EducationWorld January 14

Could a university ever adopt the Google business model and offer tuition for free? This may seem an ever more unlikely prospect as governments the world over struggle to finance the growing demand for higher education ” often levying tuition fees to plug the gap. But the president of Austral University, a private institution in Argentina, believes that universities could be on the cusp of a œbreakthrough in how they finance student education. In an interview with Times Higher Education, Fernando Fragueiro outlined the all-powerful internet firm™s business model: it offers its services to consumers for free, thus generating enormous amounts of user traffic for its services. It then makes money by selling advertising space to companies, which can target specific groups of Google users based on their searches or the content of their emails. Universities could do something similar, he proposes. Companies could pay to advertise their physical products (laptops, for example) and services to students during their course of study, helping to eliminate the need for fees, he explains. This proposal may sound like a radical commercialisation of the lecture theatre, but it stems from Prof. Fragueiro™s view that education must not be off limits to those who are unable to afford it. œEducation is a human right, not a¦ privilege for a small number of people, he says. However, he did not outline immediate plans to roll out his ideas at Austral, which does not disclose its MBA fees on its website. (Excerpted and adapted from Times Higher Education)

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The determination of the British government to reduce immigration may be hampering aspirations to attract more international students, but Australia™s newly elected right-of-centre government has no such hang-ups. Indeed, Tony Abbott™s Liberal-National Coalition, which emerged victorious from September™s general election, has been highly critical of the previous Labor government for substantially raising visa fees and financial requirements for international students in 2009 and 2010. It did so amid fears that the route to permanent residency through tertiary education that was introduced by an earlier coalition government under John Howard, which was in power from 1996-2007, had led to a feeding frenzy of low-quality, unscrupulous providers of vocational qualifications. In his first major speech on higher education in November, incoming education minister Christopher Pyne said Labor had used a œsledgehammer to crack a nut. Coupled with a series of attacks on Indian students in 2009, which provoked a barrage of critical headlines in the subcontinent, and a rise in the value of the Australian dollar, the visa clampdown contributed to a fall in the value of Australia™s international student market from 2009™s historic high point of A$16.4 billion (Rs.77,562 crore at the current rate of exchange) to just over A$14 billion in 2012. According to Phil Honeywood, executive director of the International Education Association of Australia, this amounts to a drop in numbers from about 600,000 to about 450,000. Noting that international student enrollments have grown less than one percent in the past year, Pyne criticised Labor for taking 18 months to implement post-study work rights. (The UK coalition government, by contrast, abolished automatic post-study work rights in 2012). Citing forecasts that the number of young people in the world looking to study abroad would double to more than 7 million by 2020, Pyne promises to open the jobs market to more overseas graduates from Australian universities. His pledge to extend a streamlined visa application process to low-risk non-university providers of degrees has since been fulfilled, with the admission of 22 private institutions and technical and further education colleges (known as Tafes) into the regime.The financial requirements of students from countries with the highest risk of visa fraud have also been lowered. Significantly, these announcements were made in a joint statement with the minister for immigration and border protection, Scott Morrison. In his speech, Pyne also promised to œgive priority to reviewing post-study work rights to bring about clearer and more appropriate rules that maximise opportunities for graduates to convert world-leading qualifications to meaningful, needed careers. œThose that study here, gain an Australian qualification, make friends, bring their family out to visit, participate in, and are able to contribute to our society by filling an area of genuine workforce shortage¦ are exactly the kind of people we want, he added. Such words are all the more striking given that, at the same time, the coalition has followed up on an election pledge to stem the tide of asylum seekers arriving by boat and expanded an offshore processing centre set up by the Labor government to hold them. According…

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In November 2012, David Willetts, the universities and science minister, signed an agreement with his Indonesian counterpart that struck eight new partnerships between UK universities and the most highly regarded Indonesian institutions. Cranfield University and Institut Teknologi Bandung (ITB) are creating a double-degree Masters programme in engineering and technology, for example, while Newcastle University and Universitas Indonesia will establish a doctoral training centre. They certainly have their work cut out. There seems to be relatively little independent outside scrutiny of Indonesian higher education, either by Western journalists or by global bodies such as the World Bank, but the few pieces of comparative analysis that exist do not paint a rosy picture. Indonesia finished bottom out of 50 countries in the 2013 edition of the Universitas 21 ranking which grades national higher education systems on investment, research output, gender balance, international connectivity and other measures (it scored particularly badly on the first two metrics). Despite the doubling of graduate numbers between 2005 and 2012, the enrollment rate for tertiary education ” 22 percent for women and 24 percent for men ” still lags behind much of the rest of the region, according to a briefing on Indonesia™s education system released by the British Council in May. And waiting in the wings is a huge new generation approaching university age. Out of Indonesia™s population of nearly quarter of a billion (the fourth largest of any nation), about 72 million are under age 14, according to World Bank statistics. The country will gain 250,000 more 15-19-year-olds between 2013 and 2014, the British Council report predicts. œIn 20 to 30 years from now, these people will be running the country, says Fauzi Soelaiman, educational attach© at the Indonesian Embassy in London. And if they are not properly educated, the country will suffer. œThe job for the ministry of education is very, very tough these days, he adds. Its task is made even more difficult by the country™s geography. Indonesia is an archipelago of more than 17,000 islands, which makes it œhard to distribute education evenly, Soelaiman explains. More than 700 different languages are thought to be spoken across the country. Indonesia was not occupied by the British but was colonised by the Dutch instead, and so œEnglish is not our second language, Soelaiman says. The lack of fluency in higher education™s emerging lingua franca has thwarted the government™s attempts to send Indonesian students abroad to earn Ph Ds. Of the country™s estimated 220,000 lecturers, fewer than half have doctorates. Thirty years ago, Solaiman taught undergraduates himself ” despite possessing only a BA at the time. In 2008, the government set a target of 5,000 Indonesians completing Ph Ds each year. œWe could not match that, he admits. Soelaiman would like to spend more on English language courses for potential doctoral candidates, but the law does not allow scholarship money to be used on non-degree courses, he explains. Christine Ennew, currently provost of the University of Nottingham™s Malaysia campus says that a lack of money is not the primary…

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The American social compact may be under siege, with conservatives deriding the idea of underwriting other people™s healthcare and insisting that government spending be cut. But a proposal that graduates pay for the university education of students who come after them is gaining unexpected traction. The idea, Pay It Forward, was formulated by a Seattle thinktank and may soon be tested in the nearby state of Oregon. Legislation to follow suit is under consideration in at least 10 of the other 50 US states. The idea would make public universities tuition-free for students who agree to pay a portion of their incomes post-graduation into a fund that would support the education of successive generations. Detractors say the numbers don™t add up and that Pay It Forward is really just another tax or loan ” two of the most vilified terms in a nation deeply divided over how much tax should be paid and by whom, and where total student loan debt has surpassed the seemingly implausible $1 trillion (Rs.6,130,000 crore) mark. Advocates say that while the idea is modelled on the income-based repayment systems in the UK and Australia, Pay It Forward is not a loan, because graduates are not required to repay a predetermined amount. Rather, they would pay a specified percentage of their earnings over a given number of years. The argument is that this is a fair way to reimburse the state for a service that enhances recipients™ net worth. And it seems to be making inroads with those looking for an alternative to skyrocketing tuition costs and falling public support for higher education. œAnything that we can do to work on the issue of access and affordability is important, says Sam Dotters-Katz, president of the student government at the University of Oregon. In Oregon, legislators have approved a study of the idea and are considering a pilot programme to begin in 2015. Similar legislation has been proposed or is under deliberation in at least 10 other states: Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Vermont and Washington. The approach is also being discussed in California and Texas. And one US senator has urged that federal money be allocated to get things started. œThey realise that the current system is broken and this is an interesting out-of-the-box paradigm shift in terms of higher education access, says John Burbank, executive director of the Seattle-based Economic Opportunity Institute, the liberal think tank which formulated the idea. Under the scheme, graduates would pay 0.75 percent of their post-tax income into the fund for every year they were at university over a set period of time. A student who received a degree in four years, for example, would pay 3 percent of her earnings for 24 years after graduation. The proposal™s backers say that this prospect would not necessarily compel students in high-income majors to go elsewhere. They argue that the lure of free education is stronger than concern about future obligations, especially for young adults about to enter university. œWhen you™re 18,…

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China boasts more top universities than any other emerging economy, according to a ranking that looks beyond the usual suspects in global higher education league tables. The inaugural Times Higher Education BRICS & Emerging Economies Rankings consider universities in Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, as well as 17 other œemerging economies. Peking University tops the table, with Tsinghua University  (based in Beijing) second. Four of the top 10 and 23 of the top 100 institutions are Chinese. The next best represented countries are Taiwan (21), India (10), Turkey (seven), then South Africa and Thailand (five each). According to Ziming Cai, lecturer in human resource management at the University of Nottingham, Chinese universities have enjoyed œhuge financial investment over the past three decades. Special funding was set aside to propel 39 of its universities to œtop-tier global status, he says. The government also encouraged Chinese universities to open up to the rest of the world by establishing joint programmes with Western institutions and by pushing academics to publish in international journals. According to Simon Marginson, professor of international higher education at the Institute of Education, University of London, Chinese universities are œpretty strong and growing stronger. There were œvery few countries with a per capita gross domestic product below $15,000 (Rs.9.3 lakh) which have done well in global rankings, but China is an œinteresting exception. In comparison, œIndia hasn™t had 15 years of constant funding, nor has it benchmarked itself against other countries. This despite some of its metropolitan universities having been established 150 years ago. Russia has only two representatives in the table, fewer than the former Soviet satellite states Poland (four) and the Czech Republic (three). œRussia is in the doldrums, says Marginson, who argues that its system is œinward-looking and hampered by the fact that publishing in Russian makes it difficult to disseminate its research worldwide. Although they were considered in the analysis, no universities from Indonesia, Pakistan, Peru or the Philippines have made the table, which uses the same methodology as the THE World University Rankings 2013-14. Factors considered include scholarly citations, research income and the proportion of foreign students. The 22 countries analysed are those defined as emerging markets by the FTSE (Financial Times and Stock Exchange) group™s country classification. (Excerpted and adapted from Times Higher Education)

