CBSE headquarters in Delhi: decisive action. Inset: Himanshu Gupta
Bearing down heavily on ‘dummy schools’ for a second time this year, on November 6 the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) — India’s largest national school-leaving examinations board with 30,373 affiliated schools — withdrew the affiliation of 21 schools. Simultaneously […]
Since the 2001 airborne suicide attacks on the twin towers in New York, USA and the election of the BJP/NDA government to power in New Delhi in 2014, madrasas — Islamic primary-secondary schools that originated in circa 800 as study circles in mosques whose […]
PSG College of Arts & Science: deemed varsity applicant?
The association of university Teachers (AUT) which represents higher education faculty across Tamil Nadu (pop.89 million), has formally urged the state government to reject proposals for converting government-aided private colleges into autonomous private universities. Encouraged by provisions of the National Education […]
Hot on the heels of the massive outrage provoked by the rape and murder of a junior doctor at the government-run RG Kar Hospital in Kolkata, which exposed severe malpractices in the state’s medical education system, and a scam in which public money meant for students to purchase […]
“There are an increasing number of keyboard warriors who say things in exercise of their freedom of speech to just gain traction and to stay relevant in public… What should India do to curb it? The method opted by the state must be covered within the fold of the restrictions. It must not have the […]
One of the mandates (s.21) of the landmark right of Children to Free & Compulsory Education Act, 2009, was that every school countrywide (other than private unaided schools) shall constitute School Management Committees (SMCs) comprising “elected representatives of the local authority, parents or guardians of children admitted […]
“…the truth is crystal clear. In 2014, during the Congress UPA government, there were 16,217 sanctioned posts in Central universities out of which 6,042 posts, i.e. 37% posts, were vacant. The Modi government is rapidly filling all these posts by taking every section along. This is the reason that despite the increase in the number […]
Seventy-one days after the angry Post Graduate Trainee (PGT) doctors’ movement which started on August 10 as a protest against official negligence that resulted in the horrific rape and murder of a 31-year-old trainee doctor at the government-run RG Kar Medical College and Hospital in […]
For the past year, the premier Indian Institute of Management, Bengaluru (IIM-B, estb.1973) — one of the original ABC (Ahmedabad, Bangalore and Calcutta) IIMs promoted by the Central government and routinely ranked among the global Top 50 B-schools by The Financial Times, London — has […]
GMC blueprint: India-friendly global financial hub
For introducing the metric of Gross National Happiness (GNH) as a counter to individually stressful and environmentally destructive national development metrics such as GNP (gross national product) and GDP (gross domestic product), […]
UGC headquarters, Delhi: hands-on learning directive
Somewhat belatedly, the importance of hands-on experiential education has dawned upon educationists and education policy wonks. In April the Delhi-based All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) which supervises all engineering and technology education countrywide, issued Draft Guidelines of its Apprenticeship Embedded Degree/Diploma Programme […]
Over the past 25 years since it was modestly promoted with the ambition to make education the #1 item on the sputtering national development agenda, EducationWorld (estb.1999) has relentlessly championed foundational early childhood care and education (ECCE) which had been almost totally ignored — especially in public education — […]
“This quiet revolution, this subtle shift, in the way Kashmir engages with democracy, may well be the most profound transformation of all.”
Mohammad Tabish, a Chevening Scholar, on high voter turnout in the recent Jammu & Kashmir assembly election (Outlook, October 11)
“Legend has it that one of the earliest forms of the prasad was documented […]
Two months after the gruesome rape and murder of a 31-year-old trainee doctor in the seminar hall of RG Kar Medical College, Kolkata on August 9, public protests and demonstrations continue on the streets of the ‘City of Joy’.
The horrific murder of the young medical intern which exposed the lack of […]
A dispute over the recruitment of 69,000 government school teachers in Uttar Pradesh escalated to the Supreme Court of India. On September 9, the apex court overruled an order of the Lucknow high court to draw up a fresh list of recruitees in response […]
C counting of votes of the delhi University Students’ Union (DUSU) elections which concluded on September 27, has been postponed by the Delhi high court. Responding to a petition filed by advocate Prashant Manchanda seeking directions to the government to take action against students who […]
The ninth edition of the nirf (National Institutional Ranking Framework) 2024 released by the Union education ministry on August 12 has generated considerable excitement in some higher education institutions (HEIs), especially government colleges and universities. Several low-profile universities which have been awarded high rank in NIRF […]
In a reaction to the dmk government’s refusal to implement the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 and writing its own State Education Policy (SEP) under the guidelines of the Justice Murugesan Committee which submitted a 550-page draft to the state government on July 1, the BJP-led NDA […]
Unable or unwilling to improve infrastructure and/or learning outcomes in the state’s 49,679 government schools, officials of Karnataka’s education ministry have continuously targeted the state’s 19,650 private schools for alleged violation of rules and regulations under a plethora of Acts of Parliament (RTE Act, […]
The horrific rape and murder of a second year postgrad trainee doctor on August 9, inside the RG Kar Medical College and Hospital, Kolkata (estb.1886), which ironically hosted India’s first practicing woman medical practitioner (Kadambini Bose Ganguly), has rocked Kolkata and the medical practitioners’ profession countrywide.
