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I reviewed NEP 2020 guidelines thoroughly to understand what new Indian education system would look like and the first thing I liked about NEP 2020 is that it opened a new sphere of innovation and research into our society. The new policy strongly encourages and values the acquisition of practical knowledge. It has been a couple of decades since Indian Education System is heavily criticised for being theoretical and now with the advent of NEP 2020 it might be able to repair the cracks that have been dripping for years.I won’t be able to cover all the pros and cons of the policy but I will definitely try to help you gain an insight into the bigger part of it.Let us have a look at the bright side (PROS) of NEP 2020:NEP 2020 REFORMS AT SCHOOL LEVELAt the school level, NEP 2020 has changed the 10+2 system to 5+3+3+4 system. The new policy is focused on inculcating Higher-Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) into students and thereby achieve the goal of making 50% of learners through the education system to have exposure to vocational education by 2035.FOUNDATION STAGE (3ys. of pre-school + Grades 1-2)Familiarise better with school environment early onGiven the advancement in technology, the right age to enrol children in school has changed over the years. Many parents feel that their children are maturing earlier; they are ready to go to school earlier. NEP 2020 caters the need by making a provision for children of age 3 to get enrolled in pre-school for 3 years and by the age of 5 they will be promoted to grade 1. ECCE will be delivered through a new curriculum as well as a play- and activity-based instruction. No exams will be conducted until grade 2.PREPARATORY STAGE (Grades 3-5)Focus on basic life skills: Numeracy and LiteracyBasic numeracy and literacy skills will be emphasised from grade 3 to 5. Literacy and numeracy are not just about words & numbers. Creating own ideas, decoding the information, understanding the instructions are a part of literacy and numeracy. These are the life skills that make children more aware of their immediate environment. They need to use these skills everywhere.MIDDLE STAGE (Grades 6-8)Route imagination to ideas through codingCoding will be introduced from grade 6 onwards. One of the best reasons to include coding as a part of the curriculum is to make the students feel that they get to be inventors. Learning to code is not about becoming a software developer; it is about equipping students to make the things they can imagine and to bring their ideas to life.Gain practical knowledge through diverse vocational internshipsRight from grade 6 students would have to do internships in vocational training jobs such as carpentry, metal work, electric work, artistry, pottery making, gardening, etc. as proposed by the policy. This will help them to gain interest in extracurricular fields that had never been explored by school education earlier.SECONDARY STAGE (Grades 9-12)Liberty to choose subjects of interest to increase motivationStudents won’t have to select from arts, humanities and commerce when they reach grade 10. From grade 9, the new education policy gives liberty to students to study across the humanities, commerce, sciences, sports, and vocational subjects. It will keep the students’ best interests at heart by allowing them to choose their subjects and to thereby help them have the dedication to succeed.Application-based core competencies check examsGrade 10 board exams and Grade 12 board exams will be remodelled to test primarily “core capacities, competencies rather than months of coaching or rote-memorisation”. Application-based questions which are more competency-based, promote learning and development and test higher-order thinking skills, such as analysis, conceptual clarity and critical thinking.360-degree report card: An amplified reflection to oneselfThe report cards will no longer indicate progress by tracking students back to textbooks. The assessment will be done through a “multidimensional report” of students appearing for their Board exams. Extracurricular activities like sketching, painting etc. will also be a part of the progress report of the students. The report card will not be evaluated by the teacher alone, but parents, classmates, and the students themselves will become the active participants in the evaluation process. It will provide students with valuable information on their areas of interest, strengths, and needed areas of focus.NEP 2020 REFORMS AT COLLEGE LEVELNEP leads with three profound changes at college level that will bring the most useful tactics to break free from the tunnel vision of restricted student potential:Study in the desired discipline to make optimal career choicesNEP 2020 offers flexibility to choose the subjects across the different disciplines. Students won’t have to opt for regular B.Sc, B.Com or B.A program. They will be free to custom make their own graduation discipline. They will only have to opt for the course duration, i.e. 1 year certificate, 2 years diploma, 3 years degree or 4 years research credit. This will support students to be their best selves in a way that had not been enabled before.Provision to change when one needs a changeMultiple entry and exit program of the policy makes it easier for one to study at their own pace. Let’s say if students have lost interest after completing 1st year of graduation in their stream, they can transfer their credits to a different stream of their choice and continue 2nd year onwards in the same. In another case, if students drop out after completing their 1st year of graduation, they can store their credits in a digital locker and access whenever they want to resume their studies.Access to the best quality education hub in the countryBy opening the gates to top foreign universities in India, the new policy grounds the students in their home country. With the coexistence of foreign universities, the norms of education will be standardised and made better in the light of each other. There are many other reforms in the policy which promises quality in higher education.CONS OF NEP 2020There is nothing perfect in our world. Even most of our medicines come with their side effects. Needless to mention that NEP 2020 would have some counter effects and demerits as well, to me and many other people some of these are as