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Character and potential assessment is a capability severely deficient in the sawdust caesars strutting the stage of Indian industry. Despite all their claims to professionalism, the great majority of promotions and fancy designations in India Inc continue to be awarded on considerations of nepotism, kinship, connections and sycophancy. In a society where top political appointments are made on similar considerations, this is perhaps inevitable. But the price of nepotism paid by companies™ shareholders and society is heavy. A narrative ” of which your editor has first-hand personal experience ” illustrating the validity of this observation is provided by the amazing history of the late Alok Jagdish Saxena, the promoter-chairman of Mumbai-based Elder Pharmaceuticals Ltd who passed on in October last year. Way back in the 1970s when your editor was a junior executive in Rallis India Ltd, Saxena was parachuted into the company™s  middle management following the merger of Tata Fisons Ltd, a UK-based pesticides and pharmaceuticals company with Rallis in 1972.  But although a competent executive, Saxena was given no room to ideate or innovate by the Tata Fison division general manager, Dr. S. Agarwala, a clueless medical practitioner, who by a mysterious alchemy was promoted to the position of director of the pharma division of Rallis India. Frustrated, Saxena put in his papers, and against all expert advice promoted Elder Pharmaceuticals in 1989. Under his stewardship the company prospered mightily to record a sales turnover of Rs.1,650 crore in 2012-13. And recently Elder Pharma was acquired by Torrent Pharma for a humungous Rs.2,004 crore. Nor is this the only instance of Agarwala™s poor judgement. According to him your correspondent was unqualified to write the product brochures of the company and was demoted, triggering another resignation. Within a year I established Business India as the country™s most widely read finance and commerce magazine which arguably catalysed the process of liberalisation and deregulation of the Indian economy. But for each such story that ended well, there must be thousands of lives destroyed by the cardboard cut-outs of India Inc, lions of domestic industry but bleating lost lambs in the newly emergent global marketplace. Intellectual leap requirement Despite the astonishing success of the Aam Admi (˜common man™) Party in the Delhi state assembly election being intimately connected with localised civic issues ” electricity, water supply, municipal corruption, ration cards etc ” in other parts of the country these civic issues which impact the daily lives of citizens, receive scant attention. This is certainly true of the once spic-n-span garden city of Bangalore. Today, this charming city once renowned for its well-maintained lakes and green parks is choked with road traffic and domestic and industrial waste at every street corner, the outcome of slapdash development planning by Karnataka™s notoriously corrupt establishment and somnambulant Planning Commission, who have miserably failed to develop counter-magnet cities in Karnataka (pop. 62 million). As a result Bangalore™s population has spiralled from 1 million in 1960 to almost 9 million. Despite its flourishing hi-tech IT industry, the municipal…

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Gandhi Before India by Ramachandra Guha; Penguin India; Price: Rs.899; 673 pp Arguably contemporary India™s most eminent historian who has sparked a renaissance in the study of history in the subcontinent, Ramachandra Guha is evidently certain that Mohandas Karamchand (aka Mahatma) Gandhi™s enlightened ideals continue to inspire people to fight against injustice and promote world peace. Nobel laureates Barack Obama, Aung San Suu Kyi, Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama, and Martin Luther King Jr. have publicly confessed to having learnt their political lessons and skills of resisting unjust authority from the Mahatma. Yet the starting point of this first of a two-volume biography is Gandhi™s œless known and sometimes forgotten years in Porbandar, Rajkot, Bombay, London, Durban and Johannesburg, the formative years during which the uncertain, diffident young barrister transformed into a master political strategist, philosopher and saint who began the process of unravelling the mighty British empire. Eschewing the soft option of tracing the early growth of the young Gandhi solely through ˜the prism of his own writings™, Guha draws on hitherto unexplored archives and sources, reports in newspapers of the time ranging from the regional Kathiawar Times of 1888 to local dailies like the Natal Mercury and Johannesburg Star in South Africa, and later international print media such as The Times, London and the New York Times. The biographer™s deep research led him to government intelligence reports and unpublished letters written by Gandhi himself, his friends, family and acquaintances, even his adversaries. This broadening of perspective places Gandhi in transnational contexts outside India ” in heterogeneous societies in Europe and Africa which helped to shape the young Gandhi and profoundly impacted his character and future conduct. The later Gandhi ” crusader for freedom, fearless satyagrahi, prophet of communal harmony ” is reconstructed by Guha through these diasporic experiences, primarily in South Africa where he developed strong and lasting friendships with several strong individuals. Among them: the English radical Henry Polak, a Jew, and his Christian feminist wife, Millie, with whom Gandhi and Kasturba shared a home and learned liberal values and tolerance; Jewish architect Henry Kallenbach who gave Gandhi an opportunity to initiate inter-religious dialogues; Sonja Schlesin, his Russian-Jewish secretary who taught him that women were capable of independent-minded decisions and introduced him to the women™s suffragette movement. In South Africa, Gandhi conducted experiments in community living in Natal™s Phoenix and Tolstoy settlements cutting across boundaries of caste, religion, race and culture. Nevertheless while praising the young Gandhi™s œcapaciousness, Guha doesn™t fudge the issue that during his long and formative sojourn in South Africa, he forged no real professional or personal relationships with the majority community of Africans. Gandhi™s work among the Indian migrants in South Africa built a socially inclusive movement at a time when lives of Indians in India were circumscribed by narrow distinctions of caste and creed. The period of over 20 years after Gandhi first arrived in South Africa as a London-trained barrister with full faith in British justice and institutions, to his evolution…

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2013 was another uneventful year for Indian education. With the thoroughly disgraced Congress-led UPA-II government fire fighting a spate of corruption scandals, unremitting inflation and devaluation of the rupee, and the opposition BJP blocking legislative business in Parliament, as all political parties gear up for general election 2014, education and welfare of the world’s largest child population — 480 million — was relegated to the back-burner in the recently concluded year. The hope and expectation that the dream team of Dr. Pallam Raju (Union minister), Shashi Tharoor and Jitin Prasada (ministers of state) who took charge in the Union human resource development (HRD) ministry on October 28, 2012, would belatedly usher the much needed reform of Indian education and push pending education legislation, was belied. As in 2012, last year too ended dismally without any education legislation debated by Parliament. None of the 20 pending education Bills — 11 relating to higher and nine to primary-secondary education — have been passed. Two years on, the National Commission for Higher Education and Research, Foreign Educational Institutions (Regulation of Entry and Operations), National Accreditation Regulatory, Prevention of Malpractices, and Education Tribunals among other reformist legislation are still hanging fire. The calendar year 2013 began on a bad note with the Union government slashing the school education and literacy allocation of Rs.45,969 crore earmarked in Union Budget 2012-13 by 7 percent i.e, Rs.3,240 crore. Sources in the HRD ministry attribute this cutback to the “economic slowdown and need to control expenditure” even as two surveys — the Annual Status of Education Report 2012 and All India Education Survey — released in January painted a grim picture of plunging learning outcomes and crumbling infrastructure in the school education system. Imperfect implementation of the historic Right to Free and Compulsory Education (aka RTE) Act, 2009 — the UPA government’s sole education legislation which came into force on April 1, 2010 — was another damper. The three-year time window given to all schools countrywide to improve their infrastructure and teacher-pupil ratios and other norms as detailed in s.19 of the Act and Schedule of the RTE Act, ended on March 31 with 93 percent of primary schools still non-compliant and facing the threat of closure. While the Union government turned down requests from states to extend the three-year deadline, ground reports indicate the RTE Act is still a non-starter as state governments struggle with implementation, funds constraints, teacher shortages and shoddy infrastructure. In higher education as well there was little cause for celebration. The Parliamentary Standing Committee on HRD rejected the NCHER Bill, 2011 which proposes creation of an overarching National Commission for Higher Education & Research to subsume all other regulatory bodies in tertiary education. The committee recommended continuance of the University Grants Commission (UGC) and All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE). Perhaps the highlight in education of 2013 was the out-of-the-blue announcement of the HRD ministry that the Central government proposes to enact an ordinance allowing foreign universities to set up campuses and…

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Most parents are responsible adults who want the best for their children. So why do coaches, umpires and sports teachers have to deal with so many crazy sports parents? The first reason is that parents seldom realise the harm they can do in the name of love. Although most parents would never think of punching a coach or official, they don™t hesitate to abuse coaches about lineup changes or chew out officials over perceived poor calls. In their opinion they are œstanding up for their children. The other reason is that in youth sports programmes, no provision is made for training parents. The overwhelming majority of parents aren™t aware that children™s active participation in games and sports has the potential to truly enrich and educate families. They haven™t been briefed on how to work effectively with coaches and athletes to create healthy and vibrant sports communities. Coaches don™t expect children to be successful in track and field sports without expert training and mentoring. So why should they expect parents to be supporting and understanding without the right kind of training? Training parents for involvement with children™s sports education requires them to be given opportunities to: Participate in meetings in which guidelines for par-ents, athletes, and coaches are drawn Help establish grievance procedures Connect with athletes, coaches and other parents Become acquainted with their children™s sports interests and their skills grading Contribute to the team in meaningful ways When parents are provided opportunities for sports education, coaches reap the benefit of: Transacting with well-informed parents who are committed to creating harmonious teams Parents who know how to provide effective support to their children, the team, and coaches Parents who have a clear understanding of the coach™s mission and objectives Parents who have realistic expectations of their children and the team Athletes who can frankly talk to their parents about  parenting behaviour that interferes with their performance and enjoyment of their chosen sports and games Parents who know how to appropr-iately express their anxieties Parents able to support other team parents in managing common sports-parenting problems Parents willing to support team goals Parents likely to mobilise support of the larger community for sports programmes The creation of closely-knit teams which feel connected despite differences in socio-economic status, ethnicity, race, gender, religion, age, etc Some years ago, my former Stanford teammate Dr. David Epperson and I developed and implemented a model for building supportive, vibrant team communities ” parent-athlete-coach teams (PACTS) which we introduced in schools and youth organisations across the United States. The PACT model helps parents to become involved in meaningful ways and offers a new paradigm to build sports communities. It offers a proactive solution to most problems which adversely affect contemporary youth programmes. The PACT model demands modest effort from all stakeholders in sports education ” athletes, parents, and coaches. Additional investment in time and work is certainly involved, but the payoff is huge. When parents, athletes, and coaches start working as a team, it reduces stress and conflict,…

