Dramatic events on the political stage in end-June which culminated in the resignation of chief minister Uddhav Thackeray and end of the tripartite Shiv Sena, Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) and Congress party coalition government after 31 months in office, has clouded the future of 2,088 aspirants for the coveted position of assistant professors […]
Despite widespread criticism of the BJP government at the Centre and the Union education ministry for lethargic implementation of the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, which was presented to Parliament and the nation on July 29, 2020, early childhood care and education (ECCE) professionals are deriving some comfort from the roll-out of the […]
So, is Covid-19 over? No, it’s most certainly not over. I know that’s not the message you want to hear, and it’s definitely not the message I want to deliver. This virus has surprised us at every turn – a storm that has torn through communities… and we still can’t predict its path, or its […]
A confrontation between the odisha government and Delhi-based University Grants Commission (UGC) has prompted the Supreme Court to issue a stay order against the state government and Odisha Public Service Commission from proceeding with recruitment of professors and lecturers for the state’s 11 universities and affiliated colleges.
Fifteen long-pending writ petitions dating back to 2016 challenging the process of recruiting 10,000 teachers for West Bengal’s 92,000 government schools are experiencing some traction. On April 7, Justice Abhijit Gangopadhyay of the Calcutta high court ordered a CBI enquiry into the allegedly fraudulent teacher recruitment process.
Following 82 weeks of lockdown because of the Covid-19 pandemic, 74,000 schools affiliated with the Karnataka state board reopened for on-campus offline learning on May 16 — three weeks earlier than scheduled. But right at the start of the new academic year 2022-23 while children are yet to receive new textbooks, a massive […]
A prolonged feud between Maharashtra’s tripartite (Shiv Sena, Congress and Nationalist Congress Party) MVA government and BJP-appointed state governor Bhagat Singh Koshiyari has thrown a spanner in the works of Savitribai Phule Pune University (SPPU, estb.1949).
Following the retirement of vice-chancellor Nitin Karmalkar on May 18, the VC’s office of the 73-year-old university (ranked #2 […]
A long-pending proposition endorsed by the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 to internationalise isolationist Indian higher education has received some traction. On May 2, the Delhi-based University Grants Commission (UGC) — the apex body for higher education regulation — notified the University Grants Commission (Academic Collaboration between Indian […]
“Our states have been formed on linguistic basis. So, the concerned state language or mother tongue is supreme. Everyone should understand and respect that.” Basavaraj Bommai, Karnataka chief minister on the controversy about making Hindi the national language (April 23, Times of India)
“The party line across the secular universe, is, you can’t afford to be […]
Swept to power in the legislative assembly election held in April 2021 with a comfortable majority of 159 seats in the 234-member assembly, Tamil Nadu’s Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) government has declared war against the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 approved by the BJP/NDA government at the Centre.
Somewhat surprisingly, the sixth edition of the Bengal Global Business Summit (BGBS) 2022, hosted by the state’s Trinamool Congress (TMC) government on April 20-21, attracted participation of 4,300 delegates from 42 countries, including businessmen, politicians and academics from the US, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Vietnam, Netherlands, Finland, Morocco, Bangladesh and Bhutan. During […]
With state legislative assembly elections less than a year away, rank and file activists of the BJP — even if not the top brass of the party — are targeting Muslim and Christian minorities in Karnataka (pop.65 million), widely acknowledged as the BJP’s gateway into peninsular India. Plainly the objective of the BJP […]
Among india’s 28 states, the eastern seaboard state of Odisha, formerly Orissa (pop.46.3 million), is an outlier. Unlike other states of the Indian Union in which political action is fast and furious, Odisha has enjoyed political stability and orderly governance under the ruling Biju Janata Dal (BJD) headed by Doon School and St. […]
More than 1,200 english-medium schools have closed down in Maharashtra during the past two years due to financial hardship. The majority of them are financially independent budget private schools (BPS) levying tuition fees of Rs.30,000 per year or less. They became unviable during the prolonged government mandated pandemic lockdown of all education institutions […]
Although students in india experienced the world’s highest learning loss because of the most prolonged shutdown of education institutions from pre-primaries to universities during the Covid-19 pandemic, the number of enrolments and awards for Ph D degrees rose significantly.
