerce; cooperation and civil administration. So one is to read to rise to become a responsible citizen for making the country a better place to live in.

Illiterates cannot read. Therefore illiteracy needs to be eliminated. Schools have the most major and relevant role in this respect.

Despite planned approach to eliminate illiteracy, literacy has not grown as expected.
Orissa may be cited as an example.

An average of figures indicated by various agencies indicate that 70 per cent of Orissa’s Schedule caste and Schedule Tribe people constituting 43 percent of her population are illiterate. 30 percent of OBC that constitutes 50 percent of Orissa’s population is also illiterate.

Incentives like midday meals and free textbooks etc are failing to stop the flow of school dropouts.

WHY IT IS SO?

Unemployment and lack of the scope of employment of parents is the most major cause of children of school-going age not at all going to schools and dropping out of schools. The ever-increasing numbers of child labor is indicative of this.

In most of the cases, poor children act as babysitters in their huts at the behest of their parents who in search of daily wages acquiesce into drudgery or in search of food, rush into jungles leaving the tiny kids in the care of elder babies. This unavoidable babysitting pushes children of poor families into illiteracy in rural areas.

It is also remarkable that lack of confidence in children of poor families is also a factor of illiteracy. The poor children are often not encouraged to mingle with school children belonging to advantaged families. Thereby a sort of inferior feeling gets injected into their psyche and they fail to acquire courage to aspire for education. This negative trend also spreads illiteracy.

WHAT WILL HAPPEN IF THE TREND CONTINUES?

Unless this trend is stopped, Indian democracy will be in serious doldrums. As the children shaken by the feeling of inferiority would grow, the psychological gap between them and the advantages children will grow. India can never be a country of equals at least in feeling for the country. It would end up in class wars.

On the other hand, democracy will never get informed participation, as most of the major citizens, bereft of ability to read and receive and analyze information relating to nation building, shall limit their activities to casting their uninformed votes. So majority participation in Indian democracy would be unconcerned participation and that would never be good for the country’s health.

Educated people can manage their hearths and health by themselves without being dependants on the state on every occasion, which the illiterate people can’t. As the global scenario indicates, state role will be diminished in societal management. In that condition, educated people may overcome hurdles and manage themselves. Uneducated people will perish and consequently become the society’s worst detractions.

So, it is time, the advantaged people must address themselves to elimination of illiteracy and for availability of education to all.

WHAT SHOULD BE DONE?

In this respect, Schools have the best role to play.

The Society should encourage the schools to educate their pupils to cultivate fellow feeling for the disadvantaged children.

Every student should be encouraged to adopt a poor child of his locality to literate him or her. As age factor would eliminate the communication gap between them, it would give a positive opportunity to educate the disadvantaged child.

Schools may make this essential role of a student a part of examinational incentives so that every student who makes a child of his locality literate would be rewarded with higher marks are certificates of excellence. What the mid day meals etc are unable to generate – in study aptitude – the students of the schools can do, even as they shall be, thereby, growing as responsible citizens, highly concerned for fellow beings of the society.

The schools, on the other hand, can press its faculty and library to help the environment of mutual trust and cooperation grow in the field of education.

Holidays and vacations may be best used for generation of contact between the school and the members of the society and a collective endeavor to make every body educated may be generated for all round development of all.

But would the planners and intellectuals interact and help how the process should be formulated?

Subhas Chandra Pattanayak

Sciencedom is agog with arrival of a new era. This is the era of controlled application of electricity. But that an Orissa-born scientist, Dr. Asoka Misra is the father of this era is yet to be acknowledged.

Low-intensity electric fields can disrupt the division of cancer cells and slow the growth of brain tumors, suggest laboratory experiments and a small human trial, raising hopes that electric fields will become a new weapon for stalling the progression of cancer, reports the August 2007 issue of Physics Today, the flagship magazine of the American Institute of Physics, highlighting a research, performed by an international team led by Yoram Palti of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa.

