This issue of EducationWorld marks the culmination of several months of mountainous labour in our Bangalore and Mumbai offices. The EW team has been burning the proverbial midnight oil compiling, checking and rechecking the EducationWorld India School Rankings (EWISR) 2024-25 league tables published in our September and current issue. When school leaders, advertisers and sponsors are informed that the annual EWISR is the world’s largest and most comprehensive schools ranking survey, their eyes tend to glaze and the subject is swiftly changed. Yet the plain truth is that the entire process kick-started by our new field research agency — AZ Research Partners who stepped into the breach after our long-standing research partner C fore abruptly terminated our contract (further comment is proscribed as the issue is sub judice) — initiating one-on-one interviews with 8,700 sample respondents (educationists, principals, teachers and parents) countrywide and ending with the editorial team finalising the EWISR league tables which rank day, boarding and international schools divided into 14 sub-categories under 14 parameters of primary-secondary education excellence, spanned almost six months. Strenuous additional effort was simultaneously invested by our marketing and sales office personnel in Mumbai to alert and provide opportunity to advertisers and sponsors to participate in our follow-up EWISR Awards event scheduled to be staged in Gurgaon, Delhi NCR on October 17-19 when leaders of India’s top-ranked schools will be felicitated and celebrated. Yet we believe this monumental institutional application and effort involved in publishing the annual EWISR is time well spent. Because the 4,000 (out of 1.6 million) schools ranked in the EWISR league tables are engaged in providing model nation-building service to the public. We don’t subscribe to the cynical opinion of cribber socialists and armchair critics that promoters, principals and managements of private schools that dominate the league tables, are solely — or substantially — driven by the profit motive. Numerous other options are available to capital-accumulation driven entrepreneurs and education professionals. Individuals who choose to promote and manage schools and education institutions are necessarily driven by high degree of idealism and nation-building objectives. It was national negligence that schools were not sufficiently assessed and achievements of their teachers and managements not celebrated until EducationWorld initiated its annual EWISR two decades ago. We are proud and unapologetic about this initiative. It has generated great enthusiasm — and friendly inter-school competition — countrywide. Only good can flow from it. Even though several pretender publications and organisations with less credibility and commitment towards “building the pressure of public opinion to make education the #1 item on the national agenda”, have also begun printing and publishing slap-dash plagiarised versions of the annual EWISR. As our cover depicts, eagles fly high above.
Since the annual EducationWorld India School Rankings were launched in 2007, they have evolved into the world’s — yes, world’s largest — schools rankings survey. Yet instead of celebrating this Indian achievement, the general reaction is calculated indifference and resentment. Even though EW was launched way back in 1999, politicians and babus in Delhi and state capitals like to pretend it doesn’t exist. None of the several Union education ministers and secretaries within the ministry has responded to numerous requests for interview. Presumably because ab initio we have been consistently highlighting neglect of the country’s education system by the neta-babu brotherhood. The indifference of mainstream media and India Inc is harder to decipher. Although we often cite and draw (with attribution) from popular dailies and magazines, very rarely is EducationWorld research cited in mainstream mass circulation publications. The high priests of the Times of India which reportedly earns a profit of Rs.10 crore per day, seem to believe that their business will collapse if the merest publicity is given to EducationWorld. That their business will grow if education becomes “the #1 item on the national agenda” is evidently beyond their logical capability. A similar deficiency is perhaps behind India Inc’s stubborn indifference to EW. Industry leaders hate to remember that it was your editor’s vehement opposition (as founding-editor of India’s first two business magazines) that sowed the seeds of liberalisation of the Indian economy in 1991 after which they have prospered mightily. Nor do they seem aware that a well-educated and skilled workforce advocated by this publication offers the only chance of India Inc to be taken seriously in international markets. Evidently there’s no shortage of latter-day Mir Jaffars in the media and industry. So also in education. Not a few self-styled education leaders entertain hatred, ridicule and contempt for your editors. But we carry on regardless. Slings and arrows of outrageous fortune also near sabotaged this year’s EWISR with the abrupt termination of a 17-year trust-based contract by our erstwhile rankings survey partner. The facts and circumstances of this divorce are well-known, and in the public domain. Further comment is proscribed as the matter is sub judice. Suffice it to say that it has proved a blessing in disguise as EWISR 2024-25 has been smoothly conducted by the Bangalore-based AZ Research Partners Pvt. Ltd (estb. 2002), a market research company with an impressive track record and equally impressive clients list in India and abroad. Drawing from a broader sample respondents database of SEC (socio-economic category) ‘A’ and ‘B’ as opposed to SEC ‘A’ hitherto, AZ Research has provided a rankings survey with a refreshing mix of traditionally top-ranked and new entrants in EWISR 2024-25. We believe that EWISR 2024-25 presents a reliable roadmap for parents to shortlist, if not select, schools most suitable for the aptitudes and intelligences of their children. Good hunting!
When I witness my UK-based nephews dismantle a 450 cc Harley-Davidson motor-cycle and put it back together in a jiffy, and finish household plumbing and repair jobs using sophisticated electric tools, I so regret my own education in an upscale boarding school in India where vocational education was conspicuously missing from the curriculum. Presumably, school children of this day and age are more self-reliant and invested in technology — especially new digital gadgets. However it’s very doubtful if formal vocational education in a useful trade — carpentry, electrical, plumbing, gardening etc — is provided with serious intent in India’s 1.5 million schools and 45,000 colleges. As a result, the average Indian adult is useless in the matter of repairing minor equipment (electricity, kitchen appliances, motor-car and white goods) at home or in workplaces. The plain truth is that a mere 4 percent of India’s 560 million workforce is formally skilled. The overwhelming majority of our technicians and blue-collar workers are informally trained professionals with antiquated knowledge and tools handed down from one generation to the next. That’s why across the country, bridges are falling, highways are potholed, railway accidents are frequent and the quality of manufactures is poor, making them uncompetitive in global markets. The heavy cost of neglecting public education in general and skills or vocational education in particular in the post-independence decades has impacted the country with stunning force in the new age of automation, new digital technologies and artificial intelligence. Suddenly there is the prospect of even well-educated individuals experiencing redundancy, obsolescence and career stagnation, if not unemployment. Therefore, as discussed in our cover story in this issue, belated skilling, reskilling and upskilling fever is raging across the country, manifesting as much in executive suites as in college campuses. Yet it’s a moot point whether skills education can be provided on a mass scale to a 560 million-strong workforce in quick time. As propounded in our Special Report feature on the Union Budget 2024-25 presented to the nation on July 23, a strong foundation of quality early years and primary public education is a necessary prerequisite of acceptable quality vocational education and training (VET). But unfortunately making adequate provision for public education has been a blindspot of governments, policy formulators and the establishment for several decades. Some eminent economists and pundits believe that overhauling India’s obsolete education system will take years. Yet we provide a solution to raise adequate resources to modernise the country’s outmoded education system. In our special report, we present a schema to raise almost Rs.8 lakh crore which is 5x of the Centre’s provision for education in Budget 2024-25. For details, read our second lead feature in this new ideas-packed issue. Happy Independence Day!
When I switched from the corporate sector to business journalism over four decades ago, journalism was a glamour vocation. Industry leaders and businessmen, long pilloried and abused in the heyday of socialism, were anxious to tell their stories to Business India of which I was a category-creator and first editor. After their stories were told and chronicled, it turned out that far from being the villains of post-independence India, they were in fact, heroes. At that time, apart from businessmen eager to tell their stories of success despite the hundreds of hurdles thrown in their path, politicians were not afraid to explain and justify their policies and initiatives. The launch of Business India and BusinessWorld a few years later had a happy ending. Suddenly the country came to its senses. Dr. Manmohan Singh, for several decades an architect of crushing licence-permit-quota raj, hopped into a telephone booth and changed his turban and emerged as Superman of the historic industry liberalisation and deregulation reforms of 1991. Immediately, India’s annual GDP growth rate doubled and has averaged 7 percent per year since. As a result, an estimated 400 million citizens have been lifted out of deep poverty. A decade later on the eve of the new millennium, your reportedly immodest editor identified the country’s moribund education system dominated by government schools, colleges and universities as the achilles heel of post-independence India’s continuously disappointing national development effort. In 1999, EducationWorld was launched with the mission to “build the pressure of public opinion to make education the #1 item on the national agenda”. Although almost a quarter century later, this mission remains unfulfilled, it’s indisputable that the landscape of Indian education has substantially changed for the better. Now there is a discernible temper to improve learning outcomes in all education institutions from preschools to Ph D. Bona fide educationists committed to developing India’s high-potential, yet long-neglected human resources have enthusiastically welcomed and cooperated with us to tell their stories of struggles against over-regulation of Indian education. Unsurprisingly, the neta-babu brotherhood whose control-and-command of Indian education has smothered India’s human resource development effort, are reluctant to explain or justify their policies and directives. In particular, none of the BJP appointed education ministers at the Centre since 2014 has done us the favour of explaining the revolutionary reforms — including NEP 2020 – imposed upon the nation. Therefore, this issue which offers constructive suggestions to the newly re-inducted Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan, doesn’t alas, feature an interview with him. Nevertheless we carry on regardless. Sir, debate, deliberation and discussion of critically important government policies and initiatives are fundamental to democracies. And high-quality education. Pity you aren’t aware.
The prime cause of post-colonial India’s disappointing national development effort is continuous neglect of K-12 education. Seven decades after independence and a quarter century after this publication was launched with the mission to “build the pressure of public opinion to make education the #1 item on the national agenda”, I still can’t understand why post-independence India’s omniscient central planners and panoply of acclaimed economists and intellectuals didn’t/don’t exert heavy pressure on Central and state governments to accord top priority to public primary, if not secondary, education. It’s not rocket science that a nation hosting 300 million-plus adult illiterates whose number is augmented by millions of under-schooled, unemployable youth streaming into the workforce every year, cannot possibly prosper. Yet 75 years after independence when other formerly under-developed countries such as China, Indonesia, and South Korea have attained full literacy and developed nation status, 20 percent of India’s population is illiterate. Meanwhile, numerous solutions — including a calculus repeatedly presented by EducationWorld to mobilise Rs.8 lakh crore per year for investment in education (see https://www.educationworld.in/union-budget-2023-24-260-million-children-shortchanged-again/) — are greeted with deafening silence or indulgent condescension. Against this backdrop of continuous ignorance about the critical importance of human resource development, we present a summary of a well-researched new report published by LoEstro Advisors, a reputable Hyderabad-based education-focused investment banking and consultancy firm. The report titled State of K-12: Resilience Amidst Uncertainties paints an optimistic picture of the future of private school education, which the authors believe is leading the modernisation and internationalisation of K-12 education in India. The knee-jerk reaction of socialists and left-liberals who dominate the academy and media to reform initiatives flowing from private education is sceptical, if not hostile. According to them, private schools are ‘elitist’ and irrelevant for the overwhelming majority of India’s 260 million school-going children. For one, this common assumption is untrue. Almost half (48 percent) of the country’s in-school children are enrolled in private schools, and the other half would fly to private schools, if only they could afford the tuition fees. Therefore, the obligation of government and lefties alarmed by the bright future for private schools projected by the LoEstro report, is not to devise laws, rules and regulations to drag private K-12 institutions down to government school levels, but to make sincere, dedicated effort to raise teaching-learning standards and learning outcomes in public to private school levels. In this issue, we also present a report on the inaugural EducationWorld-BSAI Education Leadership Retreat 2024. This three-day workshop attended by 70 school leaders from across the country, is a creative response towards improving the leadership skills of school promoters, directors and principals.