follows:Less emphasis on the English language up to grade 5Currently, more people are speaking in English in India probably than in the rest of the mother tongue English-speaking world combined. This is because English language has been an integral part of Indian curriculum at every stage. The new policy focuses more on regional language up to grade 5. This could lead learners to overlook the importance of global language.Native language barrier as the medium of instructionAs per the policy, the medium of instruction in primary grades will be mother tongue wherever possible. This can create serious problems for children of families where the parents belong to different ethnicities.Decisive centralised governing bodyThe state governments are restricted to practice authority in making changes in the proposed education system. Only the central government will have decisive control. This might give birth to some conflicting situations later on.Despite all demerits, I would conclude NEP 2020 sounds great overall. Usually, with innovation and research, things don’t work perfectly in one go. It is easier said than done. I hope this policy will show a higher success rate than the looming odds and other Indian education policies ever implemented before. Let’s see if it works for the best. :)

The IBM 1401 was the first computer I programmed as part of a real job (an enlisted man in the US Air Force at Air Training Command (ATG), Randolph AFB, San Antonio, Texas).In the early 60s, the USAF had a quite difficult aptitude test made for them by IBM to screen potential programmers for any of their computers. I took it for fun in early 1962, passed it, and was assigned to Randolph AFB, and IBM training school for the 1401. The training was done in one intense week, wall to wall.The range of HW architectures was much wider back then, but the 1401 was still thought to be “odd”, and today would be considered very unusual. It had been developed to gradually subsume “punched card accounting machine” (PCAM) tasks (for which IBM was the world’s largest company). As with many businesses back then, Air Training Command had a number of “shops” of such machines, with perhaps 50 to 100 machines each laid out over 0.5 to an acre.— I can’t believe that Google won’t yield a picture of one of these large “shops” — perhaps someone can find one —A very small PCAM “shop” — imagine with 50+ machines in an enormous room …The 1401 computer was a “character machine”, with a memory of 5K to 16K characters of 6 info bits plus a “word mark” bit each — these were set to indicate ends of “words” (a sequence of characters in memory addressed by the low order character. A “data character” was (most generally) an encoding of a 12-row punched card column: 4 bits to encode 0–9 and the other two bits to encode the “zone row bits”. Note that this just gives you 40 combinations, but other tricks were used …To add two numbers, the 1401 essentially did elementary school arithmetic, progressing character by character until one or both word marks were reached. (This meant that the 1401 could be set up to add one half of memory to the other half.)The 1401’s memory cycle for one character was 11.5 microseconds … so by computer standards of today it was both tiny and a snail. By PCAM standards, and tape standards, it was quite fast enough.It was essentially a two address machine, but the address registers persisted, so you could deal with “fields” on “cards” sequentially by e.g. doing one two address add — an opcode and two three digit addresses (which would be terminated by the word marks), and the next add would only require the opcode because it would use where the address registers wound up from the previous operation. (Instructions were processed in the left to right direction with word marks at the opcodes.)The 1401 was thus essentially a variable sized word and variable sized instruction machine. Getting lots of stuff done was greatly rewarded by careful planning.IBM 1401 - Wikipedia A nicely detailed article.The IBM Reference Manual we used (the version here is accidentally from early 1962, just about exactly when I started programming the 1401).The punched cards to be worked on were read by a card reader, converted to tapes, processed, the results went back to tapes, were printed, and/or punched back into card form.IBM eventually made and sold well over 10,000 of these machines (the first mass produced computer in history).The IBM 1401 “mainframe”.1403 Printer1402 Card reader/punch (good for putting program listings on top of)IBM 729 Tape Drives — with vacuum tape loop bufferingThe 1401 we worked on at ATC had 8K bytes of memory and six very fast tape drives for those days. There was no OS, and most debugging was “desk checking”. You could get “3 minutes” once a day to try a program, but you couldn’t touch the machine — you put your listing on top of the card reader and asked the operator to do this and that (making friends with the machine operators was critical).The basic learning process was to do the one week hardware school, after which you were quite able to program anything on the 1401 (this was one of the fruits of the difficult aptitude test — it probably overscreened, but everyone who did pass it had absolutely no trouble learning a whole tricky machine and its machine code successfully in a week).Then you spent some months “programming” — which was called “coding”. What was called “programming” back then was design and flowcharting the design. The PCAM machines were all flowcharted, and these were dataflow schemes. These had to be serialized a bit to be converted to computer processing.A “coder” was thus a human “compiler” — whose job it was to convert the higher level programming language of flowcharts to working machine code.After a few months of this “on the job training” and assessment one was allowed to do some design, programming, and then coding for new tasks. There were already seasoned (a year or so) programmers — also mostly enlisted men — who were generally very helpful.There was another larger computer there — the Burroughs 220 — and learning it and doing similar kind of work on it improved the programming and coding for both machines.A few other things I should mention.It was possible to be extremely clever with the 1401, and it should be obvious that the wordmark scheme allowed clever memory allocation schemes, overlays, etc.