Latest news with #Seminar
The Citizen
03-06-2025
- Business
- The Citizen
Entrepreneurial spirit flows at Zoe Legacy Foundation in Wendywood
Despite flooding near the venue due to a burst water pipe, over 100 entrepreneurs gathered for a powerful morning of learning and networking, at the Zoe Legacy Foundation's Entrepreneurship Seminar on May 17 The free seminar, hosted at the Zoe Legacy Foundation in Wendywood, brought together aspiring and established entrepreneurs under the theme of building sustainable, purpose-driven businesses. Co-founder Justin Naidoo said the event was a response to the need for grassroots economic solutions. 'Entrepreneurship is about restoring dignity and creating solutions where the formal economy can't. We are here to invest in people, building from the ground up.' Also read: Sandton entrepreneur and media personality earns international nod The seminar featured a strong lineup of speakers, including Sherwin Harris, Anastasia Jacobs, Sheryl Aaron, Chantelle Weldon, and Sthembiso Sithole. Naidoo added that topics ranged from idea generation and financial compliance, to marketing and personal branding. 'We encouraged attendees to pitch their businesses, share their stories, and connect through structured networking opportunities.' Speaker Chantelle Weldon described the day as deeply meaningful, while programme director Melini Moses emphasised the importance of storytelling in business. 'People don't just buy products, they buy people. Learning to tell your story well builds trust and opens doors.' Read more: Sandton entrepreneur and media personality earns international nod Entrepreneurs left inspired and equipped, with business owner Lorenzo Mugnaioni praising the event's organisation and impact. Puseletso Maredi, a skincare product maker, said she was grateful for the insights gained. Follow us on our Whatsapp channel, Facebook, X, Instagram, and TikTok for the latest updates and inspiration! Have a story idea? We'd love to hear from you – join our WhatsApp group and share your thoughts! At Caxton, we employ humans to generate daily fresh news, not AI intervention. Happy reading!
Morocco World
17-05-2025
- Business
- Morocco World
Rabat Hosts Regional Seminar on Education Abroad
Rabat – Rabat's Mohammed V University is partnering with The Forum on Education Abroad to host today a dynamic Regional Seminar bringing together educators, program providers, and government representatives to discuss the future of education abroad in Morocco. Under the theme 'Education Abroad as a Bridge to the Future: Innovations in Partnership and Pedagogy,' the event aims to have participants engage in collaborative discussions and presentations focused on expanding access, inclusivity, and experiential learning in the academic sphere. The official website emphasizes the seminar's commitment to addressing shared global challenges in immersive programs between Morocco and the US as well as other international communities. In a statement, Mohammed V University presented the seminar as being hands-on and collaborative, stressing that its aim is to give participants the chance to use 'applied, experimental pedagogy in inclusive program designs.' The seminar comes at a pivotal moment for international education in Morocco. As of the latest available data on UNESCO, approximately 5.1% of Moroccan students – over 68,000 individuals – are currently studying abroad. France remains the top destination: around 45,126 Moroccan students were enrolled in French higher education institutions in the 2022-2023 academic year, making Moroccans the largest foreign student community in France. According to French government figures, Moroccans represent about 11% of all international students in the European country. However, Morocco faces a significant challenge with the emigration of its skilled professionals. In fact, nearly 3,700 Moroccan doctors and engineers leave the country each year . Among them are 700 doctors and between 2,000 and 3,000 engineers, as well as almost 30,000 workers in tourism fields, seeking better opportunities abroad. This trend has raised concerns about the impact on Morocco's healthcare, engineering and tourism sectors. The one-day seminar highlights new approaches to building international partnerships and designing more impactful study abroad programs, said Mohammed V University's statement. The university hopes for attendees to exchange ideas on how education abroad can foster deeper cultural connections and global understanding. The event opens its doors this morning at 9 a.m., and will continue until 6:00 pm, with more sessions and networking opportunities planned ahead. Tags: AI in educationStudying Abroad in Morocco
Hindustan Times
15-05-2025
- Politics
- Hindustan Times
Army and the Indian nation: past, present and future
The armed forces have always had a lot of prestige and reverence in India. These emotions have been on full display in the aftermath of the recent military conflict with Pakistan. Ironical as it may sound, adulation towards the military is not the default emotion in large parts of the world, especially the decolonised world, where the army has often been seen as a threat to democracy and civil liberties. Pakistan is one of the biggest examples of what the army's toxic influence can do to a country. What makes India an exception on this count? India's recent public discourse, in fact, has veered further in the opposite direction from large parts of the decolonised world. The current regime, under the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has often politically celebrated its policy of giving more 'operational freedom' to the army than was available under the previous regimes. Does civilian control over the army; while it protects democratic freedom, tend to constrain a country's armed forces from performing to their full potential? Has it been the case in India in the past? Is a politics, which commits itself to