EducationWorld December 2021

Vidyaniketan Academy Bengaluru

“ John seems to be significantly challenged here and may have a better chance of success in another school,” said the principal.

John’s parents knew all too well what this statement meant, as he had been asked to leave his previous school as well for ‘restlessness’ and ‘disruptive behaviour’ in class, inability to cope with […]

Shalom Group of Schools, Gurgaon

The highest education is that which does not merely give us information but makes our life in harmony with all existence — Rabindra Nath Tagore

We at Shalom manifest in every thought, word and action our philosophy and mindset for a new age education. The educational scenario has undergone a drastic change as the fallout […]

The Punjab Public School, Nabha

The Punjab Public School was established in 1960 with the objective to provide quality public school education to deserving children of ex-servicemen, serving defence personnel and civilians.

Since inception, a host of Nabhaites have done the school proud. Prominent among them are: Lt Gen O.P. Nandrajog, PVSM, AVSM, VSM (Retd), Vice Admiral J.S. Bedi, PVSM, UYSM, […]

Undergraduate Degree in English Studies Remains a Good Bet

Prof. Denys P. Leighton, Professor and Dean, Jindal School of Languages & Literature O.P. Jindal Global University

Early in 2021, an eminent US public university announced a decision to eliminate its Classics department. Controversy over termination of the department coincided with revelations about Facebook and the ethics of filtering or manipulating the circulation of […]

Community Outreach programme to sensitise children about empathy

The Community Outreach Imperative

Anjali Sharma, Headmistress, Gitanjali Devashray, Hyderabad

“ None of us is safe till everyone is safe.” This became a war cry during the pandemic. But long before Covid struck, the basic truth of individual interests linked to the larger well-being of the community has remained firmly ingrained as an essential ingredient in nurturing school […]

Three Steps to Building Efficient School Fee Management Systems

Danish Kundra, Co-founder at SchoolPad

In the past eight years since inception, I have been majorly involved with schools in helping them develop their fee management processes and systems to make fee collection more streamlined and errorfree. During this journey, I discovered that fee records in schools don’t match the amounts in bank account […]

The Joy of Learning at Kangaroo Kids

Neuroscience suggests that children who receive structured formative education have greater opportunities to learn, grow and succeed in life. We teach the way children learn the best and have worked consistently towards taking teaching beyond the four walls of the classroom and adapted and implemented innovative frameworks to develop 21st century life skills in our […]

BenQ’s Hybrid Learning Solutions

Established in 2001 in Taiwan, BenQ has been a pioneer in digitalizing over 3 lakh classrooms in the country which is over 50 percent of India’s total digital classrooms. Additionally, BenQ has extensively worked with various state governments under Operation Digital Board (ODB) to leverage technology in delivering quality education countrywide.

Following are excerpts from […]

India’s best international residential schools 2021-22

International residential schools affiliated with offshore school-leaving examination boards are the most glamourous and exclusive schools countrywide. This explains why the league table of these schools is the smallest in EWISR

Woodstock’s Craig Cook: India’s best international residential schools

Although many — perhaps thousands — of K-12 schools across the country incorporate the descriptive ‘international’ […]

India’s most admired international day-cum-boarding schools 2021-22

Normatively sited on sprawling campuses on the outskirts of metros and big cities, international day-cum-boarding schools offer globally benchmarked curriculums, new-tech enabled pedagogies, state-of-the-art academic, sports and co-curricular education facilities and high-quality teachers, including expatriate faculty

IIS-Bangalore’s Lt. Gen. Arjun Ray and Sarojini Rao: best international day-cum-boarding schools 2021-22

India’s international day-cum-boarding schools affiliated with […]

India’s best international day schools 2021-22

International day schools are popular with upper middle class households, because they provide globally benchmarked K-12 education at relatively affordable prices compared with international day-cum-boarding and wholly residential schools

Rising middle class prosperity in post-liberalisation India — by 2025 the middle class will aggregate 583 million citizens — has fuelled a demand surge for schools providing […]

India’s top-ranked budget private schools

Contrary to public opinion the number of budget private schools — an entrepreneurial response to 1.20 million state government schools defined by rock-bottom learning outcomes — is not small. 400,000 BPS countrywide have a staggering enrolment of 60 million children.

