society – Arunmozhi

Do Government Teachers Deserve Better Pay Than Private Teachers in Tamilnadu?

Recently Tamilnadu’s government teachers went on a strike and captured the attention of everyone in the state. There were emotions flying from everyone. Around 5 out their 9 demands revolved around money: pay, pension and arrears. An argument which could be heard around was:

Private school teachers do much more work for much less pay, so government school teachers shouldn’t be greedy

Is it really that way? I decided to investigate with whatever little data I could. One key factor that could be used to quantify the workload of teachers is Student-to-Teacher ratio, simply stated, the number of children each teacher is responsible for. Higher the number, more the workload, more notebooks to correct, more exam papers to evaluate, longer queues to handle … you get the idea.

With that in mind, let us put data to work.

Data Used

Calculations

With the above sources giving a neat count of schools, students and teachers based on the management type of the school, it was just a matter of selecting the right columns and dividing one by the other.

Student-to-teacher Ratio = No.of Students / No.of Teachers

I uploaded the dataset to Kaggle and wrote a kernel script to perform the above calculation for each type of schools: Government, Government-Aided, and Private schools.

Observations

Here is the heatmap of the Student to teacher ratios.

There is a clear pattern that can be observed. The government aided school teachers have in some cases twice as much workload as their peers in govt or private schools. Aided school teachers do the work of all the govt. teachers like Census data, Electoral rolls, Election booth staff..etc., too.

Here is graph to give a sense of how far removed are the aided school teachers from their peers.

Conclusion

To answer the question asked in the title. I am not sure about government school teachers, but it certainly looks like the govt. aided school teachers deserve better.

Map of PM Modi’s Domestic Visits

PM Modi visited Tamil Nadu on 27th January 2019 for the AIIMS Hospital ground breaking ceremony. Twitter was trending with #GoBackModi and #TNWelcomesModi and I was curious about the number of times has PM Modi visited Tamil Nadu before.

The PM India site has a neat list of all the visits http://www.pmindia.gov.in/en/pm-visits/?visittype=domestic_visit

So, I created a map out of it.

Update:

This map was replaced after some errors were discovered in the base data.

Literacy Gap of SC community in TN districts

I was going through the Census 2011 data once again and Erode district’s low Schedule Caste (SC) literacy rate caught my eyes. It is not a very lagging state when in overall literacy. But its SC literacy was less than the least literate district of Dharmapuri. So I added the data to the TN Districts shapefile and visualised it to see how lagging are the SC community across the districts.

Here are the maps

Correction

In an earlier map, the gap of Thoothukudi was mentioned as -14%, while the actual gap is around 6% due to a typo during the data processing. The map has been updated to reflect the change.

My observations

Kongu Belt (Coimbatore, Tiruppur, Erode) is the worst. ~~The Gounder (land owning) community has ensured their position and the social ladder and ensured the peasantry remained uneducated and illiterate.~~

Update: While there might be an element of truth to it, the maps alone are not indicative of the inference. I have made the above observation based on the number of issue that have appeared on the media like the Mid-day meal staff harassment, two tumbler system etc.,

This observation has been generating a number of comments on the validity of inference without "proof". While the discrimination of SC by dominant caste is the cause for a number of issues, calling out one out of a number of factors is unqualified. https://t.co/8gwFn1ZL5U

— Arunmozhi (@tecoholic) January 14, 2019

Also, I don't want this data & map to be seen as a tool to vilify and demonize a particular community. I regret the wrong message I have conveyed.

— Arunmozhi (@tecoholic) January 14, 2019

Dharmapuri is a peculiar case, it has the lowest overall literacy in TN, but it is also the only district where SC community is more literate than the general population.
Kanniyakumari which tops the overall literacy rates also tops the SC literacy. In fact the SC community of Kanniyakumari is more literate than the general population of almost all other districts. I think it would be an interesting place of humanities research in the area of literacy, education and caste.

