Privately promoted B-schools countrywide offering postgraduate diplomas in management (PGDM — considered equivalent to an MBA degree programme which can be offered only by University Grants Commission-approved universities) inched a step closer to financial autonomy on July 10. Delivering an interim order in AICTE vs. Education Promotion Society for India, Association of Indian Management Schools […]
The controversial and hotly debated Right to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, 2009, which was substantially upheld by the Supreme Court’s April 12 verdict in Society for Unaided Private Schools of Rajasthan vs. Union of India, has raised more questions than answers. While the apex court famously upheld the constitutional validity of s.12 (1) […]
A week-long (July 16-22) strike called by the Karnataka Unaided Schools Management Association (KUSMA), which boasts a membership of 1,800 private unaided schools, to protest the “clumsy” implementation of the Right to Education Act (RTE), 2009 by the state government, received a lukewarm response. Only a handful of private unaided school managements responded to KUSMA’s […]
Following the end of 34 years of rule (1977-2011) of the Communist Party of India (CPM)-led Left Front government in West Bengal (pop. 90 million) in which private initiatives in higher education were strictly verboten, the legislative assembly passed the Techno India University Bill 2012 on July 6 to establish West Bengal’s first private university […]
The politics of confrontation practiced by the Narendra Modi government is adversely impacting education in Gujarat. The chief minister’s fetish for unrestricted control, which has ensured Gujarat remained without a Lok Ayukta (ombudsman) for most of his almost 11-year rule of the state, is now impacting the state’s education system.
Two key education Bills have become the subject of […]
“We’ve been waiting for it for 7,000 years. For the first time in history, we have our own President, elected by us.” Abdul Mawgoud Dardery, member of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood Freedom and Justice Party, whose candidate Mohamed Morsy became the country’s first democratically elected leader (Time, July 9)
With the release of Delhi University’s first cut-offs list for admission into its 65 affiliated colleges offering 54,000 undergraduate seats on June 25, the stage is set for implementing the new rules for admission of OBC (other backward castes/classes) students who have a 27 percent reserved quota in all Central government-funded higher education institutions.
A youth revolt is brewing in Mumbai (pop. 20.5 million) — India’s commercial capital and most cosmopolitan and westernised city. A series of police raids and crackdowns on pubs, restaurants, discotheques and party revellers over the past two months, is generating a surge of anger against the police and state government, particularly among influential and […]
A major examination scam has rocked the University of Madras (UoM, estb. 1857), exposing the deep rot which has seeped into and festers within this hallowed institution of higher education. An internal investigation conducted last December has unearthed a major tampering of marks racket and procedural lapses in the BE/B.Tech (arrears) exam last year. Tampering […]
The historic Right to Free and Compulsory Education Act (RTE), 2009, which came into force in the southern state of Karnataka (pop. 60 million) in the academic year 2012-13 started in June, is floundering in a sea of chaos.
On June 24, the Karnataka Unaided Schools Management Association (KUSMA), which has a membership of 1,600 private […]
With West Bengal’s education system swamped with apparatchiks and lumpenised cadres of the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM) which ruled the state (pop. 91 million) with an iron hand for 34 years (1977-2011) until the CPM-led Left Front coalition was routed in the legislative assembly elections last year, the successor Trinamool Congress (TMC) government led […]
“The coaching centres are giving training for the IIT entrance. As a result, students are not studying seriously for class XII exam and giving more attention to entrance. We want to get rid of coaching centres by giving more weightage to the board exam.”
Union HRD minister Kapil Sibal on replacing IIT-JEE with a new common entrance […]
Over 100,000 copies of Indian Constitution at Work, a class XI political science textbook published by NCERT (National Council of Educational Research and Training) — the country’s largest (Central government controlled) school texts publisher — have been proscribed and withdrawn from the market following protest in Parliament by caste-based political parties on May 14. Their grouse: a cartoon […]
The Maharashtra state government has stayed its decision to implement the controversial s.12 (1) (c) of the Right to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, 2009 which makes it mandatory for all private unaided (financially independent) schools to admit 25 percent of children in class I or preschool from among poor households in their neighbourhood. Following the […]
Even as the BJP government in Karnataka (pop.60 million) has gone into overdrive during the past month to implement the Right to Free and Compulsory Education (aka RTE) Act, 2009 in private day schools which — post the April 12 verdict of the Supreme Court — are obliged to reserve 25 percent capacity in class I for […]
Every May, the stress levels of millions of students (and parents) in the southern seaboard state of Tamil Nadu (pop. 72 million), scrambling for admission into the state’s 525 engineering and 39 medical colleges, rises in direct proportion to mercury levels. This year was no exception. Students and parents had to wait in serpentine queues to purchase […]
“Some people had said that there will be a bloodbath in Bengal. But in the year that our government has been in power, no blood has been spilt…The people will throw out those trying to create unrest in the state.” Mamata Banerjee, West Bengal chief minister, at a public rally commemorating the first anniversary of the Trinamul […]
Although dismissed as pious intent, if not populist propaganda, the Central government’s proposal to promote 6,000 model secondary (classes VI-X) schools in every administrative block countrywide (i.e 6,000 blocks) during the 12th Plan quinquennium (2012-17), is inching forward. Of these 6,000 model secondaries, 2,500 are proposed to be promoted in the public-private partnership (PPP) mode. Presenting […]
A series of exam paper leaks followed by boycott of answer scripts evaluation by teachers transformed the already hi-octane exam months of March-April into a time of high anxiety for the 596,739 students in Karnataka writing the state government’s all-important second pre-university (PU) or class XII exam, whose outcomes determine entry into colleges of students’ choice.