Public perception of media rankings of education institutions is cynical. Most people — especially academics and educators — tend to dismiss them as slapdash initiatives for generating advertising revenue. But it’s pertinent to note that academics and educators tend to know precious little about institutional development and brand building, even of schools, colleges and universities that employ them. Nevertheless, it’s important to bear in mind that establishing education institutions necessitates heavy investment in terms of finance, personnel, time and other resources. Planning, designing and constructing a school or university campus is a scaled down version of town planning. Therefore after construction of every education institution, it is incumbent upon the management to manage it efficiently, continuously improve infrastructure and service quality and transform it into a reputable brand. This is especially important since the prime objective of education institutions is to educate and develop children and youth — critically essential human capital for national development and progress. For this reason, in EducationWorld, we accord highest importance to our annual surveys rating preschools, schools, colleges and universities on a broad range of carefully ideated parameters and ranking them in separate categories and sub-categories (to eliminate apples with oranges-type comparisons). The purpose of the EW institutional ranking surveys is to not only provide maximum information to parents/students to select the most aptitudinally suitable school, college or university, but also to stimulate the latter to conduct in-house SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) meetings to improve under all parameters of education excellence. If the national goals of Viksit Bharat and $30 trillion GDP by 2047 are not to prove mere rhetoric, India’s education institutions, especially colleges, universities and professional education institutions, have to be comprehensively improved and upgraded by stimulating healthy competition. In EducationWorld, we believe that every education institution is of national importance. That’s why we take extraordinary pains to rate and rank them in discrete categories to permit proper comparison, across a broad range of parameters to stimulate them to provide holistic learning, and also provide national, states and city rankings to give them their proper place under the sun. In short, a mountain of work and effort over three months has been invested in providing the detailed EducationWorld India Higher Education Rankings (EWIHER) 2024-25 presented in our April and current issues. Therefore, parents/students, and especially academics and educators should shed cynicism and utilise these league tables as reliable launch pads to fulfill lofty individual and institutional goals.
Despite continuous efforts of EducationWorld for almost a quarter century to accord high importance to public education improvement and upgradation, human capital development remains a blind-spot of the Indian establishment, academy, and society. For over three decades the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) of the independent Pratham Education Foundation has been highlighting poor learning outcomes in rural primary education. The latest ASER 2023 which assesses the learning outcomes of rural teens arrives at the dismal conclusion that almost 50 percent of senior and higher secondary students casually promoted year after year, can’t read a sentence in English or manage common tasks such as calculating time, adding weights, figuring out discounts and repayments. Regrettably, learning outcomes in higher education aren’t much better. For a start, contemporary India’s GER (gross enrollment ratio) in higher education at 27 percent is low by international standards (Korea: 85 percent). Moreover according to several research studies (Mckinsey Aspiring Minds), over 80 percent graduates of the country’s 45,000 ASC (arts, science and commerce) and 4,500 engineering undergrad colleges are under-qualified for employment in Indian and foreign multinationals. They require prolonged post-induction education and training. Nor are our 1,113 universities much to write home about. None of them is ranked among the Top 200 in the annual league tables of the world’s best universities published by the London-based QS and Times Higher Education. This despite some of our universities being of over 150 years vintage. Against this backdrop, since 2007 we have been rating India’s most reputed schools, preschools, ASC colleges and universities slotted into various categories — to eliminate apples with oranges type comparison — inter se. The objective of the rankings is to encourage education institutions to improve their performance on several carefully ideated parameters of education excellence. We believe that our detailed annual league tables have aided and enabled school, college and university managements to conduct periodic SWOT (strength, weakness, opportunities and threats) self-assessments to improve and upgrade their curriculums. For this summer issue, following the termination of our long-standing contract for conduct of field surveys by the Delhi-based C fore, we have engaged the Bangalore-based AZ Research Partners Pvt. Ltd, a premier market research firm to partner with us to rate and rank India’s best ASC and private engineering colleges. League tables rating and universities and B-schools will follow next month. Meanwhile please note that ASC and engineering college league tables aside, there’s a wealth of carefully curated content in this pre-General Election issue of EducationWorld. Read, learn and absorb. And perhaps transform into a QEFA (quality education for all) evangelist.
The imminent completion of the second term of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-dominated NDA coalition government in New Delhi and the prospect of General Election 2024 scheduled for this summer have aroused a flood of comment relating to its track record in political, societal and economy management. In general, the party under the charismatic leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has received high marks for political strategy which has ensured that the PM’s public approval rating is way ahead of actual and potential rivals. For economy management also, the PM’s record is good. The opposition Congress Party’s contention — led by former Union finance minister P. Chidambaram — that average GDP growth during the decade of Congress-led UPA coalition rule (2004-2014) averaged 6.8 percent against 5.6 percent of the Modi government doesn’t make allowance for shutdown of the economy during the Covid-19 pandemic years (2020-21) when the country experienced negative growth. On the whole, the record of the BJP on the metric of economic growth has been good, especially since the Modi government has exhibited firm resolve to proceed with the liberalisation and deregulation of the Indian economy initiated in 1991 by the Congress government led by visionary Prime Minister Narasimha Rao. On the other hand during the past few years notwithstanding the utter failure of its Nehruvian socialist model which shackled the high potential post-independence Indian economy for over half a century, the Congress leadership — especially Nehru-Gandhi dynasty scion Rahul Gandhi — is still beating the socialist drum. But although the Modi government’s political and economy management — as also its dangerous infusion of religion into the political discourse — has attracted a flood of media comment, curiously the government’s track record in education management and development of the world’s largest child and youth population — sine qua non — hasn’t received the media and academy attention it should have. In this EW election-eve issue, Managing Editor Summiya Yasmeen presents the most thorough and detailed assessment of the BJP/Modi government’s human capital development record ever. It’s mandatory reading for the small but growing minority who have grasped the reality that unless we transform India’s 500 million children and youth from liability into high-performance assets, all is lost. And against the backdrop of lakhs of farmers staging an indefinite protest on the Haryana-Delhi border, we present a detailed feature on a subject I have been nurturing for almost half a century — the national imperative to cut our fellow citizens who live miserable lives in rural Bharat a better deal. It’s not a Himalayan endeavour. All it requires is a few policy tweaks and willingness of the prospering urban middle class to pay fair prices for agri-produce. Let’s just do it.
Even as the Great leader and the acclamatory establishment, including academics who should know better, are predicting best days ahead for the Indian economy which is all set to emerge as the world’s third largest — never mind population advantage and pathetic per capita income data — the country seems to be oblivious that the ground is slipping under its feet. Over 12 million children and youth are streaming out annually from schools and colleges without having learned to read and write properly. The latest Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2023 of the highly-respected, independent Pratham Education Foundation says the majority of 14-18 year-olds graduating from rural schools can’t read class II textbooks in their vernacular languages or calculate discounts and percentages. And 42 percent can’t read simple sentences in English, the language of business, commerce and the courts. Yet despite your editors continuously blowing the whistle about poor learning outcomes in the vast majority of the country’s neglected education institutions, there’s little visible urgency about addressing this vital issue. In the latest Union budget presented to Parliament and the nation on February 1, the Central government’s outlay for public education inched up from Rs.1.12 lakh crore last year to Rs.1.20 lakh crore in 2024-25. As a percentage of GDP, it fell from 0.37 to 0.36. Admittedly, most of the spending on education is done by state governments. But added together, the national expenditure for public education is unlikely to exceed 3 percent of GDP against the minimum 6 percent recommended by the high-powered Kothari Commission way back in 1967. The plain truth is that because of weak foundational and primary-secondary education dispensed in the country’s dilapidated public/government schools, the majority of India’s college and university graduates can’t match up to their counterparts in developed OECD and South-east Asian countries. This explains the low productivity of Indian industry, agriculture and services and the country’s widespread poverty and misery. Be that as it may, since our whistle-blowing has limited impact, this time round we invited Sridhar Rajagopalan, Co-founder and Chief Learning Officer of Educational Initiatives (estb.2001), a successful Bengaluru-based K-12 learning outcomes assessment and institutional development company, to write a diagnosis and prescription for the infirmities of India’s primary-secondary school system. The result is an engaging lead feature written from an education professional’s perspective that is mandatory reading for all education policy formulators and school leaders and educators. As usual, there’s a big bouquet of features and news features in this issue of EW. Check out our editorials and columns written by intelligent commentators and educators, as also our Education and International News sections. Lots of food for thought in them.
In my four decades-plus and counting career as a development journalist (Business India, BusinessWorld and EducationWorld) I have consistently advocated the virtues of competition and more competition in business and academia. Therefore, I was always opposed to public sector monopoly enterprises promoted by the Central and state governments, and restricted competition within the private sector as mandated under the Soviet-inspired socialist national development model. Fortunately, your editor’s strident advocacy of abolition of State monopolies and licence-permit-quota raj contributed towards liberalisation and deregulation of Indian industry in 1991 and subsequently. As a result, the Indian economy leapt out of the 3.5 percent annual GDP growth groove in which it was mired for half a century after independence and has averaged 6-7 percent ever since. Similarly, when I switched from business to education journalism with the promotion of EducationWorld on the eve of the new millennium, one of our early initiatives was to launch the annual EducationWorld India School Rankings (EWISR) in 2007, to introduce an element of inter-school competition so that they would strive for holistic education excellence. Since then, the annual EWISR has become increasingly sophisticated and evolved into the largest and most comprehensive national schools ratings and ranking initiative worldwide. The next logical step towards improving national education standards is to evaluate how competitive our children are internationally following the example of our cricket, hockey and sports contingents. That is why the Union government’s decision to opt out of PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) 2022, a global reading, science and math attainments test for 15-year-olds, is disappointing. Especially as in 2019, the BJP government at the Centre had expressed firm resolve to participate in this global test designed by developed OECD countries in which teens from 81 countries participated. The causes and consequences of non-participation are discussed in our cover story. The second lead feature of this first issue of 2024 is also about infusing international competition in higher education. After dithering over the issue for over two decades, government has permitted foreign universities to establish campuses in India. But the terms and conditions of entry are onerous and discretionary, and unlikely to enthuse top-ranked universities, especially in the US, to accept this half-hearted invitation. They tend to take the issue of academic autonomy seriously. There’s a lot else in this content-rich first issue of 2024. Check out the first of our new series of despatches written by Dr. Larry Arnn from the US. Also the Expert Comment essay by veteran columnist Sudheendra Kulkarni just back from a lecture tour of China, interview with Nitish Jain, promoter-CEO of the transnational SP Jain School of Global Management, and review of Arun Shourie’s latest book. Very best wishes for 2024!
