The country’s steadily multiplying older day-cum-boarding schools are being given stiff competition by newly promoted capital intensive globally benchmarked institutions which offer children in the country’s fast growing cities day and boarding options at attractive price points. When day schools acquire good reputation for providing excellent education or boarding schools in fast-growth tier-II and tier-III towns experience strong pressure from the local population for admission, they transform into day-cum-boarding schools. This genre of primary-secondary schools provides access to children from remote, under-served parts of every state to high quality school education. Conversely as tier-II and tier-III cities and towns grew and expanded into populous administrative capitals of state governments, boarding schools experienced heavy pressure to admit day scholars and transform into day-cum-boarding schools. The Delhi Public School, R.K. Puram, Delhi, is a prime example of an essentially day school transformed into a day-cum-boarding school, and Bishop Cotton Boys School (BCBS), Bengaluru, of a quintessential boarding school (estb.1865) gradually transforming into a day-cum-boarding institution and subsequently into an overwhelmingly day school. Although BCBS continues to admit boarders, their number is disproportionately small and for the past decade, this school is ranked in the category of boys day schools in the annual EducationWorld India School Rankings (EWISR). Another feature of the country’s steadily multiplying day-cum-boarding schools is that older, established schools in this category are being given stiff competition by newly-promoted, capital-intensive, globally-benchmarked institutions with excellent infrastructure, contemporary ICT (information communication technologies)-enabled pedagogies and state-of-the-art co-curricular and sports facilities. Thus they offer children of the rising middle class in the country’s fast-growing cities the best of both worlds — day and boarding options — at attractive price points. Against this backdrop, with latter-day day-cum-boarding schools continuously innovating and upgrading, and also offering daily and weekly boarding options, it’s unsurprising this is one of the most competitive categories of the annual EW India School Rankings survey. Therefore this year, there is a major rearrangement in the seating order at the Top 10 table. The consistently high ranked DPS, R.K. Puram, Delhi (DPS-RKP) which was unseated from its prime #1 position of 2016-17 and 2017-18 position by Modern School, Barakhamba (Delhi) last year, is back at #1 with the latter ranked #3 by this year’s sample respondents. However this year, DPS-RKP (estb.1972) is obliged to share its #1 ranking with a surprising outlier — the new genre SAI International, Bhubaneswar (SAII, estb.2008). Although the CBSE-affiliated SAII is by all metrics a comprehensively contemporary, capital-intensive school, its location in non-metro Bhubaneswar weighs against it. Quite obviously, this hardly two-decades-old school has won an excellent reputation in eastern India where sample respondents have awarded it top score under the parameter of academic reputation, and high scores for co-curricular and ports education, leadership and parental involvement, enabling it to become the first non-metro school to top the annual EWISR (estb.2007) in this category. “The top rank awarded to SAII in EWISR 2019-20 is a dream-come-true and proof of our…
