EducationWorld January 16

Coming four years after the demise of Mahendra Singh Tikait, the powerful farmers’ leader in North India, the demise in Pune on December 12 of Sharad Joshi, a champion of farmers’ rights and founder-president of the Nashik-based Shetkari Sanghatana, has left the country’s long-neglected and continuously short-changed 700 million farmers leaderless. Joshi, who quit a cushy UN job with the Universal Postal Union in 1977 and bought himself a 40-acre farm in Chakan near Nashik to experience first hand the trials and tribulations of peasant farmers, burst into the national limelight in the 1980s, when he spearheaded several national agitations demanding remunerative prices for onions (of which Nashik district is a hub) and farm produce in general. Joshi’s clarion call for higher prices for agriculture/horticulture produce and a better deal for farmers resonated with your correspondent — at that time editor of Businessworld. The outcome was a 12-page cover story in Businessworld (‘Bharat vs. India — Sharad Joshi’s Epic Quest’) which exposed the cruel neglect of the country’s rural majority and the iniquity of the Nehruvian socialist economic development model. Alas, to no avail. The idealistic Joshi was out-manoeuvred by the country’s wily politicians, and paid a heavy price for taking on the establishment with his wife committing suicide and himself reduced to penury. In the end he was co-opted into the establishment with Rajiv Gandhi appointing him chairman of a powerless Commission of Agriculture Costs and Prices based in Delhi, far away from his power base. Subsequently after an aborted attempt to revive the Swatantra Party in the 1990s, this defeated and defanged farmers’ leader was gradually seduced by the comforts of Lutyens Delhi and accepted a nomination to the Rajya Sabha where he served two undistinguished terms. The cunning of the lumpen bourgeoisie, which has converted India’s democracy to its own use in perpetuity, quite overwhelmed this idealistic farmers’ champion, RIP. Strange priorities   It’s a typical modus operandi of the country’s 18 million-strong bureaucracy which has run the economy into the ground. In the housing construction sector, they permit whole buildings and often entire residential colonies, to be completed under their noses, after which they suddenly serve a notice upon unsuspecting buyers that the land title is faulty and construction unauthorised. This common practice opens up vast opportunities for extortion and blackmail.  Evidently this modus operandi has impressed Prof. Ved Prakash, chairman of the Delhi-based University Grants Commission, the country’s apex higher education regulatory authority established in 1956. Out of the blue on November 6, UGC issued notices to some of India’s top private (‘deemed’) universities including BITS-Pilani and Tata Institute of Fundamental Research to forthwith shut down their satellite campuses. According to UGC spokepersons, these universities have committed the cardinal sin of violating clause 6 of the UGC guidelines and Article 12(5) of the Deemed Universities Regulation Act, 2010, which require prior permission of the HRD ministry to establish satellite campuses. It’s pertinent to note that the list of violators includes BITS-Pilani, ranked the country’s #1 private…

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Legal confidential: Adventures of an Indian Lawyer by Ranjeev C. Dubey, Penguin; Price: Rs.499; Pages: 299 Over three decades ago this reviewer qualified as a barrister and migrated from the UK to practice law in the Bombay high court and fulfil a subsidiary aspiration to enter public service through politics. At that time new entrants into the legal profession were obliged to sit out for up to five years in the chambers of a senior counsel earning loose change, if that, learning court craft and intricacies of the law. Instead, what I learned best was that the Bombay bar was dominated by Gujarati and Parsee sons and nephews of counsel and judges wholly driven by avarice with little interest in justice dispensation or reputation of the judicial system, and its pride of place within India’s democratic framework. Because I was well-supported by an indulgent father who regarded pupillage as an extension of my education, I stuck it out for four-plus years, during which I was the sole counsel of the Bombay Legal Aid Society which was so impecunious that it couldn’t pay even out of pocket expenses, let alone counsel’s fees. The cynicism and greed which permeated what I believed at bottom to be a noble profession, was a big turn-off. It prompted me to begin a new career in industry, even though things were looking up for me in the legal profession. Looking back, it’s a decision I’ve never regretted. What’s the joy of succeeding in a universally despised dung-heap profession which shows no signs of reformation? Neither the Bar Council of India, the higher judiciary, nor the country’s legal eminences seem to have any ideas or intent to clean the country’s patently unjust justice system which is creaking under the weight of 30 million pending cases; levies court fees for civil litigation; has failed to evolve a legal aid mechanism for the poor; incarcerates 280,000 under-trial citizens in jails, and tolerates the lowest judge-population ratio among all democracies (13 per million citizens cf. 105 in the US). Despite this grim scenario the country’s 950 law colleges and universities continue to churn out an estimated 60-70,000 poorly schooled and trained lawyers per year, who crowd the static number of lower courts and openly solicit clients, prohibited conduct practised more in the breach than observance. However readers of Legal Confidential — Adventures of an Indian Lawyer, an autobiography of Ranjeev C. Dubey described as a practising corporate lawyer, legal correspondent of several business magazines and author of two books on law (Winning Legal Wars (2003) and Bullshit Quotient (2012)), are unlikely to come across any illumining examination of these macro issues which have brought the Indian legal system into universal disgrace. Instead, it traces the career of the author who entered the legal profession with the noblest motives — “pursuit of liberty and justice” — but lost all innocence to pervasive cynicism in 25 years of practice starting in the “dog-eat-dog world” of Delhi’s Tees Hazari lower courts. “I learnt soon…