In the hearts and minds of your editors, early childhood care and education (ECCE) of youngest children under five years has a special place. Since 2010 when we staged the country’s first national/international ECCE conference in Mumbai and simultaneously introduced the EducationWorld India Preschool Rankings (EWIPR) to awake educationists and society to the critical importance of ECCE, we have emerged as the country’s most strident advocates of universal professionally provided ECCE. And we have the satisfaction of moving the needle of public policy on this issue. Perhaps as a response, the high-powered Dr. K. Kasturirangan Committee strongly recommended universal professionally administered ECCE for all children countrywide. Therefore the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 has mandated compulsory early years education for all children in the age group 3-6 under the new 5+3+3+4 school system which replaces the decades-old 10+2 schooling system, by tagging on three years of ECCE to primary schooling and renaming it Foundational Stage learning. The NEP policy document acknowledges that since children’s brains are 80 percent developed by age six, they need stimulation and growth from early years. And this official acknowledgment and initiative has come not a day too soon because according to UNDP data, 48 percent of India’s children below age 5 are severely malnourished and in danger of stunting. While an estimated nine million children aged below five receive professional ECCE in 300,000 privately-promoted pre-primary schools, the country’s 1.34 million government promoted anganwadis — essentially nutrition centres for newborns and lactating mothers which also provide rudimentary ECCE — accommodate only 80 million of the country’s 164 million children under age five. This means that 84 million infants are totally bereft of professionally provided ECCE. Deprived the foundation of essential early years education, these children suffer poor learning outcomes all along the education continuum and serve as low-end manual labour through their adult lives, a colossal loss of productive human resource. Against this dismal backdrop, it’s reassuring that NEP 2020 even if belatedly, has accorded, high importance to universalisation of professionally delivered ECCE. But it’s a moot point whether this mandate will be backed by greater budgetary allocation for anganwadis. Meanwhile refreshingly, the number of preschools ranked in our annual EWIPR has grown exponentially from 100 in 2010 in six cities to 661 in 17 cities. Moreover since the vast majority of children are dependent on much-neglected anganwadis, we have also rated and ranked model centres in three metro cities. We hope our elaborate league tables evaluating the country’s best preschools in 17 cities where there is greater awareness of vital, professionally administered ECCE will prompt the powers that be to raise standards in anganwadis under all parameters of pre-primary education.
24 years of uninterrupted publishing of a magazine is an exemplary record, even if it sounds self-congratulatory. Yet it’s a measure of our commitment to EducationWorld’s mission statement, viz, “to build the pressure of public opinion to make education the #1 item on the national agenda” that come rain or shine, health or illness, we made sure we met the publication deadline, mostly on time. For this, I thank our editorial and marketing teams in Bangalore and Mumbai. All of us have averaged well beyond the 70 hours per week prescribed by business tycoon N.R. Narayana Murthy as a pre-condition of national development — working not only hard, but also smart (see editorial p.18). As the first education-focused news publication in Indian history, we had to generate demand rather than meet it. Nevertheless, although education has not moved to the top of the national development agenda, during the past 24 years since our first issue of November 1, 1999, we have the satisfaction of having moved the needle of public policy on several critical issues. For instance, our relentless campaign to accord high importance to professionally administered early childhood care and education (ECCE) has resulted in foundational education being made compulsory in the new 5+3+3+4 school education system mandated by the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020. Similarly EW’s consistent advocacy of skilling has resulted in skills education being given high importance in NEP 2020. Likewise, the huge contribution of private schools and higher education institutions — routinely trashed in the media and academy — to Indian education was first acknowledged and encouraged by this publication. As a result of these and other EW initiatives, some ideological balance and equity has been restored in the education system — as acknowledged by Dr. K. Kasturirangan, Chairman of the drafting committee of NEP 2020 and currently of the steering committee of the National Curriculum Framework. A defining feature of EducationWorld is that we interpret ‘education’ widely. Therefore in this 24th Anniversary issue, we examine a phenomenon that purists may not classify as education. Our cover story analyses the obfuscated issue of the continuous resources and talent drain from India and related conundrum of why Indian emigrants succeed beyond the wildest imagination in their adopted countries, but remain mired in mediocrity and poverty in India. As we argue in this anniversary issue, the root cause is neglect of QEFA (quality education for all). There’s a lot else in this “over-engineered” 24th anniversary issue of EducationWorld. Check out our several Special Anniversary essays penned by respected commentators in India and abroad; our enlightening People section and our Anniversary Retrospective feature in which we recall some lead features which stimulated a turning point in Indian education. It is a bumper issue packed with information and insights. Thanks for your support and Happy Diwali to all!
On several occasions in the past quarter when our energies have been totally focused on compiling, checking and cross-checking scores across 14 parameters, totals and rankings of over 4,000 of India’s best primary-secondary schools (from a universe of 1.5 million) — since it was tentatively pioneered in 2007, the annual EducationWorld India School Rankings (EWISR) survey has evolved into the world’s largest and most comprehensive schools ranking survey — not a few within the EducationWorld teams felt the world was too much with us. We burned the midnight oil to get massive tables — the co-ed day schools league tables featuring institutional scores of almost 3,000 schools sprawled across 120 pages — right. We are only too aware that for ranked schools every detail is of high importance (see mailbox page). In last month’s unprecedented 396-page issue, we published league tables ranking the country’s most admired Day schools — co-ed, boys and girls – nationally, in states, cities/towns and parameters-wise. Vintage/legacy day schools (established more than 90 years ago) were similarly rated and ranked inter se separately. This month, we feature the glamour section of EWISR 2023-24 — the country’s best boarding (co-ed, boys and girls) and International schools (day, day-cum-boarding and residential) plus vintage schools in each sub-category. With India’s upper middle class having become acutely aware that high quality K-12 education is the prerequisite of building a strong foundation for meaningful higher education and career success of children, globally benchmarked boarding, and especially international schools affiliated with reputed offshore exam boards such as International Baccalaureate, Cambridge International and Advance Placement are mushrooming countrywide. Moreover, the new National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 which has liberalised and deregulated the education sector, has smoothed the passage of international schools to India. It’s pertinent to note that in this Part-II edition of EWISR 2023-24, the best Central and state government day and boarding schools, special needs, philanthropic and budget private schools are also rated and ranked by specially constituted SEC (socio-economic category) B, C and D sample respondent groups. The objective of the annual EWISR is to identify the best schools in diverse categories across the spectrum, and to hold them up as exemplars for their peer institutions to emulate. This we believe will raise up the entire floor of school education and ensure better learning outcomes in the broadest sense. This is a condition precedent of national development in the 21st century.
It’s here! The biggest EW issue of the year. From the blank-eyed stares one gets, there is little awareness or appreciation that since 2007 when the annual Education India School Rankings (EWISR) survey was introduced, it has evolved into the largest, deepest and most comprehensive primary-secondary schools rating and rankings survey worldwide. Unlike most surveys ranking education institutions which are conducted by a jury of eminent educationists over tea and biscuits in a closed room, EWISR is an expansive field-based survey. Given that the total number of schools in India aggregates 1.4 million, selected jurors have little knowledge of the schools beyond their parishes. Your editors have chosen the hard, and more expensive, option of conducting field surveys in which 15,000-18,000 knowledgeable sample respondents — a mix of educationists, principals, teachers, parents and senior students— are persuaded to rate schools in their region (east, west, north and south) on 14 parameters of school education on a scale of 1-100. The scores awarded by sample respondents under each parameter are totalled and schools ranked in their own categories (co-ed day, day-cum-boarding, all boys and all girls etc) to provide an even playing field for comparison. Thus an estimated 4,000 of India’s most admired schools are ranked nationally, in the states and over 400 cities and towns nationwide. It’s a laborious, time-consuming process requiring alignment of scores under 14 parameters to provide readers detailed parameter, city, states and countrywide scores and ranks requiring our partner — the Centre for Forecasting & Research (C fore, estb.2000), the reputed Delhi-based market research and opinion polls company — to deploy field personnel to interview 18,928 sample respondents countrywide. Subsequently our entire editorial team in Bangalore led by Managing Editor Summiya Yasmeen checks, reconciles data and aligns national, state and city/town rankings. Nevertheless, there’s no shortage of cribbers and nitpickers ready to find fault with the annual EWISR. They forget that prior to the launch of EW, schools, principals — and education itself — received minimal media coverage, at best confined to tiny snippets in newspapers. Some schools have written to us expressing the wish to ‘withdraw’ from the survey. This request has been denied because we believe it is our fundamental right to rate and rank education institutions open to the public, in a fair and transparent manner. Be that as it may, EWISR 2023-24 has provoked tremendous enthusiasm as reported in the pages following. Moreover, we look forward to welcoming principals and representatives of all Top 20 ranked schools to our EWISR 2023-24 Awards conclave in Delhi’s Aero City on October 13-14, for which the response from India and abroad has been overwhelming. Please note advance registration (www. educationworld.in) for attendance is necessary. Meanwhile we invite all educators and public-spirited citizens to make common cause with us in our mission to make education the #1 item on the national development agenda.
On the eve of the new millennium when this publication was launched, we ventured forth into uncharted waters when EducationWorld became the first education-focused magazine in Indian history. Our avowed mission was — and remains — “to build the pressure of public opinion to make education the #1 item on the national agenda”. Since then, much water has flown down the Ganges and although this mission has not been accomplished mainly because of the obstinacy of successive Central and state governments to increase their combined expenditure for public education to 6 percent of GDP as recommended by the Kothari Commission way back in 1967. But now two decades later, there is unprecedented public focus on education and an emerging consensus that developing the country’s abundant human resource is the precondition of India reclaiming its rightful place at the top table of comity of nations. It is in this spirit of willingness to enter uncharted waters that in this issue, we have attempted to translate and summarise the ‘predraft’ 628-page National Curriculum Framework for School Education (NCFSE) 2023 released by the Union education ministry for public comment on April 7. Although this comprehensive roadmap is described as a predraft, to all intents and purposes it is a draft which, with minor amendments, is likely to become the official guidance document to realise the ambitious goals of the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 which recommends root and branch reform of the country’s obsolete preschool to Ph D education system. Since unusually the draft NCFSE 23 doesn’t feature a foreword or summary, we have attempted to summarise this detailed roadmap presented to teacher trainers and teachers communities in particular, but also of interest to educationists, parents and self-driven students. Our objective is to allay the fears of educators who may be intimidated by the sheer size of the NCFSE 2023 draft and assure them that in reality, it is an educator-friendly document designed for easy navigation. Indeed the 13-member NCF Steering Committee, chaired by the indefatigable Dr. K. Kasturirangan (who also chaired the high-level committee that drafted the 483-page draft National Education Policy in 2019 which culminated in the 68-page NEP 2020), has done a good job in the design and road mapping of NCFSE 2023 for educators to attain the ambitious goals of NEP 2020. Yet the question whether the country’s ill-trained educators community is capable of following the exhaustive NCFSE roadmap, i.e, implement comprehensive reforms of NEP 2020, is a moot point. These are the issues of critical import discussed in our ambitious — perhaps too ambitious, you tell us — cover feature. Of course, there’s a lot else in this Independence Day issue. Check out the very interesting Ed News and People sections, as also Expert Comment essays. Abundant food for thought.
