The death of fr. stan swamy in a Mumbai hospital on July 5 has shone a powerful searchlight on the rot pervading the country’s law and order and justice systems. That the justice provision and administration system has collapsed is widely known. A mountainous 30 million cases are pending in shabby courts of law across […]
Thirty years after the defining Union budget of July 24, 1991 announced overdue liberalisation and deregulation of the Indian economy by abolishing industrial licensing and anti-monopolies legislation, slashing import duties, relaxing rules relating to international trade and substantially released the animal spirits of the country’s millions of natural entrepreneurs, cabined, cribbed and confined by half […]
It doesn’t make headline news. but evidence is emerging that the shutdown of all pre-primary and K-12 schools countrywide for over 15 months for fear of children being infected by the novel Coronavirus, is likely to blight the future of tens of millions of India’s children, especially the girl child.
Even as 12 rounds of talks are stalled between top Chinese and Indian troop commanders in eastern Ladakh, where patrols from both countries clashed on the banks of lake Tsang Po in May 2020 resulting in the death of 20 jawans of the Indian Army and an unspecified number of Chinese soldiers, media reports indicate […]
The silver lining of the prolonged lockdown of industry, business and normative life in over a dozen of India’s 29 states to prevent the spread and transmission of the deadly Coronavirus pandemic rampaging across the country, is that it has provided all good men (man embraces woman) and true, with time to deeply reflect upon […]
Political pundits, academics, sociologists and media pundits have offered numerous explainations for the second tsunami of the Coronavirus pandemic. It is several times worse than the first wave which forced the lockdown of industry and business for over six weeks from March 25, 2020. Education institutions including preschools, schools and colleges have been under strict […]
The sharp spurt in numbers of Covid-19 positive cases, fatalities, sudden shortage of vaccines, hospital beds and associated equipment threatens to reverse the limping recovery of the Indian economy from a year ago when a total lockdown was imposed by the Central government.
Although politicians tend to blame the people, the second wave of the pandemic […]
The silver lining of the devastating Covid-19 pandemic, which despite take-off of the national vaccination campaign, is surging in some parts of the country, is that it has made the neta-babu brotherhood aware that adoption of the socialist development model under which the State dominates the “commanding heights of the economy” was the biggest mistake […]
The controversial resignation on March 16 of Dr. Pratap Bhanu Mehta from the faculty of the high-ranked Ashoka University (AU, estb.2014) has provoked universal condemnation of the promoter trustees of this new genre, crowd-funded private liberal arts university established to maintain the highest standards of academic independence and institutional autonomy for which the Oxbridge universities […]
Recent intemperate and ill-considered statements of Rahul Gandhi (RG), de facto chief of the Congress party, on the military stand-off on the sensitive India-China border issue, signal that it’s high time RG retires from politics in which he has sporadic interest. Following a statement made in Parliament on February 10 by Union defence minister Rajnath […]
Even if belatedly, the leadership of the BJP has begun to differentiate itself from the Congress Party which ruled free India for over half a century during which it grafted inorganic socialism learned by Jawaharlal Nehru, post-independence India’s first prime minister in fashionable drawing rooms of the idle rich in Bloomsbury Square, London, upon the […]
On january 20, america awoke to a bright new dawn. A new chapter has begun in the history of the United States of America (pop.331 million), the world’s oldest democratic nation (estb.1776). Joseph (‘Joe’) Biden, former vice president of the US during the presidency of Barack Obama (2009-2017), with a respectable 40-year track record in […]
By the time you read this editorial, the Union Budget 2021-22 will have been done, dusted and presented to Parliament and the people. Although the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 presented last July firmly resolved to double the national (Centre plus states) annual outlay for education to 6 percent — a recommendation first made and […]
The on-going farmers’ agitation on the borders of Delhi NCR, now in its 44th day (January 8), has thrown a spanner into the recovery process of the Indian economy in the wake of the devastation caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.
