Since july 14, when the heinous rape of a six-year-old girl child of the upmarket CISCE-affiliated Vibgyor High School was reported in Bangalore, the city has witnessed a spate of child sexual abuse crimes. Over the past five months, nine cases of child molestation/rape have been reported within K-12 schools in the city. According to […]
THE 60-DAY-OLD narendra Modi-led NDA-II government is set to consolidate all skill development programmes currently administered by 21 ministries and departments of the Central government, under a newly-created Union ministry of skill development and entrepreneurship (SDE). With the Union Budget 2014-15 presented to Parliament by finance minister Arun Jaitley on July 10, having allocated an […]
THE HEINOUS RAPE OF a six-year-old girl child of the upmarket CISCE-affiliated Vibgyor High School in Bangalore on July 3 allegedly by two school-appointed gym instructors, has shaken the garden city’s community of parents. Since the ghastly crime was reported to the police on July 14 by the girl’s father, the city has witnessed strident […]
LIBERAL APPREHENSIONS that the sweeping victory of the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) in General Election 2014 would result in tampering and messing with school curriculums, are proving to be justified in Gujarat where a BJP government has been in power since 2001.
On June 30 the Gujarat State School Textbook Board (GSSTB) issued a circular […]
AFTER PREVARICATING for four years and delaying payments due to managements of 8,000 private unaided schools which admitted children from poor households in their neighbourhoods, the Maharashtra state government has approved disbursal of the fee reimbursement due to them. Under a July 16 notification, the state government has increased the formerly promised tuition fee reimbursement […]
SHORTLY AFTER THE trinamool Congress party, which ended the 34-year uninterrupted rule of the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM)-led Left Front coalition in West Bengal (pop. 91 million) in the summer of 2011, was installed in Writers Building, Kolkata, a 19-member school syllabus reform committee was appointed by chief minister Mamata Banerjee to sanitise school […]
A JUNE 30 CIRCULAR of the delhi-based Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) directing all its 15,000 affiliated schools countrywide to celebrate Sanskrit Week from August 7-13 has provoked hatred, ridicule and contempt in Tamil Nadu (pop: 72 million).
According to the circular, “the celebration of Sanskrit Week would provide a medium for popularising Sanskrit and […]
FEAR OF FAILURE, LACK OF cooperation from family, inability to control anger, sleeplessness, and poor communication skills. These are just some of the problems suffered by class X students of government schools in Uttar Pradesh — India’s most populous state (200 million) — according to a first-of-its-type study conducted by the State Council for Educational […]
“The expansion of public services and social support in India, such as it is, has little to do with any nostalgia for Nehruvian socialism. It is a natural development in a country with a modicum of democracy.” Jean Dreze, well-known developmental economist, on criticism of social sector spending (The Hindu, July 8)
CHAOS OVER NURSERY admissions in Delhi is becoming more confounded with parents resorting to fraud and trickery to get children admitted into the nurseries of the city’s estimated 6,600 composite schools, which ensures a smooth passage in school education for the next 12 years.
After an investigation by the state government’s education ministry unearthed that, “out […]
IT’S A CURIOUS PARADOX of india’s most industrial — and arguably most corrupt — state that vacancies in the state’s engineering colleges have spiralled above 34 percent from less than 1 percent in 2009, while simultaneously 94 additional colleges with an intake capacity of 67,181 additional students have become operational. A 21-member committee led by […]
THE MADRAS HIGH COURT witnessed high drama on March 7, when a batch of 41 students studying nursing in government colleges threatened to jump from the seventh floor of the additional law chambers in the high court premises unless given assurance of employment in the state’s government hospitals. After almost an hour of persuasion by […]
THREE YEARS ON AFTER IT ended 34 years of rule of the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM) led-Left Front government in West Bengal (pop. 91 million) with a landslide majority in the state legislative election of 2011, the Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress government has yet to redeem its promise to restore West Bengal’s universities — […]
THE FRAMING OF SEDITION charges against 67 Kashmiri students of the private Swami Vivekananda Subharti University (SVSU), Meerut, following an Indo-Pak Asia Cup cricket match played in Dhaka last month, has raised political temperatures in Lucknow and Uttar Pradesh on the eve of General Election 2014.
