For the past 15 months after it was belatedly acknowledged that the novel Coronavirus, aka Covid-19, which originated in neighbouring China, was rife and spreading rapidly within India and taking a heavy daily toll of lives, national attention has been focused on ways and means to combat it. But even before a comprehensive unprecedented national […]
Cancellation of the class XII school-leaving exam by CBSE, CISCE and most state examination boards in early June for fear of the Covid-19 contagion spreading in crowded examination halls, has now confronted higher secondary students with the hurdle of getting admission into the most aptitudinally and aspirationally suitable undergrad study programme in the right college […]
Since EducationWorld was launched as India’s pioneer sui generis education focused news magazine on November 1, 1999 with the mission to “build the pressure of public opinion to make education the #1 item on the national agenda”, it’s a matter of pride and achievement that despite suffering fire, floods, riots, the pangs of disprized love, […]
The public, especially the great Indian middle class, has a curious love-hate relationship with private schools. On the one hand, almost every household in the country aspires to educate its children in private schools which are not only a status symbol, but provide passports for upward mobility and financial security.
Writing an analysis of the Union Budget and its impact on Indian education every year for the past two decades has been an anguishing and frustrating — nevertheless necessary — obligation of your editor. For 20 years, we have been featuring post-Budget cover stories highlighting the low priority given by successive governments and finance ministers […]
According to all indications, the worst of the Coronavirus aka Covid-19 pandemic which prompted the complete shutdown of industry, business and trade nationwide for over three months — and closure of all education institutions from pre-primary to Ph D for over nine months and counting — is over. The infections curve has flattened across the […]
It’s an ill-wind that blows nobody good. This ancient adage comes to mind even as the malignant ill-winds bearing the deadly Coronavirus, sweeps the world raining disease and death. Although the Coronavirus, aka Covid-19 pandemic which forced the Central government to lock down industry and businesses for over five months beginning March 25, severely disrupted […]
Initiated in 2007, the annual EducationWorld India School Rankings (EWISR) survey which rates and ranks the country’s most reputed primary-secondary schools segregated into three main categories — day, boarding and international and ten sub-categories: Day (boys, girls, day-cum-boarding and co-ed); Boarding (boys, girls and co-ed), and International (day, day-cum-boarding and residential) — to ensure level […]
This issue of EducationWorld is historic for two reasons. First, it is the 21st-anniversary issue of this sui generis news magazine. Secondly, because by unplanned happenstance, it features our most famous and successful initiative, the EducationWorld India School Rankings (EWISR) for the year 2020-21. Pioneered in 2007, over the years the annual EWISR has evolved […]
It’s the most unkindest cut of all. In the Prime Minister’s May 12 Rs.20.97 lakh crore pandemic aid package for small-scale industry, agriculture, public health and free foodgrain for migrant workers that stimulated 48-point headlines in the media, there was no provision for the country’s collapsing education system with 300 million children and youth on […]
A conspicuous flaw of the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, presented to the country on July 29, is the cursory attention it has paid to India’s large and growing private education sector. Yet the grassroots reality is that almost half the country’s 256 million school-going children are attending private schools. In 1993 a mere 9.2 […]
The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 presented to the nation on July 29 after an interregnum of 34 years, expresses determined intent to revamp and universalise early childhood and primary-secondary education by 2030. In higher education, it has set the goal of doubling GER (gross enrolment ratio) from the current 25.7 to 50 percent of […]
The capacity of the people of this country to endure suffering and official ineptitude is matched by a analytical skills deficit and chronic incapability to derive logical conclusions. How else can one explain India’s sustained love affair with Soviet-style socialism which has collapsed in its country of origin and around the world?