A great mistake the Congress party made after independence was to abandon the sub-continent’s ancient tradition of free enterprise and free markets and take a sharp Left ideological turn under the influence of Jawaharlal Nehru, free India’s first prime minister. Nehruvian socialism resulted in politically free India becoming an economically enslaved nation. All business, industrial and education initiatives became subject to government supervision and permission — “everything was disallowed until it was allowed”. Nehru’s legacy of socialism was continued by his daughter and four times prime minister (1966-84), Indira Gandhi. Inevitably, economic development suffered and for almost 40 years free India experienced an annual 3.5 percent rate of GDP growth – as against 7-10 percent in South-east Asia and China. This economic stagnation was unacceptable. In 1978, the very year when Deng Xiaoping firmly placed neighbouring communist China on the “capitalist road”, your editor was appointed founding-editor of Business India and later BusinessWorld to expose the folly of licence-permit-quota (LPQ) raj over business and industry. These pioneer publications prepared the ground for the belated liberalisation of the Indian economy in 1991 under the under-appreciated prime minister P.V. Narasimha Rao (see Book Review pg. 62). After numerous adventures and twists and turns of fortune (to be detailed in my memoirs under halting preparation), with India remaining a laggard in the global race for socio-economic development, one came to the conclusion that the country’s rickety education system was at fault. Licence-permit-quota raj, which had enfeebled Indian business and industry, had migrated to the education sector. Therefore for the past 23 years, EducationWorld has been in the vanguard of reforming the country’s education system from preschool to Ph D. And one of our top priorities is to end LPQ raj in education. Although we have moved the needle of public policy on several issues in education — ECCE (early childhood care and education), skilling, and a larger role for private higher education — on this issue we have had little success as highlighted by the authors of a research study who have written the cover story of this issue. The obstinate endurance of LPQ in K-12 education has had serious repercussions on the system and is a major speed-breaker on the way to India transforming into a $30 trillion (from $3.75 trillion currently) economy by 2047, when the country will celebrate its centenary year of freedom. Therefore all right-thinking people should read our informative cover story and speak up for ending LPQ raj in K-12 education. The role of education ministries at the Centre and in the states is to upgrade the country’s 1.2 million government schools, not to over-regulate private schools which are essentially a matter of voluntary contract between parents/students and institutional managements. And in our unprecedented special report feature, we highlight the upskilling panic which is spreading through all sectors of the economy. Perhaps a beneficial development.
fter liberalisation and deregulation of the dirigiste socialist Indian economy in 1991, the country’s middle class has grown and prospered. According to some estimates it numbers 400 million or 80 million households, as the outflow of Indian graduates and latterly school-leavers, to universities in English-speaking countries — the US, UK, Australia and Canada as also to European countries — has become a torrent. India’s new upwardly mobile middle class has become acutely aware that the best quality higher education offered by well-equipped Western — especially America’s — universities is the smart passport to jobs and success in the increasingly complex workplaces of the 21st century. Therefore currently an estimated 500,000 Indian students are enrolled in higher education institutions abroad, 40 percent of them in the US. Thus far, the focus of education consultants and students aspiring for US education has been on America’s famous Ivy League institutions and universities on the east and west coasts with excellent marketing skills and international outreach. However, many of America’s relatively insular colleges and universities (in the US they are synonymous) of impressive vintage and offering high quality academic programmes are unfamiliar to Indian students and households. This reality impacted EducationWorld CEO, Bhavin Shah forcefully when he connected with the Michigan Colleges Alliance, a consortium of 14 independent (mainly undergrad) colleges sited in Michigan — the heart of America’s manufacturing industry, hosting megacorps including General Motors, Ford, Chrysler and several heavyweight defence, chemicals, and pharma multinational corporations. Excellent academic, co-curricular and sports education apart, these well-endowed colleges offer generous scholarships, and internship and placement opportunities in globally admired companies, and expressed great interest in welcoming school-leavers and graduates from India. The outcome of Shah’s week-long visit to Michigan and endorsement of MCA and its low-profile but excellent higher education institutions is our unprecedented cover story in this issue. It is certain to arouse great interest in students aspiring to attain the dream of globally reputed high quality American higher education. In addition in this issue, we present a pictorial essay of the EducationWorld India Higher Education Rankings Awards function staged in Delhi in which India’s most admired colleges and universities that topped the EWIHER 2023-24 league tables in several categories (published in April & May) were felicitated and awarded. With insightful editorials, expert columns, book reviews and news reports from around the country, we hope this Monsoon issue will enthuse our growing community of print and online readers.
The public often forgets the vast scale and diversity of subcontinental India. For instance, within the education sector there are 1.4 million primary-secondary schools; 43,796 junior and undergrad colleges and 1,113 universities countrywide established to serve the educational needs of over 500 million children and youth. It’s quite obviously impossible to evaluate and rank them all. Therefore all ranking agencies and media publications restrict themselves to rating and ranking the Top 1,000, Top 200 or other appealing number. Moreover contrary to popular opinion, it’s also impossible to conduct physical audits of even the small numbers. It would be very expensive and time consuming. The audit methodology of grading universities is practiced by NAAC (National Assessment and Accreditation Council, estb. 1994) which dispatches task forces of academics to conduct on-site institutional audits — at the assessee institution’s expense. That’s why in the 29 years since NAAC was established, it has assessed a mere 9,062 colleges and 418 universities in India. Therefore the standard method for assessing education institutions is by constituting a sample respondents database of knowledgeable individuals and persuading them to award perceptual scores on a scale of 1-100 under several parameters of school, collegiate and higher education excellence. The scores awarded under each parameter are totaled to rank institutions inter se. The other methodology is to constitute a jury of eminent educationists and invite them to rank education institutions in separate categories. Of the two methodologies we prefer the former because it is based on field interviews with a large number of knowledgeable individuals and is likely to be more accurate. However in EducationWorld we also resort to using jury evaluations to rate and rank self-nominated schools. In EducationWorld, we accord high importance to institutional ratings and rankings. Over the years the annual EducationWorld India School Rankings introduced in 2007 in which every September we rank over 4,000 schools countrywide in discrete categories under 14 parameters, has evolved into the largest schools rating and ranking survey worldwide, and generates tremendous enthusiasm. The great public interest in our school and preschool (estb.2010) ranking surveys prompted us to introduce the annual EducationWorld India Higher Education Rankings (EWIHER) of undergrad colleges and universities in 2013. The country’s Top 500 Arts, Science, Commerce colleges divided into private autonomous and non-autonomous and government autonomous and non-autonomous — it’s complicated — were separately ranked under several parameters last month (April). In this issue, we similarly evaluate India’s Top 300 government and private universities. EWIHER 2023-24 will prove very useful to school leavers and graduate students for short-listing, if not finalizing, the most aptitudinally suitable higher education institution.
A large number of media publications — dailies and periodicals — rate and rank education institutions under several parameters and in various categories. Yet all of them are either general interest publications or business magazines which regard this exercise primarily as an annual revenue generation initiative. But EducationWorld is a focused education news and features magazine whose prime intent is to reform and rejuvenate India’s fast obsolescing education system. Therefore logically, our elaborate league tables rating and ranking education institutions are more purposive and credible. We are better aware that choosing the aptitudinally most suitable college and university may well be the most important decision of a young person’s life. To conduct this national institution evaluation exercise, we have partnered with our trusted ally, the highly-reputed Delhi-based market research and opinion polls company, Centre for Forecasting & Research Pvt. Ltd (C fore, estb.2000). Over 100 field personnel of C fore interviewed 2,960 faculty and 3,707 senior students in higher education countrywide, and 446 industry representatives and persuaded them to rate India’s most reputed Arts, Science and Commerce and Private Engineering Colleges on six-nine parameters of collegiate education. Scores awarded under each parameter by these knowledgeable sample respondents were totalled to rank colleges in each category. Although considerable time and money is spent by all publications employing different methodologies to rate and rank education institutions to enable school-leavers and parents to shortlist suitable colleges, few are satisfied with ranking outcomes. Some believe that perceptual rankings are not reliable. But alternative methodologies are worse. For instance, NAAC employs a direct audit methodology to award its gradings. Not only is this a very expensive proposition, but as a recent scandal has proved, audit teams are susceptible to the blandishments of assessee institutions. Likewise, the NIRF rankings of the Union education ministry which relies on data submitted by institutions themselves have proved absurd with excellent universities such as BITS-Pilani ranked way below obscure provincial institutions. In the circumstances, our methodology which relies on the opinions of knowledgeable respondents with some reliance on the Scopus Index of published papers is the best. But as we routinely caution parents and students, even our league tables are for shortlisting the most suitable higher education institutions. The shortlisted ones require further detailed investigation. With this cautionary advice, in this issue we present the EW league table of India’s Top 500 Arts, Science and Commerce, and Private Engineering Colleges. Plus of course, our other columns and unmatched news reports and important book reviews. In the next issue, we will present the EWIHER league tables of the country’s best universities followed by a grand event to felicitate and celebrate them. For us, the condition and progress of higher education institutions is serious business.