While witnessing a live telecast of the match on campus […]
EVER SINCE THE LANDMARK right to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, 2009, which devolved part of the constitutional obligation of the State (Central, state and local governments) to provide free-of-charge elementary education to all children in the 6-14 age group onto private schools, became law on April 1, 2010, relations between the Karnataka government […]
EVEN AS ADMISSIONS HAVE BEGUN for the current academic year starting June/July, confusion about rules and regulations governing admission of tiny tots aged three-four years in Delhi’s estimated 6,600 composite private schools offering nursery education has not cleared despite a rain of legislation, litigation, clarification notifications and rules drawn up by the Delhi state government, […]
THE NINTH ANNUAL STATUS OF EDUCATION Report (ASER) 2013 — the sole national survey measuring learning outcomes in rural government and private primary schools (classes I-VIII) conducted by the acclaimed Mumbai-based NGO Pratham — depicts a downtrend in learning outcomes in rural India, which hosts 67 percent of the national population. This annual survey assesses […]
GUJARAT’S THREE-TEAM CHIEF MINISTER and now prime ministerial candidate of the opposition BJP for the general election scheduled for this summer, Narendra Modi has had to endure severe criticism for his failure to maintain law and order during the communal riots which swept the state in 2002 when over 3,000 citizens — mainly of the […]
WHEN WEST BENGAL’S FIREBRAND chief minister Mamata Banerjee ended 34 years of uninterrupted rule of the CPM (Communist Party of India-Marxist)-led Left Front government rule in the state — during which quasi-literate CPM apparatchiks filled all institutions of education driving teaching-learning standards to new lows — in May 2011, she aroused great expectations in West […]
THE SHOWPIECE OSMANIA UNIVERSITY, Hyderabad (estb.1918), a prime bone of contention between the feuding protagonists of a breakaway Telangana from Andhra Pradesh (pop. 84 million) and proponents of a unitary state, may not be as valuable a prize as popularly believed. A task force of the Delhi-based University Grants Commission (UGC) which visited and inspected […]
THE RAIN OF WOES POURING DOWN ON THE STATE OD UTTAR PRADESH (pop. 200 million) — the Muzaffarnagar riots, legislators globetrotting at public expense and exacerbating breakdown of law and order — has been compounded by the release of the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2013, published by the nationally reputed Mumbai-based education NGO […]
A Report Prepared by EY India — a subsidiary of the former Ernst & Young, UK, the world’s third largest professional services (auditing, consultancy, tax advisory) firm (revenue: $25.3 billion or Rs.154,330 crore) — for the 9th FICCI Higher Education Summit 2013 convened in Delhi on November 12-14, predicts that India’s higher education system will emerge as […]
Through a low-profile official resolution dated October 18, the Maharashtra state government has created a new office of Commissioner of Education (EC) to oversee the work of eight educational direct-orates, four of which are autonomous. S. Chockalingam (IAS), Inspector General of Registration & Controller of Stamps, took additional charge as EC on October 22. In effect the […]
The great expectations of educationists, academics and parents in West Bengal, aroused by the Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress which ended 34 years of rule of the CPM-led Left Front government in 2011, have since been dashed by the ad hoc changes decreed by several committees and commissions. Dominated by the state’s mercurial chief minister who […]
With admission deadlines fast approaching, and young middle class parents across Tamil Nadu preparing to line up in serpentine queues for application forms to admit their wards into the lower kindergarten (LKG) classes of the state’s 5,934 matriculation schools, a November 11 circular issued by the Directorate of Matriculation Schools has created consternation and added […]
The glory days of the 90-year-old Lucknow University (LU, estb. 1920), the alma mater of some of the big success stories of post-independence India — former President Shankar Dayal Sharma, journalist Vinod Mehta, cardiologist Dr. Naresh Trehan and scientist Birbal Sahni — seem to be over. Plagued by continuous and incremental government interference, surly student […]
