EducationWorld India Preschool Rankings 2015
For the sixth annual EducationWorld India Preschool Rankings 2015 survey, over 100 field researchers of the Delhi-based C fore interviewed 6,283 parents, principals and teachers in ten selected cities. Moreover in a departure from past practice, this year’s survey segregates preschools into three separate categories — owned/proprietary, franchised and pre-primaries of composite schools – Dilip Thakore & Summiya Yasmeen Persistent advocacy of universal early childhood care and education (ECCE) is a particularly noteworthy achievement of EducationWorld which completed 16 years of uninterrupted publication last month. After your editor was educated about the vital importance of ECCE for developing human capital and enabling socio-economic development by Los Angeles-based philanthropist-educationist Lowell Milken, co-promoter of Knowledge Universe (which owned over 2,500 Kindercare pre-primaries in the US) and the Milken Institute (one of America’s most respected think tanks), in 2005, this publication has conducted five annual surveys to identify and celebrate India’s best pre-primary schools as exemplars to educationists and edupreneurs interested in upgrading Indian education to global standards. It is a canon of faith in EducationWorld that without the strong foundation of professionally administered early childhood care and education and preparation for formal schooling, children will remain handicapped throughout the education continuum. Also read: India’s unsung ECCE pioneers Therefore to generate greater awareness about long neglected early-years provision, the management of this publication has also convened and staged five annual EducationWorld Early Childhood Education Global Conferences in which globally and nationally respected ECCE pundits have shared their knowledge and expertise of pre-primary education with principals and teachers from across India. The 6th EW Early Childhood Education Global Conference is scheduled to be held at Bangalore’s ITC Gardenia on January 23, 2016. Nor has our effort to impact the critical importance of ECCE upon the public been restricted to private edupreneurs and educationists. Ab initio your editors have been stridently advocating transformation of the country’s 1.6 million anganwadis into fully-fledged pre-primary schools. Early childhood nutrition centres for newborns and lactating mothers, anganwadis were established in 1975 by the Central government under its Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS). Regrettably, the country’s million-plus anganwadis are woefully understaffed and under-funded (the Union Budget 2015-16 provided a mere Rs.8,355 crore or Rs.52,219 per centre per year). Moreover, they grudgingly provide nutrition and very basic ECCE to only 75 million of the country’s 158 million children in the 0-5 age group. Allowing for an estimated 10 million middle and upper class children enrolled in the country’s 300,000 private pre-primaries, over 140 million children are currently deprived of any type of early childhood education — a colossal waste of human capital given that it’s now well-established that the brains of children are almost 90 percent developed by age eight. The silver lining is that EducationWorld’s sustained banging of the drum for committing more time and resources towards early childhood care and education woke up — even if belatedly — the somnolent bureaucracy of the Union human resource development ministry in the Delhi imperium. In November 2013, at the fag end of…
Islam must reform from within
– Rahul Singh is the former editor of Reader’s Digest, Indian Express and Khaleej Times, Dubai All major religions have their ups and downs — Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism and of course, Islam. After the November 13 terror attacks in Paris, the focus is currently on Islam. Indeed, during the past decade and a half following the destruction of the World Trade Centre’s twin towers in New York and the carnage in Mumbai seven years ago, Islam has been demonised as never before. Islamophobia has enveloped much of the world. The Taliban, Al Qaeda, and now the Islamic State (IS) aka Daesh, have become dreaded outfits, each successively more barbaric than the other. Because of Daesh atrocities, Islam is seen by the non-Islamic world as a religion that promotes violence, disregards human rights, and is contemptuous of democracy. All but forgotten is the revolutionary and liberating essence of Islam, how it originated in the early 7th century in the barren Arabian peninsula, united the scattered tribes of the region and within a century of its founder, Prophet Mohammed’s death, controlled a vast empire which reached — and included — Spain. The Turks extended Muslim rule from the Danube to the tip of the Red Sea. Islam then dominated the civilized world. Admittedly, much of this great empire was won through force of arms. But Islam’s doctrine of equality and good governance also attracted many to the faith. In the golden age of Islam, under enlightened rulers like Suleiman the Magnificent, Islamic countries were in the forefront of science and the arts when much of Christendom was steeped in feudalism. The civilisation was then synonymous with Islam, not the western world. Turning to the present, the main breeding ground of IS militants is the chaotic and bloody situation in Iraq, Syria and Libya. And for this situation, the ham-fisted interventions of western powers, primarily the USA, is responsible. The American-led invasion of Iraq began it all. The stated intention was to remove an evil dictatorship that threatened the security of the world with its “weapons of mass destruction”. When it became clear those weapons didn’t exist, the real aim was exposed: control of Iraq’s abundant crude oil reserves. When that was ensured, the Americans withdrew, leaving the Iraqis to their own devices, democracy be damned. In much the same manner, the justification for intervention in Syria and Libya was the removal of dictators and, to use a much-abused phrase, to make “the world safe for democracy”. Instead anarchic civil wars broke out in these countries. In Syria, an estimated 300,000 people have been killed and 5 million reduced to homeless refugees now flooding into Europe. But let’s leave the blame game aside and look at what can be done to counter the threat posed by IS and other Islamic terrorist organisations. The immediate and short-term answer may be the use of greater force, which effectively means more bombing missions against IS strongholds in Iraq and Syria to reduce the territory it…