Critical Education Is Not a Unitary Phenomenon
The discourse of CP, however, is the discourse of liberation and hope; it is the discourse of liberation since it questions the legitimacy of accepted power relations and recognizes the necessity of going beyond arbitrary social constraints; it is also the discourse of hope since it provides the potential for marginalized groups to explore ways of changing the status quo and improve their social conditions. In applied linguistics, CP is an acknowledgement both of the socio-political implications of language teaching and at the same time the possibility of change for both students and teachers, two groups of people who are either left out of any serious Links Of London treatment of the profession or represented superficially detached from their real-life experiences. For these people, CP is liberating in the sense that it legitimizes the voices of practitioners and learners, and gives them scope to exercise power in their local context. At the same time, it can be viewed as the discourse of hope, since by taking the classroom as the point of departure, it helps the marginalized to explore ways of changing society for a better, more democratic life:
Tags: critical literacy, critical pedagogy, school curricula, social constraints, world realities
Dams in India
India got her independence in 1947. Since then, dams in India have been built across many perennial rivers. These dams are a part of the several multi-purpose projects launched by India to serve a variety of needs. In a multi-purpose project, a river forms a unit and a river valley is developed, by exploiting all the resources of the river.
Dams are built to harness the river water so that it can be utilised according to needs. A multipurpose project is launched often for storing water for irrigation purposes, generating hydro-electricity by utilising the water stored by the dams, preventing floods and facilitating afforestation in the catchment areas of the reservoirs. However, the dams also provide drinking water, using the canals for navigation in some areas and also facilitating pisciculture and recreational activities. The main multipurpose projects constituting the major Indian dams are the Hirakud Project in Orissa, the Bhakra Nangal in Punjab, the Damodar Valley Project in Bihar and Bengal, the Tungabhadra Project in Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka, the Rihand Project in Uttar Pradesh.
At independence, in 1947, there were fewer than 300 large dams in India and by the year 2000 the number had grown to over 4000, more than half of them built between 1971 and 1989. India is declared to be the third in the world in dam building, after US and China. While some of the Indian dams were built primarily for flood control, water supply, and hydroelectric power generation, the primary purpose of most Indian dams (96 percent) remains irrigation. In fact, large dam construction in India has been the main form of investment in irrigation undertaken by the Indian government. But, starting in the 1980s, public investment in large dams in India has been the subject of a sustained controversy that was epitomized by the Sardar Sarovar Project, based on the balance between the social, environmental, and economic costs of dams and their benefits.
Tags: damodar valley project, dams in india, hydroelectric power generation, large dams, river dams