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Promoted by the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, the Akshaya Patra Foundation, Bangalore (estb. 2000) has engineered a unique public-private partnership model to provide free mid-day meals to 1.4 million primary school children in ten states   Paromita Sengupta In the 15 years since it undertook to provide cooked mid-day meals to 1.4 million children in 10,600 primary schools in Karnataka, Andhra, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Chhattisgarh, Gujarat, Odisha, Telangana and Assam, Bangalore-based NGO The Akshaya Patra Foundation (TAPF, estb.2000) has engineered a public-private partnership model which has dramatically improved student enrolments in primary schools in ten states by 22 percent during the past four years. TAPF is a not-for-profit, secular trust promoted by the Bangalore unit of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON), aka the global Hare Krishna movement. ISKCON was founded in 1966 by A.C. Bhaktivedanta (aka Srila Prabhupada) in New York to spread the message of Bhakti Yoga whose tenets require all bhakts to dedicate their thoughts and activities to please Lord Krishna who, according to the Bhagavad Gita which incorporates the Krishna Leela (tales of Krishna), enjoyed a very happy childhood. Currently, ISKCON is a global confederation of over 550 centres, 60 farming communities, 50 schools and 90 vegetarian restaurants. In the millennium year, after 126 nations signed the United Nations Millennium Declaration and enunciated its five Millennium Development Goals which included all children in primary schools and eradication of child malnutrition by 2015, Madhu Pandit Dasa and Chanchalapathi Dasa, trustees of ISKCON, Bangalore were persuaded by several business leaders of the garden city (including T.V. Mohandas Pai and Abhay Jain (founder-trustees), Ramadas Kamath, V. Balakrishnan and Raj P. Kondur) to promote the Akshaya Patra Foundation (“inexhaustible vessel” in Sanskrit) to provide free cooked mid-day meals to 1,500 children in five government schools in Bangalore. Moreover, it was the aspiration of Srila Prabhupada that no child should go hungry within ten miles of ISKCON centres. Since then, TAPF has partnered with the Central and state governments, corporates, individual donors, small and medium-scale enterprises to raise a corpus of Rs.79 crore for enabling and expanding the free mid-day meals programme to serve 1.40 million children in government and aided schools in ten states through its 24 centres across India. By employing mass production and modern assembly line technologies in hi-tech Swedish-style stainless steel kitchens, voluntary community service and sophisticated logistics, TAPF delivers nutritious meals to over a million children at a rock-bottom cost (to the foundation) of Rs.750 per child for 232 days which is topped up by state government subsidies averaging Rs.1,016 per child. For state governments which in their other primaries expend an average Rs.7.40 per child for the mid-day meal, the public-private partnership with TAPF enables a saving of Rs.3.01 per day. “I attribute the success of India’s largest NGO-run mid-day meals programme to the commitment and dedication of ISKCON missionaries, and the professionalism and best practices we have adopted from the corporate sector with the aid and advice of our trustees. We are proud…

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“Sex, sex, sexual intercourse, penis, penis, vagina.” More than 150 undergraduates are sitting in a lecture hall at China Agricultural University in Beijing, shouting loudly. Many are sexually active, or soon will be. Yet for most, it is the first sex education class they have attended. Their instructor hopes that shouting such words will help youngsters talk more openly about sex. Lu Zhongbao, a 24-year-old forestry student, says he was told as a child that he “emerged from a rock”. When he started having sex with his university girlfriend, he had little idea about contraception. It is not just China’s economy that has loosened up since 1979. The country is in the midst of a sexual revolution. A 2012 study found that more than 70 percent of Chinese people have sex before marriage. Other polls put that figure lower but consistently indicate that over the past 30 years, more young Chinese are doing it, with more partners, at a younger age. But lack of sex education means that many are not protecting themselves, resulting in soaring abortion rates and a rise in sexually transmitted diseases. The Communist Party has stuck its nose into people’s bedrooms for 30 years through its harsh family-planning policies. Yet taboos on sex before marriage prevailed, the result of paternalistic — not religious — values about female chastity, with a dose of Communist asceticism thrown in. Pre-marital sex fell foul of a range of laws, including the catch-all charge of “hooliganism”, only scrapped in 1997. On the other hand, education on the subject is compulsory in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan — societies that have cultural similarities with China. But as in India, most Chinese schools teach only basic anatomy. In 2008, the ministry of education included sex education in the national health hygiene curriculum. The barriers are not just prudery. Like football, fashion and other teenage pastimes, sex (and learning about it) is seen as a distraction from studies. The dominant message is to abstain. A 2013 review by Unesco and Beijing Forestry University noted the prevalence of “terror-based” sex education, with content largely focused on the horrors of pregnancy, abortion and HIV. In early November, a university in Xi’an in central China ran a course entitled ‘No Regrets Youth’ where students received a “commitment card”, essentially a pledge to remain virgin until marriage. It’s hardly surprising the abortion rate is so high. The one-child policy has made termination a normal phenomenon. Most clinics, private or state, put a premium on speed and offer no advice on how to avoid getting pregnant again. Marie Stopes, an international reproductive-health agency, reckons that abortions could be as high as 40 million, given domestic sales of pharmaceutical companies selling drugs used in terminations. If that number is correct, around half of all abortions worldwide are in China. The high number of terminations is in marked contrast to the low birth rate. If Marie Stopes is correct, 2.5 babies are aborted in China for every one born, compared with…

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When Michael Buehler saw that his name was trending on Twitter, he realised an all-out vilification campaign against him had reached a new level. Dr. Buehler, a lecturer in comparative politics at the School of Oriental & African Studies (Soas), University of London, did not foresee the hostility he would face when he posted a short article on Indonesian politics on a little-known academic blog called New Mandala, in November. It raised questions about alleged covert lobbying by Indonesia ahead of a visit by its president, Joko Widodo, to the White House to meet Barack Obama in late October. Dr. Buehler revealed that $80,000 (Rs.53.6 lakh) had been paid by a Singapore consultant to a Las Vegas PR firm to lobby on behalf of Indonesia, according to papers filed with the US department of justice. The Swiss academic also highlighted what he saw as the “tepid” reception received by Widodo and the “disappointing” economic returns from the first official US visit by an Indonesian president in 10 years. “The seemingly ill-conceived and poorly executed visit reflects the Indonesian government’s lack of coordination on a foreign policy agenda,” he wrote on November 6. The story was quickly picked up by the Indonesian media, but was misreported as Dr. Buehler claiming that Indonesia had paid $80,000 for Widodo to secure a meeting with President Obama. “I never said this,” says Buehler, whose research focuses on the politics of South-east Asia. “All I did in my article was to suggest that the lobbying company was hired without the knowledge of the ministry of foreign affairs.” He adds that there’s “nothing illegal about employing lobbyists”. However, the distorted story was shared more than 10,000 times on social media, prompting Indonesian officials to hold press conferences to denounce Buehler — knocking down what he called their “straw man” story and ignoring the wider implications of his claims. Dr. Buehler found himself criticised by Indonesia’s foreign affairs ministry, the Indonesian Embassy in Washington and the US Embassy in Indonesia. Attacks on him also came from various parts of the Indonesian media and academia. About 100 academic experts on South-east Asian politics have signed a letter in support of Dr. Buehler, while Lawrence Saez, head of Soas’ department of politics and international studies, says his department “unequivocally rejects the attacks and intimidation he has faced…  as well as efforts by the government of Indonesia to tarnish his academic integrity”.