Even in higher education institutions where the number of Ph D admissions took a minor […]
A long-standing demand of serious scholars intent upon acquiring multidisciplinary qualifications and skills has finally been conceded. On April 13, the University Grants Commission (UGC), the apex-level regulator of Indian higher education, issued a circular to universities permitting pursuance of two degrees simultaneously in undergraduate as well as postgraduate education (barring Ph D) […]
“All of us who believe in @INCIndia are hurting from the results of the recent assembly elections. It is time to reaffirm the idea of India that the Congress has stood for and the positive agenda it offers the nation – and to reform our organisational leadership in a manner that will reignite those ideas […]
The announcement by the University Grants Commission (UGC) of the Central Universities Entrance Test (CUET) as mandatory for admission into all undergraduate programmes of the country’s 45 highly-prized Central universities from the start of this academic year 2022-23, has provoked strong opposition in Tamil Nadu (pop.79 million). The state’s political class across the […]
With all schools in the state reopening from February 16 after a 23-month lockdown, classrooms across Bengal are coming to life. But judging by the reports published in local vernacular dailies, a large number of benches in the state’s 50,000 government primary schools are empty. During the pandemic lockdown, with a great majority […]
The high cost of the prolonged pandemic-induced 82-week schools closure in India — the most prolonged of any major country worldwide — is becoming manifest. Even though education activists have been ringing alarm bells that over the past two years several thousands of children have dropped out of the education system and have […]
The Maharashtra education ministry’s drive to match government and government-aided schools’ student enrolments with their UID (unique identification number) aka Aadhaar card registrations, has opened a Pandora’s box. Of the 2.1 million students enroled on the ministry’s online portal, SARAL, 1.9 million have fake Aadhaar cards while another 2.9 million have been enroled […]
The out-of-the-blue announcement of a Central Universities Entrance Test (CUET) for admission into undergraduate programmes of all 45 Central government universities from the start of this academic year (2022-23), has sparked a nationwide debate on its impact on higher secondary school education, the future of school examination boards and board exams, homogenisation of K-12 education […]
“The English language continued to remain dominating (sic) in our country because we were colonised. Parents fear that if their children will not learn English, they won’t have a future. Once we give them better options in regional languages, this hesitancy will go away.”
Dinesh Prasad Saklani, newly appointed director of the National Council of Educational […]
After a gap of nearly two years, 3,000 aided and 12,000 unaided private schools across Tamil Nadu reopened nursery classes on February 16, following an official order of the DMK-led state government permiting nursery classes, kindergarten, and playschools statewide to restart. This order has brought much needed relief to pre-primary schools, which had […]
With the daily count of Covid-19 cases in West Bengal dipping from 24,000 cases per day in mid-January to 500 on February 13, the state’s hyper cautious Trinamool Congress government announced reopening of all primary and upper primary schools with effect from February 16 — after a 23-months lockdown. The government also greenlighted […]
Against the backdrop of Karnataka (pop.69 million) becoming the first state countrywide to start implementing the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 beginning with higher education last September, the Karnataka Private School Managements Teaching and Non-Teaching Staff Coordination Committee (KPMTCC), which has 7,000 member schools, hosted a two-day national symposium to deliberate the ‘Regulatory […]
On February 27, as Maharashtra celebrated Marathi Language Day on the birth anniversary of popular poet, Kusumagraj, 64,000 mostly Marathi medium private aided schools announced they would abstain from conducting the state government’s forthcoming class X and class XII board exams on their premises. The managements of these schools are on the warpath against […]
If parents and students in India experienced the world’s most prolonged lockdown of schools during the Covid-19 pandemic, the national capital’s citizens claim they experienced the longest schools’ lockdown within India. Now with Covid-19 reduced to a mere epidemic, it’s official that Delhi’s 5,500 K-12 schools which educate 4.5 million children, will restart […]
“This is a country where in a range of exams marks are calculated to the seventh decimal place to decide who will get selected. Every single place where we have an exam, from IIT to CLAT, is pressure ridden because of the law of numbers. So the idea that this exam will be a relief […]
The Tamil Nadu government school teachers Association (TNGSTA) has submitted a petition to chief minister M.K. Stalin to cancel the state’s unique class XI board exams. This exam is scheduled to be written in March-April by 1 million students enrolled in 39,300 government and government-aided schools affiliated with the Tamil Nadu Board of Secondary Examinations […]
For a state that prides itself on its intellectual prowess and cultural refinement, West Bengal (pop.91 million) — or specifically the state’s Trinamool Congress (TMC) government which was re-elected for a third term in May 2021 — is exhibiting a curious reluctance to reopen its schools after an epic 82-week lockdown prompted by the Covid-19 […]
Hitherto one of India’s most secular states with a 8-million strong and prosperous Muslim minority, Karnataka (pop.68 million) is experiencing slow spread of religious communalism with headscarves row.