The prolonged closure of all education institutions following outbreak of the novel Coronavirus, aka Covid-19 which has infected over 7.6 million people and precipitated 428,000 fatalities worldwide, and 332,000 and 9,520 in India, has caused unprecedented disruption of Indian education across the spectrum from preprimaries, all the way up to universities. School leaving and college […]
As far back as I can remember, India’s higher education sector has been a big disappointment. The quality of human resource finished by the country’s institutions of higher education is woeful. This is especially true of liberal arts and humanities graduates certified by the great majority of India’s 935 universities. It would not be inaccurate […]
This letter is being written from our editorial office in Bangalore on the tenth day after the March 25 national lockdown proclaimed by the Central government following the global outbreak of the novel Coronavirus aka, Covid-19 pandemic. During this period of disruption and enforced idleness, the EW team has been fully engaged in putting this issue together, despite […]
No country worldwide makes as great a fuss about government budgets as much as we do in India. While state government budgets which should be given more thorough examination receive cursory attention, the Union budget of the Central government attracts banner headlines and invites reams of expert comment from academics, economists, businessmen and journalists in […]
An initio since the very first issue of EducationWorld was somewhat hesitantly launched in 1999 — we celebrated our 20th anniversary last November — your editors have always supported private initiatives in education. Although following the ill-advised grafting of Soviet-inspired Nehruvian socialism on the Indian economy soon after independence it became fashionable to rubbish private schools, […]
According to latest data published in the Open Doors report of the US-based Institute of International Education for year 2017-18, the number of students from India signing up with American universities declined by 8.8 percent in that year. Although the Indian cohort in American universities is still very large at 211,000, this could be the […]
Of the best decisions taken by your editor in the early years of EducationWorld which completed 20 years of uninterrupted publication last month, was to aggressively advocate universalisation of early childhood care and education (ECCE) for India’s most vulnerable children under age six. It’s strange but true that until very recently, ECCE was an area […]
Twenty years ago on the eve of the 21st century when this publication was launched in modest circumstances but with the vaulting ambition to “build the pressure of public opinion to make education the #1 item on the national agenda,” it was an inflection point of euphoria and great expectations. Globally there was a surge […]
It is appropriate that from October 2 — the sesquicentennial (150th) birth anniversary of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948) — onward, the nation will commence year-long celebrations to commemorate undoubtedly the greatest Indian of all time. Master political strategist, an individual who constantly sought self-purification in thought, word and deed, social reformer, lover of humanity and […]
Introduced in 2007, i.e, eight years after EducationWorld was launched on the eve of the new millennium, the annual EducationWorld India School Rankings (EWISR) which rank the country’s Top 1,000 primary-secondary schools divided into three main (day, boarding and international) and ten sub-categories (co-ed day, day-cum-boarding, all-boys and girls, wholly residential etc) to avoid apples […]
Since the dawn of independence when under the leadership of prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, the country ill-advisedly adopted the Soviet-inspired socialist model of economic development, private enterprise and initiatives have not been officially or socially appreciated in business, and particularly in education. Yet the plain truth is that unlike in most democracies, India’s 300 million-strong […]
Two years in the making, the 477-page draft National Education Policy 2019 report produced by a committee of nine academics chaired by Dr. K. Kasturirangan, an accomplished space scientist and former chairman of the Bangalore-based Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) — one of the few public sector enterprises to give a good account of […]
The cover story for this issue of EducationWorld was written in mid-May before the verdict of the electorate of General Election 2019 was declared. The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) which against all expectation was swept to power in 2015 in the Delhi legislative assembly election with a massive 67/3 mandate — the BJP had won […]
Although the demand for education — especially good quality education — at all levels from pre-primary to Ph D is almost limitless, there’s been a long-standing, overt official prejudice against private initiatives in education. Right from the dawn of independence, public education has been priced so low that all privately provided education seems outrageously expensive. […]