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China has reinforced its dominance in the Times Higher Education BRICS & Emerging Economies Rankings 2016, claiming half of the top 10 places. Beijing-based Peking and Tsinghua universities have taken the top two spots for the third year in a row, while the University of Science and Technology of China, Zhejiang University and Shanghai Jiao Tong University rank seventh, eighth and 10th, respectively. Overall, China is the most-represented nation, with 39 institutions in the extended Top 200 list of higher education institutions in Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa and 30 other “emerging economies”. The other BRICS nations have also performed well this year, albeit to a lesser extent, with 14 Brazilian and 15 Russian institutions, including Lomonosov Moscow State University in third place, featuring in the table. India is the third most-represented nation in the list, behind China and Taiwan, but is the only BRICS nation without a university in the Top 10. The Indian Institute of Science leads the country’s 16 institutions in 16th place. Countries outside the BRICS nations have also made progress. The National Autonomous University of Mexico is the highest-ranked Latin American institution outside Brazil, in 23rd place, while the Czech Republic has five institutions in the top 100, up from two last year. Phil Baty, THE rankings editor, says the table provides an “extraordinary case study in what can be achieved in only a couple of decades, where significant money and political will can be brought to bear”. In all, 35 countries feature in the Top 200, including 16 for the first time, such as Romania, Greece, Nigeria, Kenya and Qatar. Baty says this partly reflects the decision to expand the list from 100 to 200 universities and to increase the number of countries eligible for inclusion to 48. The THE BRICS & Emerging Economies Rankings use the same 13 performance indicators as the flagship World University Rankings but are recalibrated to reflect the development priorities of universities in emerging economies.

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When this year’s essay title in Brazil’s national high school exam raised the question of violence against women, it opened up a nationwide debate. Cited as growing evidence of the country’s progress on women’s rights, it was equally condemned as a form of indoctrination by the hard-line evangelical caucus. Yet the controversy it provoked also reflected the importance placed on the single two-day test, the Enem, which has emerged as the country’s de facto university entrance exam. Since it was created in 1998, Enem has become the biggest nationwide test in the world after the National Higher Education Entrance Examination, or gao kao, in China, taken by more than 9 million students. While the Chinese exam has a formidable reputation, the Enem was designed to assess the basic education of school-leavers. Composed of four sections of 45 multiple-choice questions and an essay, almost 6 million Brazilian teenagers sat the exam this year, held over a weekend with one four-and-a-half-hour exam and a second of five-and-a-half hours. From 2009, Enem has gradually replaced the individual entrance exams used by institutions — known as the vestibular — as a one-stop route into higher education. In 2014, President Dilma Rousseff said it was the most democratic way of ensuring that all Brazilians had access to university places. “With the Enem, you can participate in one selective process for 115 institutions at once,” she said. The exam, which costs R63 (Rs.1,100) to enter unless the student has finished education at a public school, is open to those from both private and state institutions. This year, almost two-thirds of students who registered to take the Enem were exempt from paying the fee, either because they were from state schools or low-income families. But research by consultancy firm Instituto Aquila for a newspaper in Brasilia in 2014, revealed the rate of abstentions or no-shows was much higher among state school students. Data from the educational census in Brazil reveal that 10 percent of registered private students fail to write the Enem, compared with 42 percent of state school students. According to Antonio Freitas, pro-rector of the thinktank and higher education institute Getulio Vargas Foundation (FGV), Enem’s greatest success was never going to be in improving access to higher education. “The Enem is just an exam, it can’t perform magic,” he told Times Higher Education. “It cannot resolve a problem that a student has spent 12 years in schools without lessons, the teacher is poorly prepared, there’s no library… how can an exam resolve this? Not here; not in China.” Earlier this year, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s first global survey ranked Brazil’s schools 60th out of 76 countries, based on maths and science results for 15-year-olds. Students who took Enem in 2015 will get their individual results this month. “The Enem was an evolution. These exams in any country, but principally in developing countries, are very important. It shows that public schools are offering poor service. Brazil is very behind. There are some schools…

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India will become the largest domestic higher education market by 2025, while China will remain the number one provider of international students globally, according to a British Council study. The study indicates that India will have the largest 18-22-year-old population in ten years — 119 million. The next biggest group will be in China, despite the projection that the number of Chinese in this age group will decline by roughly 35 million to 80 million. In 2012, China’s student population was 115,560,000, overtaking India’s by 71,000. Nigeria will see the highest increase in youth population, projected at about 7.4 million, to reach 23 million in 2025. Other countries that will have much bigger student populations over the next decade include Indonesia (up 3.7 million) and Ethiopia (up 3.6 million). The Shape of International Education to 2025 report predicts that the African youth population will equal, and then surpass the Asian youth population around 2078. The study is part of the British Council’s ‘Shape of Things to Come’ series presented at its annual Services for International Education Marketing conference in Edinburgh on December 10. The report adds that the trend of the US and the UK facing decreases in their global market share of international students “looks set to continue” as provision of education in traditional origin countries expands. It suggests that Sri Lanka will see the highest annual percentage growth in household income over the next decade, 5.8 percent per annum, while strong average annual growth is also forecast for Vietnam (5.5 percent), Uzbekistan (5.3 percent), China (5.1 percent), Bangladesh (4.7 percent) and Indonesia (4.3 percent). Based on figures of household wealth and population projections, as well as trends in tertiary education, the British Council predicts that China will continue to be the top supplier of international students globally in 2025, followed by India, Nigeria, Germany and Saudi Arabia, while India will be home to the largest domestic higher education market, followed by China and the US. A separate report published by the UK Higher Education International Unit in early December reveals that a higher proportion of international students would recommend the UK than any of its major English-speaking competitors. Figures in the study, International Undergraduate Students: The UK’s Competitive Advantage, show that international undergraduate student satisfaction with UK higher education is at 91 percent, while 85 percent of international undergraduates would recommend or actively recommend their UK study experience. The findings are based on feedback from 365,754 international students, which was collected from i-graduate’s International Student Barometer. Successful higher ed model England’s higher education spending increased in the first year of £9,000 tuition fees and its financing system allowed it to “raise spending in difficult times”, unlike European rivals. But the country has the most expensive public universities in the world. These developments are reported by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), whose annual Education at a Glance report includes data from England’s post-2012 system for the first time this year. The UK is reported to have…

