Letters

Thought-provoking

The cover storv in the November 15, 1992 issue of Down To Earth was eryjDod. In fact, it provokes one to think about women's education. At the National Institute of Adult Education, literacy and education of women are our primary concerns. The third -curse" factor -emphasised bv you requires us to take another look at motivation, pedagogy and evaluation. ...

Build a park in Ayodhya

The recentpe*vents at Ayodhya have resulted in India making a spectacle of itself.

Both Ram and Babar loved trees and plants and this is well-documented in the Ramayan and the Babarnama. So, why don't we create a park in the entire disputed and surrounding area, where trees pod plants beloved by Ram and Babar would be nurtured.

These trees and plants could form the backdrop in Ayodhya for exhibitions of beautiful miniature paintings associated with Ram and Babar. We can then let the park calm people's nerves so that the beauty of the paintings, the calligraphy and the poetry can work its way to the right side of the brain, which is supposed to respond to imagery.

It may be a more modern way of expressing our devotion than brick and mortar. If the park is hallowed ground, then seeds sprouting there can be taken to other parts so that our land becomes green and prosperous. ...

Indian maths not inferior

In the article on the International Mathematical Olympiad (September 15, 1992), the Indian team is reported to have returned without a medal. This is wrong; our team won five bronze medals.

There is no syllabus for the contest. The general guideline is that it is based on the school curriculum, but as there is no international uniformity in school curricula, the question papers of previous IMOs are used in training students, especially in concepts and topics that are not reflected in the Indian curriculum. This does not mean the Indian curriculum is inferior to the curriculum of other countries. ...

Media skill Lorkshop

We are organising our second workshop on group media skills, this time in Hindi, from February 21 to 27, 1993. The basic aim of this workshop is to help participants to develop creative means for communicating with people. Readers can writes to us for details. ...

Partisan review

Yorkshire TV's clandestinely Made film ,on India's nuclear programme may well be a hatchet job - one-sided, alarmist and condescending. I hold no brief for them. But the review of the film (November 15, 1992) is partisan, misleading and contains misrepresentations. To elaborate:
I. The film asserts India's nuclear programme is the world's fastest growing. This is correct, judged by the Nuclear Power Corporation's fourth advertisement in the serie's headlined Nuclear Power and You. It lists as additions to the seven huclear plants already operational in India, seven more under construction, 10 under consideration and eight in the planning stage.

2. While the review takes exception to a contention in the film that "many European countries have frozen their programmes", it asserts "though Britain may have frozen its programme, USA and France have not". France has never claimed to have frozen its nuclear activities and the reviewer is dead wrong about the US. No new reactors have been ordered in that country since 1979 and 112 orders, placed prior to the Three Mile Island accident, have been cancelled, four have been denied state licence. six have been postponed indefinit y, two were converted when partially complete to coal- and gas-fueled thermal plants and at least one was abandoned, though fully complete.

3. 1 am at a loss to understand the logic of the statement in the review, "if India now meets 2 per cent of energy needs from nuclear energy, it is partly because the reactors have been of the 200 MW variety, compared to the 1,000 MW and still bigger reactors abroad."

4. The review dismisses well-documented deformities of the residents of Rawatbhata as "rabid activist arguments". Surely, Dr Sanghamitra Gadekar, who documented the medical afflictions of Rawatbhata resi- dents, is a respected and responsible scientist and undeserving of the epithet "rabid". In asserting that "stud- ies show that the proportion of deformities in these populations is the same as in villages far away from nuclear installations", the reviewer seems to have swallowed the NPC propaganda hook, line and sinker, for which village in India suffers from malformations and strange diseases to the degree that these exist in Rawatbhata? ...

Letters Letters