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Indian Express
11 hours ago
- Politics
- Indian Express
After 32 years, Satara to host Akhil Bharatiya Marathi Sahitya Sammelan
The last time the Akhil Bharatiya Marathi Sahitya Sammelan was held in Satara, the Babri Masjid had just been demolished, and the country was in turmoil. There was also a movement to rename Marathwada University as Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar University. This was the 66th edition of the Sammelan, and the eminent playwright Vidyadhar Gokhale was the chairman. 'It is customary for the president of a Sammelan to reflect on pressing concerns of the country in their speeches, and these were the two major issues,' says Prof Milind Joshi, president of the Akhil Bharatiya Marathi Sahitya Mahamandal. The Mahamandal has announced that the forthcoming 99th edition of the Sammelan will be held in Satara. This unanimous decision was made during a meeting of the All-India Marathi Sahitya Mahamandal in Pune. 'The meeting was attended by Vice President Guruyya Swami, Executive Officer Sunitaraje Pawar, Treasurer Vinod Kulkarni, and representatives from all associated, affiliated, and constituent institutions,' said Prof Joshi. The Akhil Bharatiya Marathi Sahitya Sammelan is an annual conference by and for Marathi literary figures. The first edition was held in 1878, when Mahadev Govind Ranade—a social reformer, writer, and judge—was the chairman. Since then, the event has been one of the most important platforms for discussions and debates in the Marathi language. The 98th Sammelan was held in February this year in Delhi and was inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The Shahupuri branch of the Maharashtra Sahitya Parishad and the Mavala Foundation will be responsible for the event. They had been trying to host the event for 12 years. Satara has hosted the Sammelan twice before: in 1905, with the venerable Raghunath Karandikar at the helm, and in 1962, when N V Gadgil was the head. That was the 44th edition of the meet. 'Our Shahupuri branch has played an active role in gaining classical language status for Marathi,' said Prof Joshi. Others who wished to host the event included Sadanand Sahitya Mandal (Audumbar), the Maharashtra Sahitya Parishad Ichalkaranji Branch, and the Dakshin Maharashtra Sahitya Sabha (Kolhapur). Satara was selected after the committee in charge of selection visited all applicant organisations. The Sammelan will return to its 1993 venue, Chhatrapati Shahu Stadium, which can host 25,000 people across 14 acres. Among the architectural highlights of the address will be the main pavilion, two other pavilions, space for a major book exhibition, and sites for poetry and ghazal renditions. Food will also be available at the venue. 'The venue is within walking distance from the Satara bus stand and centrally located, ensuring easy access for local and visiting literary enthusiasts. Behind the stadium lies an 8-acre police parade ground, which will be used for parking,' said Prof Joshi. Dipanita Nath is interested in the climate crisis and sustainability. She has written extensively on social trends, heritage, theatre and startups. She has worked with major news organizations such as Hindustan Times, The Times of India and Mint. ... Read More
Time of India
22-05-2025
- Time of India
Principals, exam staff fined for mass copying cases at Bamu
1 2 Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar: As cases of mass copying during ongoing Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar Marathwada University (Bamu) examination continues unabated, university officials have decided to impose a Rs 50,000 fine on principals of affiliated colleges and Rs 10,000 fine on examination staff concerned. A total of 21 mass copying cases were detected at different examination centres under Bamu. Of these, seven colleges were already slapped with fines, while official process is in progress for imposing similar penalties on the remaining 14 colleges. Bamu public relations officer Sanjay Shinde attributed the detection of a large number of these cases to surprise visits by university vice-chancellor Vijay Phulari to different examination centres. "The VC visted 53 centres between April 29 and May 21. The visits took place in Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar, Dharashiv, Jalna, and Beed districts and caught many errant colleges off guard," he said. Shinde said action was also proposed against students found indulging in mass copying. "Such students will be subjected to whole performance cancellation, which means they have to appear for the examination again for all subjects," he said. In the latest crackdown on Wednesday, Bamu VC visited a private law college in Beed and caught a total of 53 students engaged in mass copying. He also visited two other private colleges in Beed and exposed different malpractices. Student activists have welcomed the action to fine college principals and staffers for mass copying. "It is found that many colleges collude with students inclined towards exam malpractices. The Bamu VC is going the extra mile by visiting colleges across four districts in Marathwada to keep a check on exam malpractices," student activist Tukaram Saraf said.
