NCERT Book Class 11 English Sub titling

Sub-titling

THE purpose of sub-titling is to convey the main idea or theme of each section of a long piece of writing. It helps the reader know at a glance the sub-topics that are being addressed. Giving suitable sub-titles helps break the monotony of reading long passages. Read the newspaper article given below and do the tasks that follow.

A new deal for old cities

The example of Curitiba in Brazil, which has attracted global attention for innovative urban plans using low-cost technologies, shows that inclusive development models for urban renewal are workable.

Many cities in India accurately mirror Friedrich Engels’ description of urban centres in nineteenth century England even today. “Streets that are generally unpaved, rough, dirty, filled with vegetable and animal refuse, without sewers or gutters but supplied with foul, stagnant pools instead,” wrote Engels on the living conditions of the working class in that country.

Urban Decay

The depths of urban decay in India came to global notice during the pneumonic plague of 1994 in Surat; it epitomised the failure of governments in the post-Independence era and exposed development policies that ignored fundamental public health issues inherited from colonial rule. There is little evidence to show that policymakers assimilated the lessons from the Surat public health disaster. State and municipal governments did not pursue reform in waste management, though civic conditions in Surat itself underwent change in the plague aftermath.

During the past decade, many cities pursued development agendas—often with the help of massive international loans—to project ‘modernisation’ at the cost of basic civic reform. There is thus a continuing challenge before the current mission to enable and also compel local governments to abide by the provisions of the Municipal Solid Waste Management Rules by which they are legally bound.

Post-liberalisation policies have tended to largely disregard other key factors that affect the quality of life in cities and towns: poverty, lack of sanitation, water shortages, gross undersupply of affordable housing, and traffic chaos generated by automobile dependence, in turn created by neglect of public transport. In the absence of a hygienic environment and safe water supply, chronic water-borne diseases such as cholera and other communicable diseases continue to stalk the poor in the biggest cities.

It must be sobering to the affluent layers of the population that nearly 14 million Indian households (forming 26 per cent of the total) in the urban areas do not have a latrine within the house, as per the Census of India 2001; some 14 per cent have only rudimentary ‘pit’ facilities. The number of households without a drainage connection stands at 11.8 million (representing 22.1 per cent of households). Migration to cities continues and infrastructure to treat sewage is grossly inadequate to meet the demand even where it exists. It is unlikely that the quality of the urban environment can be dramatically improved therefore, if such fundamental questions remain unresolved.

Urban transport receives scant attention from policymakers. Policy distortions have led to rising automobile dependency, higher safety risks for road users, and land use plans that are based not on the needs of people, but primarily designed to facilitate use of private motorised vehicles.

Activity

1. Notice the italicised sentence placed at the top of the article which tells us at a glance what the article is about.

2. Divide the article into four sections based on the shifts in the sub-topics and give a suitable sub-heading for each section. One has been done for you in the article as an example.

3. Look for pictures in newspapers and magazines that depict the urban civic problems discussed in the text. Cut them out and pin them to the text.

Please refer to attached file for NCERT Class 11 English Sub-titling