Deep Brain Stimulation, that facilitates resurrection of vegetative patients, reported in Nature, and conveyed by The Telegrapgh, 13 August, 2007, is claimed to be a technique that uses the minutest quantities of electric current supplied through electrodes drilled deep inside the brain with millimeter accuracy.

Biomolecular recognition in DNA with better resolution is claimed to be possible through a technique called electro deposition technique that pivots on use of Cadmium Selenium (CdSe) which is a semi-conductor, as shown online 16 Jan.2007 under the caption Biomolecular Recognition in DNA tagged CdSe nanowires, Sarangi et.al.

International industrial giant Philips has claimed to have invented fluidfocus lenses, the technique of which is counter-claimed by a France firm Varioptics. But the method common to both is controlled application of electricity.

A current of two-thousandth of an ampere of electricity applied for 20 minutes is enough to produce a significant improvement in enhancing verbal skills, reports Nature News online quoting a study by Meenakshi Iyer of National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke in Bethesda, Maryland. (The Telegraph, 1 Nov.2004)

Many more utilities with promises to usher in hitherto unknown advantages for human society like Sperm Filter to fight infertility (The Reuters, 5 Jan.2005), Deep-brain-Stimulation to allow the surgeon to neuro-navigate through the brain to the nearest millimeter for tackling Parkinsons or Alzheimers syndromes, Flexy-gadgets as conceived by researchers at Sony Tokyo Lab to Flexi-display in ads to Electric specs with adjustable focus (Science News, 2006), are a few of what are in store.

Controlled application of electricity is the life spring of all these techno-achievements

If all these achievements, present and future, metamorphose into a new era of technology, Dr. Asoka Misra, a scientist born in Dhenkanal of Orissa, should be aptly acknowledged as the father of this era.

He is the first scientist to have invented the method of controlled application of electricity to interfere into the structure of a matter in order to manipulate its character into a desired state, which was first published in the referral journal of United States of America, The Metallurgical Transactions A in 1985 proceeding eventually into publication of his conclusive determination in the February 1986 issue of the same journal under the caption, Misra Technique. His invention has been patented vide US Patent No.5,253,696 dated 19th October, 1993. And, in patenting the method of controlled application of electricity, expressed in the patent as method for controlling solidification of metals and other materials, Dr. Misra is the first in the world. His method has been referred to and relied upon in registration of later patents in USA.

It is marked that after publication of Misra Technique in 1985-86 and specifically after his technique was available for public perusal consequent upon registration of his patent in 1993, controlled application of electricity has become a sure process in shaping of various innovations that has given birth to a new era in the Sciencedom.

Honesty prevailing, Dr. Mishra deserves to be acknowledged as the father of the era of controlled application of electricity in scientific innovations as these are post-patency his method.

[Dr. Asoka Misra, did his M.S. in Metallurgical Engineering in 1972 as well as Ph.D. in Physical Metallurgy in 1975 at Polytechnic University of New York, USA and was a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Rutgers University, New Jersey, USA, from 1977 to 78. During his Doctoral but prior to Post-Doctoral period he also worked as Quality Control Engineer, Clinton Engines Corp, Iowa, USA from 1975 to 1977. After Rutgers, he joined IIT, Kharagpur as Assistant Professor in Metallurgical Engineering in 1979 wherefrom he proceeded in 1991 to New York for two years in a scientific quest. In intervening period of 1986-87, he worked as Visiting Fellow at the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden.
However, on leaving USA in 1993, he thought of helping Orissa grow in Technical education and joined O.E.C. as Principal in 1993. Since then he has steered several Engineering Colleges of Orissa as Principal including BIET, Bhadrak / ITER, Bhubaneswar / GHITM, Puri / SSECT, Balasore / KIST, Jatni / NMIET, Bhubaneswar before accepting the present assignment at KEC, Bhubaneswar.
He has four inventions to his credit out of which, two inventions are named after him and known as (1) Misra Technique and (2) Misra Random Rotation Technique. Misra Technique that forms the crux of this report has been patented in USA in 1993.]

