As noted editorially (p.10), the Union government’s underwhelming stimulus package to kickstart the economy battered by the Covid-19 induced national lockdown also offered a silver lining. While rolling out minute details of the package over five days (May 13-17), in an obiter dicta finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman also provided relief to thousands of citizens suffering […]
It’s official resurgent British Raj at The Doon School (TDS estb.1935), routinely ranked India’s #1 boys boarding school in the annual EducationWorld India School Rankings (EWISR), is over. After two expat Britons of no special distinction were successively appointed headmasters of this vintage boys boarding school promoted in pre-independence India by Calcutta […]
$2 trillion (Rs.151 lakh crore). That’s the sum that the much-maligned (and not without cause) President Donald Trump has budgeted to compensate ruined small businesses and citizens rendered unemployed in America following the national economic lockdown in the wake of the Covid-19 crisis. This staggering figure is equivalent to two-thirds of India’s […]
Iconoclastic Republic TV anchor Arnab Goswami is the man every well-mannered or aspirationally genteel middle class individual, deplores. But the meteoric rise in the viewership of this relatively new (2017) English news channel tells another story.
Ab initio Arnab Goswami transformed Republic TV’s 9 0’clock news hour into a nightly slugfest in which […]
For Rana Kapoor, former high-flying promoter-chairman of the private sector Yes Bank whose Rs.10 face value equity share was quoted at Rs.285 in its heyday and attracted public deposits of Rs.227,610 crore, the fall from grace was swift and vertiginous. It has come as a great setback for monitors of the floundering Indian economy — including your editor […]
Shoot first and investigate later. This seems to be the modus operandi of the BJP/NDA government, vaulted to power at the Centre with a landslide victory in 2014. Two years later, Prime Minister Narendra Modi made a dramatic announcement on November 8, demonetising high value currency notes. The unstated prime objective of the demonetisation initiative was to delegitimise large cash […]
EducationWorld’s first cover story of 2020 celebrated the newly-promoted Krea University (KU), peninsular India’s first American Ivy league style liberal arts varsity sited in Sri City, Andhra Pradesh, a two-hour drive from Chennai.
KU’s south Indian promoter-trustees — perhaps miffed that India’s first Ivy League model private universities (Ashoka, Jindal Global, Bennett) have sprung up […]
In mid-February four men in white linen attire walked into a liquor shop in the central business district of south Mumbai and demanded a list of documents and licences from the owner. After examining them, they highlighted several acts of omission and commission of proprietor Ashok Patel and demanded a bribe of Rs.7 lakh to […]
The unease of doing business in contemporary India is highlighted by the unfortunate experience of go-getting IIM-A alum Shantanu Prakash who spearheaded the digitisation of Indian education through Educomp Solutions Ltd (ESL), a company he promoted in 1988, and which for quite a while was the darling of the stock market when its Rs.10 paid […]
Ten years of uninterrupted British Raj in the blue-chip The Doon School, Dehradun (TDS), routinely voted India’s premier all-boys legacy boarding school in the annual EW India School Rankings, has ended. Citing “personal reasons”, Matthew Raggett, the British headmaster of TDS for the past five years, has resigned and exited India. Prior to Raggett’s appointment, […]
By any yardstick, the Republic Day (January 26) parade down Delhi’s Rajpath presided by President Ram Nath Kovind and his special guest Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro, at which representative contingents of India’s 1.3 million army, navy and air force staged a march past, was a grand spectacle. The hour-long parade featuring generals, admirals and air […]
Distance lends perspective. That’s perhaps why in a cover story titled ‘Intolerant India — How Modi is Endangering the World’s Biggest Democracy’, the London-based weekly The Economist (January 23) has produced an incisive analysis detailing how the BJP, now in its second term in office at the Centre, is committing slow harakiri through a painful […]
The cuts in corporate income taxes from 30 to 22 percent and 15 percent for new manufacturing companies announced on September 20, which were enthusiastically welcomed by Niti Aayog and establishment pundits, have proved a damp squib. The expectation was that reduced tax payouts to the IT department would prompt corporate leaders, who now have more […]
The resounding slap in the face administered to Ratan Tata (RT), chairman emeritus of the Mumbai-based Tata Sons, the holding company of the multi-business salt-software Tata Group of companies (annual revenue: Rs.7.9 lakh crore) and his hand-picked Tata Sons CEO N. Chandrasekhar by the National Company Law Appellate Tribunal (NCLAT) on December 19 could well […]
