by admin | May 25, 2021 | Entrepreneurship, Markets, News, Social Entrepreneur, Technology, Women Entrepreneur
Professor Veena Sahajwalla (right)
Sydney : In a pioneering effort to tackle the growing mountains of e-waste, an IIT-trained Australian scientist of Indian origin at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) here has helped launch the world’s first microfactory that can transform electronic waste (e-waste) like smartphones and laptops into valuable material for re-use.
Professor Veena Sahajwalla, a materials scientist at UNSW and Director of the Centre for Sustainable Materials Research and Technology (SMaRT) at the varsity, said the e-waste microfactory is the first of a series under development and in testing at UNSW which is now actively wooing Indian students to its Sydney campus.
These microfactories can also turn many types of consumer waste such as glass, plastic and timber into commercial materials and products.
Using technology developed after extensive scientific research at the SMaRT Centre, the e-waste microfactory has the potential to reduce the rapidly growing problem of vast amounts of electronic waste that cause environmental harm and go into landfills.
The microfactories can use e-waste like computer circuit boards to make metal alloys such as copper and tin, while glass and plastic from e-devices can be converted into micromaterials used in industrial-grade ceramics and plastic filaments for 3D printing.
“Our e-waste (microfactory) and another under development for other consumer waste types offer a cost-effective solution to one of the greatest environmental challenges of our age, while delivering new job opportunities to our cities but importantly to our rural and regional areas, too,” said the Mumbai-born Sahajwalla, who did her B.Tech in metallurgical engineering from IIT Kanpur in 1986.
“Using our green manufacturing technologies, these microfactories can transform waste where it is stockpiled and created, enabling local businesses and communities to not only tackle local waste problems but develop a commercial opportunity from the valuable materials that are created,” she said.
According to Sahajwalla, microfactories present a solution to burning and burying of waste items that contain materials that can be transformed into value-added substances and products to meet existing and new industry and consumer demands. She termed microfactories a “truly sustainable solution to our growing waste problem while offering economic benefits available to local communities”.
“We have proven you can transform just about anything at the micro-level and transform waste streams into value-added products. For example, instead of looking at plastics as just a nuisance, we’ve shown scientifically that you can generate materials from that waste stream to create smart filaments for 3D printing,” she said.
“These microfactories can transform the manufacturing landscape, especially in remote locations where typically the logistics of having waste transported or processed are prohibitively expensive. This is especially beneficial for the island markets and the remote and regional regions of the country.”
UNSW has developed the technology with support from the Australian Research Council and is now in partnership with a number of businesses and organisations, including e-waste recycler TES, mining manufacturer Moly-Cop, and Dresden which makes spectacles.
UNSW is one of the world’s leading research and teaching universities and is home to more than 52,000 students from nearly 130 countries. UNSW is ranked 45th in the world, according to QS World University ranking.
Sahajwalla has received numerous awards, including Distinguished Alumnus Award by the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur for her outstanding contributions in the field of materials processing for sustainable development (2015), and also the Eureka Prize (2005), Pravasi Bhartiya Samman for outstanding achievement in science (2011).
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Muslim World
Islamabad : Pakistani Nobel laureate and education activist Malala Yousafzai arrived here on Thursday, more than five years after she left the country following a failed assassination attempt by the Taliban for advocating girls rights to education.
Yousafzai’s flight landed at the Benazir Bhutto International Airport at 1.41 a.m., reports Geo News. The 20-year-old was accompanied by her parents and CEO of the Malala Fund.
She is expected to hold meetings with Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi and Army Chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa, as well as other important figures.
Yousafzai will also participate in the “Meet the Malala” programme during her four-day stay in Pakistan.
In October 2012, Yousafzai – then 15-years-old – was shot in the head at point-blank range by Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) gunmen as she was returning from her school in Swat valley.
She suffered bullet injuries and was admitted to the military hospital Peshawar but was later flown to London for further treatment.
The shooting drew widespread international condemnation, Geo News reported.
She has become an internationally recognised symbol of resistance to the Taliban’s efforts of denying women education and other rights.
In 2014, Yousafzai became the youngest recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize at the age of 17 in recognition of her efforts for children’s rights.
Earlier this month, the Nobel laureate appeared on “My Next Guest Needs No Introduction with David Letterman” on Netflix.