The Rajiv Gandhi Forum has felicitated Dr. Asoka Misra, eminent techno-academician, with The Best Scientist-2007 Award in a special function held in the IDCOL Auditorium at Bhubaneswar in the evening of August 20 marking the 63rd birth anniversary of the late Prime Minister of India.

Dr. Misra is the inventor and founder of Misra Technique that has revolutionized the world of science with the safest process of application of electric power in transformation of character of a medium in ever-newer avenues beginning from instrumental lenses to human limbs to the benefit of society. His technique has filled up a gap on the way of innovations that the scientists of the world had long been in dire need. Patented in USA, his invention has been referred to in various subsequent patents.

Dr. Ratnakar Pandey, a close associate of Rajiv Gandhi during his lifetime had joined the function as the Chief Guest and felicitated Dr. Mishra in the packed-to-the-capacity hall.

Formerly a member of the faculty at IIT,Kharagpur, Prof. Misra has enriched many techno- institutes of Orissa with his expertise as an academic-administrator after returning home from USA and is presently the Principal of N.M.Institute of Engineering & Technology, Bhubaneswar.

Happy news!

Prof. Abani Kumar Baral has completed seventy-four years, major part dedicated to didactics as well as to the cause of the teaching community.

Founder of Teachers Movement in Orissa, he continues as Secretary general of All Orissa Federation of Teachers Organizations besides being the Vice-President of FISE, the World Body of Teachers. But he is not limited to his organizational responsibilities. He is marked for unique contributions to the philosophy of systematization of the teachers organizations and connection thereof to world efforts against exploitation.

A teacher par excellence in Oriya literature, he has authored more than twenty books.

A paragon of progressive outlook, Prof. Baral belongs to that section of human society, to which struggle for others emancipation is more attractive than personal benefits.

Orissamatters.com and its sister sites join innumerable admirers in extending all the best wishes to Prof. Baral on this happy day.

Subhas Chandra Pattanayak

Politicians, who have, by assuring our peoples to safeguard their interests, got their votes; but once in power, have willfully forgotten their pledge, and have collectively strangulated Orissa, now know that the silent victims of their misrule will silently terminate their existence in power. Therefore they need a way to escape.

The only way that seems safer to them is instigating the inhabitants of Orissa against the Central government, run by another political set-up, on concocted charges of conspiracy against our soil, a solid litany being for the IIT.

When Agami Odisha, a supposedly non-political organization of intellectuals is eager to spread its campaign into our villages raising slogans against the central government for having stopped coming of an IIT to Orissa, the BJD-BJP combine has resolved to equip their cadres with the misleading potency of this campaign, which, they know, can click, as the gullible pubic, unlikely to believe them, shall have no problem in believing in an apolitical intellectual forum.

It cannot be said that this coincidence in campaign for IIT by a non-political body and the politicians in power is not deliberate and taking into accounts how the aforesaid organization has proudly allowed its forum to be used by the politicians of Orissas ruling combine to castigate the central government on different occasions in the past, it cannot be accepted that it is not being used as a mask by Naveen. Therefore, emphasis on IIT at this juncture is more harmful to Orissa than any so far.

If we correctly remember our campaign for NISc, when eminent senior citizens marked for their excellent contributions to Orissa in various fields, preferred a written demand to government of India, the friends, whose harping on IIT is getting dovetailed with Naveens campaign against the central government, had made the propaganda that the Vajpayee government had given the NISc to Orissa but the Man Mohan Singh government has gifted it away to Bengal. We all had known that this was contrary to the actual.