Unfortunately, there is a great deal of confusion about the agriculture liberalisation and deregulation legislation. Together […]
For the indian economy the recently concluded year 2020 has been an unprecedented annus horribilis. Over 18 million employees in private industry have been rendered jobless and an estimated 100 million (of 300 million) citizens who had been pulled out of extreme poverty since the economic liberalisation and de-regulation of the dirigiste centrally planned Indian […]
Discovery of an entirely new village sited 2 km on the Bhutanese side of the Sino-Bhutan border, a mere 9 km from the China-India standoff in the Doklam area in 2017, is proof that the Sino-India border dispute is by no means over.
Under a treaty signed in 1949, Bhutan is an Indian protectorate with India […]
With education institutions, especially pre-primaries and K-12 schools, shuttered for over nine months since mid-March because of fear of infection from the Coronavirus, aka Covid-19 pandemic, pitiful tragedies are being played out in millions of households across the country. The majority of India’s 480 million children are not only suffering loss of learning, but also […]
It’s the ultimate insult to the neta-babu brotherhood which despite the landmark liberalisation and deregulation initiative of 1991, continues to micro-manage the Indian economy.
In the International Monetary Fund’s latest World Economic Outlook 2020 published last month, India’s GDP is set to contract by 10.3 percent because of ham-fisted mismanagement of the Covid-19 crisis and Bangladesh […]
Two decades and a year ago, your editors embarked on a historic and perhaps in retrospect, too ambitious a mission. The first issue of EducationWorld — The Human Development Magazine, was ceremonially launched on November 1, 1999 by the late Prof. N.S. Ramaswamy (1926-2012), a great institutions builder and founding director of the National Institute […]
The 65-page National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, proclaimed on July 29, has set ambitious goals. Yet with each passing day, there’s additional apprehension about policy implementation capabilities of the bureaucracy and red-tape ensnarled government machinery, to deliver its exciting promises.
In particular, there’s rising concern about the capability of the Central and state governments hamstrung […]
The disruptive ruckus in the Rajya Sabha on September 20 over the passage of three Bills whose objective is to liberalise, deregulate and revitalise India’s moribund agriculture sector, was unwarranted and irresponsible. It’s incontrovertible that the farm sector in which 60 percent of India’s 1.35 billion citizens are employed, but which contributes only 16 percent […]
Adamantine in its obstinate refusal to fully liberalise and deregulate the Indian economy by consigning the socialist era licence permit-quota regime to the dustbin of history, the neta-babu brotherhood is endangering the unity of India. With unemployment ballooning across the country as the desultory rate of economic growth has been worsened by the Covid-19 induced […]
Despite a long and troubled history of rejection, Hindi language chauvinism is on the march again in BJP-ruled India. Prime minister Narendra Modi and members of the Union cabinet seem unaware that 56 percent of the nation’s population is unacquainted with Hindi. On August 9, Ms. Kanimozhi Karunanidhi, a member of Parliament from Tamil Nadu, […]
It’s easy and normative to dismiss as a case of just desserts, the suspicious gunning down by policemen of gangster Vikas Dubey on July 10 in Kanpur, where a week earlier he had reportedly killed eight policemen in a late night ambush. Such encounter killings — police personnel gunning down suspected criminals on grounds of […]
The private schools in India report (PSIR) 2020, jointly released by the Delhi-based Central Square Foundation and Omidyar Network India on July 22 proclaims — for the first time — the huge contribution that India’s much maligned private schools have made to the national development effort.
