Educationworld India Preschool Rankings 2014 Since September, 200 C fore field researchers have quizzed 2,332 SECA (socio-economic category A) young parents and 795 principals and teachers to rate 173 unitary pre-primaries in ten cities countrywide across ten parameters of early childhood care and education excellence. Here are the Educationworld India Preschool Rankings for the year 2014: Astonishing but true. Nobody seems to give a jot that almost half of India’s 140 million children under age five are likely to suffer brain damage and stunting due to chronic early childhood malnutrition. Even as the country’s newly-elected machismo prime minister Narendra Modi powwows with leaders of ASEAN and OECD countries where the incidence of child neglect and malnutrition is a historical memory, the shameful truth testified by the UNDP’s Human Development Report 2014, that 48 percent of India’s infants are severely under-nourished and in grave danger of physical and cognitive damage, is being glossed over by the self-serving establishment, jingoist media, and uncaring middle class. Despite a spate of neuroscience studies in the US and Scandinavian countries having conclusively established that children’s cognitive faculties are almost 90 percent developed by age eight, India’s omniscient education planners and policy formulators were in the dark about early childhood care and education (ECCE) until recently. Under severe pressure from private sector educators and not least from EducationWorld which started rating and ranking India’s most progressive independent/unitary pre-primaries in 2010 and also began staging the annual EducationWorld Early Childhood Education Global Conferences, amidst reports that the neighbouring People’s Republic of China intends to invest a humungous $8 billion (Rs.48,000 crore) in ECCE over the next two years, belatedly the babus and behenjis in the Central government’s women and child development ministry placed ECCE on the national development agenda. A National Early Childhood Care and Education (NECCE) Policy was drafted last year and approved in September 2013 by the Congress-led UPA-II government at the fag-end of its undistinguished second quinquennium (2009-14). The major policy recommendation of the NECCE is to transform all 1.6 million anganwadis — child and lactating mothers’ nutrition centres established under New Delhi’s Integrated Child Development Services programme (1975) — into ECCE centres and prescribe infrastructure, quality and other benchmarks for pre-primaries. But with the Congress and its allies routed in General Election 2014, and the BJP lumbered with a lunatic fringe of sangh parivar intellectuals whose stated intent is to revert to ancient India’s gurukul system for primary education, and to inject Hindu mythology and morality into school texts, the chances of the 21st century NECCE policy draft being applied in the country’s 1.6 million anganwadis and rolled out nationally, have dimmed considerably. The signs are not good. Instead of promoting pre-primary schools and/or helping Central government anganwadis to become full-fledged ECCE centres for children under six years of age, several state governments, led by Tamil Nadu, have issued closure notices to private preschools on the ground that they are in breach of the Right to Free & Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, 2009.…