(It is well worth your time to take a look at Val Schorre’s 1964 “Meta II” system at UCLA, a compiler-compiler that would run in an 8K 1401. I wish I had known about this when I was a 1401er, but its invention happened after I went back to school.)We were able to make a batch operating system that would run all the shop jobs, and which fit into the top few hundred characters of memory (and using tape to help).IBM had an extremely capable “tailored macro” assembler — Autocoder — that allowed a wide range of expression and “conditional assembly” to produce highly optimized and compact code.IBM already had a policy to “make everything run on everything”, and this meant that both the relatively new FORTRAN, and the even newer COBOL had to be compilable and runnable, even on the smaller configurations. The latter never made it into the ATC shop while I was there, but there was a FORTRAN “for curiosity’s sake” (this was because the compiler took about 100 passes (or “pulls” of the tape drive) i.e. a very long time).Reports Program Generator (RPG) was used for a few jobs (I tried it a few times along with others). It made a few vanilla tasks quicker, but the macro library we had developed was generally more convenient, and only a little more dangerous.The older larger slower vacuum tube Burroughs 220 did have something really interesting: the BALGOL compiler (Algol 58 with a few Burroughs touches). It had one of the most beautiful manuals, and this got me to read it. One of the officers had been a CalTech grad and had used it there. At ATC, it was also a “curiosity” but as a much “sweeter and cleaner” example of a higher level language.The next machine in line for ATC was to be a Burroughs B5000, a truly amazing machine whose hardware was made directly for an Algolic language (Algol 58 really), and all of whose software — including the OS (it had one) — was written in higher level form. I learned this machine from the documentation, only understood about half of it, and was back to college before it showed up. (A few years later — by accident — one of my grad school profs was Bob Barton, the main inventor of this marvelous design.)I was able to get back in school for the fall of 1963, and the AF let people out up to 100 days early to not miss a term. I was able to get a good part time job programming for the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, that would pay my tuition and room and board for the rest of my undergrad years at the U of Colorado.

I got below details from India ranks below Pakistan, Sri Lanka in Global Hunger Index, report says not Open Defecation-Free yetIndia has ranked 102 among 117 countries in the Global Hunger Index (GHI) as it continues to slide down the rankings. In 2014, India was ranked 55 out of 77 countries.While exact comparisons cannot be made since the parameters have changed and so have the number of total countries but the 2019 GHI report has invited a lot of criticism for the current dispensation in India.The annual index is designed to measure and track hunger at the global, national and regional levels and to assess progress and setbacks in combating hunger. India is now ranked below Pakistan (94), Bangladesh (88) and Sri Lanka (66) among South Asian nations.According to the report prepared by Welthungerhilfe and Concern Worldwide, India is among the 45 countries that have serious levels of hunger."In India, just 9.6 per cent of all children between six to 23 months of age are fed a minimum acceptable diet. As of 2015-2016, 90 per cent of Indian households used an improved drinking water source while 39 per cent of households had no sanitation facilities (IIPS and ICF 2017)," said the report.On the other hand, in stark contrast to the announcement made by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on October 2 when he declared rural India 'Open Defecation Free' (ODF), the report also suggests that "open defecation is still practiced in India"."In 2014 the Prime Minister instituted the 'Clean India' campaign to end open defecation and ensure that all households had latrines. Even with new latrine construction, open defecation is still practiced. This situation jeopardizes the population's health and consequently children's growth and development as their ability to absorb nutrients is compromised," says the report although it does not specify whether the observations are of rural or urban India.Prime Minister Modi had said on October 2 that the villages in India have declared themselves open defecation-free. The prime minister made the announcement in the presence of over 20,000 village heads at an event held on the 150th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi at Sabarmati Riverfront in Gujarat.The report also lauds efforts of two countries in South Asia in fighting hunger - Nepal and Bangladesh."Outside of India, two countries in South Asia have made significant advances in child nutrition and their experiences are instructive," the report added.Attributing the success in Bangladesh to the steady economic growth, the report said, "The authors conclude that success in this area can be achieved with robust economic growth and attention to 'nutrition-sensitive' sectors such as education, sanitation, and health. A 2015 study sought to identify the reasons behind the decline in stunting in Bangladesh at the national level from 58.5 percent in 1997 to 40.2 percent in 2011.""The study attributed the decrease primarily to rising household wealth associated with pro-poor economic growth and gains in parental education, as well as health, sanitation, and demographic factors reflecting decreased fertility rates. The authors conclude that success in this area can be achieved with robust economic growth and attention to 'nutrition-sensitive' sectors such as education, sanitation, and health.""Nepal's remarkable reduction in child stunting from 56.6 percent in 2001 to 40.1 percent in 2011 is associated with and likely attributable to, increased household assets (a proxy for household wealth), increased maternal education, improved sanitation, and implementation and use of health and nutrition programs, including antenatal and neonatal care," the report said about Nepal.The 2019 Global Hunger Index (GHI) indicates that the level of hunger and under-nutrition worldwide based on four indicators: undernourishment, child stunting, child wasting, and child mortality-since 2000.