The official line supported by the academy and media […]
With the unlock 2.0 strategy of the country announced by the Union government on June 29, it’s now official. All education institutions which have been closed since mid-March will be obliged to remain shut until July 31. This means that children in preschool-class XII in north and western India where the school year begins in […]
The troop skirmishes in the Galwan River Valley sector of the 3,488 km undemarcated India-China border which extends from Aksai Chin in the north-west all the way to Arunachal Pradesh in the northeast, that resulted in the brutal clubbing to death of a colonel and 20 men of the Indian Army on June 15, is […]
The reportedly Rs 20 lakh crore post-Covid-19 economy stimulus package announced by prime minister Narendra Modi in a national televised broadcast on May 12 has greatly disappointed India Inc and most monitors of the Indian economy because of its opacity and promise of loans strewn across Central government programmes, and token grants for stimulating aggregate […]
In a dramatic broadcast on national television and radio on May 12, prime minister Narendra Modi announced a Rs 20 lakh crore (equivalent to 10 percent of GDP projected for 2020-21) stimulus package to get the wheels of industry and business moving. Three days after the final instalment of the economy stimulus package was presented […]
A grave injustice to which the intelligentsia and great Indian middle class are helpless spectators, if not complicit, is spreading across the country in the wake of the novel Coronavirus, aka Covid-19 pandemic. The impact on the livelihoods of an estimated 100 million migrant labour citizens has been the harshest ever since the stringent nationwide […]
The emergence of peninsular Mumbai — the finance and commerce capital of India — as the most afflicted hotspot of the Covid-19 pandemic is the outcome of decades of civic planning neglect and unchecked avarice. Mumbai’s condition is indeed precarious. Of the total number of 81,970 reported Covid-19 positive cases countrywide, it has reported 16,579, […]
The outbreak of the coronavirus aka Covid-19 disease is essentially the revenge of animal species against humankind. As detailed by Prof. Yuval Noah Harari in his best-seller book Homo Deus (2017), unspeakable cruelty against nature and animals has been committed in the process of mankind asserting its dominance on Planet Earth.
In particular, during the past half century since invention of […]
Although the three-week national lockdown of the Indian economy ordered by the Central government on March 25 is undoubtedly well intentioned, it is likely to prove a good prescription overdose — a cure that’s worse than the disease, in the memorable phrasea of US President Donald Trump. During the past three months since it claimed […]
The eruption of the coronavirus (Covid 19) epidemic in China’s Hubei province with Wuhan (pop.11 million) as its epicentre — which threatens to mutate into a global pandemic — and the efforts of the Central and provincial governments of the neighbouring People’s Republic of China (PRC), have important lessons to offer government and civil society […]
The stunning victory of the aam Aadmi (Common Man) Party (AAP) in the Delhi state election last month has changed the national political discourse. For the better. Development — especially human capital development — is on the national agenda for the first time. The sheer scale of the AAP victory — it won 62 of […]
A nationwide confrontation is brewing between the country’s 30 million strong community of students in institutions of higher education and the BJP/NDA 2.0 government at the Centre which was re-elected to power with an improved majority in the Lok Sabha less than a year ago.
On January 5, with the tacit approval of the Delhi police […]
Since we convened the first National Conference on Early Childhood Education in 2010, EducationWorld (estb.1999) has been in the vanguard of a lethargic national movement to accord high importance to early childhood care and education (ECCE) for children in the age group 0-5. Unfortunately, but unsurprisingly, in a society in which the establishment has accorded […]
Although the BJP/NDA 2.0 government at the Centre is surprised by the scale and intensity of public outrage — particularly among university students and youth across the country — to the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) 2019, public apprehension and sustained criticism of the Act is justified.
Though the government claims the new legislation, […]
The recent wave of rape-murders of women citizens across the country from Unnao and Lucknow in Uttar Pradesh to Hyderabad and Ranchi, the thousand unnatural shocks that women are heir to on a daily basis and the helpless outrage of decent society, has like never before exposed the utter intellectual aridity and lack of problem-solving […]
The continuous smog pollution which has enveloped Delhi — India’s showpiece national capital — for the past month since Diwali (October 27) and several cities of north India, is the natural outcome of post-independence India’s ill-advised adoption of the Soviet-inspired Centrally planned economic development model over half a century ago.
- Reshma Ravishanker The central government’s recent announcement on scrapping ‘no-detention policy’ for classes V and VIII in schools under its jurisdiction has yet again .....Read More
The Calcutta High Court on Tuesday rejected the bail petitions of former West Bengal education minister Partha Chatterjee and four other ex-public servants in a .....Read More
