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 […]
A specially selected sample of 325 parents of preschool-going children and 54 knowledgeable principals and teachers in Delhi rated and ranked the national capital’s Top 20 preschools. Here are Delhi’s top ranked preschools for the year 2012:
Awareness of the vital importance of early childhood education (ECE) is arguably higher in Delhi than in any urban […]
A representative sample of 360 SEC A preschool parents and teachers/principals has voted Kangaroo Kids, Bandra the city’s No.1 preschool for the third year. But the Top 20 league table has been rearranged. Here are Mumbai’s top ranked preschools for the year 2012:
This year the preschool league tables of the south-eastern port city of Chennai […]
In this survivor city which has unfortunately had to suffer a succession of levelling-down administrations, Kolkata’s privately promoted preschools have emerged as islands of excellence in a sea of academic mediocrity. Here are Kolkata’s premier preschools for the year 2012:
Spared the rod of heavy-handed government regulation even during 34 years of uninterrupted rule in West […]
Although this southern sea port city’s 361 sample respondents comprising preschool parents and teachers/principals again awarded prime position to Vael’s Billabong High-Kangaroo Kids, Neelankarai, all other seats in the Top 20 league table have been rearranged. Here are Chennai’s most preferred preschools for the year 2012.
Whereas last year the EducationWorld preschools master league table for […]
A large phalanx of shiny new preschools have debuted in Bengaluru’s Top 20 league table indicating growing demand from well-informed professionals in this IT city. Here are Bengaluru’s best preschools 2012.
Although the once green and pleasant Bengaluru (pop.8 million) aka the garden city, is slowly but inexorably being asphyxiated by automotive vehicular pollution, and is […]
A civic representative sample comprising 460 SEC A preschool parents, principals and teachers have voted the previously unranked Indus Early Learning Centre, Jubilee Hills the city’s most admired preschool generating shock waves
The southern city of Hyderabad (pop 6.8 million), whose accelerating emergence as a premier academic and IT (information technology) hub has been slowed by […]
There’s rising anxiety within middle-class India whether the country’s top-ranked preschools, schools and best colleges and universities are preparing students adequately to compete in the dawning age of global hyper-competition. Dilip Thakore reports
The high interest aroused by the EducationWorld India School Rankings 2012 (see EW September) nationwide, quickly followed by publication and dissemination of the Quacquarelli Symonds […]
Promoted as a one-room test prep venture in 1995, through a strategy of backward integration, career launcher has metamorphosed into cl educate ltd, a multi-divisional corporate spanning the education spectrum and vying for market leadership. Dilip Thakore reports
With the forecast for Educomp Solutions and Everonn — hitherto India’s most high-profile and fancied listed private education ICT […]
On August 14, the Greater Noida-based CL Educate Ltd (estimated revenue: Rs.200 crore in 2011-12) completed 17 years of operations and attained adulthood. Started in 1995 by a St. Stephen’s, Delhi and IIM-Bangalore alumnus Satya Narayanan R. as Career Launcher, the enterprise has since grown from a one-room test prep school into a multi-divisional company […]
Dilip Thakore interviewed Satya Narayanan R. (popularly known as Satya), founder-chairman of CL Educate Ltd in the company’s head office in Greater Noida. Excerpts.
What were the motivations and objectives which prompted you to promote Career Launcher as a one-man tutorials firm in 1995?