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On American college campuses, money talks. That empowers two very different groups: today’s fee-paying students, and graduates of yesteryear, whose affections (and wallets) are sought by their alma maters with an ardour that might make Casanova blush. Pity university chiefs, then, as a wave of campus protests breaks out involving the past. From the Ivy League to the great public universities of the South and Midwest, student demonstrators have called for the renaming of buildings and academic departments, removal of artworks and even scrapping of sports team mascots that celebrate controversial aspects of history. The loudest opposition often involves alumni. As befits an academy that has sent former students to Congress after every election since 1789, grandees have had much to say about a row at Princeton. That was sparked when students demanded the renaming of the university’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, as well as a residential college named for the 28th president, who ran Princeton before entering the White House. Protesters cited Wilson’s white supremacist beliefs, and his moves to resegregate the federal government after taking office in 1913. An editorial in the New York Times urged university bosses to purge the name of Wilson, an “unapologetic racist”. The Republican governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie, told the Washington Post he was “disappointed” that Princeton’s board of trustees is to consider expunging Wilson’s name. On November 23, the Democratic mayor of New York, Bill de Blasio, said he “absolutely” backed student protesters at Yale — including his son Dante — who want the university to rename a dormitory that currently honours John C. Calhoun, a senator and vice president from South Carolina whose vocal support for slavery and states’ rights helped pave the way for the civil war. Some days earlier, authorities at Georgetown University, in Washington, DC, agreed to rename two halls of residence named after school presidents who sold Jesuit-owned slaves in the 1830s. Nor are works of progressive art immune. On November 23, the University of Kentucky announced the shrouding of a large fresco depicting the state’s history, commissioned by the Depression-era Public Works of Art programme. Painted at a time when the university was all-white, the mural shows black people working in tobacco fields and black musicians playing for a white audience. Two dozen black students said that they found the mural “painful and degrading”.

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In the corporate world, data sits at the very heart of business improvement. It can be used to inform decisions around anything from product development and marketing channels to what refreshments should be served in the canteen to maximise productivity. To the uninitiated, data-driven decision making can seem a cold and impersonal concept — out of place in an education institution. But in a school which embraces data — such as details of pupils’ attendance, achievements or conduct — and uses it well, teachers derive knowledge that is fundamental to helping them deliver educational excellence. So what can they do to ensure data such as students’ attendance, behaviour and achievements can be easily collated? And how can such information help to drive higher standards of teaching and learning? American statistician and author Nate Silver, who developed a data analysis system to forecast the performance and career development of major league baseball players, also used the same system to accurately predict voter behaviour in all 50 states of the American Union in the 2012 US presidential election. Likewise, in schools and academic institutions, teachers’ judgement is essential to supporting pupils’ progress, and data can provide powerful insights into what might be holding children back. Many of the UK’s top-ranked schools have become proficient at using data to inform decisions made by teachers in their classrooms. In some of the highest performing schools, current and historical pupil achievement data is stored in sophisticated management information systems. This simplifies the task of data analysis and enables it to be used to drive students’ improvement and progress. Centrally-stored data on pupils’ attendance, achievements and behaviour is very useful to provide a fuller picture of the progress of individual students and groups. Teachers can track the progress of every child quickly and easily to identify those who may need additional support to achieve more. Data can also help teachers spot potentially high-performing students who could benefit from being stretched further. Principals and teachers could analyse their pupils’ achievement data to ascertain whether pre-teen girls out-perform boys in English language, for instance, and if this is the case, they can then use the information to uncover causative factors. Insights like these derived from data can be incredibly valuable for helping teachers plan and customise lessons. For schools to transform into data-driven institutions, they first need a broad range of information flowing into their computer systems. Secondly, it’s vital the school management provides an environment in which data is welcomed and put to good use. One challenge some schools I’ve interacted with have experienced is when the data reveals an issue that requires action, decisions on tackling it are overridden by the Hippo (‘highest paid person’s opinion’). While the Hippo scenario doesn’t occur in every school, this situation is much less likely in institutions that have robust data systems and processes in place which encourage teachers to take data-driven decisions. If analysis of a school’s information system shows that lateness to lessons is impacting negatively on pupils’…

