For the past 25 years your editors have persevered to track, record and constructively criticise lackadaisical initiatives of the Union and state governments to raise teaching-learning standards in pre-primary, primary, secondary and higher education which were — and are — lagging far behind global norms – Dilip Thakore & Summiya Yasmeen

When 25 years ago your promoter-editors launched EducationWorld — The Human Development Magazine — we confidently expected it to be a runaway success. Who wouldn’t be interested in reading about the education and development of India’s children and youth — the world’s largest human resource pool? At that time, the number of primary-secondary schools countrywide was estimated at 1.16 lakh, the number of junior and undergrad colleges at 11,831, universities at 236 and number of teachers and academics at 3 million. We reckoned that if even 25 percent of these publics became subscribers, EW would become the largest circulation magazine in India, and advertising would come rolling in.

Within a few months, we were rudely educated about the resistance of all these publics to innovation, change of dull habit and worse, to human development. Teachers and academics proved to be almost totally indifferent, forcing change of direction to institutional sales. We reasoned that schools and higher education institutions established with multi-crore investment in infrastructure would easily discern the logic of subscribing to a copy for the library.

But even a quarter century after uninterrupted publishing, only a fraction of India’s 1.6 million schools (including 450,000 private schools), 45,000 colleges and 1,168 universities, have registered as subscribers. And it speaks volumes about the market intelligence and enquiring minds of the academic community that the great majority of the country’s K-12 teachers and academics in higher education are blissfully unaware of the existence of the country’s pioneer and #1 education print and online magazine. Clearly, education is very low on the national development agenda.

In the early years of the new millennium, this publication was kept afloat by equity investment by London-based angel investor Shyama Thakore and Dr. Ramdas Pai and Glenn Khargonkor of the Manipal Education Group. Surprisingly all efforts to persuade captains of industry to invest with us proved infructuous. Despite your editor, the founder-editor of Business India and Businessworld, India’s pioneer business magazines, having been on first name terms with most of them.

The turning point came in 2005 when your editor had a chance encounter with Los Angeles based billionaire philanthropist-educationist Lowell Milken (and brother Michael). They readily agreed to purchase a 26 percent equity stake — the maximum permitted under laws governing foreign investment in news media — in this floundering publication. It speaks volumes about the hypocrisy of the biggest names in Indian industry who pay lip service to high importance of public education, that this pioneer initiative to nurture and develop India’s huge and high-potential but wasted human resource, struck a sympathetic chord in faraway Los Angeles. EW and Indian society owe them a huge debt.

Another fortuitous happenstance in the year 2006 was that Bhavin Shah, business management graduate of Bombay University and former marketing executive with Gillette, signed up with this publication, as our Mumbai-based Marketing Manager. Since then, Bhavin, currently CEO of the holding company, has taken charge of the marketing and sales operations of the company with commendable success.

On the occasion of the company’s and EducationWorld’s Silver Jubilee anniversary, this is an apposite moment to publicly acknowledge the contribution of all our shareholders, marketing and editorial teams for having set EW firmly on the rails to raise public awareness about the critical importance of QEFA (quality education for all) as the essential precondition of national development.

Although saved by timely divine intervention, this publication has had a hard and rocky road to navigate and has been obliged to suffer the proud man’s contumely and insolence of office (none of the five Union education ministers of the NDA/BJP government or high officials have granted an interview). Nevertheless, for the past 25 years, your editors persevered to monitor, record and constructively criticise the lackadaisical and ponderous initiatives of the Union and state governments to raise teaching-learning standards in pre-primary, primary, secondary and higher education which were — and are — lagging far behind global norms.

In particular, we have repeatedly been invoking government (Centre plus states) to increase annual expenditure for public education to 6 percent of GDP, first recommended by the Kothari Commission in 1967, going to the extent of presenting a ‘parallel budget’ coterminously with the Union Budget every year. It provides a roadmap to the Centre to mobilise an additional Rs.7-8 lakh crore for public education. Alas, this initiative has been met with deafening silence from the establishment.

Nevertheless, during the past quarter century of dogged publishing, EW has been successful in moving the needle of public policy towards some overdue reforms in Indian education. For instance, we were the first to highlight the critical importance of professionally administered early childhood care and education (ECCE) for youngest children. In 2010 we convened India’s first-ever international ECCE Conference in Mumbai and subsequently, we introduced the EW India Preschool Rankings and Awards to rank and felicitate the country’s best preschools in major cities.

Since then, the EW India Preschool Rankings and Awards Conference has been held every year. An unacknowledged outcome is that the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 has made three years of pre-primary education compulsory for all children countrywide in 1.4 million government Anganwadi Centres (AWCs) and the country’s estimated 55,000 private preschools. Similarly, strident advocacy of investing school-going and school-leaving children with vocational skills and training (VET) has resulted in VET being accorded high importance in NEP 2020.

Another significant EW achievement is that it has ended routine disparagement of private sector schools and higher education institutions — a legacy of the country’s socialist history — which had become normative in the media and public discourse. We highlighted and reiterated the plain truth that it’s India’s estimated 450,000 private schools which educate 48 percent of the country’s in-school children, that have kept India’s K-12 system afloat. Therefore, in our EducationWorld India School Rankings survey (EWISR, estb.2005), we have never hesitated to acknowledge this reality.

In the annual EWISR, 8,000-10,000 educationally aware sample respondents rate over 4,000 of the country’s best schools on 14 parameters of school education excellence and rank them in three main and 14 sub-categories. And it should be a matter of national pride that over the years, the annual EWISR has evolved into the world’s largest and most comprehensive schools ranking survey and has enthused the entire (we also rate and rank best Central and state government schools) K-12 sector to adopt globally best teaching-learning practices to improve children’s learning outcomes.

Thus by assiduously tracking and reporting pre-primary, school and higher education news, institutions and policies, EW has shifted even if imperceptibly, the education reforms needle. Although dons of academia dominated by government colleges and universities tend to be unaware of EW (which doesn’t speak well for their market intelligence) and are less accessible, through consistent advocacy we have played a significant influencer’s role in liberalising the hitherto rigid isolationist policy that discouraged foreign schools and universities from establishing campuses in India. In particular, we have enthusiastically welcomed new-age private universities that are changing the contours of higher education countrywide, and EW has been a strong proponent of better and closer alignment between higher ed curriculums and India Inc expectations.

In sum, during the past 25 years of uninterrupted publishing, EducationWorld has established a deep and durable connect with all sectors of Indian education. In the following pages, we present milestone education events of the past quarter century and our comments and campaigns for and against. The purpose of our 25th Anniversary cover feature is to enable readers — may your tribe increase — to judge whether we have been faithful chroniclers of Indian education, and the extent to which we have influenced public policy for the betterment of the world’s largest child and youth population.

Also read: 25th Anniv call for common cause