After landing what everyone considered a dream job in Ranbaxy after graduating from IIM-Bangalore, I […]
Conducted by the premier market research and polling company C fore, Delhi, the EducationWorld India School Rankings 2012 ranks over 400 of the country’s most well-known primary-secondaries on the basis of perceptual ratings awarded by a carefully constituted sample respondents base of 3,070 parents, principals, teachers and educationists across 14 parameters of excellence. Dilip Thakore reports
Given the vast diversity of language, culture and ethnicity within each region, the regional tables of yesteryear have been replaced by state and city tables
On the basis of feedback received from field researchers of the Delhi-based market research and intelligence agency Centre for Forecasting & Research Pvt. Ltd (C fore, estb. 2000) which has been […]
The status quo has been maintained at the top table with Rishi Valley School, Chittoor and Doon School, Dehradun ranked the country’s top legacy boarding schools this year as well
The great churn witnessed in the Top 10 rankings of India’s most admired day schools is not replicated in the league table of the country’s most […]
This year the newly promoted (2003) Indus International, Bangalore and Dhirubhai Ambani International, Mumbai have ended the four-year duopoly of the vintage Woodstock, Mussoorie and Kodaikanal International. Summiya Yasmeen reports
In sharp contrast with the largely undisturbed Top 10 pecking order of British-inspired legacy boarding schools, in the league table of India’s most admired new genre […]
The highlight of this year’s day schools rankings is the rise to the very top of the Vasant Valley School, Delhi followed by The Valley School, Bangalore. Both these schools reveal striking similarities of institutional values and philosophy
At the summit of the league table of India’s 342-day schools sufficiently well-known to be rated by […]
Banners of revolt against steady erosion of the autonomy of private schools are being unfurled across the country. On August 16, the National Foundation for Promotion and Protection of Private Education is scheduled to be formally launched in Mumbai to lobby for a fair deal for India’s private schools. Dilip Thakore reports
Dilip Thakore interviewed Damodar Prasad Goyal, convenor of the National Foundation for the Promotion and Protection of Private Education in Mumbai and Bangalore. Excerpts:
What are the factors or developments which have prompted you to promote the National Foundation for Promotion and Protection of Private Education (NFPPPE)?
In spite of the qualitative and quantative growth of private, non-government education […]
Rather belatedly, promoters, trustees and principals of India’s 80,000 private schools (200,000 according to the Union HRD ministry’s calculus which tabulates each section — primary, upper primary, secondary and higher secondary — within an integrated school as a separate unit) who have hitherto regarded each other as competitors, have begun to unite and make common […]
A firestorm of protests erupted within the IITs and their alumni associations worldwide after Union HRD minister Kapil Sibal abolished the rigorous IIT-JEE (joint entrance examination), replacing it with a common entrance exam for all applicants to Central government-funded engineering and technology colleges. Dilip Thakore reports
In the end after the faculties of several Indian Institutes of […]
In 2006 following BJP ideologue Dr. Murli Manohar Joshi’s providentially aborted move to pack the boards of the IITs two years earlier, his successor Union HRD minister Arjun Singh proposed an additional 27 percent quota (i.e in addition to the reserved quota of 22.5 percent for scheduled castes and tribes) for OBCs (other backward castes) […]
During the rule of the BJP-led NDA (National Democratic Alliance) government at the Centre (1999-2004) when BJP ideologue and hardliner Dr. Murli Manohar Joshi was the Union minister for human resource development (HRD), he made a determined attack on the administrative and financial autonomy of the country’s (then) seven Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs). Inevitably, […]
These are the best and worst times for India’s community of educationists and educators, principals and teachers included. On the positive side, perhaps more than ever before in the history of the Indian subcontinent, public interest in education and its life-sustaining social and private benefits is at its zenith. On the negative, there are the […]
The majority judgement of a three-judge bench delivered on April 12 substantially upheld the constitutional validity of the Right to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, 2009 and particularly its controversial reserved quota for poor neighbourhood children in private schools. Dilip Thakore report
An uneasy silence has enveloped india’s estimated 80,000 private primary-secondary schools countrywide following […]
s.2.(n) “School” means any recognised school imparting elementary education and includes: (iii) school belonging to specified category and (iv) an unaided school not receiving any kind of aid or grants to meet its expenses from the appropriate government or local authority.
s.3.(1) Every child of the age of six to fourteen years shall have a right to free […]
Article 15 (1). The State shall not discriminate against any citizens on grounds only of religion, race, caste, sex, place of birth or any of them.
Article 15 (5). Nothing in this article or sub-clause (g) Article 19 shall prevent the State from making any special provision, by law for the advancement of any socially or educationally backward […]
“The word ‘free’ in the long title to the 2009 Act stands for the removal by the State of any financial barrier that prevents a child from completing eight years of schooling (para 5).