giving more freedom to the army also the best policy to safeguard and advance strategic interests of a country? Can this question be answered vis-a-via India in today's day and age? The answers to these three questions, both in general terms and in the specific context of India, have attracted the minds of generations of experts on history, military and strategic studies. Some of the best work on the Indian aspect of these questions has actually been published in the recent past. This week's column revisits some of the important scholarly arguments on these questions, which can hopefully, make the ongoing debate and discussion better informed. How India managed to keep the army in the barracks unlike Pakistan The British Indian army was one of the largest armed forces raised under colonial rule. It was primarily a tool of serving imperial interests, not just in imperial wars but also subjugating the domestic citizenry if needed. Our founding fathers had deeply thought about these issues even before independence. They hit the ground running as far as keeping the military's oppressive and interventionist instincts in check was concerned as soon as we got freedom. These efforts took the shape of both deeply thought-out policy measures as well as playing on optics in resetting the civil-military balance in independent India. A 2010 article in the Seminar magazine by historian Srinath Raghavan, for example, noted how Jawaharlal Nehru shot down independent India's first (British) commander-in-chief General Rob Lockhart's orders that the public be kept away from the flag hoisting ceremony on the first independence day, sending a message that the army was to be subservient to democratic control in independent India. Political scientist Steven Wilkinson's 2015 book Army and the Nation: The Military and Indian Democracy since Independence noted that Nehru deliberately chose the Commander-in-Chief's official residence Teen Murti Bhawan as the Prime Minister's residence after independence. What is even more interesting in Wilkinson's book were three factors which he identifies as having led to key difference between the civilian-military relations in newly independent India and Pakistan, which led to the military acquiring far more power and ending up dominating the civilian arm in the latter. They are: Pakistan being delivered a 'worse hand' in terms of resources; both military and civilian, during partition, the Congress's institutional structures being better than the Muslim League's, which made the former better equipped to handle political contradictions and therefore lend more credibility to democracy, and the Indian government taking conscious 'coup-proofing' steps to safeguard civilian supremacy. A detailed explanation of the arguments will take too much space, so the column will cherry-pick from Wilkinson's book to give a broad idea about them. While the Muslim League managed to get the democratic ballast for creating a new Muslim state by winning big in Muslim-reserved constituencies in the 1946 elections, the new nation-state was bound to suffer from important structural handicaps. Among them were of Pakistan inheriting a small part of the revenue generated in India but a large part of the actual conflict-ridden border with Afghanistan, which had consumed a lot of the defence spending in British India, thereby leading to a bigger burden of military expenditure. The asymmetry was not confined to resources alone. The British Indian army had disproportionate representation from both Indian and Pakistani Punjab –owing to the imperial policy of recruiting from martial races – but almost none from Bengal. East Pakistan, which eventually became Bangladesh, would have a majority of Pakistan's population but almost no representation in its armed forces, creating a fundamental asymmetry in the army's composition. Whether Pakistani army's atrocities during the Bangladeshi liberation war would have been the same had Bengalis been well-represented in the army is an important counterfactual. The Congress party, which unlike the Muslim League was an organic political beast well aware of the contradictions within the Indian society. Unlike the League, which was consumed by almost a hubris that creating an Islamic state was a silver bullet to take care of all other contradictions, the Congress knew better about the democratic challenge these posed. That Pakistan was imposing Urdu on its majority Bengali speaking population — a major reason for alienation of East Pakistan from West Pakistan — while India was carving out states on linguistic basis gives an insight into the political sense of these two parties. Muslim League's lack of political prowess in handling Pakistan's internal contradictions unlike the Congress in India — often the top leadership of the Congress changed its mind on issues after democratic pressure — weakened democracy in Pakistan and tilted the scales in military's favour. India's early political leadership did not leave everything to chance to preserve civilian supremacy over the military and took explicit measures to what Wilkinson calls 'coup-proof' India. They included things such as abolishing the Commander-in-Chief's post, empowering the civilian bureaucracy vis-à-vis the military, taking conscious efforts to make the military's leadership more representative in ethnic terms and keeping the army on a strict leash by intelligence gathering on its leadership, shortening tenures and even tactically pushing retired officers out of the country on diplomatic postings when they were seen as meddling in domestic politics. The Indian state also raised a large para-military force, which is now almost comparable to the strength of the army, to tackle internal security responsibilities which might have made the army a bigger player in internal political and ethnic tensions risking its politicisation in the process. Did the civilian leash constrain the army in India? While