For the EW India Preschool Rankings 2012, 2,284 respondents comprising SECA parents, principals and teachers in six major cities where there’s sufficient awareness of the vital importance of quality preschool education, were polled by the well-known market research firm C fore. Dilip Thakore & Summiya Yasmeen report For a rising number of young middle class parents in urban — especially metropolitan — India, the year-end festive and holiday season is clouded by the annual rush for nursery admission forms doled out in December-January. Although the preschool academic year begins in June/July, the admissions process begins with registration forms issued by the country’s most highly reputed preschools in these winter months. During the often cruel winter season, it’s routine for Delhi-based newspapers and television news channels to showcase mile-long queues of anxious parents camping beyond the gates of the national capital’s reputed nursery schools. Queueing is necessary because registration forms priced between Rs.100-500 could run out with many preschool managements printing a minimal number to avoid the onerous task of processing thousands of forms for the usually less than 100 seats available for children aged between three-six in the average nursery. “For the past half century and more, early childhood education (ECE) has not been taken seriously in India. Although India’s upwardly mobile and educated middle class fully appreciates the value of structured ECE — and this is reflected in the flood of admission applications in the most reputed preschools — the Central government adamantly refuses to transform its 1 million-plus anganwadis into ECE centres. Now with all sections of society — not only the urban middle class — beginning to appreciate that ECE is the stepping stone of primary and further education, the government should rope in the large and growing number of branded companies which provide ECE under the franchise model, to begin providing preschool education in anganwadis. This is the prescription for reaping India’s much discussed but still neglected demographic dividend,” says Swati Popat Vats, president of the Podar Jumbo Kids network of 157 owned and franchised preschools and promoter-president of the Early Childhood Association (estb. 2010), India’s pioneer association of ECE stakeholders (preschools, teachers, educators, corporates and NGOs) with a membership of over 450. Also read: Early childhood care & education – Swati Popat Vats Most ECE educators are grateful that the preschool education sector is not subject to the jurisdiction and unwanted ministrations of notoriously venal, bull-in-china-shop bureaucrats and inspectors of the Central, state and local governments who have ruined the high-potential schools and higher education systems of post-independence India. Under the law, any individual can establish and run a nursery school, and with both parents obliged to work to make ends meet in the persistently inflationary Indian economy, preschool education is attracting a growing number of entrepreneurs with much more than the early childhood education and welfare of India’s cheerful and uncomplaining infants on their mind. Consequently, the courts have had to step in to decree several governance norms for preschools. Thus interviews and testing of…