St. Mary’s HIgh School’s Bharat and Neelam Malik

In the hearts and minds of the […]

Purposeful narrative: My Name is Gulab

My Name is Gulab
Sagar Kolwankar
Tulika books
Rs.175
Pages 28

Gulab, the daughter of a manual scavenger, is mocked by her classmates as ‘Stinky Gulab’, not because she is filthy but because her father’s profession involves cleaning of clogged sewer drains and gutters.

So, on science day at school, Gulab takes her first bold step […]

Familiar story: The Sackclotman

The Sackclotman
Jayasree Kalathil; Illustrated by Rakhi Peswani
Eklavya
Rs.150 Pages 44

To be honest, I judged this book by its cover — in fact, I was totally intrigued by it. The illustrations by Rakhi Peswani are striking.

The story evokes familiar imagery from Rabindranath Tagore’s famous tale Kabuliwala. There is a young girl, and an ‘outsider’, […]

Rescued legacy: Voices from the lost horizon

Voices from the lost horizon: stories and songs of the great Andamanese
By Anvita Abbi
Niyogi books
Rs.995 Pages 176

This book records remembered stories and songs retrieved from linguistic and cultural amnesia. The history of migrant tribes from Africa is reconstructed, writes Jayati Gupta

Written by experienced researcher and academic Anvita Abbi, this book is […]

Ballooning iceberg

An unprecedented official letter written by D. Kempanna, president of the Karnataka State Contractors Association (KSCA) to the PMO (prime minister’s office), Delhi, complaining that civil engineering proprietaries and firms in Karnataka that execute civic projects for the state and municipal governments are being forced to pay bribes of 30-40 percent of their project fees, […]

Dog-in-manger corp

The leisurely pace at which slothful bureaucratic public sector enterprises (PSEs) are being privatised is costing the public heavily in terms of loss production and high prices. A case in point is the public sector Oil & Natural Gas Co Ltd (ONGC) which has totally belied its early promise.

Way back in 1980, on the occasion […]

Elusive Nobel

The centenary birth anniversary of Dr. Verghese Kurien, the brilliant visionary who engineered India’s White Revolution (1960-80s) that transformed chronically milk deficient India into the world’s largest producer thereof, was grudgingly celebrated by way of a few paid ads in the Times of India.

Given the posthumous encomiums showered upon him these days, it’s difficult to […]

EducationWorld India Preschools Rankings 2021-22

With pre-primary education hit hardest by the pandemic lockdown for the second year in succession, we are obliged to publish a truncated survey. C fore personnel interviewed 3,205 sample respondents to rate preschools in six cities on ten parameters of early childhood excellence

One of the conspicuous successes of EducationWorld, ambitiously launched in November 1999 with […]

India’s best boys boarding schools 2021-22

Since the unlamented departure of Brits from Indian shores 74 years ago, India’s legacy boys boarding schools have thrived and developed their own unique personalities, notably distinct from the indelible snobbery of their British counterparts

Although the almost 200 years (1757-1947) of British rule over India divided the subcontinent into two mutually hostile nations, and ruined […]

India’s best girls boarding schools 2021-22

Arguably, boarding schools are additionally nurturing for girl children because they offer more liberal and modern environments than conservative households in which girl children routinely suffer overt and covert gender discrimination

Although gender-segregated education is going out of fashion worldwide, in India, a uniquely heterogeneous nation with citizens practicing almost all major religions, speaking 121 […]

India’s top co-ed boarding schools 2021-22

The incremental promotion of co-ed schools is a socially positive development because as boys and girl children learn together in inclusive classrooms, they develop mutually respectful relationships and male children in particular, learn to respect girls