The election to the 650-strong House of Commons in Westminster, London — the mother of all parliaments — of 15 Indian-origin MPs has been widely welcomed in the domestic media as a signal triumph for India. While it is undoubtedly a great achievement for Indian emigrants whose parents were ruled and kicked about by our […]
There is something surreal about the anti-tuition and other fees agitation of the Jawaharlal Nehru University Students’ Union (JNUSU) which has let loose mayhem and rioting on the streets of Delhi. It’s instructive to learn that for most study programmes of this 50-year-old postgrad varsity, its 8,500 students pay tuition fees of Rs.200-300 per year, […]
The widely reported decision of the BJP-led NDA government at the Centre to privatise Bharat Petroleum (BPCL), Shipping Corporation of India (SCI) and Container Corporation of India (CONCOR) is like a whiff of oxygen to the stagnating Indian economy in which all indicators — GDP growth rate, employment generation, aggregate demand, exports, agriculture productivity — […]
The audio-visual media and entertainment industry is experiencing severe disruption worldwide. Despite this, Barkha Dutt — once India’s answer to Oprah Winfrey — persuaded former Union HRD minister Kapil Sibal, the country’s most successful Supreme Court counsel who reportedly files an annual income tax return of Rs.50 crore-plus earned from the country’s dysfunctional legal system, […]
For most cricket aficionados of this complex game in this cricket-crazy country, the recently concluded India-South Africa three-test series which ended in a complete 3-0 rout of the visitors, was disappointing. It was almost no contest as the South Africans were thrashed by a huge margin in the first test and suffered innings defeats in […]
The sheer bad manners and exalted self-opinion babus of the Union HRD ministry entertain about themselves in spite of learning outcomes in government schools, colleges and universities across the country plumbing new lows, boggle the mind. To keep these worthies, cut-off from all reality in Indian education even as they formulate impractical policies in the […]
A follow-up of the EducationWorld India School Rankings (EWISR) 2019-20 — the world’s largest and most extensive field survey of 12,213 sample respondents (educationists, principals, teachers, fees-paying parents and senior school students) across the country — the glittering EWISR 2019-20 Awards function in Gurgaon (Delhi NCR) was a great success. It was attended by over […]
One sliver of cheering news within the pall of gloom and despondency in which the BJP government at the Centre has enveloped the high-potential Indian economy is that it has taken the overdue decision to licence companies and firms to run private trains on the 68,000 route km network of the public sector monopoly Indian […]
After almost four decades in the media, one has arrived at the dismal conclusion that it’s a haven for jealous mediocrities. There’s no tradition of acknowledging a good story of another publication. Instead it’s normative to just swipe and plagiarise the work of rival publications and convert it to one’s own use.
The appointment of three Indian origin members of Parliament in the UK as cabinet ministers in the new government of prime minister Boris Johnson has caused considerable heartburn within your editor. As a law student in London over four decades ago, I was fairly active in British politics, first as an office worker for the […]
The finger prints of the country’s neta-babu brotherhood are all over the tragic death by suicide of Coffee Day tycoon V.G. Siddharatha on July 29. In a suicide note, Siddharatha wrote that all his efforts to pay off an insistent venture capital firm by liquidating his assets had been thwarted by officials of the country’s […]
Perhaps contemporary India’s most over-hyped institution is its loudly proclaimed independent judiciary. Despite the plain truth that it is the world’s most archaic and slowest judicial system, there’s no shortage of delusional nationalists ready to sing its praises. Yet the plain facts are that currently there are 33 million cases pending in the country’s too-few […]
It’s a time of reckoning for the leadership of the Congress party. The seeds of corruption which blossomed into the toxic undergrowth that now threatens to strangle this 134-year-old political party, were sown soon after independence under the leadership of the country’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru — the over-indulged son of a wealthy Allahabad […]
The appointment of three Indian origin members of Parliament in the UK as cabinet ministers in the new government of prime minister Boris Johnson has caused considerable heartburn within your editor. As a law student in London over four decades ago, I was fairly active in British politics, first as an office worker for the […]