The 80,000-plus students enroled in 294 schools run by the Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) will begin their new academic year in June with severe shortages of textbooks, uniforms and educational materials.
Embarassed PMC officials attribute this faux pas to “miscommunication and confusion” over procurement of educational material between the civic body and its school board. Under a system […]
Perhaps no politician in post-independence India’s history has precipitated as wild a run on her bank of goodwill as West Bengal’s mercurial chief minister Mamata Banerjee. Exactly a year ago when Banerjee’s Trinamul Congress party won a sweeping victory in the West Bengal legislative assembly elections to end 34 years of continuous rule of the Communist […]
An enduring and indelible characteristic of academics and administrators in India’s 31,000 colleges and 603 universities is a patriarchal mindset and prim sexual conservatism — often described as envy — which inhibits them from respecting even postgraduate students as adults. In college and varsity campuses countrywide, it’s quite common for learned professors and academics to refer to […]
“It is such a shame that India and Pakistan where large segments of population live in such desperate poverty must spend so much on weapons.” Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, Pakistan People’s Party chairman, commenting on twitter before his first visit to India (April 9)
“Almost 70 percent of unaided schools are of minority status. If they are excluded from […]
The National Translation Mission (NTM, estb. 2008 on recommendation of the National Knowledge Commission) released its first seven dictionaries — six bilingual tomes translating English words into Hindi, Bengali, Oriya, Kannada, Malayalam and Tamil, and a learner’s English which translates into four major south Indian languages: Tamil, Kannada, Telugu and Malayalam — on March 10 […]
The engineering education scenario has witnessed a complete turnaround from two decades ago, when a huge number of students applying for admission into engineering colleges had to opt for other streams because of lack of adequate capacity. Today 300,000 seats in the country’s 3,393 engineering colleges with an aggregate capacity of 1.48 million students are […]
A huge row has broken out in the southern state of Karnataka (pop. 61 million) on the issue of the state’s ruling BJP government printing hindutva-inspired textbooks for primary school children enroled in 46,000 government and 3,500 aided primary schools statewide. In February, hundreds of students marching under the banner of 14 organisations including the […]
The third annual day celebrations of the Chennai Girls Higher Secondary School (CGHSS) of the Chennai Municipal Corporation (CMC) on March 1 were marred by the attempted suicide of science teacher P. Jagatheeswaran (41) who consumed hydrochloric acid in the school’s laboratory. According to CGHSS sources, Jagatheeswaran was reprimanded for neglect of duty by the […]
Ever since chief minister Mamata Banerjee announced a team of alumni to chalk out a plan for the resuscitation and revival of West Bengal’s showpiece Presidency University (PU, estb. 1817) shortly after she ousted the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM)-led Left Front government which had ruled the state for 34 years in the historic assembly […]
“We live in a country where the government is thinking hard over spending Rs.1 lakh crore to provide sufficient food, but easily spends Rs.5 lakh crore towards tax revision for corporates.” Binayak Sen, public health specialist and activist on the financial hurdles to Parliament passing the Food Security Bill (India Today, March 5)
The Congress-led UPA-II government’s self-appraisal document Report to the People 2010–11, released in New Delhi on May 22 to celebrate the second anniversary of its second term in office, trumpets that under its watch, “our economy has enjoyed an unprecedented 8.5 percent annual growth” during the period 2004-05 to 2010-11, and claims “one of our thrust […]
A massive cohort — almost equivalent to 10 percent of the national teachers community countrywide — of 510,000 teachers is likely to be recruited and inducted into India’s 1.2 million primary and upper primary schools within the next three years to meet the 1:30 teacher-pupil norm mandated by the Right to Free and Compulsory Education […]
The 365 primary-cum-secondary (classes K-X) schools owned and run by the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (i.e. Greater Mumbai Municipal Corporation) — the richest civic government countrywide with a budgeted expenditure of Rs.19,931 crore for fiscal 2009-10 — suffer a massive image problem. Although the corporation proposes to expend a sizeable Rs.1,431 crore for the education of […]
The violent caste clashes, which were intensively covered on national television, between student groups of Chennai’s Dr. Ambedkar Government Law College on November 12, have shocked the academic community in the southern state of Tamil Nadu (pop.62 million). They graphically exposed the slimy underbelly of caste driven animosities which have permeated college campuses in this […]
The Delhi-based All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), the apex body which licences and monitors the education being dispensed in 5,000-plus profes-sional education institutions across the country, has pulled up 20 private engineering, business and hotel management education institutions in Karnataka (17 of them located in Bangalore) for introducing new study programmes without its […]
Although contemporary India boasts an impressive number of 400 universities and 18,000 colleges, the plain truth is that by global — especially western and Chinese —standards, they are small and infirm institutions, heavily regulated by the Central and state governments. Consequently they are unable to expand capacity quickly to meet the rising demand for tertiary […]
Close on the heels of the Union health ministry’s directive to make a year’s rural service mandatory for medical students across the country to tackle the acute shortage of doctors in rural India, comes yet another diktat to resolve the shortage of licensed medical practitioners countrywide. On March 10, the Union government issued a notification […]
Before Priya Bose (14) hanged herself on March 30 she was just another friendly student of the City Montessori School (CMS), Lucknow. But driven to anxiety by poor performance in her final exams, this class VIII student of one of the city’s most highly rated schools, hung herself from the ceiling fan behind locked doors. […]
Food 4 Thought Foundation collaborated with Cyient Foundation, the CSR arm of Cyient Ltd. (a global Intelligent Engineering services company), Monocept Consulting and Emesco Books .....Read More
In a significant move aimed at improving the educational system, the Odisha government has announced that the minimum age for enrolling in Class-1 will be .....Read More