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Chennai-based dancer couple Kokila Hariram and Goutham Sundararajan are co-founders of the Academy of Modern Danse (AMD, estb. 1998), the city™s first formal Western dance school which offers training and practice in classical ballet, jazz, tap, hip-hop, Latin ballroom and salsa, conducts examinations and awards certification in all genres. Kokila has a BFA (perfo-rming arts) degree from the renowned Pineapple Dance Studio in Covent Garden, London; teacher certification from the National University of Singapore, and is also certified as a Western dance teacher by the Common-wealth Society of Teachers of Dancing (CSTD), Australia. Her husband Goutham (son of the late veteran Tamil film actor Major Sundararajan) is a well-known choreographer, film and television actor. Promoted in 1998 with just four students, AMD, sited in the Russian Cultural Centre, Chennai, has 400 students aged 3.5-55 years and five teachers on its muster roll. Newspeg. AMD celebrated its 15th anniversary in August last year with a scintillating display titled ˜Ensemble™, featuring 400 present and former students, and a few parents including Kokila™s dancer parents who flew down from Brunei (Southeast Asia) to participate in the performance. Direct talk. œOur objective at AMD is to offer students professional training with a structured syllabus in all dance genres. We are the only school in Chennai offering certified, interna-tionally recognised Western dance classes and certification. Our aim is to prepare students for careers in dance, says Kokila. History. Born into a family of dancers ” Kokila™s mother is a Bharatnatyam teacher and her father presents Kathakali and flamenco with equal panache ” Kokila, who grew up in Brunei, started dancing from age three. When her parents sent her to London to study law, her aunt with whom she was staying and a ballerina in her own right, enrolled Kokila in the Pineapple Dance Studio which ended all plans to get a law degree. After completing the four-year BFA degree in performing arts, Kokila moved to Chennai with her parents, and taught aerobics at various locations in the city and signed up with the ballet school of the Russian Cultural Centre. In the course of her work, she met her husband Goutham who was choreo-graphing shows for Jeffrey Vardon (founder of the Hot Shoe Dance Company, Chennai) and began working with them. The idea of starting their own dance school œflowered naturally. œTo qualify as a teacher, I signed up for teacher training at the National Univ-ersity of Singapore and won certifi-cation from CSTD,  recalls Kokila. After her training in Singapore, she returned to Chennai in 1996, married Goutham, and the duo started AMD in rented premises within the Russian Cultural Centre. Future plans. œWe want to encourage more dancers to qualify as teachers, and add more AMD centres in the city so that interested youngsters can contem-plate dance as a career. Since AMD is accredited by international examination boards and dance schools, we facilitate students from other dance schools to write their examinations at AMD. Eventually, we would like to start a degree course in…

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Neeta Lulla, the popular Mumbai-based fashion and costumes designer, has partnered with Bollywood film director Subhash Ghai’s Whistling Woods International, Mumbai (estb. 2006) to promote the Whistling Woods International Neeta Lulla School of Fashion (WWINL), of which she is the founder-dean. During a career spanning 28 years, Lulla has designed costumes and ensembles for over 350 Indian and international feature films, for which she has won four national film awards and numerous international accolades. Newspeg. WWINL’s first batch of 20 students — all women — enrolled in the school’s advanced diploma in fashion design programme have been attending classes since August. Sited on the 150,000 sq. ft Mumbai campus of Whistling Woods International School of Filmmaking, WWINL offers 35 fully air-conditioned classrooms, and sewing laboratories equipped with Japanese pattern-making and apparel construction machines. The curriculums of the advanced diploma and diploma programme (the latter to be introduced in early 2014) cover fashion design, pattern making, quality control, visual merchandising, marketing, illustration, styling, fashion photography and journalism. History. A design graduate of the Premlila Vithaldas Polytechnic of SNDT Women’s University, Lulla started her career as an assistant choreographer to Jeannie Naoroji. A few years later, she began teaching fashion coordination and grooming at her alma mater where she continues to be visiting faculty. Almost two decades later, she promoted NSL Fashions Pvt. Ltd and its flagship Neeta Lulla retail store in Mumbai. Direct talk. “With the Indian textiles and apparel industry contributing over 4 percent of the country’s GDP, the need to develop professionals with fashion design expertise is pressing. Currently there is a severe shortage of technical and creative experts as also companies with adequate infrastructure and finance. WWINL will provide industry-ready professi-onals equipped with practical experience of apparel and textiles design,” says Lulla. Tuition fee. Diploma in fashion design (12 months): Rs.4.99 lakh; advanced diploma in fashion design (24 months): Rs.8.36 lakh. Future plans. Right now Lulla and faculty are ascertaining the trained personnel needs and requirements of the country’s top textiles and apparel companies. “We already have a good basic curriculum which will be improved continuously to meet the exact specifications of garment and apparel exporters. A few hundred years ago, Indian textiles and garments were highly prized around the world. We need to regain that eminent position,” says Lulla. Right on! Sunayana Nair (Mumbai)

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Aditya Jhajharia, a science alumnus of St. Xavier™s College, Kolkata, is the business head (East India) of Patiala-based Inizio Edutech. Founded in 2009 by Pritish K. Singh, Dhruv Kalia and Nakul Jain, Inizio Edutech provides new-age learning to students through educational tours and school-based courses. Over the past four years, it has established close links with National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) USA, which offers education programmes in several centres across the US. These programmes (residential and non-residential) offer hands-on science and math learning opportunities and interaction with NASA™s top scientists and astronauts. In May 2013, Jhajharia sent a batch of 18 students from two Kolkata schools ” South City International and DPS, Ruby Park ” to NASA. Newspeg. More recently, in association with the American Center, NASA and La Martiniere for Girls, Kolkata, Inizio Edutech convened an ˜International Youth Science Forum for Humanity and Peace™ to celebrate World Science Day on November 10. This programme was a huge success and attracted partici-pation of Kolkata™s top-ranked schools (20 participants from each school). The Youth Science Forum also drew eminent scientists and academics including Khalid El Khabbaz, president of Inizio Edutech, Florida; William A. Oefelein, former astronaut, and Dr. Bikash Sinha, former director of the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics. œThe objective of the Youth Science Forum is to encou-rage young learners to develop their STEM (science, techn-ology and maths) capabilities. The initiative was ably aided and supported by Dr. Al Globus from the Ames Res-earch Center, NASA and his team, says Jhajharia who began his career in the manufacturing and exports business before signing up with Inizio Edutech in 2011. Genesis. Inizio Edutech began its innings by taking its first batch of 24 class VIII-XII students of the Budha Dal Public School, Patiala, for education workshops in NASA installations in October 2009. Since then, 4,500 students from 50 schools including Pathways World School (Aravalli), Bal Bharati Public School (Delhi), Unison World School (Dehradun) and DPS (Kolkata) have benefited from this programme (price tag: Rs.2 lakh per student). Over the years, Inizio Edutech has signed up education tours with other institutions of international repute including national science centers, Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Tech-nology. On completing their study tours, students are given a participation certificate issued by NASA™s center in Orlando and Inizio Edutech. Direct talk. œDuring the past three months, Inizio Edutech has expanded its footprint across eastern India. The NASA tour of students of South City International School and DPS, Ruby Park were big successes with students given the opportunity to participate in several hands-on learning activities at the Kennedy Space Center, seminars at MIT & Harvard, and a unique workshop conducted by professional Broadway actors, says Jhajharia. Future plans. Four years on, Inizio Edutech has consolidated its educat-ional tours and is acquiring a good reputation in India and abroad. œThere is tremendous enthusiasm among secondary and higher secondary stud-ents for STEM learning. Unfortunately K-12 education in India still tends to be textbooks and classroom focused. Encouraged by…

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Driven by a need to lend a helping hand to the country™s neglected and educationally deprived children, after working in India™s booming IT (information technology) industry for 18 years with blue-chip corporates including Wipro, i-flex, Deustche Software and HCL, Latha Srinivasan, a software engineer and business management graduate of Bharathiar University, Coimbatore and U-21 Global, Singapore went solo in 2009 and promoted the Bangalore-based Chipper Sage Pvt. Ltd. Since then, the company has established a library and learning centre which provides bulk lending, group reading, teacher training services for schools and child-friendly English, science and maths learning progammes for children in the age group 2-14. Arvind Venkatadri, an electronics engineering alum of R.V. College, Bangalore and IIT-Roorkee, also acquired vast experience over a period of 21 years working with ISRO and IT industry majors such as C-Dot, Wipro and Texas Instruments before signing up (2007) as head (library programmes) of the Bangalore-based Akshara Foundation, promoted by social entrep-reneur Rohini Nilekani which has established 1,620 libraries in government primary schools in Karnataka. In mid 2013, Venkatadri put in his papers and signed up with Chipper Sage which has seven full-time and 12 part-time employees on its muster roll. Newspeg. In September, Chipper Sage launched its latest English language learning product for 2-14 year olds branded Smart Tiles. Somewhat reminiscent of scrabble blocks, a lower kindergarten set of 60 tiles comprising alphabets, phonics and consonants blend tiles, magnetic board and text-book, is priced at a modest Rs.650. With phased subsequent purchases of a total of 220 tiles, a child will normatively develop an English vocabulary of 3,000 words by age seven. Direct talk. œSmart Tiles is based on the pedagogy of sight word recognition which enables children ” and illiterate adults ” to recognise entire words and memorise their meaning. In school, Smart Tiles is supported by our software program branded Flow of English which is teacher-led and develops the LSR (listening, speaking and reading) skills of children. The USP (unique sales proposition) of Smart Tiles is that children keep them at home for self- learning and reinforce what they learn in their classrooms, says Srinivasan who designed the software which supports the Flow of English and Smart Tiles programs. History.  The first ˜product™ launched by Chipper Sage in 2009 was Tailorbird, a library-cum-learning centre for children to visit as often as they liked to read age-appropriate English books and listen to readings and indulge in play-cum-learning activities. Subsequently the company introduced its Leader Reader (a schools-based, teacher-led progr-amme to develop English reading and compreh-ension skills of preschool to class VII students); teacher-led science exper-iments, and Win-O-Math programme designed to help children learn basic maths œwillingly and effortlessly. Smart Tiles is the latest English vocabulary development programme developed by the company. Future plans. With Venkatadri™s excellent track record of establishing over 1,620 affordable and customised libraries in schools across Karnataka, Chipper Sage has drawn up plans to multiply its Tailorbird libraries-cum-learning centres countrywide. œThere™s huge and unsat-isfied demand for English language learning…

