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Field of education is associated with herculean task and innate responsibility of escorting societies forward. Across space and time, it has been an unambiguous synthesis that education should precede any progress or change. It helps humans to understand themselves and better their interaction with rest of the society. Hence the field of education and dissemination of knowledge is very much a pivotal entity in the evolution of human civilisation. No country in the globe over centuries could afford to flourish on the paths of growth and development while ignoring the crucial role of education. Country like India where in there has been a perpetual struggle over the decades to overcome perils of colonisation and social stigmatisation reflective in terms of poverty, unemployment and illiteracy. In order to overcome these bottlenecks 'knowledge dissemination' must spearhead the change. Apart from other funding inadequacies, infrastructural lacunae, education sector in India has also been grappling with certain innate contradicting and counterproductive structures. Hence in this paper we have made an effort to address and assess the nature and impact of these dichotomies over the field of Education in India.

Developing nations including Bangladesh are significantly lagging behind the millennium development target due to the lack of science, technology and engineering education. Bangladesh as a least developing country has only 44 engineers per million people. Its technological education and gross domestic product growth are not collinear. Although limited progress was made in humanities, basic sciences, agriculture and medical sciences, a vast gap is left in technical and engineering education. This paper describes the present condition of engineering education in the country and explores ways to improve engineering education in order to meet the national as well as global skills demand. (Contains 3 tables and 7 figures.)

Digital humanities is a result of the convergence of digital technology with social sciences and humanities. It is one of the key research areas around the world by the library and information science profession, and in cognate areas such as art and archeology. Focus groups, digital humanities centres are created for intensive researches which are located mainly in libraries as their core programmes. The library techniques and methods such as knowledge organisation, knowledge management, search and retrieval design, education, and emerging areas such as metadata, semantic mapping, ontology, thesaurus construction, digital curation, discovery services, find application in digital humanities. A new area of study, historical informatics complements the digital humanities. India has vast potential application of digital humanities with its diverse culture, customs and languages and so on. India is reckoned as one of the advanced countries in the IT sector, hence recognising the socio-cultural legacy and diverse historical background, it is viewed that digital humanities has many opportunities and applications for LIS professionals in India to contribute substantially. This paper brings together the concepts, tools, and applications of digital humanities and proposes a course of study in LIS curriculum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study attempts to analyse research contributions of the Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar in physics and astronomy during the period 2006-15. The data for this study was extracted from Scopus. The study analyses the year-wise research productivity, national and international collaborations, top collaborating institutions, most prolific authors, journals used for communication, most preferred journals for publication, number of citations received by the University during the period under study. This paper analyses that the university has published 652 papers in physics and astronomy. The University had registered the average citation impact per paper of 7.01 per cent and 6 publications received 51 to 100 citations. Among the Indian universities, University stood at 23rd rank in term of publications output (652) and h-index (29), 16th rank in average citation per paper (7.01 per cent) and 18th rank in share of high cited papers (1 per cent) and 19th rank in terms of international collaborative papers (27.45 per cent) during 2006-15. Around 68.71 per cent publications of the University in physics and astronomy were in national collaboration between GNDU and several other Indian organisations. The study clearly indicates that journals are the most preferred form of publication to communicate research works by the researchers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Internationally, there is an increasing awareness of the need to include humanities in the medical curriculum. The Medical Humanities Group at the University College of Medical Sciences, Delhi, organised a series of events to explore this area. This paper describes our experience with Augusto Boal's "Theatre of the Oppressed" (TO). Twenty-six participants attended a 2-day workshop culminating in a "forum theatre", in which the spectators are transformed from passive observers to active participants or spect-actors. The participants' responses to our workshop indicate that TO provides a multitude of experiences and addresses a wide range of learning domains. TO challenges the senses and offers a promising and enjoyable option for learning medical humanities.

The practice of medicine is an art as well as a science. As doctors diagnose illness and treat patients day after day, they constantly interweave the social, psychological, ethical and scientific aspects of clinical practice. However, the humanistic values necessary for this approach are generally perceived to be lacking in today's medical practice. The Medical Council of India (MCI) believes that a course in medical humanities can help students cultivate a humane attitude towards their patients, as well as give them the knowledge and skills to deal with the complex challenges they will face as they practise medicine. The new Graduate Medical Regulations being formulated by the MCI provide time for teaching this aspect of medical practice. This paper contains some suggestions for the implementation of a medical humanities course in medical colleges.

