Among India’s unique budget private schools which have emerged as alternatives to dysfunctional government schools, MIS, ranked India’s #1 BPS for three years (2015-17) by EducationWorld, has emerged as a model institution, writes Autar Nehru Established in 2002 to provide affordably-priced English-medium education to children of working-class parents living in the ‘regularised unauthorised’ housing colonies of West Delhi, during the past two decades Muni International School (MIS) has developed into the country’s role model budget private school (BPS). Promoted by former teachers and idealist entrepreneurs as alternatives to dysfunctional government schools defined by crumbling buildings, chronic teacher truancy, English language aversion and rock-bottom learning outcomes, the number of BPS countrywide has ballooned to an estimated 400,000 with a massive enrolment of 60 million children. In this category of primary-secondaries fashioned after private English-medium schools, MIS has emerged as a model institution. In the annual EducationWorld India School Rankings (EWISR) which rank BPS separately inter se, MIS was ranked #1 for three years (2015-2017). In the latest EWISR 2020-21, MIS is ranked #2 in India and #1 in Delhi NCR. Credit for nurturing MIS into the country’s foremost BPS is unanimously given to its visionary and can-do founder-director Ashok Thakur, a former Indian Army infantryman (1984-1992) who after early retirement promoted MIS with his life savings of Rs.1.40 lakh and a first batch of 26 children. “The prime objectives of MIS are to develop the latent potential of each child and provide English-medium primary-secondary education to children of working-class households and enable them to break out of the cycle of poverty and illiteracy. During the past 18 years since MIS was founded, we have demonstrated that good quality education can be provided to the poor at prices they can afford. By reviving India’s ancient tradition of peer-to-peer learning, we have been able to improve children’s learning outcomes dramatically. In MIS, we believe that grand buildings and infrastructure and highly qualified teachers are not necessary to provide quality K-X education,” says Thakur. According to Thakur, the school’s peer learning pedagogy with teachers discharging the role of facilitators, has recorded extraordinary academic results from children, the majority of them first generation learners with negligible academic support at home. In the academic year 2019, all MIS students who wrote the class X exam of the Central Board of Secondary Education cleared the testing exams of the country’s largest pan-India schools board with an average score of 75 percent. Uniquely in 2013, MIS was selected by the Japanese embassy in New Delhi for a student exchange programme with schools in Japan. Moreover in 2015, the US-based Ashoka Foundation (estb.1980) conferred its Changemaker School encomium on MIS. “Our peer-learning system encourages children to learn collaboratively, giving and receiving feedback and continuously measure each other’s progress. This is supplemented by our IPDS (inherent potential discovery system), under which students are periodically tested by their teachers who provide supplementary support and remedial education if required,” explains Thakur. Another distinguishing feature of the MIS curriculum is that every student…
