For the seventh annual EW India Preschool Rankings 2016 survey, over 100 field researchers of the Delhi-based C fore interviewed 7,898 parents, principals and teachers in 16 cities countrywide to rate and rank owned/proprietary and franchised pre-primaries separately -Dilip Thakore & Summiya Yasmeen Readers of this sui generis publication are familiar with the lament that education — universally accepted as the building block of national development — has been severely under-funded, under-governed and neglected in post-independence India. The price of sustained neglect of education has been heavy. The country’s population has tripled since independence, industrial and agriculture productivity measured in terms of output per employee and crop yields per hectare is arguably the lowest worldwide, sanitation and public healthcare standards are rock-bottom and with only 74 percent of the population literate, 21st century India grudgingly hosts the worlds largest number of wholly illiterate citizens (300 million). Despite all these evils spreading across the landscape, the annual outlay for public education (Centre plus states) has averaged a mere 3.5 percent of GDP for the past 69 years after the newly-independent nation was promised an exciting “tryst with destiny” on August 15, 1947. Against this, annual expenditure on public education in countries around the world averages 5 percent with the developed OECD nations routinely spending the equivalent of 7-10 percent of GDP for educating their children and youth. And if you are convinced as we are, that resources invested for the education and development of the worlds largest child population (480 million) are insufficient, provision for early childhood care and education (ECCE) for the country’s 164 million children under five years of age is even less so. The number of infants who receive professionally administered early childhood care and education in the nations estimated 300,000 private pre-primary schools aggregates a mere 10 million. Of the remaining 154 million, 84 million children are provided rudimentary ECCE in the country’s 1.34 million anganwadis — essentially nutrition centres for newly born infants and lactating mothers — established by the Central government under its Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) programme promoted in 1975. Although in recent years, government spokespersons have been paying lip service to providing early childhood education in the country’s 1.34 million anganwadis, its the last priority of these severely understaffed and ill-maintained centres. According to a study conducted last year (2015) by the NITI Aayog (an advisory council which has replaced the Soviet-style Planning Commission that was abolished by the newly-elected BJP-led NDA government in 2014), 51.8 percent of the country’s AWCs (anganwadi centres) suffer poor hygiene and sanitation conditions. Significantly these centres and the ICDS programme are administered by the Union ministry of women and child development (WCD). Despite the WCD ministry having chalked up a miserable record — a staggering 48.5 percent of India’s children below age five are severely under-nourished and in danger of stunting — repeated calls by educationists to transfer the ICDS programme to the Union human resource development (aka education) ministry have fallen on unheeding ears. Following…