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Narendra Desirazu is promoter of the Bangalore-based Jennard Galleries, a start-up which offers innovative art education and learning programmes to educational institutions, enabling students to study and analyse copyrighted reprints of great works of art from around the world. Newspeg. In the seven months since Jennard launched commercial operations in April last year, several high-profile private schools including Oakridge International, Chrysallis High, Indus International, Lawrence School, and Insight Academy apart from the International Institute of Information Technology (all in the garden city), and the Ashok Leyland School in Hosur, Tamil Nadu, have signed up for its ArtVantage programme. Jennard’s in-school great works of art exhibitions are marketed as integrated packages of ten canvases for a three-month rental period at Rs.950 per painting, inclusive of installation charges and teaching aids. Genesis. Jennard Galleries is the outcome of Narendra Desirazu’s growing appreciation of art, developed during frequent visits to major museums worldwide and a general passion for buying eye-catching reprints, says this alumnus of Madras and Iowa State universities who worked for over two decades as an IT professional in India and abroad. My objective is to teach art appreciation and spark creativity in Indian youth. Good museums in India are rare and even the few good ones showcase only Indian art, he says. To follow up on his dream, in early 2013, Narendra Desirazu invested Rs.10 lakh from his personal savings into the project. Also read: The Importance of Art Appreciation Direct talk. Each package is accompanied by curatorial notes describing the artist, the art form, details of each canvas and supplementary teaching aids such as DVDs and researched power point presentations, says Narendra Desirazu, who returned to India in 2002 and has several start-ups in the IT sector to his credit. Future plans. With school managements and students having responded enthusiastically to Jennard Galleries art education and appreciation initiative, Desirazu is encouraged to extend the footprint of ArtVantage beyond Bangalore. We’ve drawn up plans to install our licenced reprints of great works of art across the country in 700 educational institutions over the next three years. For this, we are in the process of signing up franchise partners in other cities. We have also partnered with Camlin to help us popularise art via their art competitions and are connecting with corporates to roll out ArtVantage to less privileged schools through their CSR initiatives, enthuses Narendra Desirazu. Way to go! Paromita Sengupta (Bangalore)

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A chemical engineering and business management graduate of the blue- chip IIT-Bombay and IIM-Ahmedabad, K. Sharat Chandra (34) is co-founder of the Hyderabad-based Butterfly Edufields Pvt. Ltd (estb. 2008), an education venture which designs and markets innovative hands-on science and maths learning kits for K-10 schools. The company™s in-school and after-school learning-by-doing kits are being used by 51,000 children in 120 private schools, and over 400,000 children in 3,800 government schools in Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. Newspeg. Butterfly Edufields recently won the 3rd All India Management Association (AIMA) Global innovation award, and received Rs.5 crore as venture capital from the Mumbai-based Aavishkaar Venture Management Services. History. Schooled in Korba (Chhattis-garh) and Nagpur, Secunderabad-born Sharat Chandra worked for two years as a business analyst with auditing and consulting major KPMG after graduating from IIT-B in 2001, prior to joining IIM-A in 2003. While preparing for a professional career in industry, he met with former IIM-A professor-turned- social entrepreneur Sunil Handa who promoted the highly acclaimed Eklavya School, Ahmedabad in 2004, which aroused his interest in K-12 education. Moreover while on an exchange programme to Germany, Chandra visited several primary-secondary schools in Leipzig. œI was struck by the huge emphasis accorded to practical training in German schools, which is in sharp contrast to our own system of education which is totally devoid of experiential and conceptual understanding, recalls Chandra. This epiphany prompted him to promote a learning centre for children to advance their understanding of science and maths concepts in 2005. Three years later, the venture transformed into Butterfly Edufields which has established five science learning centres in schools and designed hands-on learning programmes for students. Since then the company™s maths and science do-it-yourself experiment kits, card games, board games and activities for children mapped to the syllabi of CISCE, CBSE and state examination boards, have become very popular with school managements, teachers and students. All kits are indigenous and designed by an R&D team under guidance of experienced school teachers from top-ranked schools. The company has established a manufacturing unit in Hyderabad with a capacity to produce 400,000 kits per annum. Direct talk. œI was saddened by surveys which indicated that given a bulb, a pair of wires, and a battery, 80 percent of engineering graduates were unable to connect the circuit and light up the bulb. There™s a huge gap between theory and practice in Indian education which is evident right from school where learning means merely passing examinations. I entirely subs-cribe to the message in the Chinese proverb, ˜You hear you forget, you see you remember and you do, you understand™. Experiential learning makes education meaningful and skills oriented, says Chandra. Future plans. Greater awareness of the importance of learning by doing within the teacher, parent and student communities has encouraged Chandra to set ambitious targets for Butterfly Edufields. œWe have set targets to reach one million children in private and 10 million children in government schools with our curriculum-mapped in-school and after-school science and maths learning…

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After several decades as a student and teacher in Ghana, Zambia, South Africa, the UK, Switzerland and India, during which I met parents from all walks of life and an enormous diversity of backgrounds, I am amazed by the astonishing similarity of their expectations in the matter of children™s schooling. What surprises me most is this similarity is consistent across differences of creed, colour, culture and socio-economic background. In fact, I have found that four reasonable and simple expectations sum up what most parents want from a school. Interestingly, these fundamental expectations strike me as characteristic of an environment in which young people are most likely to learn and develop. It is an environment which pioneer psychologist Carl Rogers (1902-1987) described as œa growth promoting climate. It may interest educators, principals and teachers to learn about these parental expectations, which school managements should respect to create ideal conditions for learning. Children will be cared for. Since time immemorial, schools have been expected to discharge in loco parentis responsibility, i.e to act as a good parent would. This is an obligation that requires deep teacher commitment to nurture and develop children to their full potential. Nel Noddings, currently the Jacks Professor Emeriti of Child Education at Stanford University, has written extensively on the subject of care in education. She defines caring as œa state of being in relation, characterised by receptivity, relatedness and engrossment. According to Prof. Noddings, dialogue is an essential part of caring. Teachers cannot be caring without engaging in meaningful dialogue with students. Parents believe that our care for their children flows from close relationships formed by discussion, exchange, and genuine love of working with young people ” not merely from a sense of duty or the cold context of impersonal interaction. Children will feel supported. It™s not enough for teachers to claim to support their students. The question we need to ask ourselves is, do the young people we work with actually feel they are supported? This is a mistake that educational researchers often make. Detailed instruments are devised to measure the extent to which teachers exhibit supportive behaviour. Although several studies have described classrooms in which teachers claim to support  students (and truly believe they do), students themselves don™t feel the same way. Moreover parents expect not just academic, but also emotional support for their children ” that at least one adult in the school relates to their child by way of what Carl Rogers described as œunconditional positive regard. Another psychologist David Myers has defined this expectation as œan attitude of grace, an attitude that values us even knowing our failings. Children will experience success. Every responsible parent instinctively knows ” and this has been corroborated by research ” that experiences of success have a profound effect on the mental well-being of children, especially in terms of reducing anxiety, and paving the way for greater success and self-esteem. Anxiety reduction is important because it is a significant impediment to learning. Of course, sensible parents don™t…

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I™m a commerce graduate with three years work experience. To better my job prospects, I want to pursue an MBA degree through distance learning. What are my options? Nilima Swamy, Bangalore A full-time MBA has greater value in the job market. However if it™s not possible for you to enroll in a full-time programme, a distance MBA is the next best option. Among the instit-utions offering this course are IGNOU, New Delhi; Annamalai University; Symbiosis Centre for Distance Learning, Pune; Madurai Kamaraj University, Directorate of Distance Education, Madurai; Anna University Centre for Distance Education, Chennai; and S.P. Jain Institute of Management Studies, Mumbai. I™m a first year B.Com student interested in a career in banking. Will a chartered accountancy (CA) qualifi-cation help me? Deepak Mehta, Mumbai This is a professional qualification which renders you eligible to work in most divisions of a bank. Typically, chartered accountants work in loan disbursement, credit and risk assess-ment; the treasury; audit and acco-unting divisions; foreign exchange; debt and equity trading and merchant banking. The CA study programme now allows students to substitute three years of articleship with one year of industry training and two years of articleship. Thus working with a bank during the one year of industry training will be useful. I™m a class XII (commerce) student keen to acquire an MBA degree after graduation. I™m confused as to whether I should sign up for a BMS (bachelor of management studies) or B.Com degree after Plus Two. Shashi Iyer, Chennai Both degrees qualify you to apply for admission into reputable B-schools. If a Masters degree is your goal, BMS will give you greater exposure and experience. However no weightage/advantage is given to BMS graduates for admission into MBA courses. My advice is that you begin preparing for the MBA entrance tests during the second year of your BMS degree programme. I™m a third year B.Com student interested in accountancy. Will compl-etion of the Certified Public Accountant (CPA) course help me secure admission into a reputed B-school/university in Europe or America? Navin Chawla, New Delhi Candidates who clear the uniform CPA Examination are awarded a CPA licence in the US. The examination is a 14-hour computer-based test (CBT) with four papers ” auditing and attestation; financial accounting and reporting; regulation; and business environment and concepts. In general, 150 credit hours of education at an accredited college or university is a precondition of writing CPA. Many of the 150 credit hour programmes lead to a Master™s degree such as an MBA. In the Indian context, a B.Com degree with CA training is a good base for CPA certification. The CPA licence has no bearing upon admission into US/European business schools. After graduation, you will need to complete the first year of a M.Com degree, to meet the 16 years of education requirement for admission into postgraduate programmes in the US. During this period, plan to write the GMAT and TOEFL tests. For further information log on to www.aicpa.org. After completing my B.Sc in 2015 I…

