Excerpt from LiveMint by Bhuma Shrivastava Read Full Article
Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) student volunteers helped Bihar flood victims with relief and health services last year. And they provided counselling and trauma care to employees of the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower after the luxury hotel was attacked by terrorists in November.
Such work isn’t unusual for an institute that sent teams to refugee camps after Partition in 1947 and, more recently, helped in reconstruction work in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands after the devastating Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 and recorded farmer suicides in Maharashtra.
TISS has a record of stretching the definition of academics, from the postgraduate courses it offers in public health and social entrepreneurship to disability studies and action.
But for two years in a row, TISS’ health system courses have missed the top slot in the Mint-C-fore survey by a whisker. Last year’s write-up in Mint on the top-ranked Institute of Health Management Research in Jaipur generated scathing comments from TISS fans, who wrote in to complain that the Mumbai-based institute was worth a lot more than it had been given credit for.
All the more reason for a trek to the TISS campus in Mumbai’s Deonar area, a campus that’s so simple it could be a smaller version of Rabindranath Tagore’s Santiniketan in West Bengal.
Even the greenery on the campus is not in the form of carefully cultivated and manicured gardens. A stroll through the campus is more like a walk in the woods, with each tree and shrub allowed to grow and proliferate on its own, albeit not wildly….Read Full Article