a lot of the credit for preserving India's nascent democracy from the military's intervention is due to Jawaharlal Nehru, his legacy suffered the biggest damage when India's faced a humiliating defeat at the hands of China in the 1962 war. The China debacle generated a widespread opinion that the civilian leadership had jeopardised national security in its zeal to keep the military on a leash thereby crippling its fighting capabilities. To be sure, the idea has been contested by historians such as Raghavan who has argued that claims of civilian interference behind the China debacle were 'at best radically incomplete and at worst downright false'. Facts notwithstanding, the hangover of the 1962 military debacle led to a sub-optimal arrangement in the civilian-military relations. The government let the army decide its course on operational issues without any civilian oversight without ceding control on larger policies and resource allocation. This did not necessarily lead to better outcomes. To be sure, on other important occasions, such as what Raghavan terms as India's delayed intervention in the 1971 war in his book on the creation of Bangladesh, both the civilian leadership and the army took the wrong line of delay despite counsel to the contrary. Raghavan's views on civilian-military relations, of course, are firmly tilted in the favour of the former being in command. 'Civilian involvement (including those at the tactical levels in army matters) is essential, even if it may not always have a salutary effect. This is particularly so in a democratic system', he wrote in his Seminar essay quoted above. Other scholars, such as Anit Mukherjee have argued that the real collateral damage in the uneasy truce – what he calls 'the absent dialogue' between politicians, the military and bureaucrats in India in a 2020 book by the same name – is the efficacy of the army in performing its stated goals. These issues have manifested themselves in things such as lack of coordination and resource optimisation between different military wings (army, air force and the navy) and procurement needs being delayed inordinately for the military. This silo-based approach has also created the problem of the lack of adequate domain knowledge about military affairs in the civilian arm of the government, which, in fact, jeopardises the very idea of effective civilian control of the military. To be sure, Mukherjee's book is primarily focused on the pre-2014 period when India did not have a post of the Chief of Defence Staff (CDS), often seen as a necessary reform to undo the unity-of-purpose damage done by abolition of the Commander-in-Chief's post in the armed forces. Civilian-military relations hit a nadir in the run up to 2014 with a serving army chief accusing the government of falsifying his age to shorten his tenure, there was an unexplained movement of army troops towards the national capital in what was described as an alleged coup-attempt and even army veterans came out openly against the government of the day on issues such as One Rank One Pension. These controversies were preceded by things such as the growing chorus for defence reforms in the aftermath of the Kargil war and the civilian-military discord on things such as demilitarisation of the Siachen Glacier and the propriety and maintainability of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) in areas where the army was involved in counter-insurgency operations. While some of the issues flagged in Mukherjee's book have been addressed under the current government, most importantly the creation of a CDS, the armed forces and their ability to live up to their own stated national security doctrine is far from being realized at the current moment. Operational freedom can do very little do take care of structural constrains for the military While the entire country is celebrating the efficacy of India's air-defence systems (very expensive weaponry) in the aftermath of the recent conflict with Pakistan, the political narrative vis-à-vis the armed forces was very different in the 2024 general election. The opposition made the Agniveer scheme – which plans to hires soldiers for only four years instead of the much longer hirings with retirement pensions earlier – a major electoral issue hoping to attract the votes of unemployed youth who were hoping to land a job in the armed forces. While most rational observers take narratives of future wars becoming more and more mechanised and even digitised to the extent of making conventional combat irrelevant with more than a pinch of salt, there is little doubt that the military will become more and more capital intensive gradually, making it more expensive but less employment generating. In a country like India where jobs are scarce and fiscal resources already stretched thin towards balancing the necessary (such as national security) with the political prudent (welfare), the rising capital intensity of the military is bound to become an increasingly difficult to handle contradiction. In conservative institutions such as the army, these are anything but easy contradictions ton handle. In a 2023 compendium published by the Observer Research foundation, for example, former army chief Manoj Naravane talks about the army being saddled with ten thousand mules and as many handlers despite animal transport battalions becoming redundant with the availability of all-terrain vehicles. Employment is not the only concern vis-à-vis India's future military preparedness. Procurements, caught between red-tape, resource constraint and the ambitions of import substitution continue to put a squeeze on the military's operational prowess, especially the air force and the navy. Senior military functionaries, serving or retired, have flagged these concerns, especially in the context of the rising military might of China. The latter is significantly ahead of India not just in terms of economic resources but also