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With Mars Orbiter having created history by vaulting India into the elite club of outer space nations, the demand for aerospace engineers is likely to zoom in the near future Mars Orbiter, India’s first interplanetary mission engineered by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has created history with India joining an elite club of outer space nations comprising the US, Russia and China. With several deep space missions in the offing, the demand for aerospace engineers is likely to double within the next five years, says Dr. N.G.R. Iyengar, pro vice chancellor of Jain University and director of the International Institute of Aerospace Engineering and Management (IIAEM, estb. 2006), Bangalore. Aerospace engineering is a science which focuses on research, design, development, construction, testing, science and technology of aircraft and spacecraft. It is further divided into aeronautical and astronautical engineering. The former deals with aircraft operating in the Earth™s atmosphere and the latter with aircraft venturing into outer space. To qualify as an aerospace engineer, aspirants should be well versed with the basic principles of aerodynamics, aerospace structures, flight mechanics and control, propulsion, avionics, meteorology, airworthiness regulation and air traffic control and management. Aerospace engineering study programmes at the advanced diploma, bachelor’s, Master’s and PhD levels are offered by mechanical engineering departments of several universities and specialised technology institutes, some of whom offer degrees in space-focused astronautical engineering as well. Among the well-known institutions offering aerospace study programmes at the graduate and postgraduate levels, are the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore and IITs at Kanpur, Chennai, Mumbai and Kharagpur. Some universities also offer aerospace engineering at the undergraduate level. In addition to undergrad, postgrad and research programmes, Jain University’s IIAEM offers a Masters programme to engineers employed in the aviation and related industries as also research establishments to upgrade their skills. Likewise, the ISRO-sponsored Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology, Trivandrum (estb. 2007), offers undergraduate and postgraduate aeronautics, astronautics and space science courses. Distance learning programmes in aerospace engineering were introduced by IGNOU in 2009. For those interested in studying abroad, America’s globally renowned National Aeronautics & Space Agency (NASA) offers advanced programmes in aerospace engineering. Aerospace engineers are in great demand in the civil aviation and defence sectors, Indian Air Force, ISRO and other research organisations such as DRDO, National Aeronautical Laboratory etc as also in higher education institutions. Inevitably, pay packages are handsome ranging from Rs.35,000 for freshers to Rs.3-4 lakh per month for experienced professionals. The demand for India-trained aerospace engineers is sustained. Indian engineers constitute a significant percentage of technical professionals in NASA. India is poised to become the world’s third largest market for aircraft by 2020 with 1,800 aircraft flying Indian skies, transporting 400 million passengers per year. The Union government’s planned investment of $12.1 billion (Rs.73,810 crore) in the airports sector during the 12th Plan period, of which $9.8 billion is expected to flow from private sector enterprises engaged in the construction of new airports, expansion and modernisation of existing airports etc, will give…

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Dilip Thakore interviewed Sanjeev Bolia, the peripatetic promoter-chairman and chief executive of Afairs Exhibitions and Media Pvt. Ltd (AEM/Afairs) over the telephone in Kolkata and Kathmandu. Excerpts: How satisfied are you with the growth and development of Afairs? The company has achieved a lot during the past 20 years, but there™s a lot more to achieve. Following liberalisation and deregulation of the Indian economy in 1991, there™s a new and growing awareness of the value of high quality school and higher education within the country™s fast-expanding middle class. Therefore parents are anxious to provide the best education experience for their children. Moreover low annual rates of economic growth in Western countries, rising unemployment and falling household incomes have made India™s top-ranked schools and colleges, which offer high-quality, globally benchmarked English medium educ-ation and year round good weather for sports education, an attractive proposition for households with a tradition of providing private educ-ation. These developments have created excellent conditions for the growth of Afairs. How satisfactory is the response from schools and colleges, your prime revenue sources? Four-fifths or 80 percent of the schools and colleges which showcase their institutions in our exhibitions and fairs are repeat customers who have been with us for over five years. They need high quality platforms and forums to present their globally benchmarked institutions in which they have invested huge financial and other resources, to attract students. Our exhibitions and fairs which are held across 27 cities in India and in eight countries abroad, enable them to achieve these objectives. Our estimate is that our exhibitions have facilitated over 3,000 foreign students admissions during the past eight years and have placed a large number of Indian schools on the global map. Likewise, what™s the feedback from  parent and student communities? For parents, our IIPSE (Indian and International Premier Schools Exhibition) started in 2004, and staged in 16 cities across India, is a real blessing. In every exhibition they get access to infor-mation, faculty and admission officers of 40-50 schools offering quality Indian and international education. Afairs education fairs are eagerly anticipated because they enable parents to com-pare and contrast and pick and choose the best available and affordable schools for their children. Since 2007 AEM has begun staging The Great India Education Fair (TGIEF) which showcases a mix of schools and colleges in eight countries including Thailand, Nepal, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Sharjah etc. How successful is this initiative? Very successful because we are adding new countries to our itinerary every year and the number of exhibitor institutions is rising continuously. For instance in our very first IIPSE exhibition-cum-fair in Thailand in 2007 we had only 25 participants. During the past three years we have been averaging 50-60 institutions, and to date more than 350 Indian schools have exhibited in our TGIEF fairs abroad. International schools are enthusiastic participants in our education fairs abroad because they are genuinely interested in diversifying their mix to include foreign students. According to all rating and ranking agencies India has a…

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A substantial share of the credit for leading the charge of India™s legacy boarding and new genre international schools into neighbouring countries and further afield in the new millennium, should accrue to the Kolkata-based Afairs Exhibitions and Media Pvt. Ltd. Dilip Thakore reports For over half a century, successive governments in New Delhi have made sporadic attempts to attract foreign students into India™s higher education institutions. In the early years after independence when there was heavy emphasis on Afro-Asian unity and the Non-Aligned Movement, a large number of scholarships were offered by the government-sponsored Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR, estb.1950) to school and college students from African, Asian, and newly independent countries under various programmes such as the Cultural Exchange Programme, General Cultural Scholarship Scheme, Apasaheb Pant Scholarship Scheme, Commonwealth Scheme, Technical Cooperation Scheme of the Colombo Plan, Reciprocal Scholarship Scheme, Scholarship for Sri Lanka and Mauritius, SAARC Scholarship Scheme and ICCR Scholarship Scheme. However the early enthusiasm of Afro-Asian students for Indian higher education tapered off as the Central and state governments tightened their grip on the country™s public colleges and universities, eroded their autonomy and drove academic standards southward. With not even one of India™s 35,000 colleges and 700 universities ” some of which were established over 150 years ago ” ranked in the authoritative league tables of the world™s best universities published annually by the London-based rating agencies Quacarelli Symonds (QS) and Times Higher Education ” despite the best efforts of government and ICCR ” the number of foreign students in India™s higher education institutions is estimated at a mere 27,500. Meanwhile, promoted only by word-of-mouth and information passed along informal grapevines, right from the early 1950s, a few dozen among India™s 80,000 English-medium private schools have been steadily attracting students from abroad, especially from the 20 million strong Indian diaspora. Barred from high-quality English medium schools by formal and informal apartheid practiced in former British colonies and protectorates, a large contingent of children of prosperous businessmen in these territories ” including your Uganda-born correspondent ” were packed off to boarding school in India. An unsung achievement largely ignored by politicians and the media is  that India™s much maligned private education providers, particularly vintage boarding schools such as Woodstock, Mussoorie (estb. 1852), Kodaikanal International (1901), Hebron, Ooty (1899), St. Paul™s, Darjeeling (1823) among others, have hosted batches of  primary-secondary students from the US, Thailand, South Korea, Nepal, Kenya, Bangladesh among other nations for several decades. In the new millennium this quiet migration of school students to India has received fresh impetus with the promotion of a spate of new genre, capital-intensive international schools distinguished by sprawling campuses, state-of the-art infrastructure, often foreign headmasters and affiliation with offshore examination boards such as Cambridge International Examinations (CIE), UK and International Baccal-aureate Organisation (IBO), Geneva whose school-leaving certification is unreservedly accepted by picky univer-sities around the world. Offering infrastructure and curriculums comparable with the best in the West at a fraction of the price of private CIE/IB education abroad,…

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Over three years ago, when the Lok Sabha passed the Right to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, 2009, almost no one noticed the anomaly of its having to guarantee what was already guaranteed in the Constitution. The reason why the Lok Sabha felt it necessary to do so was, however, obvious: 59 years after independence we had still not achieved the goal, set out in the Constitution, of universal, free primary education. Even today half (53 percent) the children who start primary school don™t enter secondary education and, as our Nobel laureate economist, Amartya Sen, never tires of reminding us, India™s literacy percentage is not even close to that of China. This failure is reflected in the declining share of education in the Central and state budgets; in the chronic teacher-absenteeism in state schools, especially in rural areas; and the rush in recent years, even among the poorest of the poor, to scrape up enough money to send their children to private schools. The RTE Act is therefore an admission of failure. However when education is a state subject, an Act passed by Parliament is little more than a declaration of intent. The most that the Central government can do to implement it is allocate more funds for education. But is lack of money the real prob-lem? Or is it lack of accou-ntability among teachers in primary schools; absence of innovation in the curriculum; failure to match education to the changing needs of a fast growing economy, and lack of awareness of the desperate need for excellence in a world where economic barriers are crumbling and competition between nations is becoming fiercer by the day? The answer is the second. Spending money can only be a means to an end. It cannot be allowed to become the end itself. It is in the defining of ends, and equipping our educational institutions to meet them, that we have failed most miserably. The failure begins at the primary school stage where there™s an acute shortage of trained teachers. One, but by no means the worst effect of this is that village school masters and teachers teach up to four classes at a time, segregating students in parts of the same room. The shortage of school teachers is made more acute by chronic absenteeism. Nine years ago, when the UPA began its crusade to improve education, a World Bank study had already discovered that the average attendance of school teachers in government primary schools in the rural areas was one day in three. This shocking state of affairs was allowed to persist because political parties had long ago turned school teachers into their election agents. Total job security and a fat government salary, shielded against inflation by regular DA (dearness allow-ance) increases, was the quid pro quo. Needless to say, when the main qualification of a school teacher is her capacity to mobilise votes, education has remained at a discount. This is reflected not only in the lack of teaching aids in…

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The newest of the three DPS schools promoted by the KKEC Trust, this K-12 school constructed on a 16-acre plot with superior infrastructure, has attained full capacity in quick time.  Over the past 64 years, since it was registered to provide excellent and holistic K-12 education, the Delhi Public Schools Society (estb. 1937) has promoted 190 DPS schools countrywide under the owned (11) and franchise models. However until the dawn of the new millennium, the reputation and fame of DPS was restricted to the national capital and the Hindi heartland states of north India. But in 2001, K. Rahman Khan, former chairman of the Bangalore-based Al-Ameen Educational Society and currently Union minister of minority affairs, and chairman of KK Educational and Charitable Trust (KKECT, regstd. 1999) signed up with DPS Society to set up the first franchisee school south of the Vindhyas” DPS Bangalore South. Quite obviously the DPS brand of school education has struck a resonant chord among citizens of India’s IT city because since then, the number of DPS schools promoted by the trust has multiplied to four (Bangalore South, North, East and DPS, Mysore) with an aggregate enrollment of 16,000 students. More pertinently, all three DPS schools of Bangalore have quickly established excellent reputations for providing high quality education in the garden city. In the latest EducationWorld India School Rankings 2013, DPS, Bangalore South (estb. 2001) is ranked #16, DPS, Bangalore North (estb.2002) #6 and DPS, Bangalore East (estb. 2007) #17 in Karnataka. In particular over the past seven years, DPS, Bangalore East, constructed on a 16-acre plot in the suburb of Sarjapur with a project cost of Rs.35 crore and superior infrastructure, has earned excellent notices for providing rigorous academic and extra-curricular education. In quick time, this CBSE-affiliated K-12 school has reached its full capacity of 4,400 students mentored by 275 teachers. In terms of planning, design and space utilisation, DPS, Bangalore East, designed by well-known education institutions architect Dinesh Verma, is an improvement on our previous two schools. We have a green campus because of a comprehensive water management and recycling system, and the school, which also features a one acre organic farm maintained by students who are encouraged to learn a range of life skills, is subject to rigorous energy audits. Because of good spatial planning we have been able to set aside 10 acres for sports including field games such as cricket, football and hockey. DPS, Bangalore East provides the best infrastructure of any day school countrywide proportionate to its very affordable tuition fees, says Mansoor Khan, a business management graduate of Bangalore University and chief executive of all four DPS schools promoted under the aegis of KKECT. The school’s academic infrastructure is impressive, comprising 200 classrooms fitted with Smart class boards supported by capital intensive science, computer and maths labs, and a well-stocked library housing 15,500 books. An indoor sports complex of 50,000 sq.ft offers table tennis, squash, badminton and basketball courts, a gymnasium, swimming pool and training facilities for taekwondo, yoga…

