When American educationist Sal Khan started Khan Academy in 2008, he would probably not have imagined the platform would eventually help government school children in rural Punjab solve maths problems — in their mother tongue, Punjabi.A room at the Punjab Education Department’s office in Mohali was turned into a studio, with softwares for screen recording and editing, tablets with a digital pen, some laptops and a microphone. A team of 26 government teachers took on the mammoth challenge of translating Khan Academy’s entire maths content for Classes 6 to 10 into Punjabi from English. A year later, and after translating nearly 11 lakh words and creating 440 new videos, Khan Academy’s Punjabi website is now live for students and teachers to login and study, anytime, anywhere.Behind this is a memorandum of understanding signed over three years ago by Punjab’s State Council of Educational Research and Training (SCERT) and the globally acclaimed online coaching platform to help children in government schools.Punjab has made the website fully functional in Punjabi, with over 9.5 lakh students from its government schools registered as users and 3.3 lakh of them actively using it. Every mathematics teacher also has a login ID to check students’ progress.For Khan, who was born to a Bangladeshi father and Indian mother in the US, it all started when he had started helping his 12-year-old cousin in solving maths problems over the phone. Soon, he developed a software to help kids study online. Currently, Khan Academy reaches at least 13 crore students across 190 countries and a crore in India via video lessons and online content focusing on maths and science, which is free to use for all. It currently has 7.46 million subscribers on YouTube alone.To ensure that content and videos in Punjabi matched the standards and format followed by Khan Academy globally, the Punjab teachers were given training by its staff and a review process was followed before putting it on the website.“Initially, we had signed the MoU with Punjab for piloting the project as a pilot in 180 schools in 2019, which was increased to 1,082 schools in 2021-22. It was then extended to all government schools in Punjab and localisation of our content in Punjabi was started because SCERT felt students would learn better if taught in their own language,” says Revanth Voothaluru, senior programme lead and Punjab coordinator for Khan Academy, India operations, which is working on a pro bono basis with Punjab government.For the teachers, however, it wasn’t a simple task to ensure that while trigonometry as “tikonmiti”, statistics as “ankda vigyan” and algebra as “beejganit” are explained in the simplest possible way to the students, the standards and formats of the organisation headquartered in California were also maintained. From using a tablet instead of a blackboard for writing answers to getting familiar with screen recording software, the teachers even mastered editing software to create at least 440 new video lessons which were originally in English, covering the entire syllabus for Classes 6 to 10.Nirmal Kaur, assistant state project director, Punjab Education Department, and nodal officer for the project, said since Khan Academy’s content for India is based on the NCERT syllabus, it made the work a bit easier. “Punjab’s SCERT also follows NCERT content so we just had to focus on translating from English to Punjabi. Our 26 teachers specialising in maths worked day and night to make it possible. While 22 worked as text translators, four were video creators. Now we have two periods fixed in a week in all schools for practising maths on this customised website and teachers can also track students using their login ID. We had transformed one of our rooms into a studio to record videos in the particular format,” she says.The Khan Academy follows a particular format for video lessons—there is only text and audio-visuals without the teacher visible. A student can only see an answer being scribbled on the black slate-like screen, with the audio of the teacher explaining it step-by-step. “Teachers were provided with Wacom pen tabs, laptops, microphones and two softwares— Sketchbook and Camtasia—to replicate the original format,” says Nirmal Kaur.One of the video creators, maths lecturer Seema Sharma, explains how it works. “Initially, we had to listen to the original video at least 3-4 times as they were in a foreign accent. It was difficult for us. And then we had to record the same video in Punjabi,” she says. “We would solve the question on the tab using Sketchbook which appears like a blackboard. The text we wrote would appear on the laptop screen and get recorded with Camtasia, the screen recording software. We would explain the topic simultaneously via microphone and then final editing was done,” she says. “Sometimes we even took work home so that videos could be recorded in silence during the night.”According to the data, compiled by Khan Academy, Punjab is leading among all the Indian states it has a collaboration with — both in terms of translation and usage.Voothaluru says: “We are in the process of creating regional language websites for Maharashtra and Assam, but Punjab is the first where it has been completed and being used. Earlier, we had also started work in Kannada for Karnataka but the project was stopped midway due to their internal issues and it was never introduced in their schools.”The usage data shows that in Uttar Pradesh, where the academy’s Hindi content is being used in Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidalayas (Classes 6-8), there are 7,23,000 registered students of whom 42,000 are active. In Maharashtra (Classes 1-10), there are 43,000 registered students of whom just 1,300 are active. “In Punjab there are 9.5 lakh registered students (Classes 6-12) of whom 3.3 lakh are active. We have also partnered with the Union Territory of Chandigarh and Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalayas (JNVs) but it has just started,” he added.The MoU in Punjab was signed under the leadership of former education secretary Krishan Kumar.Pardeep Aggarwal, Punjab’s Director General of School Education, and Maninder Sarkaria, SCERT director, who continued with the project after Kumar’s transfer, say that due to the pandemic, it was decided to focus on such platforms that can help students at home too.However, according to teachers who are using the platform now in their schools, while it is a great initiative to introduce content in Punjabi, there were some issues on the ground restricting the usage.“Students in government schools come from underprivileged backgrounds and do not have access to smartphones or internet at home. While we are making them practise on the Khan Academy platform in schools, they cannot complete assignments at home. They also do not have enough data packages to access videos at home. But since the content has been introduced in Punjabi, it is now reaching more students who earlier had issues with the English website,” says Manjinder Kaur, maths teacher from Government Senior Secondary School in Jhansla village of Patiala. “Some schools also have a shortage of computers,” she adds.Yogesh Nayyar, a teacher from Ferozepur, said: “Content in Punjabi is a good initiative for rural students, but seeing current times, it is important to make them fluent in English too. We are using English and Punjabi websites both and they are enjoying learning with videos. We have 20 computers in our lab but we also show them videos on projectors.”The Punjabi platform can be accessed and used by any student, from any school by logging into pa.khanacademy.org.
