The annual EducationWorld India School Rankings Awards Nite dinner staged in New Delhi’s The LaLit Hotel on September 14 to felicitate India’s top-ranked day, boarding and international schools, received unprecedented response from 400 principals, trustees, and teachers of the country’s most respected schools. In a filled-to-capacity chandeliered auditorium, EducationWorld felicitated and celebrated India’s Top 10, Best in States and Best in Cities from among 725 schools as per their ranking in the EducationWorld India School Rankings 2013 league tables published in early September.

This year the EW India School Rankings were restructured with the former day, legacy boarding and international league tables sub-divided into co-ed, day-cum-boarding, all-girls and all-boys day schools; co-ed, all-girls and all-boys boarding schools; and day, day-cum-boarding, and wholly residential international schools. During the five-hour awards nite, Top 10 schools in all ten sub-categories were presented trophies and certificates.

Among the principals and education leaders who accepted awards on the occasion were Arun Kapur of the Vasant Valley School, Delhi; Zarene Munshi and Dermot Keegan, Dhirubhai Ambani International School, Mumbai; Roy Robinson, Bishop Cotton School, Shimla; Abha Adams, Step by Step, Noida; Lt. Gen. Arjun Ray, Indus Inter-national School, Bangalore; and Ryan Pinto, Ryan International Group of Institutions among others from across the country.

Moreover on the occasion Sumer Singh, principal of The Daly College, Indore; Dr. Achyuta Samanta of KIIT University and KISS; and Dr. Augustine and Mme Grace Pinto of the Ryan International Group of Institutions, were conferred the Lifetime Achievement in Education Leadership 2013 awards and special citations.

The awards nite began with an attractively choreographed Assamese folk dance and rendition of the Grammy award-winning song We are the World by students of Deepalaya, a Delhi-based NGO which runs 337 learning centres providing education to 50,000 underprivileged children in Delhi NCR. This was followed by the formal release of EducationWorld Books’ latest title 101 Intelligent Education Essays by Graham Cooper, head of product strategy of the UK-based Capita SIMS, a premier school information management systems company, and title partner of the awards.

Other event partners included Knowledge Universe and Asian International College, Singapore (represented by Swapna Pawar); Funtoot Personalised Learning (Rajeev Pathak); FitKids Education Pvt. Ltd (Kishen Whabi); Amity University Press (Raghu Ramakrishnan Aiyer & S.K. Sinha); and Afairs Exhibitions and Media Pvt. Ltd (Sanjeev Bolia).

The awards nite celebration was preceded by an invitation only, first-of-its-kind interactive high-tea session with Nimesh Shah, managing director and CEO, and Nitin Jain, vice-president of the ICICI Prudential Asset Management Company, who addressed school trustees and promoters on the subject ‘Exploring opportunities for addressing the capital needs for expansion of quality private education in India’.

In the pages following we present a pictorial essay of the awards nite.

To view the EW India School Rankings Awards Nite photos visit http://www.picasaweb.google.com/106128334471259355569/EWIndiaSchoolRankingsAwards2013Photos03