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After completing my graduation, I want to pursue a career in events management. Please advise.  Anita Sawant, Mumbai With the entertainment industry booming, events management is a good career choice. The best option is to sign up for a postgrad course at the National Academy of Event Management and Development, Apeejay Institute, among others. Another option is to sign up for an MBA degree programme and to do your summer project in an events management company. Once you are sure you want to make a career in this field, you could apply for jobs in events management companies such as Wizcraft, Percept or work in the marketing department of any other company. I’m a class XI student keen on a career in chemical engineering. What are my prospects in this industry? Shekhar Iyer, Chennai Chemical engineering graduates usually work in the pharmaceuticals, healthcare, pulp and paper, food processing, polymers, biotechnology, electronics, environmental health and safety industries, as also in technical and research jobs in the chemical and petrochemical industries. Specialisation in chemical engineering could be in plastics and polymers, food technology, ceramics, bioprocess technology, pharmaceutical technology, perfumes and flavours, petroleum engineering etc. After my graduation, I want to enroll for a Masters degree in Spanish. What are my career prospects? Neela Fernandes, Panjim With the emergence of the global economy, opportunities for professionals with fluency in one or more foreign languages have grown exponentially. Besides being the second language of the US, Spanish is the official language of 21 countries including Mexico, Costa Rica, Honduras, Puerto Rico, Panama, Paraguay, Nicaragua, Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Cuba, etc. Over 400 million people around the world speak Spanish, making it the fourthmost popular language worldwide. Spanish is also one of five official languages of the United Nations. Learning Spanish has become popular in India because of booming trade ties with Latin American countries and the flourishing business process outsourcing (BPO) industry. Moreover, MNCs, international banks, airlines, customs offices, export houses, telecom majors, NGOs, travel companies and Indian embassies in Spanish-speaking countries require foreign language experts. Translation work also offers growing opportunities. After graduating in microbiology, I want to continue my studies abroad. Which universities abroad offer Masters programmes in microbiology? What are my employment prospects after graduation? Vikram Rao, Bangalore The postgrad programmes of Harvard, Stanford, Wisconsin-Madison, Washington (St. Louis) and U Cal, Berkeley universities are rated among the best in the US. Microbiologists work as technicians in pathology labs, research assistants (in genetics and biochemistry), or chemical/food and beverage companies. Clinical research is another good option. Also joining the Indian Academy of Sciences (www.ias.ac.in) is a great career choice. I’m a third year B.Sc (statistics) student interested in a banking career. I want to sign up for an MBA in banking offered by IGNOU (Indira Gandhi National Open University). Please advise. Navin Bhatia, Mumbai With this degree, you won’t be eligible to sign up for the MBA (banking and finance) programme of IGNOU. This programme is open to graduates who have cleared the…

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With investment in India’s stem cell research industry having crossed Rs.1,000 crore, there’s exploding demand for research and product development professionals  Indra Gidwani Stem cell research and therapy is a promising new career option for bright youth with appetite for science and innovation. It is centred around advanced biological research conducted by scholars from diverse science backgrounds to discover new treatments for chronic ailments.  Those who might benefit from stem cell therapies include people with spinal cord injuries, type 1 diabetes, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, heart disease, stroke, burns, cancer and osteoarthritis. Stem cells also have the potential to be grown into new nerve and muscle tissues for use in transplant and regenerative medicine. Since the dawn of the new millennium, India has emerged as a key biotech player in the Asia Pacific region, second only to Japan and South Korea. A growing number of pharmaceutical and biotech companies led by Bangalore-based Biocon Ltd have successfully developed a range of biologics, biosimilars, differentiated molecules and recombinant human insulin which are being marketed under company brand names. It is estimated that investment in stem cell research in India has crossed over Rs.1,000 crore. Therefore there’s a huge and growing demand for trained research and product development professionals. STUDY PROGRAMMES There’s a common misconception that only individuals with medical or para-medic education backgrounds are eligible for entry into this fast-track industry. Science graduates with at least one subject in the biological sciences, MBBS or B.Pharma or BDS or B.VSc or BE (biotechnology) are thriving in this field. The more ambitious should ideally pursue a Masters in biotechnology, biochemistry, genetics, zoology, life science or regenerative medicine (available only at the Manipal Institute of Regenerative Medicine, Bangalore) to qualify for top-level positions in this newgen industry. Moreover, qualifications can be boosted with a diploma or other certification in specialised stem cell study programmes offered by the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore; National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bangalore; National Centre for Cell Science, Pune; National Institute for Research in Reproductive Health, Mumbai; Manipal Institute of Regenerative Medicine, Bangalore; Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Hyderabad; Michigan-In-Centre for Regenerative Medicine, Chennai; Indian Institute of Technology, Madras; MS University, Baroda and Sri Chitra Tirumal Institute for Medical Sciences and Technology, Trivandrum. PAY & PROGRESSION “There’s exploding demand for professionally trained manpower in this evolving branch of biomedicine especially for postgraduates in the sciences for whom there are careers in quality control, R&D, production, clinical research, supply chain and human resource development. Remuneration packages tend to be higher than in other industries. At entry level, a postgrad with a Masters is likely to be inducted as a research associate at Rs.4 lakh-plus and a Ph D at Rs.6 lakh plus per annum,” says Vijayaraghavan Pisharody, general manager (human resources and corporate communication) of the Bangalore-based Stempeutics Research Pvt. Ltd (estb.2006), a pioneer stem cell company jointly promoted by the Manipal Education and Medical Group and Cipla Ltd. Stempeutics is the first company in the world to be granted a US process…

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PwC India and NIIT University (NU) announced a strategic partnership to create a trained talent pool of cyber security professionals in India, on December 28. Academics from NU and senior professionals of PwC India have co-created a two-year work-integrated specialised Masters programme in cyber security. This postgrad programme is the first cyber security study programme that blends academic and professional education, with PwC India being an equal partner in developing and delivering the programme. “In today’s digitised environment, securing the cyberspace has become a top priority of businesses and citizens across the world. This calls for teams of trained professionals who are equipped to combat the challenges posed by hackers every day. Our partnership with PwC India is a step in this direction,” said Rajendra S. Pawar, chairman of the NIIT Group and founder of NU. Added Deepak Kapoor, chairman of PwC India: “Cyber security is a major focus area and growth driver for PwC India. We currently have around 300 people in this practice and need to increase it tenfold to about 3,000 over the next four-five years. In this programme with NU, PwC India is collaborating with academia to bring industry-ready talent with required customised skill-sets, into the marketplace.” New UK-India initiative The Rt. Hon. Sajid Javid, MP and secretary of state for business, innovation and skills, and Jo Johnson, minister of state for universities and science in the UK government announced the launch of the ‘2016 UK-India Year of Education Research and Innovation’ campaign in New Delhi on December 10. According to a UK government spokesperson, the year-long campaign will highlight the strength and mutual benefits of the bilateral relationship between India and the UK across a range of digital technology-enabled education and training initiatives. “The UK is committed to supporting prime minister Modi achieve the goal of preparing young Indians for the 21st century. Over the past ten years, the UK-India relationship in education, science and technology has grown substantially with the introduction of bilateral programmes such as UKIERI and the Newton-Bhabha Fund. The new initiative will further support research, catalyse innovation and forge lasting intellectual partnerships between the UK and India,” said Sajid Javid, speaking on the occasion. The UK-India Year of Education, Research and Innovation programme was developed by a UK-India working group in July 2015 and announced during the visit of prime minister Narendra Modi to London last November. MaGE-Open University concordat The Bangalore-based Manipal Global Education Services (MaGE) inked a MoU with UK’s Open University — one of the world’s oldest open universities — in Bangalore on December 10. “This partnership will explore collaborations to support the development of innovative programmes focused on equipping students with the skills they need to succeed in the workplace,” said a joint statement released by MaGE chief executive S. Vaitheeswaran and Open University vice chancellor Peter Horrocks. “Education is increasingly moving online, and this MoU between two established leaders in the education space will allow both to offer learners high quality, cross-spectrum learning, based on the…