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Bihar Indo-French cooperation accords During a 30-minute interaction with Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar in Patna on December 3, French ambass-ador to India Francois Richier offered cooperation in higher education, particularly by way of student and faculty exchange programmes with the new Nalanda International University and National Institute of Technology (NIT), Patna. According to Richier, a memorandum of understanding has already been signed between Nalanda International University and French research school EFEO for student and faculty exchange programmes. A similar pact was signed between NIT, Patna and the Engineering School of France on December 4. Praising chief minister Nitish Kumar as a œvery positive man, Richier added that opportunities will be explored for engagement between France and Bihar in the field of primary education as well.  After his discussions the ambassador visited the famous Buddhist site of Bodh Gaya and offered prayers. Nagaland Plea for differently abled Governor Ashwani Kumar called upon private industry, religious and educat-ional institutions as also government, to provide employment to differently abled people. Addressing an industry-sponsored symposium in Kohima on December 3, Kumar called upon the Central and state governments to œjoin the struggle of differently abled people. œWhile it may take time to change the attitudes of people, governments and parliaments around the world have legislated laws to protect the rights and promote the cause of differently abled people, he said, urging private sector companies and industrial establishments, religious and educational institutions to create jobs for differently abled people in Nagaland and beyond. Tripura State university plans A state government-sponsored university will be established on the grounds of the Maharaja Bir Bikram (MBB) College in Agartala. Tripura™s higher education minister Bhanu Lal Saha informed the media in Agartala on December 3 that MBB College was chosen as the site of the proposed university because it has a sprawling campus. According to Saha, a committee headed by the education secretary has finalised a plan for constructing the proposed university and the state government will shortly introduce a Bill in the legislative assembly for the purpose. The state government will also forward a proposal to the University Grants Commission for obtaining approval for the varsity. œA detailed project report is almost ready and will be forwarded to the Centre for sanction of funds estimated at Rs.15 crore per year, adds Saha. The state government will also establish an English-medium science college on the premises of the old Central Jail in Agartala as a new jail has been constructed at Bishalgarh, a distance of 16 km from the state capital. Jharkhand XLRI™s new international centre Delivering the 22nd Annual JRD Tata Ethics Oration on Business Ethics organised by the XLRI School of Mana-gement in Jamshedpur on December 7, Union HRD minister Dr. M.M. Pallam Raju expounded on the link between education, business and politics. During the course of his address, Raju expressed appreciation of XLRI as the first B-school in the country to introduce a core course on managerial ethics and award a medal to the best writer…

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“His tireless struggle for freedom earned him the respect of the world. His humility, passion and humanity earned him their love.” Jacob Zuma, President of South Africa, mourning the loss of his iconic predecessor Nelson Mandela who died on December 5 (Time, December 23) “If Narendra Modi becomes the prime minister of India, I will stay in India and I will fight it because I know exactly what kind of person he is.” Ramachandra Guha, author-historian, on the possibility of Modi being elected as prime minister of the country (Deccan Chronicle, December 22) “Nothing emboldens the corrupt more than the belief that there will be negligible or no consequences for their corrupt behaviour. The Lokpal will, hopefully contribute in some measure to create the nexus between crime and punishment.” Pawan K. Varma, adviser to the Bihar chief minister, on the Lokpal Bill (Times of India, December 21) “No one can die of cold. If people die of cold then nobody will survive in Siberia.” Anil Gupta, Uttar Pradesh principal secretary, on media reports that several children had died due to extreme cold in the relief camps of Muzaffarnagar (December 27) “Being an old party is no guarantee for the survival of the Congress… In British politics, the Liberal Party won by a landslide in 1905 but never returned to power ever after…” Lord Meghnad Desai, well-known economist, on the Congress party™s prospects in the impending 2014 general election (National Standard, December 29) “More spending on health and education solidifies the foundation of growth as well as development. You can start anywhere anytime and each of them will work.” Nobel laureate Amartya Sen advocating greater government social sector spending (The Hindu, December 31) “A small act of misunderstanding or a minor fracas gets amplified into what is literally a collective execution of men and a systematic rape of women.” Shiv Visvanathan, social scientist, on the Muzaffarnagar riots in which over 60 people were killed and hundreds left homeless (Deccan Chronicle, December 31)

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For the great majority of 250,000 engineering students graduating from Tamil Nadu™s 560 engineering colleges in May this year, hopes of getting remunerative employment in the IT (information technology) industry are dimming. During the boom years of the industry (2003-08), HRD managers of IT companies descended in droves on college campuses to recruit stud-ents. But this year campus recruitment from Tamil Nadu™s engineering colleges is expected to decline by 40 percent although IIT-Madras and a handful of highly-ranked deemed universities continue to attract IT multinationals including Microsoft, Oracle, Google, offering 30 percent higher salaries.  However major indigenous companies (Wipro, Accenture, TCS, Cognizant Technologies and Infosys) are not only hiring smaller numbers in the campus recruitment season (September-Febr-uary), but are restricting themselves to recruiting toppers at salaries (Rs.3-4 lakh per annum) which have been static for the fourth consecutive year. Cautious hiring by IT companies is not peculiar to Tamil Nadu; it is prevalent countrywide, raising the prospect of nearly 50 percent of the 1.5 million graduates churned out by 3,393 engineering colleges across the country, being unemployed after graduation. According to estimates of the Delhi-based National Association of Software and Services Companies (Nasscom), the number of freshers hired by IT companies will drop by 17 percent, from 215,000 in 2012-13 to 180,000 this fiscal year. Nasscom spokespersons ascribe this to the growth rate of India™s IT industry declining to 10.2 percent in 2012-13, from 30 percent in 2008. Dimming employment prospects are expected to hit Tamil Nadu™s engineering graduates particularly hard as the state hosts the second largest number of engineering colleges (560) in India after Andhra Pradesh with nearly 40 percent of the 250,000  students churned out by the state™s colleges running the risk of unemployment and/or under-employment. Several comp-anies which recruited students a year ago have deferred their joining dates by almost a year, forcing many of them to take up jobs in other industries for which they are overqualified and underpaid. œUntil very recently the practice of IT companies was to recruit fresh graduates and train them in-house. But these days companies are hiring job-ready toppers to cut training costs. We are striving hard to make students job-ready through collaborations with IT firms for training students and inviting more companies to visit our campus. But despite these initiatives only 65 percent of our students have been placed thus far, says Sivagnana Prabhu, head of training and corporate affairs of the RMK Group of Institutions, Chennai. Knowledgable educationists in Chennai blame the Delhi-based All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) ” the apex regulatory body authorised to license all technical education institutions countrywide ” for recklessly licensing private engineering colleges in Tamil Nadu during the past decade. To the extent that their number has risen from 237 in 2005-06 to 560 in 2013-14 even as industry™s demand for engineers is tapering off due to the declining growth of the IT industry and the economy in general. Moreover AICTE has failed in its primary duty of supervising the quality of education…

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With placement offers from major IT companies, the first batch of students from the Indian Institutes of Information Technology (IIITs) established in 2008 in three rural regions of Andhra Pradesh (pop. 84 million) ” Basar (Telangana), Nuzvid (Andhra) and Idupulapaya (Rayalaseema) ” are all set to start their dream jobs when they complete their B.Tech programmes in March at astronomical salaries (Rs.5 lakh per year) by rural India standards. Coming at a time when weak financial conditions globally have resulted in most IT majors bypassing several urban colleges, these campus placements have generated huge enthu-siasm in the state govern-ment-run rural IIITs prom-oted under the Rajiv Gandhi University of Knowledge Technologies (RGUKT) umbrella by the state™s late chief minister Y.S. Rajashekhar Reddy (1949-2009). RGUKT and its constituent institutes were promoted to provide IT education to rural youth with the initial target of admitting at least 1 percent of meritorious rural youth into the six-year integrated programme which includes a two-year pre-university course and a four-year B.Tech programme. Admission to the IIITs is given to secondary school leavers topping the Andhra Pradesh Board of Secondary Education™s class X SSC exam. Selected students are provided free education, hostel and mess facilities for the entire duration of their study programme. Despite this the initial 6,000 seats offered had to be reduced to half last year due to the medium of instruction in the six-year programme being English with which most students admitted were unfamiliar, having studied in Telugu upto class X in government-run schools in remote villages. However remedial classes seem to have worked wonders and RGUKT vice chancellor Prof. R.V. Rajkumar is understandably elated by the job offers made to students. œWe have a highly motivated faculty which devised innovative pedagogies to improve students™ English listening, speaking and writing skills to instill confidence in them. This year these efforts have yielded results, he says. This euphoria is justified because most students in these institutions are from poor households with incomes in the range of Rs.50,000-100,000 per year toiling in remote villages of Andhra Pradesh. With 185 of the 6,000 students in the three campuses having already been selected by infotech giants such as Infosys, TCS, and Tech Mahindra and FMCG major ITC by way of campus placements, the RGUKT management is hopeful of placing the remainder by end January. Dr. Amarnath Reddy, who heads the varsity™s placement cell, is optimistic that in the next round of interviews some students could get pay packages of up to Rs.10 lakh per annum. œPlacements to high paying jobs is not only good for students themselves, but will encourage more rural youth to sign up with IIITs and help to reduce the rural-urban divide in Andhra Pradesh, says Reddy. At a time when Andhra Pradesh is in deep turmoil because of the imminent formation of the new state of Telangana to be carved out of the composite state, this is a welcome silver lining. Aruna Ravikumar (Hyderabad)