When American educationist Sal Khan started Khan Academy in 2008, he would probably not have imagined the platform would eventually help government school children in rural Punjab solve maths problems — in their mother tongue, Punjabi.A room at the Punjab Education Department’s office in Mohali was turned into a studio, with softwares for screen recording and editing, tablets with a digital pen, some laptops and a microphone. A team of 26 government teachers took on the mammoth challenge of translating Khan Academy’s entire maths content for Classes 6 to 10 into Punjabi from English. A year later, and after translating nearly 11 lakh words and creating 440 new videos, Khan Academy’s Punjabi website is now live for students and teachers to login and study, anytime, anywhere.Behind this is a memorandum of understanding signed over three years ago by Punjab’s State Council of Educational Research and Training (SCERT) and the globally acclaimed online coaching platform to help children in government schools.Punjab has made the website fully functional in Punjabi, with over 9.5 lakh students from its government schools registered as users and 3.3 lakh of them actively using it. Every mathematics teacher also has a login ID to check students’ progress.For Khan, who was born to a Bangladeshi father and Indian mother in the US, it all started when he had started helping his 12-year-old cousin in solving maths problems over the phone. Soon, he developed a software to help kids study online. Currently, Khan Academy reaches at least 13 crore students across 190 countries and a crore in India via video lessons and online content focusing on maths and science, which is free to use for all. It currently has 7.46 million subscribers on YouTube alone.To ensure that content and videos in Punjabi matched the standards and format followed by Khan Academy globally, the Punjab teachers were given training by its staff and a review process was followed before putting it on the website.“Initially, we had signed the MoU with Punjab for piloting the project as a pilot in 180 schools in 2019, which was increased to 1,082 schools in 2021-22. It was then extended to all government schools in Punjab and localisation of our content in Punjabi was started because SCERT felt students would learn better if taught in their own language,” says Revanth Voothaluru, senior programme lead and Punjab coordinator for Khan Academy, India operations, which is working on a pro bono basis with Punjab government.For the teachers, however, it wasn’t a simple task to ensure that while trigonometry as “tikonmiti”, statistics as “ankda vigyan” and algebra as “beejganit” are explained in the simplest possible way to the students, the standards and formats of the organisation headquartered in California were also maintained. From using a tablet instead of a blackboard for writing answers to getting familiar with screen recording software, the teachers even mastered editing software to create at least 440 new video lessons which were originally in English, covering the entire syllabus for Classes 6 to 10.Nirmal Kaur, assistant state project director, Punjab Education Department, and nodal officer for the project, said since Khan Academy’s content for India is based on the NCERT syllabus, it made the work a bit easier. “Punjab’s SCERT also follows NCERT content so we just had to focus on translating from English to Punjabi. Our 26 teachers specialising in maths worked day and night to make it possible. While 22 worked as text translators, four were video creators. Now we have two periods fixed in a week in all schools for practising maths on this customised website and teachers can also track students using their login ID. We had transformed one of our rooms into a studio to record videos in the particular format,” she says.The Khan Academy follows a particular format for video lessons—there is only text and audio-visuals without the teacher visible. A student can only see an answer being scribbled on the black slate-like screen, with the audio of the teacher explaining it step-by-step. “Teachers were provided with Wacom pen tabs, laptops, microphones and two softwares— Sketchbook and Camtasia—to replicate the original format,” says Nirmal Kaur.One of the video creators, maths lecturer Seema Sharma, explains how it works. “Initially, we had to listen to the original video at least 3-4 times as they were in a foreign accent. It was difficult for us. And then we had to record the same video in Punjabi,” she says. “We would solve the question on the tab using Sketchbook which appears like a blackboard. The text we wrote would appear on the laptop screen and get recorded with Camtasia, the screen recording software. We would explain the topic simultaneously via microphone and then final editing was done,” she says. “Sometimes we even took work home so that videos could be recorded in silence during the night.”According to the data, compiled by Khan Academy, Punjab is leading among all the Indian states it has a collaboration with — both in terms of translation and usage.Voothaluru says: “We are in the process of creating regional language websites for Maharashtra and Assam, but