Time of India
14-05-2025
- Business
- Time of India
How these Sambhajinagar youth became world-class AI engineers
Shravan V Inamdar (centre, sitting), data scientist at Findability Sciences, along with his colleagues at the company's office in Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar Talk to almost anyone in India's software circles about building global-class products from unexpected places and the conversation quickly lands on Sridhar Vembu's Zoho experiment. The billionaire moved swathes of his SaaS giant from Chennai and the Bay Area to tiny Mathalamparai in Tamil Nadu, showing that high-end engineering can thrive amid paddy fields as much as inside glass towers. But 1,200 kilometres to the north-west, an equally audacious story has been unfolding, quietly, inside an industrial city better known for mediaeval caves than machine-learning models. Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar , formerly Aurangabad, is Maharashtra's fifth-largest urban centre. It is here that Boston-headquartered Findability Sciences has spent the past decade quietly turning 100 young men and women from low-income families into artificial intelligence engineers. Anand Mahurkar, the CEO and founder of Findability Sciences, calls them 'the finest AI engineers on Earth'. Nearly all are first-generation graduates; many grew up in humble dwellings on the edge of the city. None arrived with the skills the company needed. 'The education system simply doesn't teach what we require,' Mahurkar rues. 'So we start from scratch – two years of painful, unproductive work for us, but absolutely transformative for them.' Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Transform Your Child's Confidence with Our Public Speaking Program Planet Spark Book Now Undo Those two years resemble a crash-course in scientific thinking rather than typical corporate upskilling. The recruits begin with remedial mathematics before spending months on probability, linear algebra and statistical theory. Programming comes later. 'Anyone can learn to code today – LLMs can write decent boiler-plate code,' Mahurkar argues. 'But without a rigorous grounding in statistics, you cannot frame or validate an AI model. Maths is the oxygen, while coding is merely the plumbing.' The company partners with Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar Marathwada University's statistics department. Professors moonlight as in-house trainers. Recruits handle messy datasets from day one, sales ledgers, satellite imagery, crop-sensor feeds, and must defend their modelling choices at weekly colloquia. By the time their two-year apprenticeship ends, they have built at least one production model for a paying customer. The results are hard to dispute. Findability's Sambhajinagar team now designs, trains and maintains every one of the company's enterprise-AI products, serving more than 60 large customers across the US, Japan and India. They have built demandforecasting engines for Daikin's vast Texas air-conditioner manufacturing plant. 'We give them annual savings of 20 to 30 million dollars,' Mahurkar says. 'We tell them which models will sell in which regions, and where to stock those models, which distributors will buy them, and why. All this with 95 per cent accuracy.' Another success story comes from a sugar manufacturer in South America, where Findability's AI optimisation model increased sugar yield by 2.5 per cent, adding $5 million to the company's bottom line. Retention is also startlingly high for the company: many engineers have stayed seven or eight years, an eternity in India's jobhopping tech culture. The reason, Mahurkar believes, is clear intellectual ownership. 'They are not anonymised resources on a bodyshopping bench. They see the sugar yield tick up because of their optimisation loop. They hear the Daikin foreman say he finally knows what to stock in Florida.' Humble beginnings That global footprint belies Findability's bootstrap origins. Mahurkar grew up in Ambajogai, a village 400 km east of Mumbai. A national scholarship trimmed his college fees at Sambhajinagar's Government Engineering College to Rs 250 a year. In the 1990s he joined Mumbai-based Datamatics, rose through the ranks and was shipped to Boston to help flog document-management software. 'I watched American salespeople fail, encroached on their turf, and grew the business from $4 million to $40 million,' he recalls. By his mid-thirties he was Datamatics' president, responsible for 10,000 staff. Entrepreneurial itch prevailed. In 2010, he registered the neologism 'findability' with the US patent and trademark office, 'I own that word, it's very common now though,' he tells us with a laugh and set about building a platform that could stitch together a corporation's scattered data. 