The Prayas ePathshala

Exams आसान है !

04 May 2024

MAINS DAILY QUESTIONS & MODEL ANSWERS

Q1. Promoting learning in one’s mother tongue is essential for holistic development, cultural preservation, and academic success. Recognizing and valuing linguistic diversity in education is a step towards creating inclusive and effective learning environments for children. Analyse.

GS I – Social Issues

Introduction:

At the foundational stage, ensuring the understanding of literacy and numeracy by the learners is by far more important than thrusting the language of commerce. In a 1953 report entitled “The use of vernacular languages in Education”, by the UN, two aspects stood out. One, its iteration that “every child of school age should attend school, and the best medium of teaching is the mother tongue of the pupil.” And two, its emphasis that “all languages, even the so-called primitive ones, are capable of becoming media for school teaching; some perhaps merely as a bridge to a second language, while others maybe used at all levels of education”.
For early stage learning, linguistic familiarity is key. Embracing the country’s rich tapestry of languages for schooling will help ensure that no child gets left behind.

Benefits of Education in mother tongue:

Mother tongue is critically important for cognitive, psychological and personality development, education and learning.
Psychologists say it’s important that expressions and vocabulary are chosen with care when we talk to children.
Research shows how the brain differently absorbs and recalls languages learnt in early childhood and later life.
Every language spoken in the world represents a special culture, melody, colour and is an asset.
Several psychological, social and educational experiments proved that learning through the mother tongue is deeper, faster and more effective.
Much of a child’s future social and intellectual development hingeson the milestone of mother tongue.
Incomplete first language skills often make learning other languages more difficult.
Children of migrant families are finding themselves at crossroads, being unable to master either the first or the second language they are forced to study in.
Gandhiji warned: “If the English educated neglect as they have done and even now continue, as some do, to be ignorant of mother tongue, linguistic starvation will abide.”

Challenges in implementation:

The National Education Policy, 2020 has advocated, that “wherever possible, the medium of instruction until at least Grade 5, but preferably till Grade 8 and beyond, will be the home language/mother tongue/local language/regional language” for both public and private schools. There are a few challenges in realising the NEP tenets.
A given class may have learners from more than one mother tongue, teachers are not recruited on the basis of languages understood, spoken and written by them, and often resources are not available in the languages understood by the child.
While there is no need for haste in making educational materials available in Indian languages, the approach and methodology should be discussed threadbare by policymakers and educationists,without political pressure or interference.
In Tamil Nadu, for instance, the bid to impart engineering education through the Tamil medium has not created any impact despite the principal political players using language as a political too
What should be made obvious is that the use of English, wherever desirable, should be retained, with no aversion shown on the ground that it is a “foreign” language.

Need and Significance to preserve India’s linguistic diversity:

Ecological diversity:

Cultural diversity through oral traditions, stories, songs, poetry, and rituals passed down from generation to generation.
Languages express identity
Languages are repositories of history
Language contribute to the sum of human knowledge
Languages are interesting in themselves
improved cognitive abilities in children when they are taught in their mother tongue in primary school
There is enough research and evidence now to prove that if children are taught in their mother tongue, particularly in the foundational years (ages 3 to 8), then higher retention, higher proficiencies, lesser repetition of grades, and improved test scores are seen. To create a student-centric environment, we cannot allow the “sink or swim’ approach of submersion. Given the available resources, bilingual teaching, with the aid of bilingual textbooks and e-content, etc. can be a great beginning to secure the future of our learners and their abilities.

Q2. Addressing gender inequality in the workplace requires a comprehensive approach that tackles its root causes and fosters a culture of equality and inclusivity. Discuss.

GS I – Social Issues

Introduction:

The Supreme Court of India has come out heavily against another archaic idea with patriarchal overtones by observing that rules which penalise women employees for getting married are unconstitutional. “Terminating employment because the woman has got married is a coarse case of gender discrimination and inequality. Acceptance of such [a] patriarchal rule undermines human dignity, right to non-discrimination and fair treatment.” The observations were part of an order which upheld the rights of Selina John, a former lieutenant and Permanent Commissioner Officer in the Military Nursing Service, who was discharged from service in 1988 for getting married.

Gender inequality in workplace:

Lack of Economic Empowerment:

Women’s Labor force participation globally is 51% while it is 80% for men as per World Development Report 2012. In India it is 23% as per the PLFS Survey.
Women are underrepresented in senior managerial position and overrepresented in low paying jobs. Oxford Survey shows that globally only 19% firmshave a female senior manager.

Access to productive capital:

It is harder for women to access funds and capital for farming, starting a business or for other developmental works.
Women tend to lack access to informal networks that provide opportunities to work in high-profile projects, which include attending conferences abroad or on-the-job opportunities.

Crisis of regular employment:

When women are not reported as workers, it is because of the lack of employment opportunities rather than it being on account of any “withdrawal” from the labour force.
This crisis of regular employment will have intensified during the pandemic and the lockdown.