“Every day when I pick up the newspaper there is some incident… Some women have been assaulted. It could be a college student, a child, or a middle-aged lady. (There must be) something wrong with Indian men if we can’t address this problem… This goes back forever but is now talked about since the Nirbhaya […]
“This is a budget that will take the country’s villages, poor and farmers on the path of prosperity. In the last 10 years, 25 crore people have come out of poverty. This budget is a budget for the continuation of the empowerment of the newly emerged Neo Middle Class.”
PM Narendra Modi on the Union […]
Justice Murugesan (centre left) with chief minister Stalin
A draft of Tamil Nadu’s state Education Policy (SEP), developed as an alternative to the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, has been submitted to the ruling DMK government by the Justice Murugesan-led panel.
After the DMK was voted to power in the legislative […]
A month after writing to Prime Minister Narendra Modi urging him to abolish the National Entrance-cum-Eligibility Test (NEET) for admission into medical colleges countrywide, on July 24 the state’s cabinet headed by chief minister Mamata Banerjee passed an official resolution calling for the abolition of […]
The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 presented to the nation after an interregnum of 36 years, accords high importance to early childhood care and education (ECCE). To the extent that it mandates integration of three years of compulsory ECCE into the formal school education system reconfigured as 3+5+3+4 to replace the previous […]
The highly reputed multi-campus Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS, estb.1936) — India’s first major postgrad institution for the study of social sciences including habitat education, gender, media, labour and management, rural development studies — has suffered a severe embarassment.
A July 8 order issued by Uttar Pradesh’s BJP government which directed government school teachers to mark their attendance digitally — proclaimed as a first countrywide — was rescinded on July 16 after statewide protests by the teachers community.
Political commentators in Lucknow, the admin capital […]
Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan: yet another committee
Under fire for the NEET-UG exam scandal from opposition parties as well as a swelling number of monitors of India’s failing education system, Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan has constituted an Education Advisory Council (EdAC) to advise the ministry of education (MoE) on […]
Despite Tamil Nadu having been ruled by anti-upper caste political parties for almost half a century, caste-based atrocities against Dalits — the lowest caste in the iniquitous Hindu varna system — have been on the rise in the state, particularly in primary-secondary schools. This paradox highlights the complex […]
“Young India wants jobs more than temples… For most of us, a good education was the passport out of poverty into the middle or affluent class. Now, a young person with a college degree is NINE times as likely to be unemployed as her illiterate counterpart, according to an ILO report. This indicates both the […]
The political storm generated in Parliament in Delhi by the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test-Undergraduate (NEET-UG) scam, in which as many as 67 students scored a perfect 720, and over 1,500 were awarded booster “grace marks”, has come as a fortuitous opportunity for Bengal’s ruling Trinamool Congress (TMC) government […]
After the national education Policy (NEP) 2020 mandated reconfiguration of the 10+2 primary-secondary schooling system into a new 5+3+3+4 continuum formally integrating early childhood care and education (ECCE) into elementary education, several states across the country have begun the process of integrating three years […]
National council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), the country’s largest publisher of K-12 textbooks, is again in the throes of a controversy following its “rationalisation-cum-revision” of class XII social science (history) textbooks, widely prescribed by schools countrywide including 29,662 upscale schools affiliated with the Central […]
“At the very least, the result pricks the bubble of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s authority. He made this election about himself: His performance, his omnipotence and omniscience, and his ideological obsessions. Modi is, for the moment, not the indomitable vehicle for History, or the deified personification of the people. Today, he is just another politician, […]
King George’s Medical University, Lucknow: heaviest penalty
Medical education in Uttar Pradesh — India’s most populous state (215 million) — is a mess. For one, the entire state covering an area of 243,286 sq. km is served by 72,757 registered medical (allopathic) practitioners, a ratio of 1:3800 doctor per 100,000 population cf. […]
West Bengal’s multi-crore teacher recruitment scam which has marred the entire third term in office (which began in 2021) of chief minister Mamata Banerjee has ballooned into a major General Election 2024 issue.
In General Election 2019, the resurgent BJP won an unprecedented 18 of West Bengal’s 42 seats […]
KAMS’ Shashi Kumar (centre right) with CM Siddaramaiah
By several metrics, the southern state of Karnataka (pop.70 million) is India’s most educationally advanced. Bengaluru, the state’s admin capital, is widely regarded as the Silicon Valley of India for hosting a large number of new genre ICT (information communication technology) companies and […]
College graduates: research drive initiative. Inset: M. Jagadesh Kumar
The Delhi-based University Grants Commission (UGC) has greenlighted direct entry of graduates with four-year Bachelor (Hons) degrees into PhD programmes. On March 13, UGC gave formal approval to the UGC (Minimum Standards and Procedure for Award of PhD Degree) Regulations, 2022, enabling graduates […]
“The protests are a product of that suffocating sense of thwarted political agency that a lot of young people feel… The students are, perhaps inchoately, attempting that work of moral repair.”
Pratap Bhanu Mehta, former president, Centre Policy Research, on pro-Palestinian student protests at US university campuses (Indian Express, April 24)
Despite a plethora of legislation including the Indian Penal Code 1860, Juvenile Justice (Care & Protection of Children) Act, 2000 and the RTE Act, 2009 expressly prohibiting corporal punishment of children, the ancient tradition of teachers inflicting physical punishment for real and imagined misbehaviour is widespread in India’s 1.60 million schools. Reports of teachers inflicting […]
- Mita Mukherjee Nearly 25 lakh persons working as pre-primary facilitators and caregivers in the country will be offered training to equip them with the .....Read More
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