Data Source:

http://www.tn.gov.in/deptst/areaandpopulation.pdf

Thattachu – Open Source Typing Tutor

Typing tutor is a known ancient domain to work on. There are a number of places online/offline, tangible/intangible places to learn typing. But Srikanth (@logic) stumbled on a peculiar problem when worked for the Wikimedia Language Engineering team. The new age Indic input methods involved in computers seem to have no place to learn how to type on them. The only way seems to be – have a visual reference for the layout and begin typing one key at a time. This might be the most inefficient method of learning to input information. So what do we do?

Enter Thattachu

Thattachu is an open source typing tutor. It is built using the tool that Wikimedia Language Engineering Team have developed called jQuery IME. jquery.ime currently supports 62 languages and 150+ input methods. This is a JavaScript library which can be used on any web page. So we (I & Srikanth) set out to build a generic typing tutor which could employ any of the 62 languages or 150+ input methods. The project was conceived in May 2014 and was worked on only by May 2015 as I was busy with my Teach For India Fellowship. Thattachu borrows its tutor style from GNU Typist or gTypist which I used to learn touch typing in English.

Interface

Thattachu has three pages:

Home page – A welcome page for those visiting the site and explaining what it is about.
Course Selector – A place where you choose the course to learn. You select the language and the input method you want to learn and it lists the available courses.
Workbench – A place where you practice typing. When you select a course in the Course Selector, the workbench loads with the course you selected and you can begin typing with the input method you chose. It remembers your most recent course and lesson so you can continue from where left it the previous session.

Course Structure

Each language has a set of input methods – each input method has a set of courses. The courses are classified based on their difficulty as “Beginner”, “Intermediate” and “Expert”. Each course has a set of lessons to complete and and each lesson is a collection of lines that have to be typed.

thattachu_courses

Thattachu Asiriyar

Creating the tool is the easier part of a content dependent system. The real work is generating the content that the tool can be used with. That way we faced the challenge of creating course.JSON files required for the tool. Hence a user friendly tool Thattachu Asiriyar was born.

Thattachu Asiriyar lets anyone author a course and generate a course file. If you want to author courses, go to Thattachu Asiriyar create the course file and mail it to
arun [at] arunmozhi [dot] in -mentioning “Thattachu course” in the subject.

Github savvy authors

Or if you have a Github account and know about pull requests. Kindly

Fork the Thattachu repo https://ghbtns.com/github-btn.html?user=tecoholic&repo=thattachu&type=fork&count=true
Put the course file into the data/language_code folder
Update the courselist.json in your folder with the metadata and the filename
Send me a pull request.
Feel awesome for helping the humanity learn typing

Developers

Here are a few points for those interested in the code or those who think they can improve Thattachu.

Thattachu is a web application written in HTML and JavaScript (AngularJS).
It is a completely static site with all the information stored as JSON files and served by XHR requests when requested by the Angular $http.
For input jQuery.ime is used.
It is a completely static site and can be hosted in any web server.
It uses localStorage of the user to track last worked on course and load it when the user opens the page next time.

Icons/Font related to Indian Culture

There seems to be a clear lack in availability of icons and icon fonts for using in the Indian cultural context. I realized this when we were designing a wedding invitation and we couldn’t find any free available material. So I am creating a list of known objects with cultural relevance and create them in my free time. All the icons you see here are available in Wikimedia Commons in Public Domain License. Feel free to do whatever you want with it. I suggest you upload your derived works to keep the spirit.

Nadaswram –
Mridangam –
Murasu –
Bullock Cart –
- Bullock face –
- Bullock Full –
Tea Tumbler –
Catapult –
Garland –
Pot –
Two hands Vanakkam –
Cycle Tyre –
Cycle tube Catapult –
Mango –
Banana tree –
Full Boil / Half Boil –
Biriyani –
Betel Leaf –
Head with towel –
Head with ear rings and pottu –
Kumbam –
Banana Leaf with Food –
Kolam (Thanks Pravin) –

If you happen to read this and have an idea of what more could be included, kindly leave your suggestions as comments. Or if you happen to find these icons in some form for free usage post the link.