In fact, an international seminar on science education held in 1996 under auspices of UNESCO had stressed on building up of institutes of sciences of international standard with emphasis on their balance distribution within respective geographical limits of the participating countries. India being a signatory to this resolution, in normal course of administration, decided to establish four National Institutes of Sciences in four parts of the country including one at Bhubaneswar in Orissa. So the Vajpayee government and the NDA had no role in conceiving NISc for Orissa. Rather, it is Vajpayee administration and NDA that had rendered this conception inconsequential.

Placing this on records, I had noted in orissamatters.com that, records show that there was stiff objection to put one of the said NIScs at Bhubaneswar. The Bengali lobby, as is its wont, had whipped up this controversy. But the UGC had rejected the Bengali pressure and declared that when expansion of such institutes would be taken up in course of time, the demand for one at Kolkata might be considered.

Thereafter, Vajpayees government had slept over the decision.

This was because, Vajpayee was unwilling to dissatisfy the Bengalis. His inner courtyard was murmuring under footsteps of a Bengali projected as his son-in-law who was observed as a facilitator by segments in the media. Mamata Banerjee, who leads a regional party of Bengal, was close to Vajpayee. There was no impossibility therefore to put a stymie on proceeding of the NISc.

Whatever be the motive, the fact was that even though NISc was a concept of UNESCO, and the UGC, in which planning to funding of higher education is vested under the law, had lawfully drawn up the plan and determined the location of four NIScs in four befitting regional nerve-centers, the Vajpayee government had preferred slough over the scheme as and after the Bengali pressure was turned down by the UGC.

When this is the fact, the podium of Agami Odisha was used to tom-tom that the NISc was the contribution of NDA to Orissa; but because Orissa rejected UPA, Man Mohan Singh has diverted it to Bengal. This false propaganda was coined and spread deliberately, so that the Naveen Patnaik government that had blatantly failed to bring the NISc to Orissa because its priority was not on science education but on distribution of land and mines to non-oriyas in lieu of what the Judeo tapes have given glimpse of, could escape criticism.

The same motive is now conspicuous in the campaign for IIT.

If political use of apolitical concerns of intellectuals is allowed, it is proper to oppose this campaign.

On the other hand, for Orissa, an IIT is not the essential requirement. The essential requirement is irrigation to her cultivable lands. Some of the friends including former chief secretary of Orissa Mr. Sahadev Sahoo have reacted to my previous discussion with the arguement that IIT is to be funded by the central government and irrigation by the state government. So demand for IIT should not be seen as an impediment to irrigation, they have stressed. To me, which sector is funded by which of the governments – central and state – is not the issue.

The issue is: which is essential for Orissa? IIT or irrigation?

There could be no two opinion on the fact that whichever is of primary utility to the people is essential.

Irrigation is of primary utility and hence irrigation is essential.

Naveen Patnaiks government has neglected this essential need.

Its schizophrenic eagerness to embrace and keep imperialists pleased is so oblivious of peoples primary requirement, that, unless commons are helped to pursue a demand for irrigation single-mindedly, Orissa will perish forever. Therefore, there is necessity of keeping the mass mind concentrated on demand for water to every inch of cultivable land and from this demand attention should not be allowed to be diverted to any other agenda.

As I note, peoples have started agitating against supply of river water to industries as they are now subjected to acute shortage of drinking water. Peoples have started agitating against use of underground water by industries as that renders their wells in adjoining villages empty. People have started agitating against pollution of their rivers by industries as that makes them bereft of useable water. People have started looking sternly at their misfortune of distress-selling their products, even their babies and their bodies, with determination to find out the factors behind their wretched poverty. And, slowly but steadily they are understanding that they are unable to get rid of poverty, because their lands are lying barren due to non-availability of water. And, they are rushing into the last limit of tolerance.

As a conscious member of my community, I stand with these disadvantaged fellow beings and I suggest that the elite of us should not confuse our people with projection of IIT as the panacea.

Every design that may divert mass attention from the essential requirement to a non-essential ancillary of industry like the IIT needs to be defeated.