For most people including educators, the National Curriculum Framework (NCF) for K-12 education — last presented to the nation in 2005 — is what the apocryphal elephant was to the seven blind men of Hindoostan. As our indefatigable Managing Editor, Summiya Yasmeen discovered in parleys with over three dozen educators — principals, teachers, education consultants — before short-listing 19 for interview, most have a hazy idea of what NCF is all about and its purpose. This prevailing confusion is confounded because the new NCF, which is expected to be finalised by year end, will be presented in four detailed and separate documents. The first document (360 pages) for Foundational Stage was presented to the nation on October 20 last year and was acclaimed by ECCE (early childhood care and education) professionals and preschool promoters. The second document, the National Curriculum Framework for School Education (NCFSE), which will lay down a framework/guidelines for primary-secondary schools countrywide, is scheduled to be released shortly. NCFSE 2023 is expected to provide guidelines to managements and teachers of all 1.40 million schools countrywide, which have a staggering number of 260 million children on their muster rolls, to attain the ambitious goals set by the National Education Policy 2020. NEP 2020 based on a detailed 484-page report of the Kasturirangan Committee, mandates radical overhaul of India’s moribund education system, KG-Ph D. After the imminent NCFSE is presented, two more comprehensive documents on teacher education and adult literacy will be presented later this year by a NCF Steering Committee chaired by Dr. K. Kasturirangan. This will complete the process of conceptualisation and finalisation of the unprecedented NCF 2023. Looks like an overdue sea change is imminent in Indian education. But the devil is in implementation. As usual at this time of year, our second lead story examines the Union Budget 2023-24 from the perspective of India’s long-suffering children. Despite being aware that children countrywide suffered severe learning loss during the unduly long Covid lockdown of schools averaging 82 weeks, and that they urgently need intensive remedial education to catch up, Dr. Sitharaman has presented a business-as-usual budget. Yet unlike intellectuals and pundits, in EW we are not content to merely breast-beat and lament. For the tenth time we present an alternative budget/schema suggesting ways and means to mobilise Rs.7-8 lakh crore for investment in education and human resource development. He that hath ears let him hear! Also check out excellent essays by Rajiv Desai and London-based edupreneur Sanjay Vishwanthan and other unique content that distinguishes this journal from all others worldwide. Yet while your editors — metaphorically speaking — can take horse to water, they can’t alas, make it drink.
Although Indian education is at a liberalisation and deregulation inflection point three decades after Indian industry was liberalised in the landmark Union Budget of 1991 — when licence permit-quota raj which had cabined, cribbed and confined the Indian economy for over four decades was substantially dismantled — better late than never. Indians have a bad history of writing and recalling history. But it’s important to remember that for several millennia until the mid-18th century, the Indian subcontinent and neighbouring ancient China, were the wealthiest and most prosperous countries worldwide contributing 50 percent of global GDP. India was in a sweet spot when the nation attained its political freedom in 1947. Several visionary industry pioneers including G.D. Birla, J.N. Tata, Kasturbhai Lalbhai, and the Chettiar industrialists of peninsular India who had prospered between the two World Wars despite numerous hurdles placed in their path by the British Raj, were well-positioned to transform independent India into Asia’s fastest developing and most prosperous economy. But that tryst with destiny was sabotaged by imposition of Soviet-inspired Nehruvian socialist ideology upon high-potential independent India. Thousands of laws, rules and regulations were enacted to shackle private enterprise. Tax revenue and national savings were canalised into giant Soviet-style public sector enterprises (PSEs) managed by government clerks and bureaucrats. Unsurprisingly, despite being conferred monopoly status, India’s 256 Central PSEs and an equal number promoted by state governments, never generated promised surpluses which would have financed public infrastructure, educa[1]tion and health. Forty years later, a non-Nehru leader of the Congress party — prime minister P.V. Narasimha Rao — substantially dismantled neta-babu licence[1]permit-quota raj. As a result the annual rate of GDP growth doubled and 400 million citizens were lifted out of poverty, until the Covid pandemic pushed an estimated 100 million back under the poverty line. Unfortunately, while Indian industry was substantially unshackled in 1991, the logic of liberalisation was not extended to the education sector. The tight grip of the neta-babu brotherhood and left academics over Indian education had the same effect. None of India’s 42,000 colleges or 1,072 universities — despite some of them being of 150 years vintage — is ranked among the Top 200 WUR (World University Rankings) published annually by the globally respected QS or Times Higher Education. Thirty years later, after promulgation of the National Education Policy, 2020, there are signs that the logic of liberalisation is being applied to India’s floundering education sector. But as our detailed cover feature warns, don’t rule out a spanner in the works. Our second lead story beams an overdue spotlight on a neglected dimension of India’s moribund education sector: developing children’s SEL (social and emotional learning) skills, badly damaged by the over-long lockdown of schools during the Covid pandemic
With former space scientist Dr. K. Kasturirangan, chairman of the nine-member committee which authored the 484-page Draft National Education Policy, 2019 which translated into the 66-page National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, having unobtrusively accepted the position of chairman of a steering committee to implement NEP 2020, the speed of overdue reform of India’s moribund education system is accelerating. Last October, the Union education ministry formally launched the National Curriculum Framework for Foundational Stage 2022 detailing ways and means to incorporate vitally important professionally administered early childhood care and education — which your editors have been stridently advocating since 2010 — into the new 5+3+3+4 school education system. Moreover, it’s a welcome development that implementation of the Kasturirangan Committee’s root and branch reforms in higher education — the other end of the learning spectrum — has also gathered momentum. As reported by our Delhi-based correspondent Autar Nehru (see p.18), Prof. Mamidala Jagadesh Kumar, chairman of UGC (University Grants Commission) — the apex regulatory body of higher education — is rolling out liberalisation reforms proposed by NEP 2020 at fast clip, and has emerged as the can-do point man for higher education reforms of the BJP government. Yet the plain unheralded truth is that the reform rush that’s shaking up the shady bowers of Indian academia has been catalysed by the country’s new age private universities legislated by state governments. They have infused new life and stimulus into the country’s also-ran higher education institutions — 42,000 colleges and 1,072 universities, some of them of 150 years vintage — a few of whom are ranked in the bottom deciles of the World University Rankings league tables of Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) and Times Higher Education, the highly-reputed London-based rating agencies which assess and rank HEIs around the world. Only after emergence on the national landscape of a rash of new genre, globally bench-marked privately promoted universities — anathema to left and left-liberal academics, politicians and media pundits who have presided over the slide of public universities into mediocrity — has a new spirit of competition and search for academic and research excellence invaded India’s lackadaisical higher education system. For further and better particulars, read our unprecedented cover story of this issue. For the engaged and intelligent, there is rich fare in this first issue of 2023. Check out respected public intellectual Sudheendra Kulkarni’s case for settling the long-pending border issue with China; US-based educationist Jessica Cavallaro who advocates new age agile classrooms and the People page which introduces academic VIPs. Let’s co-operate to make 2023 a landmark year for Indian education!
Smooth induction of infants into the education system so they develop genuine love of learning, spirit of enquiry and problem solving capabilities is an issue of utmost importance which has not received the attention it deserves. In the latter half of the 20th century, it was normative practice to start drilling and skilling children to become literate and numerate as early as possible. Fortunately in recent years, the education philosophies of early childhood care and education (ECCE) pioneers such as Rudolf Steiner, Jean Piaget, Dr. Maria Montessori and our own Gijubhai Badheka among others which posited that infants learn best through play, exploration and discovery, have acquired currency. In EducationWorld, we like to believe this publication has played a major role in impacting the vital importance of professionally administered ECCE upon the academy, establishment and government. In 2010, we convened the first ever ECCE international seminar/conference in Mumbai. Simultaneously, we introduced the annual EducationWorld India Preschool Rankings which identified and felicitated the country’s best pre-primary schools. The socially beneficial outcome of persistent advocacy of professionally administered ECCE is that the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 accords high prior[1]ity to early years education. It has reconfigured the 10+2 school education system into a 5+3+3+4 continuum by incorporating five years of compulsory ‘foundational education’ into the formal school system. This is a most welcome initiative that augurs well for the cognitive development of youngest children, provided care is taken to ensure that they are not pushed into early literacy. Another issue that requires clear thinking and reflection is the status of budget private schools (BPS) in India’s K-12 education system. Within the establishment and academy dominated by Left ideologues, the popular per[1]ception is that BPS promoters and principals exploit fees-paying, lower middle and working class parents by promising to provide English and/or English[1]medium primary-secondary education to their children, but deliver precious little. That may be true, but if so how would they explain the multiplication of BPS countrywide to over 400,000 with an aggregate enrolment of 60 million (that’s not a typo) children? The plain truth is that standards of education in the country’s 1.20 million free-of-charge government schools are so poor, that a growing number of lower middle and working class households prefer fees levying BPS to free-of-charge government schools. Therefore to enable parents to choose the most suitable BPS for their progeny and to stimulate affordable schools to improve, we have been rating and ranking them since 2015. In this issue we also unapologetically present league tables rating the country’s most reputed BPS on 11 parameters of school education excellence, ranking them nationally and in their host states and cities. Totally unprecedented.
The very first issue of EducationWorld — The Human Development Magazine has hesitantly launched in a small 600 sq. ft low-ceiling office in Bangalore (now Bengaluru) on November 6, 23 years ago. The inaugural issue was blessed and formally released by the late Prof. N.S. Ramaswamy (1926-2012), a visionary and insufficiently honoured education institutions builder — founding-director of NITIE, Bombay, Jamnalal Bajaj Institute of Management Studies (JBIMS) and Indian Institute of Management-Bangalore. Perhaps that’s why this publication despite — or perhaps because of — its ambitious mission statement (“to build the pressure of public opinion to make education the #1 item on the national agenda”, was greeted with indifference, and often hostility. With the country’s risk-averse banking system, nationalised to enable business and industry, comprehensively uncooperative, we owe our institutional survival to the faith reposed in this ambitious venture by our magnanimous investors — the Manipal Education & Medical Group (Dr. Ramdas Pai); Glenn and Sandra Christo; Knowledge Universe, Los Angeles (Lowell and Mike Milken); my London-based sister Shyama Thakore; Everonn Group (P. Kishore); GEMS Group, Dubai (Sunny & Dino Varkey); Hemendra and Aditi Kothari, and edupreneur Aditya Mody. This a good occasion to thank them for their philanthropy, patience and sustained support. Although the holding company of EducationWorld, which also publishes ParentsWorld and has several other education promotion verticals, hasn’t prospered sufficiently to reward our shareholders with dividends and bonuses, the good news is that it is a financially viable and self-supporting business enterprise. For this encomiums are due to our Mumbai-based business development team led by CEO Bhavin Shah. However, for the editors and employees of EducationWorld (and ParentsWorld) financial viability is a means to fulfil the end of human resource development for national prosperity. Admittedly, education has not become the #1 item on the national agenda, but it has risen higher to mid-point. Our cover story in this 23rd anniversary issue is a clarion call for greater private sector engagement with human resource development. As testified by several global wealth surveys, the number of HNI (high networth individuals) and unicorn companies in India is multiplying rapidly. Simultaneously India’s middle class has expanded to over 350 million citizens. This is an opportune time for all of us to practice philanthropy — big and small — to upgrade India’s education institutions from preschools to research institutes, into globally respected powerhouses of learning. Let’s cooperate in our resolute mission to make education and human resource development the #1 item on the national development agenda.