Punjab is the first where it has been completed and being used. Earlier, we had also started work in Kannada for Karnataka but the project was stopped midway due to their internal issues and it was never introduced in their schools.”The usage data shows that in Uttar Pradesh, where the academy’s Hindi content is being used in Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidalayas (Classes 6-8), there are 7,23,000 registered students of whom 42,000 are active. In Maharashtra (Classes 1-10), there are 43,000 registered students of whom just 1,300 are active. “In Punjab there are 9.5 lakh registered students (Classes 6-12) of whom 3.3 lakh are active. We have also partnered with the Union Territory of Chandigarh and Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalayas (JNVs) but it has just started,” he added.The MoU in Punjab was signed under the leadership of former education secretary Krishan Kumar.Pardeep Aggarwal, Punjab’s Director General of School Education, and Maninder Sarkaria, SCERT director, who continued with the project after Kumar’s transfer, say that due to the pandemic, it was decided to focus on such platforms that can help students at home too.However, according to teachers who are using the platform now in their schools, while it is a great initiative to introduce content in Punjabi, there were some issues on the ground restricting the usage.“Students in government schools come from underprivileged backgrounds and do not have access to smartphones or internet at home. While we are making them practise on the Khan Academy platform in schools, they cannot complete assignments at home. They also do not have enough data packages to access videos at home. But since the content has been introduced in Punjabi, it is now reaching more students who earlier had issues with the English website,” says Manjinder Kaur, maths teacher from Government Senior Secondary School in Jhansla village of Patiala. “Some schools also have a shortage of computers,” she adds.Yogesh Nayyar, a teacher from Ferozepur, said: “Content in Punjabi is a good initiative for rural students, but seeing current times, it is important to make them fluent in English too. We are using English and Punjabi websites both and they are enjoying learning with videos. We have 20 computers in our lab but we also show them videos on projectors.”The Punjabi platform can be accessed and used by any student, from any school by logging into pa.khanacademy.org.
The Supreme Court collegium led by Chief Justice of India U U Lalit, in its meeting held on September 28, recommended the elevation of Justice Prasanna B Varale of the Bombay High Court as Chief Justice of the Karnataka High Court. Justice Varale’s elevation will be after the Central government clears his appointment and issues a notification for the same.Along with Justice Varale, three senior judges of the Bombay High Court were recommended to be elevated as chief justices of other high courts or as Supreme Court judge.Born on June 23, 1962 at Nipani, Justice Varale graduated in Arts and Law from Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar Maratha University and enrolled as an advocate on August 12, 1985. Justice Varale joined the Chamber of advocate S N Loya and practiced civil and criminal law.He was also a lecturer at Ambedkar Law College in Aurangabad from 1990 to 1992. He worked as assistant government pleader and additional public prosecutor at the high court bench in Aurangabad and as additional standing counsel for the Union of India. He was appointed as a judge of the Bombay High Court on July 18, 2008.Earlier this month, a bench led by Justice Varale allowed pleas by nine persons, including Dadra and Nagar Haveli (DNH) Union Territory administrator Praful Khoda Patel, seeking to quash a Mumbai Police FIR over the death of parliamentarian Mohan Delkar on February 22 last year.The high court bench led by him also initiated a suo motu PIL on a stalled project to publish the writings and speeches of Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar.A division bench led by Justice Prasanna B Varale had also initiated a suo motu PIL in January this year wherein the court took cognisance of a news report about the risky journey of girls from Khirkhindi village in Satara district, who had to row a boat across the Koyna dam every day to reach their school. It had asked the Maharashtra government to provide help to school children facing a similar plight in the state.The Supreme Court collegium, in its meeting held on September 26 had recommended the elevation of Justice Dipankar Datta, Chief Justice of the Bombay High Court, as a judge at the apex court. Earlier this year, two Bombay High Court judges Justice S S Shinde and Justice Amjad A Sayed were elevated as chief justices of Rajasthan and Himachal Pradesh high courts, respectively. While Justice Shinde retired as the chief justice of Rajasthan HC last month, Justice Sayed has tenure as Chief Justice of Himachal Pradesh HC till January 2023. In April 2019, Justice Abhay S Oka of the Bombay High Court was elevated as the Chief Justice of the Karnataka High Court and in August 2021 he was elevated as a Supreme Court judge.
