Under the college mentoring programme CDS has adopted the Department of Economics, Faculty of Social Sciences of Government College, Nedumangad, Trivandrum.
Government College, Nedumangad is a higher education institution located in a rural area not too far from the small town of Nedumngad in Trivandrum District. The college, established in 1981, has a total strength of 1019 students of which 80 per cent are women. Further, students belonging to the reserved category accounts for about 62 per cent. The college affiliated to the University of Kerala and is NAAC accredited with a B grade. It offers undergraduate degree programmes in Economics, History, Malayalam, Commerce, Mathematics and Physics and Master’s in Economics, Commerce, History and Malayalam. The Department of Economics has three permanent lecturers and one guest lecturer and admits every year 55 students for the undergraduate degree and 18 for the postgraduate degree programme. The latter was started only from the academic year of 2018-19. The college has reasonably good infrastructure in terms of classrooms, seminar hall, a reasonably good text book oriented library and limited computing facilities although all of them are in need of some sprucing up and refurbishment.
CDS is presently mentor to the Department of Economics of the college and helps enable the faculty and students of the department to further improve their knowledge and understanding of economic theory and its application to selected economic problems of the country and the region. This project has been dovetailed into the K N Raj Training and Fellowship Programme at the Centre, which aims at improving the quality of teaching of Economics especially at the undergraduate level in Kerala state.
Earlier a delegation from the Centre consisting of Professor Sunil Mani (Director), Professor Praveena Kodoth, Dr Sunandan Ghosh, and Dr Ritika Jain visited and held discussions with the principal of the College, Dr I Mini, and two of the three members of the Department of Economics, Ms. Sibi Naduvilakkandi, the Head of the Department, and Mr. Nandu C J.
The CDS team had a detailed discussion with the college authorities especially on the ways in which CDS could be of any assistance to the Department in strengthening the hands of the faculty towards improving the quality of instruction and in the infrastructural support for such an enhancement. The discussions that ensued resulted in the following:
- CDS faculty will help the College faculty in improving the teaching of micro and macro economics at the undergraduate level, Econometrics and Research Methods at the post graduate level and also some help in designing the project reports that the Master’s students will have to do at the second year of their programme;
- The three faculty members of the department will be given free membership of the K N Raj library at CDS for a period of years to begin with beginning April 1, 2019. They could also attend the annual one month Teaching Innovations Programme in Economics which CDS conducts on an annual basis.
- Both the faculty and students will be placed on the CDS’s mailing list for all academic events at the Centre such as the seminars, special lectures and for the annual “India’s Economy and Society” series of seminars;
- CDS faculty will also occasionally visit the college for delivering lectures/seminars on mutually agreed topics and at mutually agreed timings; and
- CDS will help the college to strengthen its collection of textbooks in Economics and also in strengthening the computing facility at the department.
The mentorship which commenced from April 1, 2019 will be for a period of three years. There will be annual review of the programme essentially to understand the outcomes and to see if any corrections are to be made.