Speaking of Swat, Malala stated: “It is just like a paradise on Earth.”
She said she “did not realise how beautiful Swat was” until she moved to the UK.
During a visit to Canada last year, she was provided an opportunity to address the country’s parliament, Dawn news reported.
Last April, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres selected Malala Yousafzai to be a UN messenger of peace, the highest honour bestowed by the UN chief on a global citizen.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Interviews
By Saket Suman,
New Delhi : Women’s rights crusader and controversial writer Taslima Nasrin was only 32 when she was hounded out of her country and forced to live in exile in Europe and America. Twenty-four years on, she’s lost all hope of returning to her native Bangladesh, where the crowds once bayed for her blood and where she feels she “would be killed right away”.
Starting out with her first collection of poetry in 1986, she published several books before “Selected Columns”, that led to the formation of “Taslima Smash Committee”. Her newspaper columns explored everyday perils of women and, to a large extent, held Islam responsible for the subjugation of women and their rights.
“Fundamentalists were angry because I was writing against Islam. It did not matter to them that I was also writing against other religions. In fact, I was not writing against anyone but for women and their rights,” Nasrin recalled in an interview with IANS here.
Notwithstanding this complication, her second book of essays was published in 1992, but copies of it were soon burnt at the National Book Fair in Bangladesh which she was not allowed to visit.
Almost at the same time — not very far away from her home country — a large crowd of Hindu kar sevaks demolished the 16th century Babri Masjid in Ayodhya and just as a series of communal riots were engulfing India, Nasrin could feel its ripples back in Bangladesh.
“I was seeing and observing everything. Hindus were being targeted. Their shops were being broken down by mad crowds of people and so many Hindu patients were in hospitals telling their horror stories. I visited many places to see what was happening. I gave shelter to some of the Hindus. I just thought that nobody should be oppressed or tortured because of some buildings being destroyed. It was not the fault of Bangladeshi Hindus,” she explained.
And so her documentary novel “Lajja”, which is a protest against the torture on the minority community of Bangladesh, was published, and banned simultaneously in 1993. However, contrary to popular beliefs “Lajja”, or Shame, was not the reason behind her ouster from Bangladesh.
“In ‘Lajja’ I didn’t write anything against Islam. The fanatics were angry from before, because of my newspaper columns on women, not ‘Lajja’. It was not against Islam, but my ‘Selected Columns’ was very much against Islam because I was defending women. Fanatics were demanding the banning of my other books, not ‘Lajja’. They were happy that it was banned though,” she maintained.
In April 1994, Nasrin was invited to Paris for a talk on Press freedom and stopped in Kolkata on her way back to Dhaka. “I gave an interview to The Statesman newspaper and said that Quranic law should be changed, but it was misunderstood and headlined that Quran should be changed,” she claimed.
Nasrin issued a rejoinder immediately, saying “I don’t believe in religion so why should I feel the need to change it” and the newspaper obliged by publishing a corrigendum the following day — but it was too late.
“When I entered Dhaka, aag jal raha tha (the city was on fire). They would have killed me right away. They believe Allah has written the Quran and the interview said that I wanted to change the Quran. It was a big thing. There were lakhs of people on the streets across the country. The government filed a case of blasphemy against me. The fundamentalists were already angry, now they had got something solid against me,” she said.
Through June and July of 1993, Nasrin remained in hiding. “Baad main mera bail hua on condition that I had to leave the country,” she recalled. Meanwhile, several Human Rights organisations were pressurising the governments in the West to come to her rescue. Noted writers like Milan Kundera and Salman Rushdie, among others, wrote open letters, published in several leading European newspapers at the same time.
“One night, the police put me on a flight. I was received in Bangkok by the Chief Security officer of Sweden and they took me to Sweden. I just didn’t want to believe that it was forever. I thought it would be for one month, two months or three months, maximum six months. So I was very restless to go back to my country. I never wanted to settle anywhere else… but I slowly realised it was not possible. Bangladesh was left far behind,” she lamented.
From Sweden to Germany to Paris and then to the United States and finally to India, Nasrin was living what she calls the “celebrity life” — her books were being translated into foreign languages, many ministers would come to visit her and she was being bestowed with several prestigious honours. “It was all too big for me. Prize, prize. But I always wanted to go back to my country — that would have been the real prize,” she said.