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A series of about turns by the Congress government in Karnataka on the issue of student admissions into the state™s 250 professional i.e. medical, engineering, dental, etc colleges has created a crisis in professional education in the state. On December 14, the state government led by chief minister M. Siddaramaiah announced an intent to implement the long-pending Karnataka Professional Educational Institutions (Regulation of Admission and Determination of Fee) Act, 2006 (KPEI Act), which empowers the state™s private professional colleges to conduct their own œsingle common entrance test and stipulates formation of a fees fixation committee to determine the tuition chargeable by them. A fees committee under the chairmanship of Justice Ajit J. Gunjal, a retired judge of the Karnataka high court, has been constituted to determine the fee structure of each private college depending on factors such as location, investment in infrastructure and number of study programmes. The fallout of the declared intent to implement the KPEI Act, 2006 from the next academic year beginning July, is that success in the state government-conducted Common Entrance Test (CET) will ensure admission only into state government and aided medical and engineering colleges which number a mere 12 and 21 respectively. On the other hand under the current seat-sharing agreement (renewed annually) between the government and the Consortium of Medical, Engineering and Dental Colleges-Karnataka (COMED-K), the state™s 187 private professional colleges surrender 25-45 percent of seats to CET toppers at rock-bottom prices. With the KPEI Act eliminating the need for this consensual agreement, availability of seats to CET toppers at highly subsidised, government prescr-ibed fees in top private institutes will soon become history. For instance the number of engineering seats available at government fees would shrink to around 6,150 from the 42,200 that were available under seats sharing arrange-ments. Likewise medical seats available to CET toppers will fall to around 1,150 from 2,200 (almost 50 percent) as there are only 12 government medical colleges while in dental education, CET toppers will have to compete for a mere 100 seats as there are only two government dental colleges in the state. Unsurprisingly, the government™s decision to reduce the number of seats available to CET toppers drew a flood of protests from middle class parent and student communities used to availing heavily subsidised professional education for the past several years. Confronted with loud public protest, on December 20 the state government did a U-turn with chief minister Siddaramaiah announcing that the government won™t implement the KPEI Act, 2006 in the coming academic year. œIn the interest of students, we have taken this decision….  The earlier system will continue, Siddaramaiah told reporters, adding that the government intends to sign a consensual seat-sharing agree-ment with private professional colleges again. Inevitably, private professional colleges which have to surrender 25-45 percent of capacity at way-below-cost tuition price to CET toppers, are less than ecstatic about the status quo. They are no longer willing to sign the traditional consensual agreement with the government on seat-sharing and a common fees structure.…

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To the surprise of academics cynical about the promises of the Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress government which was swept to power in West Bengal in 2011 ending 34 years of rule of the Communist Party of India (CPM)-led Front government, efforts of the past two years to restore Kolkata™s Presidency University (estb. 1817) to its former status as West Bengal™s pre-eminent institution of higher education, have started showing results. On December 13, the first e-classroom of the university equipped with a video conferencing unit and bandwidth provided by the National Knowledge Network, was inaugurated with an e-lecture delivered by Dr. Yuri Manin, incumbent professor of mathematics at the Max-Planck-Institut, Bonn (Ger-many). The lecture was not only webcast, it was simultaneously podcast on the university website, allowing the external student community to tune into it. With the inauguration of Presidency™s e-classroom, fully interactive lectures can now be held in tandem with several classrooms worldwide. According to the varsity™s top brass, the e-classroom is a giant stride towards connecting PU with classrooms around the world. Restoration of Presidency™s reput-ation and pride prior to its 200th anniversary in 2017 was articulated by chief minister Mamata Banerjee as a top priority, immediately after she was sworn in following the rout of the Left Front which during its 34 years of uninterrupted rule (1977-2011) of West Bengal, ruined the state™s once highly admired education system by packing schools and universities with dogmatic under-qualified teachers and professors. In May 2011, she appointed a ten-member mentor group, headed by reno-wned Harvard academic Prof. Sugata Bose and guided by Nobel Laureate Dr. Amartya Sen, to devise ways and means for the rejuvenation and revival of PU. Established in 1817 as Hindu College (it was christened Presidency College in 1855), Presidency was the first college in India to admit women students (1897), and steadily developed into a world class institution by the mid-1960s attracting nationally and internationally renowned faculty, despite abysmal working conditions and low wages paid by the Left Front government. However to the disappointment of Kolkata™s academy, the Trinamool Congress government™s Budget 2012-13 made no provision to fund the proposed make-over. It allocated a measly Rs.240 crore for the state™s 18 universities and 374 colleges, provoking widespread cyni-cism about its proclaimed intent to restore PU to its former glory. In the circumstances the inauguration of the varsity™s globally connected e-classroom at an estimated cost of Rs.10 lakh has come as a pleasant and unexpected surprise. On December 13, more than 60 students and half a dozen teachers filed into the state-of-the-art class not just to listen to Prof. Manin™s lecture on num-bers, but also to experience an e-classroom for the first time. Later in the evening, the students connected with Russian mathematician Vladimir Voevodsky of Princeton University. œThere are many distinguished Presidency alumni around the world who cannot always travel to PU but are keen to take classes. Dr. Amartya Sen and Prof. Sugata Bose ” both alumni of this university ” have agreed to connect their classrooms at Harvard…

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Although the western sea-board state of Gujarat (pop. 62.7 million) is endowed with an entrepreneurial and international trading tradition of several millennia, it has not been able to overtake  neighbouring Maharashtra as the country™s most industrialised state. Knowledgable observers of the national development scenario believe that a major factor behind Gujarat being obliged to play second fiddle to Maharashtra is the neglect of English learning by almost all governments of the state because of misinterpretation of the call of the Porbandar (Gujarat)-born Mahatma Gandhi for swadeshi nationalism and development. œGujaratis are rubbish at English. But the state does nothing to make the lower middle classes competitive in the lang-uage. In Gujarat™s government-run schools, students are denied English as a subject until class V, meaning age 10 which is too late. The Congress has supported introduction of English earlier, but the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) reject this. The upper castes, BJP supporters almost to a man, are fine with this policy, because they are business-oriented and don™t need these skills. It is the children of Gujarat™s poor who are cruelly denied opportunity¦ and have little means of escape through language¦ opines Aakar Patel, the well-known insightful columnist (Mint Lounge, October 13). Although Patel also criticises Narendra Modi, Gujarat™s incumbent three-term chief minister and the BJP™s prime ministerial nominee for the 2014 general election, of subscribing to this RSS/BJP prejudice against English language learning, there are indications that Modi has had second thoughts on the subject. In his third term which began when the BJP swept the state assembly election of December 2012, Modi has initiated several measures to remedy the situation. One of them is to encourage civic municipal corporations in the state to promote affordable English-medium primary-secondaries for the general public. œA pilot primary school was promoted in Shahpur area of Ahmedabad in May last year and encouraged by its success we plan to add five more, says Jagdish Bhavsar, chairman of the municipal school board of the BJP-ruled Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC). The corporation-run English medium schools are named Ahmedabad Public Schools (APS) and will start functioning from the start of the new academic year 2014-15. The pilot APS, Shahpur, which started off with kindergarten classes and added class I of primary school, has already admitted 150 students since it was inaugurated on May 13 last year. Before the commencement of the new academic year, it expects to admit another 100 students. Members of AMC™s school board say that a growing number of parents have been representing to chief minister Modi for AMC to establish affordable English medium schools which œdon™t fleece people with exorbitant fees and forced donations. Currently AMC™s school board manages 456 Gujarati medium primaries with an aggregate enrollment of 160,000 students. Therefore AMC™s ˜diversif-ication™ into English medium primaries is being keenly watched for replication by the civic corporations of Vadodara, Surat, Rajkot, Junagadh, Jamnagar and Bhavnagar. Although perhaps inevitably, the state government has woken up late to the damage English illiteracy…

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Aspiring would-be school teachers who passed the state government™s Teacher Eligibility Test (TET) in 2011 have become infamous in Lucknow, the admin capital of Uttar Pradesh (pop. 200 million), India™s most populous, under-governed and arguably, most educationally backward state. They have regularly been protesting on the city™s roads, blocking traffic and indulging in anti-social behaviour. Recently they resorted to relay hunger strikes to force the Samajwadi Party government of the state to implement the Allahabad high court™s decision of November 20 which ruled that selection of assistant teachers (newly recruited teachers) in primary as well as junior high schools of the state should be on the basis of scores obtained in the TET held on November 13, 2011. The court had directed that the exercise of selecting assistant teachers should be completed by March 31, 2014. In light of the court™s judgement, TET qualified teachers are demanding the start of the counseling procedure for appointment of 72,825 teachers statewide. Comments Ganesh Shankar, president of the UP TET Sangharsh Morcha: œThe decision of the court has been in our favour. But the government doesn™t want to make the appointments. It doesn™t care about the fate of nearly 3 lakh TET qualified teachers who passed the exam almost three years ago. On its part the Samajwadi Party which was elected to power in March 2012 ” six months after the exam was written ” is reluctant to make the appointments (it has appealed the Allahabad high court™s judgement in the Supreme Court) because of allegations of widespread cheating and fraud during the TET conducted on November 13, 2011 during the rule of the Mayawati-led BSP government in the state. As early as November 26, 2011, charges were made that bribes were collected from thousands of aspirant teachers who wrote TET 2011. Sanjay Mohan, then director of Uttar Pradesh Board of Secondary Education which conducted the exam, was arrested on February 7, 2012 on the charge of extorting bribes from aspiring teachers and a sum of Rs.4.67 lakh was seized from him. Shortly after the Samajwadi Party government was sworn in March 2012, the state™s youthful chief minister Akhilesh Yadav appointed a committee to investigate the charges related to TET 2011. Inevitably the teacher-aspirants who did well in the test protested appointment of the comm-ittee. The committee headed by Jawed Usmani, chief secretary of the state, confirmed œanomalies in the exam and recommended that a merit list of teachers should be prepared on the basis of marks obtained in the class X, class XII, graduation exams and TET. œThis is very unfair. Rules for any examination are made at the beginning. How can they alter the rules in the middle of the game? This will lead to the disqualification of so many TET qualifiers, says Shankar. But even though the Allahabad high court has decreed that the UP govern-ment appoints 72,825 assistant teachers solely on the basis of their performance in TET 2011, the high pass percentage (48.3) of aspirant teachers who wrote the…