On the subject of investment in equity shares quoted and traded on the stock exchanges which serve the socially beneficial purpose of channelling the savings of prudent citizens into nation-building enterprises and projects managed by the country’s most competent ‘capitalists’ who can multiply investors’ savings many times over, a caveat emptor warning needs to be […]
When the Narendra Modi-led BJP/NDA alliance was returned to power in New Delhi for a second term with a greater majority in General Election 2019, the general expectation was that the economy was set to experience a prolonged boom. Yet as the newly elected government’s first 100 days in office milestone is about to be […]
The recent notice issued by the Securities and Exchange Board (SEBI) banning Prannoy and Radhika Roy, Lutyens Delhi’s original power couple and founders of New Delhi Television Ltd (NDTV) — India’s pioneer English language television news channel — from functioning as directors of the publicly listed NDTV Ltd, and also from all key managerial positions […]
Undoubtedly Azim Premji, promoter-chairman of the Bangalore-based computer software and IT enabled services giant Wipro Ltd (annual revenue: Rs.50,692 crore; headcount: 171,425), is India’s most exemplary philanthropist and a role model for the country’s multiplying tribe of weight challenged billionaire businessmen engaged in an orgy of conspicuous consumption. Premji has irrevocably transferred 67 percent of […]
The rating and ranking of education institutions by media publications has become quite the fashion these days. Yet the league tables of media publications and HRD ministry vary widely because of divergent methodologies employed in ranking HEIs (higher education institutions).
We believe that the institution evaluation methodology used by EducationWorld is the best because it is […]
In recent months as the start of the new academic year approaches, several privately-promoted primary-secondary schools ranked respectably in the authoritative annual EducationWorld India School Rankings league tables, have complained that the Council for Indian School Certificate Examinations (CISCE) and its long-serving secretary-general Gerry Arathoon in particular, are rejecting affiliation applications of high-potential, capital-intensive schools […]
The death of Yogi Deveshwar in Gurgaon on May 11 after serving as chairman of the Kolkata-based cigarettes, hotels, agri-products multinational ITC Ltd (annual revenue: Rs.51,500 crore) for several decades, attracted considerable media comment and well-deserved encomiums for him.
Yet the plain truth which everybody seems to have forgotten is that the foundations of ITC’s prosperity […]
With over 65 percent of the country’s population engaged in farming and related occupations, India should have been the world’s largest agriculture and processed foods economy. Seven decades later, 40 percent of the horticulture produce of rural India rots before it can get to urban markets, inflicting an annual loss of Rs.60,000 crore on India’s […]
The collapse of Jet Airways Ltd (estb. 1994) is a latter day morality tale of the rise and fall of Naresh Goyal, founder-chairman of this crashed airline. Right from the start there was considerable speculation about how Goyal, given his modest background as travel agent, was able to pay for his 60 percent equity stake […]
Not surprisingly, an event of landmark significance in Indian politics has escaped adequate interpretation by academics and media pundits. On April 18, Mukesh Ambani, chairman and CEO of Reliance Industries Ltd, India’s largest private company (revenue: Rs.6.23 lakh crore in 2018-19; payroll: 255,000) publicly endorsed Milind Deora, Congress party candidate from the prestigious Bombay South […]
On April 12, TCS and Infosys Ltd (estb.1981), the latter promoted by N.R. Narayana Murthy and several others including Nandan Nilekani, architect of the Big Brother Aadhar ID card, declared their annual 2018-19 results. TCS with a sales revenue of Rs.146,463 crore and net profit of Rs.31,472 crore beat Infosys with Rs.82,675 crore and Rs.15,410 […]
Time to put the bubbly back into the fridge. Enthused by the rosy picture of the economy drawn by spokespersons of the establishment and the BJP/NDA government in particular — globally highest GDP growth for the five years past, fantastic albeit unrecorded employment growth in the medium and small-scale industry and self-employment, huge increase in […]
- Reshma Ravishanker In a second such incident in less than a month, students in Bengaluru were caught carrying e-cigarettes to school. This was confiscated .....Read More
Vidyashilp University recently hosted its premier event, India Rising: Aspiring Undergrads Summit 2024 at P. Dayananda Pai Auditorium in Yelahanka, Bengaluru. The event united leading .....Read More