“I so much wanted to go back to my country, but now all my close relatives and family are gone. And I know that the country has been totally Islamised now. All my old classmates now wear the hijab, so many of my friends have been hacked to death. Bloggers are being killed. Those people are being hacked to death and I am their old target. I would be killed right away,” she says.
Nasrin maintained that “I will never be able to go back because the government will always prevent me from entering”, but yearns for freedom of movement. “Why should Bangladesh say that you are not allowed to enter this country? I should be allowed, if I don’t go there, that is my choice, but as a universal citizen, I should be allowed to move freely. Not only me, everybody,” she maintained.
Nasrin’s latest book is titled “Split” and its Bengali original was banned by the Left Front in West Bengal as well as by Bangladesh in 2003. While the West Bengal government lifted the injunction after the ban was struck down by the Calcutta High Court in 2005, Nasrin was eventually driven out of Kolkata, the city that she found closest to her home in Bangladesh.
Taslima Nasrin has since been living in New Delhi under a government Residence Permit which needs to be renewed at regular intervals.
(Saket Suman can be contacted at saket.s@ians.in)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Events, News, Social Round-up
By Somrita Ghosh,
Jhunjhunu : Sending her elder daughter Manushree to an English-medium school in Jhunjhunu (Rajasthan) was a distant dream for Sushila Thakan some eight years ago. Though she had her husband’s moral support, she received little cooperation from her in-laws after she gave birth to a girl child.
“Everyone wanted a male child and female newborns were considered no less than a curse. No one wanted a girl child,” the 32-year-old homemaker Sushila told IANS.
As per the 2011 census, Jhunjhunu district of Rajasthan had the worst child sex ratio in the state with 863 girls per 1,000 boys and got tagged because of its regressive traditional practices not only as a “socially backward” district in official statistics but also as a microcosm of the wrongs that ail Indian society.
The child-sex ratio in Rajasthan as per the 2011 census was one of the lowest in the country — 888 females per 1,000 males as against the national ratio of 919 females per 1,000 males. Noted economist Amartya Sen had once said that India had some 40 million “missing women” and this skewed sex ratio has improving slowly, district by district.
Jhunjhunu, itself, is rapidly changing, claims Sushila. She said that although she later gave birth to a son, her daughter is the most pampered and loved one in the family now, an indicator of how society is transforming.
Today with a ratio of 951 girls per 1,000 boys, the district has become a role model for other districts in the country that are attempting to improve their child-sex ratio.
“This is because there has been awareness in the region about the importance of girls and impact of education. The state government came up with many schemes for girls and highlighted the need for equal sex ratio. Now the discrimination has almost ended here,” Sushila emphasised.
However, the road to success was not a smooth one for the Rajasthan district. There were many hiccups which motivated and persevering district officials had to overcome in their mission.
“It’s not something which improved overnight. It’s a continuous process and a collective effort by everyone — former district collectors, women welfare and health departments, NGOs and others,” Dinesh Kumar Yadav, Jhunjhunu’s District Collector, told IANS.
Yadav, who was posted in Jhunjhunu last year, said the biggest challenge for him and the administration was battling the mindset of the people — misogynist thinking and male child-oriented approach of families.
“It was very difficult. We had to chase people, knock doors of every household, engage them with our schemes and make them understand through examples. Many girls from Jhunjhunu have joined the army, become government officers, or are working with multinational companies in big cities like Delhi. And we promoted such success stories, especially among families with girls,” he added.
In order to encourage people to have a girl child, the administration started several schemes, some involving financial incentives, and even pushed for the celebration of rituals like ‘kuan-poojan’ (worship of a well), which were earlier performed only after birth of a son.
“We had to fight certain misconceptions… that only a male child will support them during old age. We showed them how girls have been supporting their families as well,” he said.
Jhunjhunu also had a low literacy rate among women and to improve that the district administration started felicitating meritorious girls who outshine boys in exams.
“We started this felicitation programme called ‘Jhunjhunu Gaurav Samman’ where schools would put up pictures of meritorious girl students. We also took out rallies in honour of such meritorious girls,” Yadav explained.
Jhunjhunu was also facing a high school-dropout rate among girls and to increase the enrolment of girls in schools, the administration first identified families where girls were either not enrolled or had dropped out.
