Over the past three months, more than 100 field personnel of the Delhi-based market research and opinion polls company C fore interviewed 8,245 sample respondents including SEC (socio-economic category) ‘A’ parents, preschool principals and teachers to rate and rank proprietary and franchised pre-primaries separately in 16 cities countrywide – Dilip Thakore & Summiya Yasmeen Nineteen years after the first issue of EducationWorld was launched with the noblest purpose of “building the pressure of public opinion to make education the #1 item on the national agenda,” this mission statement is nowhere near attainment. However, this publication can claim a substantial share of the credit for impacting the critical importance of QEFA (quality education for all) as the precondition of sustained national development on the collective public consciousness. In particular, your editors take pride in having succeeded in impacting the vital importance of early childhood care and education (ECCE) upon the public. Prior to 2010 when we published the first league tables rating and ranking pre-primaries (aka preschools) in six major cities, there was minimal awareness about the critical importance of ECCE for nurturing and developing the country’s human capital and social significance of professionally administered early years education for children in the 0-5 age group. Since then, the pioneer annual EducationWorld India Preschool Rankings have been followed up with the EducationWorld National Early Childhood Education Conference at which national and international ECCE experts and practitioners have delivered lectures and conducted teachers’ workshops and training sessions for hundreds of delegates comprising preschool promoters, principals and teachers from all over the country signing up for the EW National ECCE conferences. The end result of all this activity and impactment of ECCE on public consciousness is the emergence of the Mumbai-based Early Childhood Association of India (estb.2011) — a representative organisation of over 5,000 privately promoted preschools across the country — as a force to reckon with in pre-primary education policy formulation councils, professionalisation of early childhood education, a rising number of ECCE conventions and awards events and not least the Congress-led UPA government finalising a National Early Childhood Care and Education policy draft, which received cabinet approval at the fag end of its second term in office (2013). Moreover, in its Samagra Shiksha (holistic education) scheme conceptualised as a programme to integrate school education holistically as a continuum from preschool to class XII education, the BJP-led NDA government at the Centre has accorded ECCE parity with primary and secondary schooling with the states assured of Central government support for their initiatives in public preschool education. Indeed, it’s pertinent to note that until this publication took up and championed the cause of ECCE by commissioning its annual EW India Preschool surveys followed up with national ECCE conferences and workshops, pre-primary education was limited to provision of babysitting and crèche services for working mothers in which the emphasis was on nutrition and unstructured play for infants. This was especially true of the 1.4 million anganwadis, essentially nutrition centres for lactating mothers and newborns established —…