Within 40 days of your reading these words, a new government will have assumed office in New Delhi. At the time of writing, the situation is fluid and although the incumbent BJP/NDA coalition is the frontrunner of General Election 2019, it is impossible to forecast the outcome of the world’s largest democratic election. The tea […]
Decades of under-funding and neglect of public K-12 education has sparked a private schools revolution across the country. With public/government schools anathema to the country’s fast-expanding middle class, a multiplying number of education entrepreneurs, aka eduprenuers are running the gauntlet of incorrigibly corrupt government bureaucrats to promote well-equipped, new genre private preschools to primary-secondaries offering […]
As a former editor of two business magazines who switched tracks to focus on the country’s failing education system by co-promoting EducationWorld on the eve of the new millennium — a year of great hope and expectations — I was struck (and remain struck) by the near total disconnect between industry and academia. In particular […]
A positive development in higher education which has brightened the new millennium for millions of the country’s neglected but eager-to-learn, upwardly mobile youth is the establishment of several private liberal arts and humanities universities across the country. The promotion of the O.P. Jindal Global, Ashoka, Bennett, Shiv Nadar among other universities inspired by America’s blue-chip […]
Far from being an enabler as it was heralded to become, digital technology has made parenting an incrementally complex duty. Although digital wonder apps enable working mothers to keep an eye on infants at home and supervise their care throughout office hours, digital technology also has its dark side replete with lurking dangers for children, […]
Perhaps the most heartbreaking injustice that has been visited upon the citizens of free India is the open, continuous and uninterrupted neglect of its youngest children. The statistics are grim and pitiful. Of the country’s 164 million children under age five, 48 percent suffer severe malnutrition and are in danger of stunting and brain damage. […]
An assessment of the education development track record of the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government which completed four years in office at the Centre in May and is now readying for General Election 2019, seemed the apposite choice for the cover story of this anniversary issue of EducationWorld (estb.1999) which completes 19 years of […]
In the bad old days, boarding school education was hard grind. Born in British-ruled East Africa where my sire was a plantations tycoon, I was despatched to boarding school in India at young age and spent almost a decade enduring cold showers, authoritarianism and arbitrary caning, not to mention gating, face-offs behind the chapel and […]
The annual EducationWorld India School Rankings (EWISR) 2018-19 survey of the country’s Top 1,000 primary-secondary schools presents the most comprehensive, in-depth and extensive league tables of any schools evaluation survey worldwide. This is confirmed by Prof. Geeta Kingdon, chair of education economics and international development at the Institute of Education at University College, London and […]
In a departure from past practice, this months cover story is written by an academic with some help from our editorial team. Although in the past lead features have been written by individuals whose names dont figure on our tombstone, those writers have always been journalists, or individuals who describe themselves as such. However when […]
Licence-permit-quota raj, which was the dominant development blueprint of post-independence India and devastated the country’s economy reducing the average annual rate of GDP growth to 3.5 percent (cf. the Asian average of 7-10 percent) for over four decades until liberalisation and deregulation in 1991, is alive and flourishing in Indian education. Although the ease of […]
To impact the importance of ECCE upon the ignorant establishment and the public consciousness, EducationWorld has commissioned six annual surveys to rate, rank and celebrate the best pre-primaries in cities countrywide where there is a modicum of awareness of the vital importance of early childhood, pre-primary education. Moreover at considerable expense and effort, we have […]
There’s a traditional, deplorable control-and-command culture within post-independence India’s higher bureaucracy, particularly the estimated 6,375-strong twice-born IAS (Indian Administrative Service) fraternity which essentially runs the Central and state governments.
Apart from transforming high-potential India into a time-agnostic and hostile-to-business, subsidies-addicted and perhaps irremediably corrupt economy, the control-and-command culture of bureaucrats at the Centre and in the […]
EducationWorld in collaboration with the Boarding Schools Association of India (BSAI) hosted the second edition of Education Leadership Retreat 2024 at Sunbeam School, Varuna, Varanasi .....Read More
IIT Delhi organised its 11th Alumni Day on Sunday under the theme ‘Engage, Enrich, Empower: Celebration of an Emotion’ that brought together alumni, students, and .....Read More