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Punjab Panjab-Birmingham concordat Panjab University’s vice chancellor Arun Kumar Grover and University of Birmingham provost and vice principal Adam Tickell signed a collaboration MoU (memorandum of understanding) in Chandigarh on behalf of the two universities on December 8. Under the terms of the MoU, the two universities will collaborate for research projects, faculty and student exchanges, stage conferences jointly and organise workshops to develop innovations and discoveries for large-scale application. Each party will appoint a coordinator to conduct collaborative activities covered by the MoU. Panjab University is ranked in the 501-600 bracket of the THE World University Rankings for 2015-16 and Birmingham #148. Odisha Maa Rama Devi University Chief minister Naveen Patnaik inaugurated Odisha’s first women’s university in Bhubaneswar, named after freedom fighter and social reformer Maa Rama Devi, on the occasion of her 116th birth anniversary (December 3). “Increased participation of women in higher education promotes gender equality in society. The development of society requires equal participation of women in every walk of socio-economic life,” he said speaking on the occasion. Describing Maa Rama Devi as an icon for women’s empowerment, Patnaik added: “Breaking the traditional world of conservatism, she dedicated herself to the nation. I hope Rama Devi Women’s University will bring qualitative changes among its students, and gradually evolve into an institution that inspires women in Odisha.” Haryana Forced labour row Several education ministry officials including block education officer Rajkumar Ahlawat and senior principal Naresh Verma questioned students of a government senior secondary in Hat village in Jind on December 1, following complaints that they were forced to whitewash and paint classroom walls. Earlier, some students had complained that school principal Lajpatray compelled them to whitewash classroom walls “under threat” of reducing their exam paper marks. However, others said they participated of their free will. Village panchayat members, including Sarpanch Rajendra, alleged the principal has transformed the school into a “hub of politics”, while some village residents complained that scheduled caste and other backward caste students haven’t been paid their stipends for the past three years. However, principal Lajpatray claimed he had paid the students for the painting work from his own pocket. The report of ministry officials will be sent to district headquarters soon. Meanwhile block education officer Ahlawat clarified that whitewash and painting are not included in permissible campus beautification projects. Bihar Fraud-free exam initiatives The state government has announced stern measures to counter cheating during board exams scheduled for March 2016, Bihar’s education minister Ashok Choudhary informed media in Patna on December 10. According to Choudhary, 12 exam centres have been dropped from last year’s approved exam centres list. Over 1.6 million children will write their board exams in March. The black-listed exam centres include the government school, Manhar in Vaishali district, whose photograph showing scores of parents and friends scaling the walls of a four-storied building to aid and abet examinees in March last year, went viral on social media. Choudhary warned that if cases of mass-scale copying in the 2016 matriculation examination…

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“The 2015 draft NEP, however, will be far from the timely policy document that will provide the vision and way forward for a floundering Indian educational system. This document will be the product of a deeply flawed, secretive and ineffective approach to the formulation of education policy.” John Kurrien, Director Emeritus, Centre for Learning Resources, Pune, on the Union HRD ministry’s public consultations process (Times of India, December 1) “The reason I think the wealthy Indians don’t give as much as Americans — in fact, Americans are actually leaders in this — one is their families are much larger in terms of wealth sharing. Two, a majority of Indians who are wealthy believe that they must leave their entire money as inheritance to their children.” Azim Premji, chairman of Wipro Ltd, on why Indians are philanthropy averse at an IIM-Bangalore Alumni Meet (December 14) “There is a lot to learn from Japan. But for India, one compelling lesson that Japan offers is its fierce focus on education. This is the backstory to Japan’s emergence as a technological powerhouse.” Patralekha Chatterjee, journalist, on the recent visit of Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe to India (Deccan Chronicle, December 17) “I think it (Indian education system) should allow a system of creativity, project-based, experiential learning. We should teach students to take risks and not penalise them.” Sundar Pichai, Google CEO, on the Indian education system’s obsessive focus on accumulation of academic knowledge, in an interaction with Sri Ram College of Commerce, Delhi students (December 18) “There is extensive research to prove that transferring children to the adult justice system does not reduce crime, and in fact increases recidivism as it exposes these children to hardened criminals.” Barkha Deva, public affairs commentator, criticising recent amendments to the Juvenile Justice Bill, 2015 (The Hindu, December 21)

