Against Neoliberal Assault on Education in India: A Counternarrative of Resistance.
The Indian State has been demonstrating its unwavering commitment to private capital and its neoliberal offensive. The education and health sector reflect its antipeople orientation along with other anti-working class measures such as the doing away with old pension scheme, privatisation of airports, neglect of farmers resulting in over 1.5 lakh suicides across country between 1997 and 2005 (Sainath, 2007), etc. On the education front the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in a full Planning Commission held on 13 th September 2007 showed his commitment to privatisation by stating that “we also need to recognise the role currently being played by the private sector and the policy design must factor this in” (The Hindu, 2007). A leading weekly then revealed that the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) has been trying to moot private partnership in government schools (Raman, 2008). These developments have been taking place along with number of measures that the government has been adopting (Kumar, 2008) to masquerade its real neoliberal face.
Neoliberal Globalization, Saffron Fundamentalism1 and Dalit Poverty and Educational Prospects in India
The teacher would ask me to keep a distance from him so that he could not be touched. He would not accept my notebook from my hand — he would ask me to place it on the table after checking it, would throw it on the ground in front of me to pick up. He never hands me the notebook as he does with the others. He has never accepted water from my hand and I have been told not to use the common drinking glass and am always forced to sit in the last row of the class. (Bunty, 11-year-old boy)
Imaging the Internal Structure of an Alpine Glacier via L-Band Airborne SAR Tomography
In this paper, we report results from the analysis of 3-D L-band airborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) acquisitions acquired in March 2014 over the Mittelbergferner glacier, Austrian Alps, during the European Space Agency (ESA) campaign AlpTomoSAR. The campaign included coincident in situ measurements of snow and ice properties and ground-penetrating radar (GPR) data acquired at 600 and 200 MHz over a total length of 18 km. Radar data were acquired by repeatedly flying an L-band SAR along an oval racetrack at an altitude of about 1300 m over the glacier, such that two data stacks from opposite views are obtained. Data from all passes were coherently combined to achieve 3-D resolution capabilities, resulting in the generation of 3-D tomographic SAR (TomoSAR) cubes, where each voxel represents L-band radar reflectivity from a particular location in the 3-D space at a spatial resolution on the order of meters. TomoSAR cubes were finally corrected to account for wave propagation velocity into the ice, which was a necessary step to associate the observed features with their geometrical location, hence enabling a direct comparison to GPR data. The TomoSAR cubes show the complexity of the glacier subsurface scattering. Most areas are characterized by surface scattering in proximity of the ice surface, plus a complex pattern of in-depth volumetric scattering beneath and scattering at the ice/bedrock interface. Various subsurface features observed in GPR transects at 200 MHz clearly showed up in TomoSAR sections as well, particularly firn bodies, crevasses, layer transitions, and bedrock reflection down to 50 m below the ice surface.