Surely it is a marker of positive socio-economic progress that the number of sufficiently well-reputed co-ed boarding schools included in […]

Quality education: New definition

Today education has to prepare young citizens to address contemporary health and climate change challenges and harness new technologies, writes Prof. Geeta Kingdon

As India’s education system from pre-primary to university begins to find its bearings after the longest lockdown of education institutions worldwide, it’s important to devise ways and means to rejig the system for […]

Education Briefs

Mindler acquires Immrse
New Delhi, November 16. Delhi-based edtech startup Mindler, a career guidance platform for students and educators, announced acquisition of Immrse, a virtual career internship and simulation platform, in a cash and stock deal. Mindler expects to close the acquisition within three months.

Promoted by Pratham Sutaria, an alumnus of Indian School of Business, […]

Indian Army-KU agreement

Jammu & Kashmir
Indian Army-KU agreement
Srinagar, November 8. The Indian Army signed a collaboration agreement with Kashmir University, Srinagar for providing distance education study programmes to soldiers posted in the Valley. The agreement was signed by vice chancellor Prof. Talat Ahmad and Lt. Gen. D.P. Pandey, General Officer Commanding, Chinar Corps at Gandhi Hall […]

West Bengal: Other priorities

Baishali Mukherjee (Kolkata)

Following chief minister Mamata Banerjee’s October 25 declaration that education for class IX-XII students in West Bengal’s 92,000 government and 2,000 private schools, 372 colleges and 32 universities would resume, they were duly reopened on November 16 after the unprecedented 20-month pandemic lockdown. Although education minister Bratya Basu has expressed willingness to reopen […]

Karnataka: Another stick

Reshma Ravishanker (Bengaluru)

Parents protest in Bengaluru

Even as the reopening of primary-secondary schools on November 8 after 64-weeks of pandemic lockdown cheered the state’s 21,000 private unaided schools, a new circular of the state’s BJP government directing them to issue transfer certificates (TCs) to students within seven days has proved a dampener. On November […]

Maharashtra: Excellence price

Dipta Joshi (Mumbai)

Dattatray Ware: suspension outrage

The Maharashtra government’s celebrated Wablewadi Zilla Parishad Primary (WZPP) School in Shirur district, Pune, that made headlines for transforming into a state-of-the-art Marathi medium school delivering internationally benchmarked education, is facing a crisis because of political machinations. On November 22, the Pune Zilla Parishad education department suspended its […]

Delhi: Deferred price

Autar Delhi (Delhi)

Delhi school children: Omicron uncertainty

As schools in delhi reopened after an unprecedented closure of 73 weeks (arguably the most prolonged schools closure worldwide) because of the Covid-19 pandemic, there’s looming uncertainty about another lockdown following the discovery of Omicron — a new variant of the novel Coronavirus.

Meanwhile on November 17, the […]

Letter from the Editor

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 […]

Mailbox: Timely changes

Timely changes

Congratulations to Team EW for bringing out a mammoth 280-page 22nd anniversary issue! The EducationWorld India School Rankings are undisputedly the most comprehensive school rankings in the country, perhaps worldwide.

Special thanks for adding two new parameters — online education effectiveness and mental & emotional well-being services — to assess schools in these changed times. […]

Create enabling conditions at home

There’s undoubtedly something rotten in the state of India. The recent appointment of Parag Agrawal, an alumnus of IIT-Bombay as the US-based chief executive of Twitter Inc, USA and successor of Jack Dorsey, the promoter-chairman of this multi-billion dollar hi-tech social network corporation, is being hailed as a great triumph of India and IIT-B in […]

Good ends nullified by bad means

The dramatic repeal of three contentious agriculture reform Acts of Parliament, viz, Farmers Produce Trade and Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation) Act, 2020; Farmers (Empowerment and Protection) Agreement on Price Assurance and Farm Services Act, 2020; Essential Commodities Amendment Act, 2020, by way of prime minister Modi’s national television broadcast on November 19, has evoked mixed […]