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In a first-of-its-kind event in India’s most populous state, a child parliament was convened on December 17-18 by the Uttar Pradesh State Commission for Protection of Child Rights (UPSCPCR). It was attended by 160 students (58 girls and 102 boys) aged between 12-18 years from 22 districts statewide. The Children’s Parliament received top level attention with chief minister Akhilesh Yadav, the speaker of the legislative assembly Mata Prasad Pandey and urban development minister Azam Khan among others in attendance. The child delegates from 36 government and private schools were nominated by district magistrates across the state. To qualify for participation, the nominated child delegates were asked to write a general knowledge test administered by school managements on behalf of the UPSCPCR. The selected 160 were then allotted themes under the broader framework of the United Nations’ newly-adopted 17 sustainable development goals and requested to pen down questions which were first approved by members of UPSCPCR and then narrowed down for presentation to Akhilesh Yadav accompanied by his wife Dimple, who is a Samajwadi Party MP representing Kannauj. Clearly the children/youth were well chosen because they posed intelligent questions. For instance, Anshumant Dinesh from Noida asked why malnutrition is not an important issue in a state where 37 percent of children suffer it. Yasmeen from Varanasi criticised the state government’s much publicised 1090 Women’s Powerline initiative under which a specially constituted police call centre deals with complaints of sexual harassment. She said she had been so harassed by some village boys that she had stopped attending school, and complaints to 1090 had yielded no result. Likewise, Sandhya Singh from Barabanki wanted to know why the state, which is well on its way to hitting the mark of 10 million unemployed youth by 2017, is diffident about providing career counselling to children in government schools while Mohammed Yunus from Aligarh wanted the government to rethink its definition of development. In Uttar Pradesh, which is notoriously hostile to children — 380,000 infants die before age five every year and because of widely practised female foeticide, the ratio of girls to male children is 902:1,000, and 22,223 schools function with just one single teacher and 2.8 million child marriages are performed annually — these are very relevant questions. To his credit and to the surprise of the public, UP’s youthful (41) chief minister Akhilesh Yadav listened carefully to delegates of the Children’s Parliament and promised to give their grievances due consideration. On the issue of poor learning outcomes in government primaries for instance, he said that 168,219 para-teachers would be given audio-visual aids to improve teaching while the challenge of career counselling would be tackled by setting up telephone helplines. Juhie Singh, the chairperson of UPSCPCR, believes that the Children’s Parliament was a useful exercise as it has resulted in “concrete announcements”. For instance letters were sent by the chief minister to all MLAs, newly elected panchayat leaders, anganwadi workers and auxillary nurses and midwives to urgently address the issue of child malnutrition, she…

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A state government circular of October last year to all district officials of the school education department announcing a radical change in the character of class X and XII board exam question papers for students writing the school-leaving examinations of the Tamil Nadu State Board of School Education (TNSBSE) in February-March, has generated considerable anxiety within principals, teachers and parents of children in the state’s 53,000 government and 6,000 private matriculation schools (unique to Tamil Nadu). According to the circular, for the first time exam papers will include application and concept-based questions, and the AIADMK government has directed district education officials and school principals to guide and train students to take on the new-style question papers.  Although the government is yet to make a formal announcement about the changed exam papers format and provide details about the percentage of application-based and textual questions, principals and teachers are in a tizzy because the announcement has come in the middle of the academic year, leaving little time for teachers to prepare students to answer the proposed new-style questions. Moreover, the fury of the north-east monsoon floods which devastated the state capital Chennai, Cuddalore, Kancheepuram and Tiruvallur districts in November-December forced closure of schools for 35 days. This unprecedented calamity prompted the Jayalalithaa-led AIADMK government to postpone the half-yearly exams scheduled for December 7 to January 11 for all 6,000 matriculation and 53,000 government schools statewide.    Against this backdrop not a few educationists and principals believe that the proposal to introduce revolutionary changes in the class X and XII board exams is not advisable and should be postponed to the next academic year. However, it’s pertinent to note the new-style question papers proposal was mooted by an expert committee constituted by the AIADMK government a year ago, in the wake of wide criticism over the quality of nearly one million class X students and 800,000 class XII students clearing the TNSBSE examinations every year. According to educationists, the sub-standard TNSBSE syllabus and its rote-centric exams have led to a huge increase in the number of students sailing through the board’s exams with flying colours year after year. However, these star students don’t fare anywhere near as well as CBSE and CISCE-affiliated school students in the public exams for entry into engineering, medical and commerce colleges. Therefore a year ago the education ministry had proposed a change in the exam papers format to enable state board students to enter premier institutions such as the IITs and NITs. In June 2015, of the 451 class XII students from Tamil Nadu who qualified to write the JEE (advanced) of the IITs, only 33 were from TNSBSE-affiliated schools.  In principle, academics in Chennai welcome the proposal to include analytical and application-based questions in the exam papers of the state board. But they are highly critical of the samacheer kalvi or common school curriculum — introduced by the predecessor DMK government in January 2010 and endorsed by its successor Jayalalithaa-led AIADMK government for all, including matriculation schools. For…

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Education and health, widely accepted as mutually reinforcing by social scientists, were grossly neglected during the 34-year uninterrupted rule of the CPM-led Left Front government (1977-2011) in West Bengal, running the then most industrially and academically advanced state of the Indian Union into the ground and prompting a steady flight of capital and professionals. Unfortunately incumbent chief minister Mamata Banerjee and the Trinamool Congress, which routed the CPM-led Left Front alliance in the assembly election of 2011, haven’t succeeded in making good their election promises to revamp these sectors either. Against this dismal backdrop, the Central government’s announcement on October 7 of the establishment of three All India Institutes of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) modeled on the Delhi-based AIIMS, which is routinely voted India’s #1 medical college-cum-teaching hospital, in Nagpur (Maharashtra), Manglagiri (Andhra Pradesh) and Kalyani (West Bengal), has enthused monitors of West Bengal’s medical education scene. Currently there are only 17 medical colleges in West Bengal (pop. 91 million), including 13 promoted and managed by the state government, one run by the West Bengal University of Health Sciences and three private medical colleges with an aggregate enrolment of a mere 2,450 students. Therefore news of a new AIIMS in Kalyani, 50 km from Kolkata, has been widely welcomed by academics and the medical fraternity in the state. “The new AIIMS will be established as institutes of national importance for providing quality medical education, nursing education and also to provide tertiary healthcare facilities to the people of these locations,” said Union power, coal and new and renewable energy minister Piyush Goyal after West Bengal’s first AIIMS project, to be constructed at a cost of Rs.1,754 crore, was cleared by the Union cabinet on October 23. AIIMS, Kalyani will undoubtedly “augment the facilities of quality medical education and will also address the shortfall of healthcare professionals” in West Bengal as promised by Goyal, because the scale of the project is unprecedented in the medical education history of the state. The proposed AIIMS will be a full-fledged medical college equipped with a 960-bed teaching hospital, an auditorium, nursing college, night shelter, hostels and residential facilities for doctors and employees. It will also have separate blocks for teaching ayurveda, siddha, homeopathy and unani — traditional medical education systems. Unsurprisingly, medical practitioners and professionals are jubilant about this project proposal being cleared (and funded) by the Centre. “Private hospitals don’t cater to the general public. Therefore the high-quality medical care offered by the teaching hospital of the new AIIMS will be a huge benefit for students and the lay public,” says Dr. Suvro Banerjee, senior consultant and interventional cardiologist at the Apollo Gleneagles Heart Institute, Kolkata. However, Dr. Banerjee expresses apprehension about the “small town of Kalyani” attracting top-grade faculty. But Dr. Bhabatosh Biswas, vice chancellor of the West Bengal University of Health Sciences, believes West Bengal’s first AIIMS will prompt the development of Kalyani into an education hub on the lines of Vellore in Tamil Nadu. “The new AIIMS will sharply upgrade the quality…