Nonfulfillment of particular criteria required for women:

Younger and more educated women are often not seeking work because they aspire to skilled non-agricultural work, whereas older women are more willing to engage in manual labour.
Secondary Education for women is lower than man in majority of countries while this stands at less than 80% in India.

Unequal pay:

Women’s wages are rarely equal to men’s wages, with a few exceptions.
Globally women still earn 20% less than men. In a recentILO report, India was among the bottom five countries, with a gender pay gap of 34 per cent.
That is, women get 34 per cent less compared to men for performing the same job with same qualifications.
The gap between female and male wages is highest for non-agricultural tasks — the new and growing source of employment.

Glass Ceiling effect:

Corporates: Women still earn on average 79 percent of what men earn, hold only 5 percent of Fortune 500 CEO positions, and represent on average 17 percent of global Board positions.
When it comes to peer recognition, women are at loss as they muster less support.
As per Mckinsey report women were overlooked for promotion even in companies like Google for their reproductive choices.
Women continue to face the same kind of discrimination at work as they face in society.
According to a recent Accenture research report, the gender pay gap in India is as high as 67 percent in corporates.

Exceedingly long woman’s workday:

Counting all forms of work — economic activity and care work or work in cooking, cleaning, child care, elderly care — a woman’s workday is exceedingly long and full of drudgery.
In the FAS time-use survey, the total hours worked by women (in economic activity and care) ranged upto a maximum of 91 hours (or 13 hours a day) in the peak season.
No woman puts in less than a 60-hour work-week.

Safety Issues:

Concerns about safety and Harassment at work site, both explicit and implicit.
Social norms about household work are against women’s mobility and participation in paid work. Childbirth and taking care of elderly parents or in-lawsaccount for the subsequent points where women drop off the employment pipeline.
The cultural baggage about women working outside the homeis so strong that in most traditional Indian families, quitting work is a necessary precondition to the wedding itself.
When increases in family incomes are there, due to the cultural factors, women leave the work to take care of the family and avoid the stigma of working outside.
Social norms and stereotypes: Classifying men as “bread winners” and women pursuing jobs as “career women” was reported by Oxford University Survey. It also highlighted that most of the unpaid work is seen as a women’s job.
Deeply ingrained bias: Ironically it exists among both men and women – against genuine equality. According PISA test data, the notion that “boys fare better at maths” is unfounded. Yet this belief still exists.

Measures needed:

Non-farm job creation for women:

There is a need to generate education-based jobs in rural areas in the industrial and services sectors
The state governments should make policies for the participation of rural women in permanent salaried jobs.
The governments should also generate awareness to espouse a positive attitude towards women among the public since it is one of the most important impediments in women’s participation in economic activities.
Local bodies, with aid from state governments, should open more crèches in towns and cities so that women with children can step out and work. The crèches will open employment opportunities for women.

Recognition of the contribution of women:

As we emerge from the lockdown, it is very important to begin, first, by redrawing our picture of the rural labor market by including the contribution of women.
Generate women-specific employment with proper conditions:
The immediate or short-run provision of employment of women can be through an expansion of the NREGS.
On the other hand, a medium and long term plan needs to generate women-specific employment in skilled occupations and in businesses and new enterprises.
In the proposed expansion of health infrastructure in the country, women, who already play a significant role in health care at the grass-root level, must be recognized as workers and paid a fair wage.
In the expansion of rural infrastructure announced by the Indian government recently specific attention must be paid to safe and easy transport for women from their homes to workplaces.
Reduce the drudgery of care work:
There is a need for immediate measures to reduce the drudgery of care work. For example, healthy meals for schoolchildren as well as the elderly and the sick can reduce the tasks of home cooking.

Skilling the women:

Initiatives such as Skill India, Make in India, and new gender-based quotas from corporate boards to the police force can spur a positive change. But we need to invest in skill training and job support.
The private sector could also take active part in training women entrepreneurs. For example: Unilever’s Shakti program, which has trained more than 70,000 rural women in India as micro-entrepreneurs to sell personal-care products as a way of making its brands available in rural India

Equal pay:

The principle of equal remuneration for work of equal value that is protected by Indian law must be put to actual practice. Improved wage-transparency and gender neutral job evaluation is required to achieve this end.
Expansion of rural infrastructure: announced by the Indian government recently specific attention must be paid to safe and easy transport for women from their homes to workplaces.

Reduce the drudgery of care work:

As the lockdown is lifted, economic activity is growing but the young and old women still remain at home.
Addressing structural issues which keep women away from the workforce is a must.
Policy decisions need to articulate gendered concerns during public health emergencies because gender-sensitive pandemic planning may substantially mitigate these concerns.
With more than 75% women not contributing to the economy, the nation is not only losing on the economic part but also the development of 50% of our population. The numeric consequences of reducing obstacles to women’s full economic participation far exceed the demographic advantages of having a larger pool of young workers. It is thus high time to talk of the gender dividend along with the demographic dividend.
There is no, one size fits all strategy as multiple issues are plaguing women workforce participation in India. If women’s workforce participation in India is realized to its full potential and given India’s demographic dividend, it can easily achieve the target of $5trillion economy.