indigenous capabilities of its military industrial complex. In fact, while conflicts with Pakistan continue to animate a large part of the country and popular opinion, India's real strategic challenge emanates from its eastern not western neighbour, which has been supporting the former to keep the spectre or a two-front war alive for India. India's military prowess, or the lack of it, is not something, which exists in vacuum. It is deeply linked with other aspects of what the Indian state choses to do. For example, India's growing proximity to the US which is now described as a strategic alliance – an idea being increasingly questioned in the wake of President Donald Trump's recent public statements hyphenating India-Pakistan – has often been peddled as an excuse to severe its defence relations with Russia. This chorus became louder in the aftermath of the Ukraine war. Russian air defense systems played a major role in the recent conflict. While Russia is more willing to offer its best military equipment and also more likely to share technological know how and interoperability with other systems; imported or locally developed, at cheaper prices, it simply cannot be a substitute for the US in a lot of commercial transactions and cutting-edge technologies which are equally important for the Indian state. Similarly, despite being supportive of the Palestinian cause (at least on a de jure basis) India has cultivated a deep strategic relation with Israel and procures a lot of defence hardware from it, making it an important cog in the wheel of India's military preparedness. These contradictions make India' pursuit of its strategic goals a difficult balancing act where future decisions are always at the risk of falling between the proverbial stools of being oblivious of the past or sidetracked by it. While it is to be expected that the political regime of the day will always portray itself as handling these strategic contradictions better than its opposition even as the latter tries to pit one against the another for political gains, a democracy must always guard against policy becoming a victim of its own propaganda rhetoric. The last thing which can help this cause is a shrill and uninformed public discourse which is often encouraged by competing stakeholders in the democratic realm. Roshan Kishore, HT's Data and Political Economy Editor, writes a weekly column on the state of the country's economy and its political fallout, and vice-versa.
Telegraph
04-04-2025
- Business
- Telegraph
Cash-strapped councils to cut gold-plated pension contributions
Cash-strapped councils will pay less towards gold-plated pensions next year in a move that could save ratepayers millions, experts say. Almost £1 in every £4 raised in council tax is currently spent on funding the generous schemes, with some local authorities forced to contribute more than a quarter of workers' salaries. However, the level of contributions required will fall for most local authorities from next April, according to actuary firm Hyman Roberts. A 2pc cut would save Birmingham City Council, which effectively filed for bankruptcy 18 months ago, almost £3m a year. It comes as council tax was hiked by an average of 5pc for the new financial year, with almost half of properties in England now facing bills of at least £2,000. Council retirees receive a guaranteed income for life, which rises each year with inflation. Their pensions are part of the Local Government Pension Scheme, which has more than six million members from a range of employers in 86 locally administered funds. Funds are valued every three years before employers are told how much they must pay towards pensions, with the next round across England and Wales currently in progress. Local authority budgets have been crippled by rising costs in recent years, but the average contribution was still 21.1pc of pay at the previous 2022 valuation – and some councils pay considerably more. Birmingham City Council currently pays contributions worth 27.2pc of salaries at a cost of over £142m a year – despite being forced to make £150m in cuts elsewhere. Speaking at the Local Government Chronicle's Investment Seminar, Robert Bilton, whose firm Hymans Robertson worked on around a third of valuations in the latest round, said: 'Pretty much all the local authorities are seeing a reduction in contributions. 'The Local Government Pension Scheme was in a really strong funding position at 2022, and nothing that has happened since then has really diminished that. 'Employers that are paying a relatively lower range will see a relatively smaller reduction, maybe 1pc of pay per annum for the next three-year cycle, whereas it's much larger for the employers who are paying higher rates.' The Local Government Pension Scheme was judged to have an overall surplus of £22.1bn at its 2022 valuation, but 26 schemes still didn't have enough money to pay their pensions long term. According to pension consultants Isio, however, the surplus had grown to £85bn by January this year. Just four schemes remained in deficit, opening the door for a reduction in contributions from April 2026. Joe Dabrowski, of the Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association, said he expected the strong funding position to lead to reduced employer contributions in many funds. He said: 'Obviously that might free up more cash for councils, which will then have more scope within their wider budgets to use the money for something else. 'Local authorities have been under pressure on their budgets because of increased demands, whether it's social care, reduced central grants or other things. This could be a shot in the arm for budgets for the time being.' More than 7,600 retired council workers receive pensions of more than £50,000 a year, an investigation by The Telegraph found. A final decision on pension contributions is expected later this year. The Local Government Association was approached for comment.