The already tardy implementation of the right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (aka RTE) Act, 2009, in Karnataka has hit yet another roadblock with the Central government slashing funds for the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA, ‘Education for All’) programme. The Congress-led UPA-II government at the Centre has cut the state’s RTE-SSA grant for 2013-14 to […]
“I will run RJD with my son, like Congress is run by Rahul-Sonia.” Rabri Devi, wife of former Bihar chief minister and RJD chief Lalu Prasad Yadav after he was convicted in the fodder scam case (India Today, October 14)
“Innovation and creativity are a part of the American culture, a natural trait of an immigrant society. […]
A performance audit for the year 2012-13 of the Central government-sponsored Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS, estb.1975) in Gujarat tabled in the legislative assembly on October 3, has embarrassed the three-term chief minister and Bharatiya Janata Party’s officially anointed 2014 prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi. In his audit report, the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) […]
Over 80,000 high school teachers of 20,000 state government and government aided secondary schools in Karnataka are all set to strike work in mid-November to force the six-month-old Congress state government led by chief minister M. Siddaramaiah, to raise their pay to the Sixth Pay Commission scales of Central government schools. At a meeting organised […]
With the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs (CCEA) on October 3 approving Rashtriya Uchchatar Shiksha Abhiyan (RUSA), a Central government-sponsored scheme for upgrading the higher education system in India’s 29 states and seven Union territories, new hope has risen in official circles that the “sick child of Indian education’’ — the tertiary education system as […]
Spared the heavy-handed and usually obsolete regulations of Central and state government educrats and itching palms of school inspectors for 65 years since independence, privately-provided nursery and preschool education is about to be included within the regulatory ambit of government.
On September 20, the Union cabinet approved a draft National Early Childhood Care and Education (NECCE) […]
The condition of the education system in West Bengal (pop. 91 million) is near its nadir. Acts of indiscipline and general lawlessness are now a daily occurrence in this state which led the subcontinent’s education awakening and renaissance of the mid 19th century. All hopes of the political transformation of West Bengal following the electoral […]
After prolonged hesitation, on September 15 the Maharashtra State Council of Examinations (MSCE) declared that it “proposes” to conduct a statewide Teacher Eligibility Test (TET), as mandated by s.23 (1) of the Right to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, 2009, in November. Maharashtra (pop.112 million) is among the last states to implement TET (conducted […]
Gujarat Vidyapith (university), an Ahmedabad-based K-Ph D education institution promoted by Mahatma Gandhi in 1920 as a nationalist alternative to the Western education system in the heady days of the freedom struggle, is caught in a clash between the traditional and modern.
On September 12, an estimated 250 of the vidyapith’s 4,300 students staged a protest fast before the registrar’s […]
Karnataka’s mid-day meal scheme, which provides hot cooked lunches to 6.1 million children in 55,113 state government and government-aided primary schools, has come under a cloud following the horrible deaths of two six-year-olds within the space of ten days in September. On September 17, a class II girl child was burnt to death after she […]
Despite being ruled by former film star-turned chief minister J. Jayalalithaa who shook more than a leg on the silver screen during her heyday, a rising wave of puritanism is sweeping over campuses in the industrially and educationally advanced southern state of Tamil Nadu (pop.72 million), ranked third nationwide in the Union finance ministry’s latest […]
“Language diversity should not be seen as a development liability, but as an economic asset.” Ganesh Devy, scholar-activist, on the People’s Linguistic Survey of India (Outlook, September 9)
“Pens and books are the weapons that defeat terrorism.” Malala Yousafzai, 16-year-old Pakistani education activist who survived a 2012 Taliban assassination attempt, presiding over inauguration of Europe’s largest regional […]
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