Since it was somewhat hesitantly and experimentally introduced in 2007, the annual EducationWorld India School Rankings (EWISR) survey, which rates and ranks 3,500- 4,000 of India’s best schools, has evolved into the largest and most detailed schools ranking survey worldwide. However it arouses mixed emotions in diverse publics. Left intellectuals who curiously continue to dominate the academy despite the rejection of communist/ socialist ideology in Russia and China — the fons et origo of this obsolete creed — have contempt for it. It’s a commercial venture, the evaluation methodology is flawed, it provokes unseemly competition et al. But bona fide school promoters, principals and teachers love this annual survey because it provides feedback on ways and means to upgrade and improve institutional performance across a broad range of parameters of school education excellence. Parents also look forward to the annual EWISR because it enables them to shortlist, even if not select, primary-secondary schools most likely to develop the unique intelligences of their children. That’s why every year there is a clamour from schools countrywide for inclusion in our survey. In 2007 a mere 250 schools were sufficiently well-known to sample respondents to include in the survey. In the latest EWISR 2022- 23, the number of schools included in our league tables has risen to 4,000 from 392 cities and towns across the country. The field interviews-based institutional evaluation methodology adopted by us is elaborate, and expensive. Every summer over a period of four months, field researchers of the Centre for Forecasting & Research Pvt. Ltd, aka C fore, Delhi, a highly-reputed specialised market research and opinion polls company, persuade over 14,000 carefully chosen, knowledgeable sample respondents (educationists, fees-paying parents, principals, teachers and senior students) to rate the country’s most reputed schools on a scale of 1-100 on 12-15 parameters of school education excellence. Subsequently, the parameter scores are totaled to rank schools in 22 segregated categories. We believe that segregating schools for assessment and ranking is important to provide level playing fields and eliminate apples and oranges type comparisons. Last month we published detailed league tables spread over 344 pages rating and ranking the country’s most-reputed Day Schools (co-ed, day-cum-boarding, girls, boys) nationally and in the country’s 29 states and seven Union territories. In this issue we present EWISR 2022-23 Part II rating and ranking Boarding (co-ed, boys and girls) and International (day, day-cumboarding and residential) schools. Moreover league tables evaluating the country’s best Vintage legacy, Central and State government (day and boarding); Special Needs and Philanthropy schools are also featured. There’s something in these league tables for everyone — parents, educators, students and social scientists.
Over the past 15 years since the detailed globally unprecedented EducationWorld India School Rankings (EWISR) survey was introduced, it has generated great enthusiasm within the educationists, institutional promoters, principals, teachers and students communities countrywide. This is because unlike all other schools ranking league tables (except for blatant knockoffs) which evaluate primary-secondary schools on a single parameter, i.e, learning outcomes in school-leaving board exams, the annual EWISR league tables assess schools under 12-15 parameters including teacher welfare and development, teachers competence, leadership, infrastructure, co-curricular menu, sports education, parental involvement, among others. Moreover, the methodology adopted by us is based on elaborate — and expensive — field interviews, rather than the usual six jurors sitting in a room with little knowledge of schools beyond their bailiwicks. Every summer over a period of four months, field researchers of the Centre for Forecasting & Research Pvt. Ltd, aka C fore, Delhi, a highly-reputed specialised market research and opinion polls company, persuade over 14,000 carefully chosen, knowledgeable sample respondents (educationists, fees-paying parents, principals, teachers and senior students) to rate the country’s 3,500-4,000 most reputed schools on a scale of 1-100 on 12-15 parameters of school education excellence. Subsequently, the parameter scores are totaled to rank schools in 22 segregated categories. We believe that segregating schools for assessment and ranking is important to provide level playing fields and eliminate apples and oranges type comparisons. The objective of this prolix explanation of our institutional ranking methodology is to assure readers that maximum possible care has been taken to make the annual EWISR league tables as fair and objective as possible to enable parents to choose most aptitudinally and emotionally suitable schools for their children. This is important because choosing a school that will optimally develop the unique intelligence(s) of children in their formative years will shape the rest of their lives. The proposition that academic reputation and record should be the sole criterion for selecting children’s schools has become obsolete. We hope EWISR 2022-23 which rates and ranks 3,500-4,000 of India’s most admired schools in 392 cities and towns countrywide will aid and enable parents to select the most suitable school for their children. Simultaneously, a parallel objective of the annual EWISR — the world’s largest and most comprehensive schools ranking survey — is to stimulate and motivate institutional managements to strive for all-round perfection and benchmark themselves with globally respected schools. India’s 1.5 million schools — including 450,000 private schools — have a vitally important responsibility to nurture and develop the world’s largest and most high-potential child and youth population.
It’s highly unlikely that you’ll encounter an individual as enthused by the surprisingly unsung exploits and initiatives of Barefoot College, Tilonia (Rajasthan) as your correspondent. During the past decade, I have written three cover features on this pioneer community college which has greened the desert landscape of Tilonia (pop.4,500) and a cluster of villages in its neighbourhood, and restored the dignity and self-respect of thousands of rural folk of Ajmer district. The promotion and development of BC into a model education institution based on Mahatma Gandhi’s philosophy and development model by Sanjit (Bunker) Roy, an alum of the The Doon School, Dehradun and Delhi’s blue-chip St. Stephens’s College, is a story of extraordinary grit and determination to deliver some benefits of the successful freedom movement led by Gandhiji to the neglected majority of rural Bharat, the other India. The decision of newly independent India to take the socialist road and prioritise development of heavy industry through promotion of monopoly public sector enterprises (PSEs) has proved a disastrous failure. Managed by venal politicians and business-illiterate bureaucrats, PSEs have egregiously failed to generate the promised surpluses (‘profit’ is a dirty word in the leftist lexicon) for investment in public education, healthcare and infrastructure in rural India which has evolved into poor, backward and illiterate Bharat, almost another country. Although 65 percent of India’s population toils in hinterland Bharat, it contributes a mere 16 percent of annual GDP and the average per capita income of Bharat is half of urban India. This is the iniquity that the Barefoot College management led by Roy has successfully addressed since this community college was established fifty years ago in the water-stressed boondocks of Rajasthan. Early this year, BC modestly celebrated its Golden Jubilee, a landmark which inspired the third detailed cover feature on this grassroots development model which on merit should have been replicated in all 742 districts of India, but has not been. Why and how this extraordinary skills development institution which provides a blueprint to lift the rural majority out of poverty, has been ignored and at best damned with faint praise — and has recently suffered institutional schism — is explained in our Independence Day cover feature. It’s also a sad story of betrayal and compassion deficit. There’s a lot else in this content rich issue of the country’s premier education newsmagazine. Read about the collateral damage caused by the hasty imposition of CUET as also Sanjaya Baru’s essay and our editorials which recommend reflection and introspection on India’s 75th Independence Day.
Work on formulating the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 presented to the nation after an interregnum of 34 years, began in 2016 when the TSR Subramanian Committee working at manic speed, presented the first draft. Evidently, the committee’s report to liberalise and deregulate the education sector on the lines of liberalisation of the Indian economy in 1991, was unpalatable to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) which had swept to power in New Delhi in 2014 with a massive majority in Parliament. In 2017, a nine-member committee under the chairmanship of space scientist Dr. K. Kasturirangan was constituted to formulate another draft. In end-2018, the Kasturirangan Committee submitted its 484-page report to the BJP government which was re-elected in 2019 with an even greater majority in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of Parliament. Subsequently, NEP, approved by the Union cabinet, was presented to Parliament and the nation on July 29, 2020. NEP 2020 proposes radical reform of post-independence India’s moribund pre-primary to Ph D education system. But to attain this laudable and overdue objective, NEP 2020 proposes greater instead of lesser, government supervision and regulation of the education sector. A large number of supervisory bodies such as HECI, NHERC, NAS, SSA, NAC etc have to be established, essentially to regulate private initiatives in education. The question of whether Indian education needs greater or lesser government regulation aside, the ground reality is that two years on, most of these supervisory committees and bodies have not been constituted. Moreover, there’s considerable suspense about who will be the “academics of unimpeachable integrity” appointed to administer the proposed supervisory and regulatory agencies. Against this backdrop, the stubborn refusal of Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan to defend and clarify NEP 2020 is deplorable. Minister: our cover story is not a trifling academic exercise. It was conceptualised as a public platform for honest and open discussion of this policy initiative which may improve or damage the future of the world’s largest child and youth population — and indeed, determine India’s standing in the global community of nations. Therefore, your obstinate refusal to advise the implementation progress of NEP 2020 is against the public interest. For proof of poor management of post-independence India’s education system, check out our special report feature which explains why youth desperate for medical qualifications are compelled to sign up with institutions in unknown and often hostile countries where they often suffer great anguish and deprivation. Moreover, this monsoon issue of EducationWorld is rich with thought-provoking editorials, opinion columns and book reviews. Let’s engage.
J. Krishnamurti (1895-1986) aka Jiddu/JK, was one of the great philosopher-seers of the 20th century with deep interest in the education of children. While an adolescent, the young JK was discovered on the banks of the River Adyar, Madras by William Leadbetter, a grandee of the Theosophical Society (estb.1875), who in an epiphanic moment identified him as a World Teacher with capabilities to save the world hurtling towards two World Wars. Privately educated in Madras and later in England, Krishnamurti was a gifted child who reportedly learned to read and write fluent English in six months and began presenting his world view in lectures to English and European audiences while in his teens. Although JK never attended school or college he developed a deep and abiding interest in the education and nurturance of children. In 1928, he promoted the Rishi Valley School (RVS) and trust in Madanapalle, a tiny village in Chittoor district of Madras Presidency, which over the next nine decades, has emerged as India’s most respected co-ed boarding school routinely top-ranked in the annual EducationWorld India School Rankings survey (estb.2007). Moreover, the number of boutique schools promoted by Krishnamurti Foundation India (KFI) has multiplied to six with an aggregate enrolment of 2,000 children mentored by 270 highly qualified teachers committed to practising the education and child nurturance precepts preached by Krishnamurti. But even though KFI schools are all highly ranked nationally and in their host states, they have maintained a low public profile and their excellent reputation is restricted to SEC (socio-economic category) ‘A’ educated, liberal and high income households across the country. We believed — and continue to believe — that JK’s education philosophy, pedagogies and best practices being faithfully implemented in KFI schools countrywide, need to be propagated and replicated nationwide to raise teaching-learning standards in K-12 education. Fortunately, advocacy to the effect that KFI should not hide its lamp of learning under the biblical bushel, but share its glow with educationists and educators countrywide, stimulated a change of mindset within the foundation’s trustees. We were given access to the extraordinary leaders of KFI. Many thanks to the trustees and secretary Vishwanath Alluri in particular, for enabling us to present Krishnamurti’s prescription of introspection, self-discovery, harmony with all beings and Nature as the essence of holistic primary-secondary education. I believe that in this fractious era of caste, class and religious antagonisms even as the ravages of climate change and global warming are manifesting globally, Krishnamurti’s education and art of living philosophy has the potential to stimulate the overdue renaissance of Indian education.
