For the sixth annual EducationWorld India Preschool Rankings 2015 survey, over 100 field researchers of the Delhi-based C fore interviewed 6,283 parents, principals and teachers in ten selected cities. Moreover in a departure from past practice, this year’s survey segregates preschools into three separate categories — owned/proprietary, franchised and pre-primaries of composite schools – Dilip Thakore & Summiya Yasmeen Persistent advocacy of universal early childhood care and education (ECCE) is a particularly noteworthy achievement of EducationWorld which completed 16 years of uninterrupted publication last month. After your editor was educated about the vital importance of ECCE for developing human capital and enabling socio-economic development by Los Angeles-based philanthropist-educationist Lowell Milken, co-promoter of Knowledge Universe (which owned over 2,500 Kindercare pre-primaries in the US) and the Milken Institute (one of America’s most respected think tanks), in 2005, this publication has conducted five annual surveys to identify and celebrate India’s best pre-primary schools as exemplars to educationists and edupreneurs interested in upgrading Indian education to global standards. It is a canon of faith in EducationWorld that without the strong foundation of professionally administered early childhood care and education and preparation for formal schooling, children will remain handicapped throughout the education continuum. Also read: India’s unsung ECCE pioneers Therefore to generate greater awareness about long neglected early-years provision, the management of this publication has also convened and staged five annual EducationWorld Early Childhood Education Global Conferences in which globally and nationally respected ECCE pundits have shared their knowledge and expertise of pre-primary education with principals and teachers from across India. The 6th EW Early Childhood Education Global Conference is scheduled to be held at Bangalore’s ITC Gardenia on January 23, 2016. Nor has our effort to impact the critical importance of ECCE upon the public been restricted to private edupreneurs and educationists. Ab initio your editors have been stridently advocating transformation of the country’s 1.6 million anganwadis into fully-fledged pre-primary schools. Early childhood nutrition centres for newborns and lactating mothers, anganwadis were established in 1975 by the Central government under its Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS). Regrettably, the country’s million-plus anganwadis are woefully understaffed and under-funded (the Union Budget 2015-16 provided a mere Rs.8,355 crore or Rs.52,219 per centre per year). Moreover, they grudgingly provide nutrition and very basic ECCE to only 75 million of the country’s 158 million children in the 0-5 age group. Allowing for an estimated 10 million middle and upper class children enrolled in the country’s 300,000 private pre-primaries, over 140 million children are currently deprived of any type of early childhood education — a colossal waste of human capital given that it’s now well-established that the brains of children are almost 90 percent developed by age eight. The silver lining is that EducationWorld’s sustained banging of the drum for committing more time and resources towards early childhood care and education woke up — even if belatedly — the somnolent bureaucracy of the Union human resource development ministry in the Delhi imperium. In November 2013, at the fag end of…