'Every organisation needs the ability to find information,' he says. 'That was the simple idea.' That idea, that organisations would find it valuable to organise and analyse their disparate sources of data, turns out to be incredibly useful during the AI wave we are going through today. But even back then Mahurkar's approach was noticed. By 2014, Big Data mania was erupting and IBM's Watson group asked him to join its advisory board. Findability's plumbing, what Mahurkar now brands 'data logistics' turned out to be precisely what Watson needed. SoftBank spotted the potential in 2018, offering a joint venture in Japan in exchange for a $7 million minority stake. Mahurkar reluctantly accepted, conscious that he had remained profitable and debtfree since day one. The pandemic tested that discipline: 60 per cent of revenue evaporated in weeks. He refused to sack a single employee and clawed back the lost business over the next year. 'Our noses were bloodied,' he says. 'We learnt by failing.' Throughout those setbacks, Sambhajinagar remained non-negotiable. The city's designation as a Smart Industrial Cluster, Maharashtra's new AURIC zone, finally gave Findability the real estate it wanted. Recently the company bought four acres on which it plans a 700-person AI research campus. 'No more Bengaluru, no more Hyderabad,' Mahurkar insists. 'Quality employment must reach smaller towns. When that campus is full, I can die peacefully.' The social dividend matters to him because he remembers what a 1,000 mechanical-engineering degree did for his own life. 'These kids who joined us used to cycle ten kilometres to school,' he says. 'Now they sit opposite CTOs in Boston and Tokyo, explaining Kfold cross-validation.' Agentic future The firm claims compound annual revenue growth of 25 per cent, all selffunded bar SoftBank's minority cheque. Its 'enterprise forecasting' and 'business-process copilot' products account for the bulk of turnover, and both are built almost entirely in Sambhajinagar. The next frontier is agentic AI – bundling multiple models so that they coordinate like a team of specialists. The prototype, unveiled in January at a local conference, was coded by the Sambhajinagar cohort and is already running pilot projects in manufacturing and agriculture. One sugar client now wants a centre of excellence that can take the optimisation playbook across palm-oil, soybean and rice mills worldwide. For Mahurkar, the commercial expansion is gratifying but secondary. He measures success in human capital. 'When I started, I thought an office with a big hoarding would be enough,' he says. 'Two weeks ago we finally put our name on a building in Mumbai. But the real billboard is in Aurangabad. It tells every student from a small village that statistics, not postcode, decides whether you build world-class AI.'
Time of India
30-04-2025
- Politics
- Time of India
Babasaheb Ambedkar Marathwada University reschedules exams due to law entrance and CA test clash
Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar: Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar Marathwada University (Bamu) announced on Wednesday the rescheduling of some of its examinations that were initially slated for May 2, 3, and 6. This decision was taken because these examination dates were clashing with the state common entrance test (CET) for law courses and the chartered accountant (CA) exam. "The postponed examinations on these three days will be held at the end of the examinations for the respective courses. A separate communication will be issued to colleges to this effect shortly," said Bharti Gawali, the director of Bamu's Board of Examination and Evaluation. Earlier, some stakeholders, including senate member Narendra Kale, had requested the rescheduling of the examinations. "Scores of students appear for the state CET for law courses as well as the CA examination. These students would have suffered an irrevocable loss due to the clash of exams. The prompt response by the university authorities in rescheduling the exams will help many students," Kale said. Student activist Tukaram Saraf said the university authorities must be more careful when charting the timetable of examinations. "It makes sense that no university examination should take place on the day when any state-level or national-level common entrance test is scheduled. Many other state universities already keep an eye on the schedule of such exams, and Bamu must follow suit," he said. The undergraduate and postgraduate examinations of Bamu commenced on April 8 and April 29, respectively, across Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar, Beed, Dharashiv, and Jalna districts.