Alhough some self-styled educators and educationists may be unaware, EducationWorld which has a record of 22 years of uninterrupted publishing, come floods, famine or pandemic, has been ranking education institutions across the spectrum from preschools to universities since 2007, perhaps the only news magazine worldwide with this record. But given the pathetic condition of the country’s education system, it’s hardly surprising that we are anti-establishment. Therefore, it’s rare for ministers and minions to give your editors interviews and access. I wonder why, when our intent is to highlight education excellence and if at all, offer constructive criticism to reform a moribund education system which has clearly failed to develop the abundant human capital of post-independence India. Regrettably, this culture of unaccountability has also spread to private sector education institutions whose cause and contribution EducationWorld has championed ab initio. It’s not unusual for privately promoted schools and colleges to decline information and access out of an unwarranted sentiment of false modesty which abjures publicity and are content to do their bit for the public weal in a tiny corner of the country. To them my advice is to heed the biblical injunction against hiding their lamp under a bushel. The public interest would be served better if they let their light shine and shared best practices and precepts. The subject of non-cooperation surfaced during the course of laborious preparation of this issue which is Part II of the annual EducationWorld India Higher Education Rankings (EWIHER) 2022-23. In April we rated and ranked India’s most admired government and private Arts, Science and Commerce colleges of undergrad education. In this issue we present the country’s most detailed ratings (10-14 parameters of higher education excellence) and rankings of the country’s best private and government universities. Please note that unlike the rankings of several publications which are determined by small committees of jurors, all EW ranking surveys from pre-school to university are based on field interviews conducted by over 100 field personnel of our partner market research and opinion polls company, C fore, Delhi for a period of three-four months. For this survey, they interviewed over 4,000 sample respondents comprising higher education faculty, final year students and industry representatives. The sample respondents were persuaded to award scores under each parameter. These scores were totalled to rank public and private universities in 15 categories (multidisciplinary, engineering, liberal arts, agriculture etc). EWIHER 2022-23, painstakingly collated and published over the past two months, is undoubtedly the most detailed higher education institutions evaluation survey nationwide. School-leaving students, parents and career counsellors who neglect to study them are doing themselves injury.
Not a few academics and pundits tend to be derisive of education institution rankings. The main criticisms are that they are shallow and compare dissimilar institutions, and sample sizes are too small to provide an accurate assessment of the relative merits of education institutions, each of which is unique in its own right. Critics are also unanimous that media publications publish institutional ranking league tables to rake in advertising revenue and that inevitably, there’s a quid pro quo. Now in their tenth year, the annual EducationWorld India Higher Education Rankings, are designed bearing these criticisms in mind. First, higher education institutions are carefully divided into separate silos to ensure that apples with oranges-type comparisons are eliminated to the maximum extent possible. Thus Arts, Science and Commerce undergrad colleges are not only ranked separately but sub-divided into private autonomous, government autonomous and private non-autonomous colleges. Re sample size, the field surveys for EW preschools. schools and higher education institutions are conducted by the Delhi-based Centre for Forecasting & Research Pvt. Ltd (C fore, estb. 2000), the highly reputed market research and opinion polls company whose clients include several political parties. In its judgement, the sample size of over 4,000 faculty, senior college students and industry representatives is more than sufficient, especially because sample respondents are carefully selected. “We interview a lesser number of respondents to forecast election outcomes in states with populations running into millions,” says Premchand Palety, the founder-director of C-fore. Apropos the charge that media publications tend to rake in high revenue from issues publishing academic institutional rankings, it’s true because after investing money and huge effort, we deliver a valuable service to school leaving students. One can’t pander to well-remunerated academics who believe any profit generating activity is sinful per se. This issue also contains league tables ranking the country’s best private engineering colleges. Government promoted IITs and NITs which are routinely top-ranked in all media rankings but admit a mere 2 percent of the 1.3 million school-leavers who write the IIT-JEE annually, are not ranked in our user-friendly league tables. Nevertheless all these illogical and arbitrary classifications made by the overweening educracy which has messed up the education system, including higher ed, are likely to become redundant in the near future. The National Education Policy 2020 proposes that all undergrad colleges should gradually transform into autonomous multi-disciplinary universities by 2035. It’s aconsummation devoutly to be wished.
With the third wave Omicron variant of the novel Coronavirus, which ill-advisedly prompted first the Central and later state governments to impose the most prolonged lockdown (82 weeks) of education institutions from pre-primaries to universities upon the children of India not proving as deadly as the previous Delta variant, schools, colleges and universities have resumed on-campus teaching-learning. However because of exaggerated caution in the matter of reopening schools for fear of the impact of the virus on children, teachers and the world’s largest child and youth population have a long, hard road ahead to make good the learning loss of almost two years. In my opinion, the best solution is to declare the past two academic years 2020-21 and 2021-22 — the education lockdown was imposed on March 25, 2020 and has only recently been relaxed — zero academic years. That is children in K-12 education, even if not in higher education, should start the new academic year from the time they were shut out of classrooms. Or if not for two years, at least for one. Mysteriously, this proposal is considered blasphemous. This proposition made in a lead feature in our February issue (educationworld.in/declare-2021-22-as-zero-academic-year/) has been greeted with sullen silence by teacher and parent communities. But there’s no side-stepping the grim reality that in the vast majority of the country’s 1.5 million primary schools — especially historically under-provisioned 1.2 million government schools — children have not received any meaningful education for two years. In this connection, the deafening silence from Shastri Bhavan, Delhi which houses the Union education ministry and its newly (July 2021) appointed minister Dharmendra Pradhan, is bewildering. Even as all requests for an interview remain unacknowledged, one has not heard a single utterance from the Rt. Hon’ble minister on vital issues such as reopening of schools, remedial education, the meagre provision for education in Union Budget 2022-23, mental health and well-being of children during the prolonged lockdown, or indeed any words of comfort or reassurance to the world’s largest population of children and youth. Be that as it may, in this issue we present a ten-point agenda to rescue India’s cruelly neglected children and youth from the hard grind ahead of them following the world’s longest education lockdown. Even if the minister has no time for our prescription, educationists, educators and enlightened parents should study it seriously. There’s too much at stake. Our unprecedented cover story apart, there’s much more in this first post-pandemic issue. Check out our second lead story on the rising popularity of the Gap Year, our stimulating People profiles, editorials and book reviews. Even though I may not be entirely objective, no other news publication provides as rich a mix.
Way back in 2004 when this pioneer education news magazine, promoted in 1999 with the mission to arouse public opinion to exert pressure on the ignorant establishment to develop India’s abundant and high-potential human capital, was in its infancy, we featured a cover titled ‘Dirty dozen corrupt practices destroying Indian education’. Seventeen years later following a rising number of anecdotal reports of multiplying rackets and rip-offs in the education sector, your editors were compelled to revisit this issue. And lo and behold, the dozen corrupt practices that were poisoning the education system in yester-years are flourishing unchecked. Worse, after enactment of well-intentioned legislation such as the landmark Right of Children to Free & Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, 2009, new rackets have been devised with a larger number of parasites nibbling at roots of the system. It’s a telling commentary on the depth of the moral rot that has permeated post-independence India’s professedly socialist society, that there’s no shortage of citizens ready, willing and able to profit from denying the world’s largest child and youth population their fundamental right to good quality education which is tantamount to snatching bread from their mouths. Although the major share of the blame for this sorry situation must be laid at the doorstep of politicians and bureaucrats who foolishly believe that the nation can generate financial capital without developing human capital, the establishment — academia, business, industry and the influential middle class — are complicit. We have stood idly by as the abundant, high-potential human resources of the country are being washed down the drain. It’s high time a political consensus and societal acceptance that provision of acceptable quality education for all, is the non-negotiable pre-condition of national growth and development. The cover story apart, in our special report feature we have advanced a proposition likely to generate controversy, and hopefully, intelligent debate. Should the academic year 2021-22 during which most education institutions were shuttered because of the Covid pandemic be written off and re-covered? Well, I believe this is the best option, especially for children in pre-primary and primary education. It will prove less stressful for children and provide them a strong platform for future learning. This issue of EW is especially rich with unique editorial content. Check out the insightful essays penned by Dr. Krishna Kumar and Prof. Geeta Kingdon, and our People section which profiles several inspiring movers and shakers in Indian education.
When after several years of invitation, the top management of the low-profile Hyderabad/Vijayawada-based Sri Chaitanya Group of Institutions (SCGI) agreed to tell its story, there was considerable excitement in the offices of EducationWorld. Because over the past 36 years since foreign-returned medical practitioners Dr. B.S. Rao and Dr. Lakshmibai Jhansi Boppana established a higher secondary school in Vijayawada to prepare Andhra Pradesh’s under-served youth — especially girl children — for entry into the country’s top-ranked engineering and medical undergrad colleges, the Sri Chaitanya Group of Institutions (SCGI) has evolved into the country’s largest K-12 private schools chain. Although liberal academics and purists tend to disparage academicsfocused K-12 education as stressful, drill-and-and-skill rote-learning, SCGI’s extraordinary record in preparing students to top stiff public entrance exams such as IIT-JEE, NEET and AIIMS, has made the Sri Chaitanya Group a household name in Andhra, Telangana and several neighbouring states of the Deccan plateau. But now the next generation led by two highly-qualified and competent Boppana sisters has signalled a clear intent to rollout the tried, tested and successful SCGI English-medium K-12 education model across the country. They contend that far from dispensing stressful memory-based primary-secondary education, by ensuring that children grasp fundamental theory, concepts and application skills, SCGI teachers make learning a joyful and stimulating experience for children. Over the past 35 years driven by public demand, the number of SCGI schools and junior colleges have multiplied to 750 with an aggregate enrolment of 650,000 students mentored by 29,360 well-trained and well-remunerated teachers. Having attained economies of scale, SCGI tuition fees are modest ranging between Rs.13,000-80,000 per year (and less than Rs.2 lakh in boarding schools) varying across geographies. They have empowered tens of thousands of children from aspirational middle class homes to enter the country’s top-ranked professional colleges and carve out successful careers in industry and the professions in India and abroad. SCGI schools aren’t high-ranked in the annual EducationWorld India School Rankings because our sample respondents are drawn from high-income SEC (socio-economic category) ‘A’. However to millions of aspirational middle class parents and students they have provided academic passports that have catapulted them into SEC ‘A’. That’s extraordinary public service which needs emulation and replication. In EducationWorld we believe in acknowledging and celebrating education institutions committed to pursuit of excellence. That’s why the substantial number of pages allocated for Grand Jury and preschool ranking awardees. May their tribe increase!