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The latest CAG (Comptroller and Auditor General of India) audit report on the University of Mumbai (UoM, estb. 1857) indicts the varsity™s administration for gross mismanagement, misappropriation of funds, apathetic governance, and has exposed several administrative lapses. Conducted between January-March last year and accessed under the Right to Information (RTI) Act by public interest activist Vihar Durve, the report says that the university management has failed to conduct audits of any department or unit during the past five years despite paying the salaries and perks of five personnel in its internal audit wing, employed for the purpose of conducting pre-audits of expenditure, physical verification of stocks, post-audit of receipts, scale regulated contingencies etc. However, Rajan Welukar, vice chan-cellor of UoM since 2010, doesn™t seem to be particularly bothered by the scathing CAG report. œThe CAG report has mentioned incorrectly (sic). While we are in the process of responding to all the findings, it is incorrect to say we haven™t conducted audits. When I was appointed in July 2010, my first move was to direct that statutory audits be completed for the period 2007-2010 within six months. The audit for 2011-12 is 99 percent complete, he says. While declining to share the latest financials, Welukar claims that UoM™s financial health has improved. œThe varsity™s annual revenue has increased by 30 percent during my tenure, he says. Despite the vice chancellor™s nonchalance, the contents of the CAG report are damning. It says, of the varsity™s 741 affiliated colleges, with an aggregate 670,000 students, 564 haven™t been conferred permanent affiliation œindicating presence of some deficiency in colleges older than six years. For instance Thadomal Shahani Engineering College, Mumbai has been granted continuation of temporary affiliation since 1983 by local inquiry committees because of deficiency of classrooms, library/laboratories and faculty. The report also suggests that since the affiliation fees income derived by UoM for continued and extended affiliation constitutes a significant portion of the Rs.29.22 crore received as affiliation fees by the university between 2006-10, it gives œan incentive to overlook the lack of facilities in colleges and continue granting affiliation on temporary basis. The report has brought to light only a fraction of the administrative lapses of the university™s management. Never-theless they are pressing and indicate how political interference has diluted the credibility of this once prestigious institution. œSome of the problems confronting UoM involve huge sums of money. Affiliation fees are levied on the basis of the number of courses a college offers. Typically a college offers at least eight-10 courses so the varsity receives crores of rupees by way of affiliation fees. Despite this the university is deeply in the red and has 365 principal and 1,319 sanctioned non-teaching posts lying vacant, says Dr. Neeraj Hatekar, professor of economics at UoM and convenor of the Joint Action Committee for Improvement of Higher Education, which has demanded the resignation of the vice chancellor for œincompetence across several parameters. Unsurprisingly, this vintage varsity™s reputation is getting a hammering. In the authoritative QS World…

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An unofficial turf war waged covertly between the University Grants Commission (UGC, estb. 1953) which is mandated to supervise, regulate, fund and subsidise university education countrywide and the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE, estb. 1987), has been decisively won by the former. Following a Supreme Court verdict earlier this year which stripped AICTE of its powers to accredit, supervise and regulate technical education institutions affiliated with a university, on December 3 the UGC issued a draft of new regul-ations governing technical education giving universities/colleges and other stakeholders time till December 31 to make suggestions and amend-ments. This new set of regulations called the UGC (Approval of Colleges Offering Technical Educ-ation by Universities) Regulations, 2013, will come into force soon after this deadline elapses. On April 25, in Association of Managements of Private Coll-eges vs. All India Council for Technical Education & Ors. (Civil Appeal No. 1145 of 2004) and Adaikalamath College Etc. vs. All India Council for Technical Education & Ors. (Civil Appeal Nos. 5736-5745 of 2004), the Supreme Court had clipped AICTE™s wings. The court ruled that technical colleges and institutes affiliated with universities are not œtechnical institutions as defined under s.2 (h) of the AICTE Act, 1987 and as such fall outside the jurisdictional purview of AICTE and should be governed by parent universities and UGC under provisions of the UGC Act, 1956. The role of AICTE is of an advisor to UGC in matters relating to technical education, ruled the two judge bench of the apex court. A curative petition filed by AICTE was dismissed by the apex court on July 23. œIt is held after analysing the provisions of ss.10, 11 and 12 of the AICTE Act that the role of inspection conferred upon AICTE vis- -vis universities is limited to the purpose of ensuring proper maintenance of norms and standards in the technical education system so as to conform to the standards laid down by it with no further or direct control or scope for any direct action except to bring it to the notice of UGC, ruled the court. In effect the apex court divested AICTE of the wide power it has exercised over all colleges/institutes of technical education ” including tech-nical institutions affiliated with univ-ersities ” to inspect, accredit, recognise, regulate and derecognise them for not conforming with the accreditation norms and conditions laid down by the council. Henceforth AICTE can exercise these powers only in relation to stand-alone technical education institutes unaffiliated with a university. Conseq-uently the jurisdiction of AICTE which hitherto extended to over 11,800 institutes of technical education countrywide has been reduced to cover an estimated 1,000 independent technical education institutions. The Supreme Court™s April 25 judge-ment has displeased the managements of most technical colleges as well as the Union HRD ministry who feel that UGC doesn™t have the expertise or band-width to supervise the country™s 8,562 ˜recognised™ technical education coll-eges/institutes. According to sources in Shastri Bhavan, Delhi (which houses the HRD ministry), Union HRD minister Dr. M.M. Pallam…

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Thanks for the EW India Preschool Rankings 2013 (EW December). The league tables   are very informative and useful to parents looking to enroll their children in quality preschools across the country. In Delhi in particular, there are so many nurseries opening every other day that it™s difficult for parents to distinguish the best. In fact my request is that the 2014 rankings list in Delhi should be expanded to Top 50 preschools cover-ing all the major residential areas of the national capital. Currently most of the ranked preschools in the Delhi league table are sited in Vasant Vihar, Vasant Kunj, Punjabi Bagh or GK. There are many good preschools in other areas such as Janakpuri, Dwarka, and Nizamuddin. However, I must congratulate the editors of EducationWorld for including rankings of the Top 10 preschools in Gurgaon and Noida. Awareness of the importance of early childhood care and education in these two cities of Delhi NCR is very high, with several educat-ionists coming forward to promote high-quality preschools. Suman Saxena Delhi Zonal rankings plea Congratulations to all preschools ranked in the EducationWorld India Preschool Rankings 2013 (EW December). The ˜Mumbai™s most esteemed preschools™ story is elaborate and inspiring. However we are perplexed by the Mumbai league table. Our parents ” more than us ” vouch for our expertise and professionalism. Kangaroo Kids, Kandivali (East), is the most sought after preschool for special education, infrastructure, individual attention to students, competence of teachers, innovative teaching, safety and hyg-iene, leadership quality, teacher welfare and development. We excel and sur-pass on other parameters too. I want to draw your attention to the fact that not one preschool beyond Andheri West (suburbs extend from Bandra to Vasai) ” except one in Kandivali (E) ” has been included in the Mumbai league table. I suggest that the Mumbai rankings survey be bifurcated zone-wise, as many preschools are avail-able to children in a 3 km perimeter. Suburban and south Mumbai preschools should be ranked in their own areas. If this is done, many preschools will aspire and strive to reach the minimum quality parameters of ECCE, and EducationWorld will take a step towards breaking new ground and raising the bar for provision of quality early years education. Currently your survey and findings are of little help to the great majority of parents and educators. Zone-wise preschool rankings will generate confi-dence in parents and help them to make appropriate choices. It is a morale booster for educators and schools alike to be validated by an esteemed mag-azine like yours. Kusum Kanwar Director, KK Kids Learning Systems and franchisee, Kangaroo Kids, Kandi-vali (East), Mumbai New parameter proposal Congratulations for publishing the EW India Preschool Rankings 2013 (EW December). Your rankings have done an excellent job of drawing the attention of preschool educators to vital para-meters such as innovative teaching, safety and hygiene, and special needs education. Though the ten parameters of early childhood education under which the survey has ranked preschools are all-encompassing, I want to suggest the addition of…

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The dramatic political debut of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in the recently concluded Delhi state assembly election, and the rout of the Congress party in the assembly elections held concurrently in the Hindi heartland states of Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh, are landmark events in the troubled history of post-independence India, a sorry narrative of the first great nation-building enterprise of the post-colonial world order whose currents have run pathetically awry. The strength of the ruling Congress is reduced in the Delhi legislative assembly from 43 to 8, and from 96 to 21 seats in Rajasthan. Yet even as the euphoria which has followed the defeat of the Congress in these ˜semi-final™ elections (a curtain raiser for the general election due to be called before May 2014) is justified, it is pertinent to remember that within three years of the decimation of the Congress party in the general election of 1977, Mrs. Gandhi and the Congress were voted back into office in New Delhi. Therefore there™s real and omnipresent danger of history repeating itself. Over the past 65 years Congress leaders right down to the grassroots level have accumulated vast wealth, which can and will be used to buy influential vote banks and manipulate the electoral process. Like the communist parties of Russia and China, the Congress has metamorphosed into a mafia-like privilegentsia which will fight fang and claw for the right to continue to harvest the loaves and fishes of office at the Centre and in the states. Yet even if the Congress tainted by venality and corruption has thoroughly alienated the electorate, the prospect of a coalition led by the right wing BJP, urges caution. For a start, just as Congress has corruption embedded in its core, the BJP is infected with the deadly virus of religious fundamen-talism and communalism, which could mire the nation into low-intensity civil conflict of the genre which has destroyed Lebanon and threatens to destabilise several countries of the Middle East and Africa. Moreover, during its first term in office (1999-2004), the BJP also provided ample proof of its susceptibility to corruption and primitive capital accumulation. It™s against this backdrop that AAP™s stupendous debut in the Delhi state election comes as a reviving dose of oxygen for the battered public, which has had to endure the self-serving machinations of Congress/BJP for too long. Yet it is abundantly clear that AAP is a single-issue party which lacks the intellectual depth and maturity to flesh out a comprehensive agenda covering vital issues such as defence, foreign policy, education, public health and fiscal policy and management. These lacunae are bound to be highlighted by wily leaders of the mainstream parties playing for larger stakes in the forthcoming general election. Therefore it makes sense for the AAP leadership to make common cause with new political formations such as Lok Satta and the Children First Party of India, which lack the vast monetary resources of Congress and BJP and are struggling against the public™s Stockholm syndrome, but…

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