Medical education fails to address the medical student's many questions, doubts and anxieties about his profession and his own relation to it. Students' growing disillusionment with the profession and increasing disconnect with the realities of the healthcare scene in India have reached critical levels, resulting in a general clamour for reform of the medical curriculum. Many look towards medical humanities for the answer to the problem. Referring to some of the available western thinking and practice of medical humanities (MH), this paper recommends the evolution of an indigenous model which will draw on the growing body of new scholarship on India in the humanities and the social sciences. Some guidelines are offered for starting an MH programme, stressing the need for a flexible and broad-based approach, and a participatory pedagogy focused on students' needs, that draws creatively on available resources. Rather than viewing the 'arts' as a discrete addition to our personalities, an MH programme needs to show us how to integrate the multiple facets of our personalities.

Engineering, particularly in India, is a very technical form of education, with very little emphasis on social science and liberal arts related subjects. It produces a large number of quality engineers from different institutions every year, who are highly capable of solving engineering problems in their chosen fields, but quite often find its difficult to effectively participate in the developmental activities in the country as they are unable to comprehend correctly the societal needs. The present society and the education system do not provide enough opportunities to explore nature and the society at large and thus quite often, the experts in various engineering fields become isolated and are unable to understand the real needs of the people. One option to bridge the gap is to introduce a few humanities, social sciences and ethics related courses in the engineering curricula. The paper discusses various possible methods to implement such a plan, evaluates them and concludes that at this point of time, the most appropriate solution would be to make these topics in-built into the engineering subjects. However, in order to implement this, the engineering professionals must get convinced about the need and the initiative should come from them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The introduction of digital information resources on Internet has revolutionised the academic world. The Internet is paving way for a great leap in the field of higher education and research. This paper is an attempt to investigate the use of Internet resources by the academic community of the Sri Venkateswara University (SVU), Tirupati. For this purpose a survey was carried out using questionnaire tool. The results show that users from all branches of science are making use of Internet resources better than social sciences and humanities. Providing training to its users at the beginning of each semester will improve its use and reduce the problems faced by the library users. The paper highlighted the various problems and issues involved in handling digital library and has given suggestions to improve the library services to meet the demands of the users. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to analyze the growth of research work in the field of social sciences and humanities in Odisha during the period 1996 to 2015. The analysis has been done taking into account the publication output of Odisha as reflected in Scopus database. The present study analyzes the year wise growth of publications, most productive authors, major subject areas of research, types of publications preferred by the researchers, preferred journals and the major productive institutions in the field of social science and humanities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The impact of Twenty-years-old conflict on Kashmiri society has proved deeper, wider and has engulfed the totality of social dynamics. In actuality, every sector and every section of the Kashmiri society suffer in totality at the individual as well as group level. Education was the major causality as a result of the conflict .The major cause leading to the decreasing working days were incidents of violence and crumbling of the entire system of governance. This paper aims to focus on the impact of the conflict situation on education of youth in Kashmir. The present study has been limited to youth enrolled in various degree colleges covering the faculties of general science, social science, Humanities, Business/commerce and computer science. The respondents were selected from the colleges of six districts of Kashmir province of Jammu and Kashmir. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the present study is to investigate the use of Online Public Access Catalogue by the users at Guru Nanak Dev University Library, Amritsar (Punjab). A sample of 112 users was taken from various categories of users covering different disciplines such as Basic Sciences, Applied Sciences, Social Sciences and Humanities. A questionnaire was designed and distributed among the users to collect the primary data. The paper focuses on various aspects of OPAC such as awareness, frequency of use, frequently used access points, satisfaction level, etc. The findings revealed that most of the users use the OPAC to locate the documents despite facing some difficulties. However, majority of the users are not satisfied with the OPAC. The study suggests that the users should be made familiar with the use and operation of the OPAC by providing special training. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bapsi Sidhwa's Ice-Candy-Man is the most authentic expression of the partition of India. It makes alive the grotesque experiences of refugees, mass murders, and exploitation on both individual and collective level. Being a politically motivated novel, the whole story of the novel moves around the mega event of partition and its aftermath. It has been made into a film 1947- Earth by noted Canadian director Deepa Mehta. The shifting patterns of communal conflict in the novel present the humane as well as the Satanic survivals in the unsympathetic world. The survival in this novel is not confined to any individual Hindu or Muslim. It covers different communities and also the entire globe in terms of the theme of survival. This paper is a modest attempt to highlight the survivals. It will examine the survival critically on the personal and social level with reference to the major characters in terms of its socio-political-religious contexts of partition and the British Raj. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]