Since the EducationWorld India School Rankings (EWISR) survey was somewhat tentatively introduced in 2007, this annual initiative has evolved into the largest, most detailed and perhaps most sophisticated primary-secondary schools ratings and ranking survey worldwide. This claim is undisputed because every year 3,000 schools well-reputed in their regions (north, west, east and south) divided into three broad categories — Day, Boarding and International — and several sub-categories (day, day-cum boarding, all-boys and girls) to compare like with like, are evaluated under 14 parameters of school education excellence. The parameters include teacher welfare, teacher competence, leadership, individual attention to students, infrastructure, co-curricular, sports and special needs education among others. This year (2021-22) due to the prolonged 60-70 weeks of lockdown of all schools for fear of children succumbing to the dread novel Coronavirus aka Covid-19, and children forced to learn from home best they can, two new parameters — ‘online education effectiveness’ and ‘mental and emotional well-being services’ — have replaced internationalism and sports education. To conduct EWISR 2021-22, 120 field personnel of the highly reputed Delhi-based market research and opinion polls firm Centre for Forecasting & Research Pvt. Ltd (C fore, estb.2000) — our surveys partner ab initio — interviewed 11,458 sample respondents (educationists, school principals, fees-paying parents, teachers and senior school students) and persuaded them to rate reputed schools in their regions/zones under 14 parameters of school education excellence on a scale of 1-100 with the critical parameter of teacher competence given double weightage. Scores awarded by the sample respondents under each parameter were totalled and schools ranked inter se in their sub-categories. Moreover, schools are ranked nationally, in the states and cities and towns and under every parameter separately. However, it’s easier said that the annual EWISR is the world’s most comprehensive schools ranking survey, than to justify this claim. Huge resources in terms of time, money and herculean labour are a necessary precondition of publishing the annual EWISR. Field interviews stretch over months. Subsequently, the scores awarded to 3,000 schools by sample respondents under every parameter had to be checked and totals verified. In sum, mountains of collaborative intellectual capital and labour have been invested in pre-publication work. For this, I thank my colleagues, all of whom worked laborious days and often nights, to compile the numerous EWISR league tables contained in this bumper issue of EducationWorld. I am delighted that they are enthusiastic partners in our mission to reach quality education to all children and youth countrywide. Merry Xmas & Happier New Year!
The annual EducationWorld India School Rankings (EWISR), introduced in 2007 and continued ever since without a break-even in the pandemic year, has evolved into the world’s largest and most sophisticated schools ranking survey. Sophisticated because unlike other surveys that rank education institutions in India and abroad, the EWISR evaluates the country’s 2,500-3,000 most reputed primary-secondaries under more than a dozen parameters of K-12 education excellence, not merely on academics. That’s because ab initio since this unprecedented education-focused news magazine was tentatively launched exactly 22 years ago, we have held firm the belief that education at all levels should be an enjoyable, holistic experience for students, rather than the vale of tears which children’s education experience has been transformed into by post-independence India’s academics and exam outcomes obsessed public. Fortunately, since then there has been a substantial even if inadequate, change in the public mindset in favour of balanced, holistic education to realise the full potential of children. Proof of this changed mindset is the growth of the annual EWISR into the world’s largest school ranking survey which arouses great enthusiasm, not only in India but in neighbouring countries where the best schools are ranked by specially constituted juries. Moreover, the geographical spread and number of schools ranked in EWISR has extended to 351 cities and almost 3,000 primary-secondaries countrywide with schools assessed under 14 parameters and ranked nationally, in their host states and cities. And since the annual EWISR is essentially a perception-based nationwide survey of knowledgeable sample respondents comprising educationists, principals, teachers, parents and senior students, it’s a massive exercise requiring 120 field personnel of our partner organisation, Centre for Forecasting & Research Pvt. Ltd (C fore, estb.2000) — a nationally reputed market research and opinion polls company — to interview more than 11,000 sample respondents countrywide over four months. But despite the substantial resources invested by your editors in the annual EWISR and the great boost, it has given to holistic education and human capital development, some academics and school leaders are dissatisfied and critical. They believe that perception-based evaluation and ranking league tables are imperfect. Yet a physical audit of 1.6 million schools would stretch for years, apart from being ruinously expensive. In the prevailing circumstances, the EWISR institutional evaluation methodology is the best option available. Please note we don’t claim that the EWISR league tables are holy writ. At best they enable parents to short-list the most convenient and aptitudinally suitable primary-secondaries for their children and select the final one after careful study of short-listed schools. Against this backdrop, we present the comprehensive and as yet unmatched EWISR 2021-22 as the bumper cover story of our 22nd-anniversary issue. Also, check out the special anniversary essays written by brilliant public intellectuals.
There is properly no history, only biography,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82), the great American essayist, lecturer, philosopher and abolitionist. Yet in post-independence India, there is a curious reluctance within society — and the media — to give credit to great leaders in vocations other than politics and the film industry. This despite the reality that in business, social sector and the academy, outstanding leaders have built strong institutions that are making valuable contribution to the country’s economy and the national development effort. Fortunately in my long career in journalism, I haven’t experienced this national inhibition. Way back in 1978 when I was appointed editor of Business India and three years later of Businessworld — India’s first business news magazines — at a time when private sector industry leaders and businessmen were routinely pilloried and rubbished, I made it a practice to lift the corporate veil and identify and eulogise leaders who kept wheels of the economy turning and ensured flow of goods and services into the marketplace. That’s because early in my career, I became aware that the real heroes of the national development effort weren’t overweening politicians and bureaucrats who under the convenient cover of socialist ideology established a stranglehold on post-independence India and transformed its high-potential economy into one of the world’s most backward, but thousands of agriculture, industry and academia leaders working unappreciated and unsung behind the scenes. Until EducationWorld was promoted in 1999, there was similar indifference towards education, and even hostility against private education institutions. Despite the reality that private schools host 48 percent of the country’s school-going children, and have perhaps educated independent India’s entire middle class. Therefore, ab initio EducationWorld also lifted the veil covering education institutions to acknowledge and proclaim the country’s best performing schools, universities and leaders who are nurturing the nation’s high-potential, but mainly neglected, human resource. In this issue on the occasion of the 12th anniversary of the O.P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat (Haryana), recently ranked India’s #1 private university and among the global Top 750 in the World University Rankings 2022 of the well-reputed London-based rating agency Quacquarelli Symonds (QS), we have ventured a step further. We present a biography of Dr. (Prof) C. Raj Kumar, a very extraordinary scholar-entrepreneur who has played a major role in getting this globally benchmarked law, social sciences and humanities university with 12 schools off the ground in record time while winning global encomiums. Our hope is this log cabin to White House genre narrative will inspire all educationists to dream big and aim high.
The greatest tragedy of post-independence India’s national development effort is an egregious failure to develop its abundant and high-potential human capital. The inherent capabilities of the country’s people are evidenced by consistently rising agriculture and industry output and the steady growth of the services sector despite the majority populace having continuously experienced sub-optimal education for over seven decades. As highlighted by eminent contemporary historian Dr. Ramachandra Guha in an interview with EducationWorld (https://www.educationworld.in/educationworld-interview-with-dr-ramachandra-guha), the greatest mistake of post-independent India’s leadership was failure to universalise primary education. Indian society has paid a heavy price for this myopic failure to nurture and develop its human capital. In its 75th year of independence, the Republic ungraciously hosts the world’s largest number of comprehensive illiterates and total factor, industry, agriculture and government productivity is lowest among major countries. Moreover, it’s well-documented that in the country’s 1 million government rural primaries notorious for crumbling buildings, pathetic sanitation and chronic teachers truancy, over 50 percent of class V children can’t read or understand class II textbooks or solve simple sums. It’s against this backdrop that Dharmendra Pradhan, hitherto Union minister for petroleum and natural gas, has been appointed Union education, skills and entrepreneurship minister. In keeping with the tradition of BJP/NDA education ministers, who know little about public accountability, Pradhan didn’t respond to our entreaties to grant an interview or even respond to an emailed questionnaire. This despite the unchallenged status of EducationWorld (estb. 1999) as the country’s premier education news and features publication. Nevertheless in this issue, we assess the chances of the new education minister succeeding in overcoming two formidable challenges that confront him — quickly placing the pandemic-derailed education system back on the rails and simultaneously implementing the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020. To enable the minister to scale these daunting peaks, we present valuable expert advice about drawing up priorities from some of the country’s most knowledgeable and successful education leaders. In the national interest, Pradhan should heed this advice. Our constructive cover story apart, there’s much else in this autumn issue of EW. The special report written by Delhi-based journalist Abhilasha Ojha highlights the selfless herculean efforts of several education evangelists to keep the flame of learning alive in rural India. Also check out the comment columns including an abridged version of a lecture by Dr. K. Kasturirangan and erudite historian Dr. Gitanajali Surendran. Stay well, stay safe.
By any yardstick the novel Coronavirus, which originated in Wuhan China in late 2019, and has infected over 200 million individuals worldwide and inflicted 4.2 million fatalities — including 31 million and 427,000 in India, i.e, Bharat — has taken a grim toll of lives and livelihoods. The evidence that it has severely damaged the Indian economy which was already losing momentum prior to December 2019, is accumulating and fast becoming overwhelming. It’s now official that the economy (GDP) contracted by 8 percent in the fiscal year ended March 31, 2021. Since then it is limping back to normal and is forecast to grow by 9-10 percent this year on a lower base. This means GDP in 2021-22 will be on a par with 2019-20. In particular the future looks grim for the world’s largest child and youth population struggling to realise its potential in a backward society, ignorant of the critical importance of human capital development. The fact that schools, colleges and universities in India have been shuttered for almost 60 weeks — the longest education freeze of any country worldwide — is proof enough of the low importance accorded to education, i.e, human capital development, by the Central and state governments and society in general. Admittedly, in the interests of child safety, caution should be the watchword on the issue of reopening schools and education institutions. But caution has to be balanced against the hugely damaging consequences of children’s loss of learning and in the long run, of respectable livelihoods and national productivity. Especially since available medical evidence indicates that children are less vulnerable to the dread virus than adults. That’s why schools were quickly reopened in most countries after initial panic. Last month EducationWorld presented an unprecedented media report on this issue titled ‘Why Schools Should Reopen Right Now’ (EW July). Nevertheless despite the Centre having belatedly devolved this decision upon state governments, dithering on this issue continues. Apart from Punjab no state government has decreed reopening of school campuses. Meanwhile as government vacillates, institutional leaders have been left to their own devices to devise ways and means to maintain learning continuity of students. A minority of the most dynamic and innovative have successfully switched to new digital technologies to provide online classes and learning. But there are many shades and permutations and combinations of online education. In this Independence Day issue we present a selection of institutional leaders — eduleaders — who have formulated creative responses to the Covid-19 tsunami to sustain continuous learning for children under their care. Your editors wish readers a happy Independence Day with a call to all stakeholders in education to put their shoulders to the wheel to aid and enable the faltering national development effort. Meanwhile advice to the Central and state governments: Lead, follow, or get out of the way.
