BIG LAKE

India projects an image of a nation churning out hundreds of thousands of students every year that are well educated, a looming threat to the better paid middle-class workers of the west. Their abilities in math have been cited by President Barack Obama as a reason why US is facing competitive challenges.      India’s economic expansion was supposed to create opportunities for millions to rise out of poverty, get an education and shower with good jobs. But as India liberalized its economy in 1991 after decades of socialism, it failed to reform its heavily regulated education system. The overbearing bureaucracy in the education system resulted in focusing on rote learning rather than critical thinking and comprehension. Muddying the picture is that 75% of technical graduates and more than 85% general graduates are unemployable by India’s high growth global industries, including information technology and call centers, according to NASSCOM report.    The c...

I came across this little boy in class 4 of a rural school who had come to school after being absent for a whole month. The reason, there was no soap at home to wash clothes so his mother hadn't washed his uniform and he could not face the prospect of wearing a dirty uniform to school. Faced with the demand for money for the soap the father had remarked that he should earn his own money if he wanted such luxuries as soap. The child has taken this seriously and has gone to work for three days at a neighbouring house and made a princely sum of Rs.50 with which the soap was bought and he could come to school that day. I asked the child who in his family had studied the most and the shocking reply was, 'my father'. This father is apparently a B.Sc. graduate and he is an agricultural wage labourer. I wonder, what it must take for the father to be able to see a future better than his own for his son as a result of what must seem a totally futile exercise, namely educ...

It took the road repair crew 6 days to fix the damage done to the road below left (and more great images found here ). After it was announced in Wednesday’s budget that £100 million is to be set aside to fix Britain’s potholes , here’s hoping we can go about filling the holes with something resembling this level of efficiency! 

Japan Earthquake: Two Weeks Later Two weeks after northeastern Japan was struck by a massive earthquake and tsunami, the cost of the disaster is becoming clearer. The Japanese government has estimated the direct damage at as much as $310 billion, making it the world's costliest-ever natural disaster. As of today, more than 10,000 deaths have been confirmed and another 17,000 people remain missing. At Japan's stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, it raised suspicions of a possible breach when two workers waded into water 10,000 times more radioactive than normal and suffered skin burns. Earthquake survivors return to their homes to collect what they can find, to mourn their losses, and try to find a sense of normalcy in lives that have been ripped apart. Collected here are recent images from northeastern Japan, 14 days after it was rocked by disaster on a historic scale. [ 46 photos ] Mar 25, 2011 112 Comments Select Language ​ ▼ ...