Advancement of education is a recognised head of charity. S.3(2) has been enacted with the object […]
Under an innovative scheme devised by Dr Achyuta Samanta, the for-profit KIIT University is a means to a greater end: to fund and grow the Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences (KISS) which offers 15,000 children and youth from 62 tribes, K-postgraduate free-of-charge fully residential education. Dilip Thakore reports from Bhubaneswar
The prime focus area of Dr. Achyuta Samanta, the visionary founder-director of KIIT University and the Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences (KISS, estb. 1992), is the latter institution which provides free-of-charge K-postgrad education to 15,000 aboriginal children drawn from 62 most backward and neglected tribes of the eastern seaboard state of Odisha (pop. 41 million), […]
Dilip Thakore interviewed Dr. Achyuta Samanta, the visionary founder- director of KIIT University and the Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences (KISS) on the KISS campus in Bhubaneswar. Excerpts:
To have promoted and established KIIT as one of India’s top 20 private universities within 15 years is a commendable and extraordinary achievement. What were the aims and objectives behind […]
I congratulate Dr. Samanta for establishing institutions of character like KIIT and KISS. I urge the students of KIIT and KISS to take a lead in spreading the message of peace and non-violence in the present day strife-torn world — Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, former president of India
Every day, in a rare feat of organisational efficiency and management, 259 Agastya teacher-instructors disseminate hands-on science education to over 4,800 government school children in ten states through its science centre in Kuppam, 28 satellite science centres and 61 mobile science vans, sparking a belated science education revolution in rural India. Summiya Yasmeen reports.
Dilip Thakore interviewed Ravi Venkatesan, the Bangalore-based chief executive of Microsoft India (who was abroad) through e-mail. Excerpts:
It’s well-known that education and healthcare are high priority objectives of your parent Microsoft Corporation Inc, USA. How important are these socio-economic issues for MicrosoftCorporation (India)?
Microsoft Corporation began with the dream of a PC on every desk and in every home. Thirty years ago, this […]
Following recommendations of three expert committees, Union HRD minister Kapil Sibal has given in-principle approval to the country’s show-piece IIMs — hitherto closely tied to the apron strings of theministry — to rationalise their boards of governors, improve faculty pay scales, and establish formal fundraising offices to augment their incomes. Dilip Thakore reports
Although the silver jubilee celebrations of the Indira Gandhi National Open University (estb.1985) were dutifully inaugurated in Delhi on November 19 last year, there seems little awareness or pride in the unique achievements of the world’s largest distance education varsity. Autar Nehru & Summiya Yasmeen report
A historic silver jubilee anniversary — a landmark in the […]
At a crowded press conference held in Shastri Bhavan, New Delhi on June 25, newly sworn-in human resources development minister Kapil Sibal outlined a heavy agenda for radical reform of India’s school and higher education systems. Excerpts:
School Education
• Enactment of the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Bill. Notification of the 86th Constitutional Amendment.
Following the return to power in Delhi of the Congress-led UPA-2 government and the appointment of Congress party heavyweight Kapil Sibal as Union HRD minister, there’s new hope that the education sector, completely bypassed by the socio-economic reform process of the past two decades, will be given top priority. Dilip Thakore reports
Dilip Thakore interviewed Dr. Ranjan Pai, managing director and chief executive of Manipal Education and Medical Group Pvt. Ltd (MEMG), the holding company of all for-profit enterprises of the Manipal Education Group, in his office in Manipal Towers, Bangalore. Excerpts from the 90 minute interview.
For over 50 years the focus of the Manipal Education & Medical Group […]
The entry of the Manipal Education Group, which over the past half century has focused its energies on higher education, into the primary and secondary schools sector, has created a flutter within the somnolent dovecotes of Indian academia, and generated great expectations within India’s 300 million-strong middle class. Dilip Thakore reports
The country’s premier and perhaps only university town, Manipal (pop.28,000) is India’s answer to the university towns of the American Mid West and Britain’s Oxbridge. Though Manipal with its utilitarian PWD-style buildings lacks the defining architecture which distinguishes and characterises Britain’s ancient university towns, there is no denying that it is perhaps India’s only (another […]
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