Report on Manthan At NU - 2013

India is one of those developing nations who have shown immense progress and development in each and every sector since its independence. India has emerged as a pioneer in many fields like science and technology, infrastructure, sports and many more. But despite of all these achievements there are still a lot of contemporary issues that need serious discussions and plausible solutions. Under the NU’s Asia Lens Initiatives, Manthan @ NU-2013 was organised on October 08, 2013 at NIIT University in Senate room by Dr Anuradha Parasar to discuss some of the contemporary issues faced by Indian Society. The guest list included  member from Japanese company, Parents of NU Students, NU’s Leadership Team, Faculty, Staff and Student body.

On arrival, all guests were greeted as per NU’s Asia Lens tradition by Asia Lens Students Team Shibeli and Dibya Saran Kurian by applying ‘Tilak’ and tying a traditional “dhaga” on the guests wrist. The whole event was available online and was attended online by the parents of NU Students and other invited guests. The Event was photographed by Asia Lens Studenr Team – Amit Bhadra & Sourabh Madan.

The event as hosted by Dr Anuradha Parasar was divided into two parts. The first part of the event introduced the events as organised under NIIT University’s Asia Lens Initiatives and the future events planned through a video. It was followed by Harmoniun Vadan by Nikita Mangla (B. Tech. Year I) and Tabla Vadan by Sreyash R Tripathi (B. Tech. Year I ).

The second part was a competition between two B. Tech. Yr I teams namely – NU Revolutionaries and NU Team. The first team NU Revolutionaries Team comprised of team members Alphonse, Satyam, Nishchay, Arnav and Tanmay. The second team NU Team comprised of team members Nikita, Sreyash, Prateek and Kanika. The competition was judged by Mrs Rekha Pandey and Professor Amitabha Ghoshray. Both the teams had to give a presentation on the topics assigned to them in a specified duration. The criteria for judgement were based on the innovative solutions proposed by the teams on the issue.

Topic of discussion for the NU Revolutionaries Team was Improving the Reach and Efficiency of Public Distribution System. This team proposed the following solutions:

Ø  “You used to withdraw money from the ATM; now you may withdraw food grains from a similar ATM!”

Ø  “Moulding a young mind to be responsible for his/her nation will always be a beneficial solution no matter what.”

Ø  Replace the old manual way of handling accounts by new technological aspects nation-wide.

The pros and cons of the above proposed solution was discussed threadbare by team members along with the presentation on analysis of impact of Solutions.

The topic for presentation of NU Team was Small Multigrade Schools and Increasing Access To Primary Education in India. For implementing the solutions, the following changes were recommended by NU Team :

Ø  Redesign the system of district level education administration and school management

Ø  Institute a system of monitoring and evaluation of student learning

Ø  Improve the efficiency of the teacher training process

Ø  Explore innovative options for financing the reforms

The presentation also focussed on e - learning and mobile learning and discussed the various measures for plugging the holes were also proposed.

The presentations were followed by musical piece – Tabla vadan by Venugopal and Aliestier Noel Xver on the keyboard.

Ashoo Dubey, Head, TCO, NIIT University & Suresh Joshi, Ahlcon International School, Delhi were the guest speakers. Mr Suresh Joshi gave the presentation online on Teaching Physics Using Indian games. He made participants aware of the techniques used by him to make the students learn physics by simple and popular games like Gulli-Danda, Pithu etc.It was a whole lot of a new learning experience for all the guests. There was an open Q & A session after the presentation for the competing team members in which all the guests including the online guests posed questions and the contesting team replied to their satisfaction. It was a very healthy and interesting session. The solutions presented by the teams on the issues were thoroughly discussed.

NU Team was declared as the winner of the competition. The event concluded with a vote of thanks to all the participants including online participants and to the members of NU Leadership Team – Dr Rajendra Pandey (President NU), Dr Parimal Mandke, (Vice President), and Dr. Sunil Khanna (Vice President NU) for their kind support. The event was followed by a group photograph of all the guests and the participants.