“Then we contacted many women officials in administrative posts for help and made teams who would visit the families and motivate them to enrol their girls in school,” he said.
Not just Jhunjhunu, but nearby Sikar district — which also had a poor child sex ratio of 885 girls per 1,000 boys in 2011 — also improved to 944 girls for every 1,000 boys.
“We understood that change would come only if we managed to engage with local people. We went on to select female brand ambassadors within the community who had already broken the ceiling to create a self-identity,” Naresh Thakral, District Collector of Sikar, told IANS.
Women then started attending awareness classes organised by the Anganwadi centres and NGOs.
“Slowly and steadily, women started raising their voice against discrimination and difficulties faced by them in raising girls. They became vocal and aware of the need for a balanced sex ratio and the importance of having a girl child,” Thakral said.
Although lowering the socio-cultural barriers was the first target, both districts were facing another major challenge — female foeticide.
“There were many cases of female foeticide, which beside being illegal also posed threat to the pregnant women. Initially we connected with families with pregnant women and tried to know if they were seeking for sex determination tests. In such cases, the women activists would try to convince them against foeticide,” Yadav said.
Both districts have succeeded in putting an end to female foeticide with implementation of strict laws and strong vigilance.
“We also started an operation where women became our informers. We stopped about 106 foeticide attempts, of which 60 were reported by women. In some cases, our volunteers chased such families to other districts and states. In some cases, volunteers even chased the families to Haryana to stop foeticide,” Yadav said.
But just a check on hospitals was not enough. Even more important was educating women to stand against female foeticide. And to encourage female births, several schemes for mothers of girl children were started, not just by the state government but also by the Central government.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s flagship “Beti Bachao Beti Padhao” (Save her Educate her) scheme which started off from Panipat in Haryana in 2015 also reached Jhunjhunu.
“Every year, we get around Rs 1 crore under this scheme , which helps our campaigns. Earlier we had to approach people for resources, but now the government has come around to help,” Yadav said.
Modi had on International Women’s Day this year launched the pan-India expansion of the scheme to all the 640 districts of the country and chose Jhunjhunu as the venue for the event. He honoured several officials, including one each from Jhunjhunu and Sikar, who had contributed to uplifting the status of women in their respective districts.
(The weekly feature series is part of a positive-journalism project of IANS and the Frank Islam Foundation. Somrita Ghosh can be contacted at somrita.g@ians.in )
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Muslim World
Washington : Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has said that women are “absolutely” equal to men as he is set to arrive in the US on Monday during which he will meet President Donald Trump and tour a number of American cities.
On Sunday, CBS News programme “60 Minutes” aired an episode about the prince and where he hopes to take Saudi Arabia.
When asked if women were equal to men, the Crown Prince said: “Absolutely. We are all human beings and there is no difference.”
He acknowledged that Saudi Arabia has been dominated by an “ultraconservative interpretation of Islam” that was wary of non-Muslims, deprived women of basic rights and constricted social life, the New York Times reported.
“We were victims, especially my generation that suffered from this a great deal,” he said about conservatism that spread through the kingdom after 1979.
Bin Salman’s rise to power has been accompanied by an easing of restrictions on women’s dress and an expansion of their role in the work force. He said the government was working on policies to ensure equal pay.
The kingdom had also allowed women to drive in an order which will go into force from June.
However, women in Saudi Arabia are still bound by so-called guardianship laws that give male relatives control over aspects of their lives.
Talking about his drive against corruption, he defended the recent jailing of over 380 princes, businessmen and former government ministers in the Ritz-Carlton in Riyadh as “extremely necessary.”
There were accusations of abuse by relatives and associates of the detained. They said that many detainees were subjected to “coercive tactics” and “physical abuse” to get them to sign assets over to the state.
The Saudi government, however, denied that any abuse took place.
The Crown Prince, who has been criticized for lavish personal expenses at a time when he is preaching fiscal responsibility, defended his private spending as “his business”.
In recent years, he bought a yacht for a half-billion dollars, a French chateau for over $300 million and a painting for $450 million, the New York Times reported.
“As far as my private expenses are concerned, I’m a rich person and not a poor person,” he said. “I’m not Gandhi or Mandela.”
—IANS