Since December 31, 2021, six hijab (headscarf)-wearing Muslim girl students of the Government Girls PU College (classes XI-XII), Kundapur in the state’s coastal […]
The opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is gearing to hit the streets with statewide protests against the incumbent Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) coalition government’s proposal to curb the powers of the governor in 11 state government universities. By law and convention, state governors appointed by the Central government, are ex-officio chancellors of all public universities […]
Delhi University: full circle. Inset: Dinesh Singh
The wheel is set to turn full circle for Delhi University (DU, estb.1922), one of India’s largest (82 affiliated colleges and 400,000 students) and most popular universities. In 2013, DU became the first university to introduce four-year arts, science and commerce undergrad programmes.
Within six weeks of reopening senior schools (class IX-XII), colleges and universities after a prolonged 65-70 weeks lockdown because of exaggerated fear of the Covid-19 pandemic, West Bengal’s 92,000 government and 1,500 private schools, 372 colleges and 32 universities have been ordered to shut down again from January 3. A mere two citizens […]
In line with other states such as West Bengal, Delhi, Uttar Pradesh and Haryana, following a sudden spurt in Covid-19 infections triggered by the Omicron variant, Karnataka’s BJP government has ordered an immediate shutdown of primary-secondary schools and switch to online instruction with effect from January 6. Optional on-campus classes are permitted for […]
On December 16, the pune police investigating allegations of malpractice in the recruitment exam of the Maharashtra Housing and Area Development Authority (MHADA) held between December 12-20, stumbled upon large scale tampering in the state’s annual teacher recruitment exam.
Investigations into the state’s teacher eligibility test (TET) — a compulsory qualification for college/university graduates […]
Following a prolonged and sustained campaign by EducationWorld, which staged its first international conference on early childhood care and education (ECCE) in 2010 and has been since rating, ranking and awarding the best private pre-primary schools and government-run anganwadi centres in major cities countrywide, the critical importance of ECCE was acknowledged by the high powered […]
Following chief minister Mamata Banerjee’s October 25 declaration that education for class IX-XII students in West Bengal’s 92,000 government and 2,000 private schools, 372 colleges and 32 universities would resume, they were duly reopened on November 16 after the unprecedented 20-month pandemic lockdown. Although education minister Bratya Basu has expressed willingness to reopen […]
Even as the reopening of primary-secondary schools on November 8 after 64-weeks of pandemic lockdown cheered the state’s 21,000 private unaided schools, a new circular of the state’s BJP government directing them to issue transfer certificates (TCs) to students within seven days has proved a dampener. On November […]
Delhi University (DU) plans to introduce a PhD programme in Hindu Studies starting the 2025-26 academic session, as recommended by the Governing Body of the .....Read More
Madhya Pradesh School Education Minister Uday Pratap Singh admitted publicly that he was aware of at least 500 school teachers who skip work and hire .....Read More