The Supreme Court collegium led by Chief Justice of India U U Lalit, in its meeting held on September 26, recommended the elevation of Justice Dipankar Datta, Chief Justice of the Bombay High Court, as a Supreme Court judge.Justice Datta, who was a senior judge at the Calcutta High Court, was appointed as the Bombay High Court Chief Justice on April 28, 2020. He will be elevated to the apex court after the central government clears his appointment and issues a notification in this regard.The son of the late Justice Salil Kumar Datta, a former judge of the Calcutta High Court, Justice Datta was born on February 9, 1965. He obtained his LLB degree from the University of Calcutta in 1989. He enrolled as an advocate the same year and practiced in the Supreme Court and in high courts, dealing with constitutional and civil cases.Justice Datta has served as the junior standing counsel for West Bengal between May 2002 and January 2004, and as a counsel for the Union government since 1998. He was elevated as a permanent judge of the Calcutta High Court on June 22, 2006.He took over as the Chief Justice of Bombay HC after Justice Bhushan P Dharmadhikari during the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic and ensured the functioning of the court through virtual and hybrid modes. Justice Datta also passed several directions to authorities to provide medical assistance to citizens besides redressing the grievances of migrant workers during the lockdown. He also changed the working hours of the high court from 11 am-5 pm to 10.30 am-4.30 pm. Before him, the last Bombay HC Chief Justice to have been elevated to the Supreme Court was Justice Anil Dave, who became an apex court judge in April 2010.In July 2020, a bench led by Chief Justice Datta passed directions to the state government to reduce overcrowding in jails during the pandemic and pulled up the prison department on the “sorry state of affairs”On December 16, 2020, in a setback to the then Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray-led state government, a division bench including Justice Datta, while hearing the central government’s plea through its salt commissioner laying claim to the 102-acre Kanjurmarg salt pan land, stayed the order of the collector that transferred the said land to the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA) for the Metro car shed project.In a judgment on PILs filed by former police officers of Maharashtra seeking restraining orders against “media trial” in the Sushant Singh Rajput death case passed in January 2021, a bench led by Justice Datta had held that a “media trial” pending the investigation of any case violates the Programme Code under the Cable TV Network Regulation Act and does have an impact on the probe by “interference with administration of criminal justice.”Moreover, on April 5 last year, a bench led by Chief Justice Datta directed the CBI to carry out a preliminary inquiry into the corruption allegations made by former Mumbai police commissioner Param Bir Singh against the then state home minister Anil Deshmukh, while terming the case as “unprecedented”. In the same month, Justice Datta pulled up the state government over fire incidents in hospitals across Maharashtra and observed that the safety of patients was of paramount importance.In July 2021, a division bench led by Justice Datta had directed the civic authorities to ensure that elderly and disabled persons have the benefit of Covid-19 vaccination at their residence as per the policy formulated by the state government, despite the Centre not being willing to adopt a policy for the same.The following month, Justice Datta held it “desirable” for Maharashtra Governor Bhagat Singh Koshyari to take a decision at the earliest regarding the recommendation by the state council of ministers under then CM Uddhav Thackeray on the nominations of 12 members to the Legislative Council – pending for eight months at that point – and said the seats “cannot be kept vacant indefinitely”. Those 12 names were recently scrapped by the current dispensation under Eknath Shinde.On February 26 this year, a bench of Chief Justice Datta and Justice Girish S Kulkarni passed a judgment in a suo motu PIL raising concerns over the collapse of unauthorised buildings and issued a slew of directions to the civic bodies and planning authorities in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR).The same day, Justice Datta refused to interfere in a PIL against special permission granted in 2002 to Lake City Corporation for purchasing lands for a private hill station Lavasa in Pune district and said that the “judicial hands-off” approach is best suited in the case due to “gross delay” in the filing of PIL. The court, though, observed “personal interest” and “exertion of influence and clout” by NCP chief Sharad Pawar and his daughter Supriya Sule in the impugned project and that NCP leader Ajit Pawar, who was the irrigation minister and ex-officio chairman of Maharashtra Krishna Valley Development Corporation (MKVDC) “failed to disclose the direct or indirect interest and was found to be remiss in his duty only to that extent.”CJ Datta, on July 29 this year, directed the Mumbai suburban collector to take steps to remove 48 structures, including unauthorised portions of buildings near the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport (CSMIA), which flouted height norms and were in the way of the approach surfaces of the runaways. On Monday, he dismissed as withdrawn a PIL filed by Jain Charitable Trusts seeking a restriction or ban on the advertisement of non-vegetarian food in print and electronic media. The high court asked the petitioners why they were seeking to encroach on others’ rights.
