The Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) will soon be offering programmes in warehousing, financial accounting and office management in a bid to provide more job-oriented courses, a university official said Wednesday.
The varsity’s Centre for Corporate Education Training and Consultancy (CCETC) has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the National Centre for Business Education’s (NCBE) National Collateral Management Services Ltd. (NCMSL).
‘The employment opportunities of the learners will increase with this MoU as its objective is to make a commerce student job ready,’ NCBE director Mukund S. Annigeri said.
‘They have academic knowledge but not experience. We have structured the courses to provide on-the-job-training to them,’ he added.
A post-graduate diploma in warehousing, logistics and supply chain management, diploma in advanced financial accounting and taxation and a certificate course in office management and human resource will be offered under the MoU.
IGNOU’s vice chancellor V.N. Rajasekharan Pillai said: ‘We want to certify and provide education training and capacity building so that the learners can get a certification.’
‘When we looked for people with required skills in the field of warehousing, logistics and supplying or even in the agriculture business, we didn’t get them. A huge expertise in the skills sector is required to be bridged,’ said NCMSL managing director Sanjay Kaul.
‘The warehousing and the office management course is another employment oriented skills development programme which aims to fill these lacunae,’ added Kaul.

With the pro-Anna Hazare chants getting louder, the teachers’ union of Lucknow University and degree colleges in Uttar Pradesh Thursday announced to go on a mass casual leave to support the activist’s fight against corruption.

Besides going on a day’s mass casual leave Thursday, the Lucknow University Teachers’ Association (LUTA) and the Lucknow University Associated Colleges Teachers’ Associations (LUACTA) are holding several programmes later in the day to express their solidarity with Hazare, who is fighting for a stronger Lokpal bill.

Young people in Bangalore joined the protest in their own ways — some skipped lunch, others joined the crowd at Freedom Park and Electronic City and some even wore T-shirts inside out.

At IISc, many students fasted in support of Anna; 20 of them cycled to Freedom Park from their campus and unfurled a banner which had the signature of over 600 students supporting Anna’s cause.Indian Institute of Management- Bangalore students wore T-shirts inside out.Students from IIM -Ahmedabad and IITs in Gandhinagar, Guwahati and Hyderabad set up an online petition supporting them.

Set to roll out a new job growth plan in September 2011, President Barack Obama wants American kids to focus on science, technology and maths where he feels the US is losing ground to India and China.

“I can guarantee you, if you are a skilled engineer, if you are a skilled computer scientist, if you’ve got strong math skills and technical skills, you are going to be very employable in today’s economy,” he told a crowd at an agricultural plant in his home state of Illinois.

To encourage learning in these areas, Obama said, “We’re trying to institute a whole-what’s called a STEM programme – science, technology, engineering and math – in the lower schools so that kids start getting oriented towards those fields.”

The Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) has announced the result of the Civil Services (Preliminary) Examination, 2011 held on 12.06.2011.

The candidature of the qualified candidates is provisional. In accordance with the Rules of the Examination, all these candidates have to apply again in the Detailed Application Form (DAF), which is available on the website of the Union Public Service Commission www.upsc.gov.in. All the qualified candidates are advised to fill up the DAF and submit the same ONLINE for admission to the Civil Services (Main) Examination, 2011 to be held from 29.10.2011. The DAF will be available on the website of the Commission till 11.59 PM on 1.9.2011.

The Supreme Court Tuesday held that students have the right to inspect and photocopy their answer sheets after their evaluation under the Right To Information (RTI) Act.

The Apex Court bench of Justice R.V. Raveendran and Justice A.K. Patnaik allowed the disclosure of the answer sheets of the examination conducted by boards, universities, institutions and public service commissions, when it upheld the Calcutta High Court judgment that permitted the students to inspect their answer sheets.
The apex court pronounced its verdict saying that evaluated answer sheets come under the definition of “information” and reiterated the duty of the public authority under the transparency law to allow maximum disclosure as envisaged by the RTI Act.
The case reached the apex court from high court which by its March 28, 2008, judgment permitted a student, Pritam Rooj, to inspect his answer sheets. Rooj was a student of mathematics in the Presidency College.
In 2006, when he sat for the first part of degree examination he secured 52 percent marks. In the second year he got 208 out of 400 marks and got just 28 marks out of 100 in fifth papers. Upon seeking re-evaluation, his marks increased by four in the fifth paper.
He contended that his poor marks stood in the way of his getting admission in post-graduation course and applied to inspect his mark sheet under the RTI law which was rejected.
The university said that the answer sheets of an examinee cannot be shared.
The high court over-ruled it. The order was challenged in apex court by the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) and the West Bengal Board of Secondary Education, among others.

Mumbai: An international school in Juhu is offering a mini-MBA to its students from class IX onwards.

RIMS International School and Junior College in Juhu is the only school in the city to offer Business Enterprise, a newly-introduced subject that will cover all the topics taught in a conventional MBA programme.

Introduced by the Cambridge international Education (CIE) board, the subject will equip students with managerial skills required to starta business.

A day before the first cutoff list is to be announced by the colleges under Delhi University, some have uploaded their criteria list on their website. And even those who were expecting sky-high cutoff percentages would be surprised.

SRCC (Sri Ram College of Commerce) has kept its cutoff for B.Com (Honours) for general category at 100 per cent and for the OBC category is 98 per cent.

The cutoff percentage for the general category for BA (Honours) Economics at SRCC is as high as 98.25% and for OBC category, the cutoff percentage is 96.25 per cent.

However, it must be noted that the first list seems nothing more than a word of caution.

Hope still remains for the candidates who have failed to score such marks as the second cut off list will surely accommodate a few of them.

The cutoff lists for other colleges such as Sri Venkateswara, Ram Jas and Kirori Mal also have similar figures to reveal.

The cutoffs of other Delhi University colleges are likely to be announced by Wednesday.

The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) results were announced on Monday for seven regions across the country, ending days of anxiety for Std XII students. After a dip in the pass percentage last year, it escalated again, by nearly 2%, in 2011.
The total number of candidates who appeared this year was about 7.7 lakh, which is 9.85% more than 2010. The overall pass percentage was 81.71, an increase of 1.84% over last year, when the percentage had fallen to 79.87.

“Students have performed extremely well this year. It is one of the best academic performances to date. But there is no single reason for their success. Students have become more intelligent, and can understand the subject matter better,” said Vineet Joshi, chairman, CBSE board.

Also, once again, the Chennai region, under which Maharashtra falls, topped the list of overall pass percentages, with 91.32, followed by Ajmer with 85.5. Delhi stood third with a pass percentage of 85.45. While more boys appeared for the exam from the Chennai region, girls scored better.

Nearly 33,887 boys appeared against 27, 450 girls, but the pass percentage of girls remained higher than boys — 86.93 and 77.83 respectively. “CBSE cannot disclose the name of the regional toppers as it is against our policy. The names will be given out by the schools,” said a CBSE spokesperson.

The Supreme Court today directed the Central Government to hold a single eligibility- cum-entrance examination for MBBS and post-graduate medical courses in the country from this academic session.

A Bench of justices, Mr R.V. Raveendran, and Mr A.K. Patnaik, passed the order, saying that it will also be applicable for private medical colleges in the country.

The Bench asked the Government to hold the single common entrance test on a plea by Medical Council of India seeking to start a single eligibility-cum-entrance examination for MBBS and post-graduate Courses
Earlier, a panel set up by the health ministry to run the Medical Council of India ( MCI) had suggested that a common entrance exam would lessen the stress of the student.