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Despite the municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (MCGM) being the richest local government institution countrywide (annual budget: Rs.33,514.15 crore), there’s steady flight of children from its 1,000 plus primary schools sprawled across expensive real estate in Mumbai. According to a report Schools Run by the MCGM released on December 21 by the Mumbai-based non-government organisation Praja Foundation (estb.1997), the aggregate number of students in MCGM primaries declined by 7,000 in 2014-15. Data obtained by Praja under the Right to Information Act, 2005, indicates that the number of students in MCGM schools declined from 404,251 in 2013-14 to 397,085 last year. MCGM owns and runs 1,252 primary schools in Greater Mumbai for children from low-income households, offering primary education in seven vernacular languages besides English. According to the Praja report, the flight from vernacular medium schools was 10.4 percent compared to 5.3 percent from its English primaries. “At this rate, the day is not far when MCGM schools will have more teachers and employees than students,” says Nitai Mehta, managing trustee of the Praja Foundation. According to Mehta, 40,778 students have dropped out of MCGM schools during the past five years, even as the corporation’s education budget has doubled from Rs.1,761 crore in 2010-11 to Rs.2,630 crore in 2015-16. Annual per capita student expenditure in MCGM schools is Rs.59,744, the highest of all municipal governments countrywide, because of generous spending on free uniforms, books, lunch etc. Moreover this year, over 21,000 class VIII students were given electronic tablets free of charge. Nitin Wadhwani, founder-director of the Citizens Association for Child Rights, an NGO which is involved with MCGM’s education programmes, says that all is far from well with the corporation’s schools. “While the records indicate an excess number of teachers, in reality, most classes are without teachers because they are busy attending to administrative work or training programmes. Even MCGM’s English medium schools, in which enrolments are rising, are struggling with teacher shortages,” he says. Typically, MCGM officials don’t accept that muddled syllabus formulation, ill-trained teachers reluctant to teach in English, and teacher absenteeism are prime causes behind the steady exodus of students from free-of-charge MCGM schools into fees-levying private, especially unrecognised private budget schools, which are mushrooming in Mumbai’s proliferating slums. Instead, they blame parents’ growing aversion to vernacular medium schools. “Parents from even low-income households prefer private ‘convent’ to municipal schools and English medium education because of the aspirational values attached to them. This is reflected in the 14.77 percent annual increase in MCGM’s English medium primary schools. But even so, most city-based parents want to get their children into private English-medium schools under the 25 percent quota reserved in private schools by the Right of Children to Free & Compulsory Education Act, 2009. For similar reasons children are dropping out of municipal schools in Nagpur and Pune as well,” says Dr. J. Keluskar, deputy education officer of MCGM’s education department. Yet at bottom, informed educationists and academics in Mumbai ascribe the rising unpopularity of MCGM’s schools to the…

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The ruling aam aadmi party (AAP) piloted two education bills — the Delhi School (Verification of Accounts and Refund of Excess Fee) Bill 2015 and Delhi School Education Act and Rules 1973 (Amendment) Bill 2015 — through the Delhi state legislative assembly on December 3. Introduced by deputy chief and education minister Manish Sisodia as “revolutionary”, the proposed bills (now awaiting approval of the President who is advised by the Central government) invest the AAP government (which was voted to power with an overwhelming majority in the assembly election of February 2015) with the power to determine fees, teacher pay scales and admission processes of 1,800 private unaided schools in Delhi NCR (national capital region), excluding Gurgaon and Noida. Under the Delhi School (Verification of Accounts and Refund of Excess Fee) Bill 2015, the state government will have the power to appoint a five-member committee — comprising a chartered accountant, retired civil engineer, an eminent educationist and additional-director of education, and headed by a retired high or district court judge — to inspect the accounts of all private unaided (financially independent) schools, direct refund of “excess fees” levied, adjudicate complaints and/or take suo motu action regarding violations of the provisions of Delhi School Education Act, 1973. The committee is also empowered to address complaints made by parents of at least 20 students or one-fifth of the total strength of a school whichever is less, with regard to utilisation of fees/funds. Violators could get a jail term of upto seven years or a fine of upto Rs.5 lakh or both. The amendment to the 43-year-old Delhi School Education Act, 1973 (DSE Act) bans all capitation fees or forced donations and prescribes admissions by lottery in all including entry level classes (s. 16A). Under s. (10) (1) (a) it also abolishes teacher pay parity between private and government schools prescribed by the DSE Act since “many budget schools which charge very low fees cannot pay their teachers at (sic) par with the government pay commissions”. “The salary and allowances payable to, and the terms and conditions of service of employees of recognised private schools shall be such as may be prescribed by the government,” says Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal.  Unsurprisingly, the bills have enraged private school promoters, principals and teachers (denied pay parity with overpaid government school teachers). According to them, the two bills fly in the face of the Supreme Court’s full-bench judgement in T.M.A. Pai Foundation vs. Union of India (2002) in which the court upheld the fundamental right of all citizens to promote education institutions under Article 19 (1) (g) of the Constitution and earn reasonable profit.  “It looks like the authorities concerned do not understand the way a school operates nor have they studied the rules laid down by the apex court of the country in related matters. The poor condition of government-managed schools is not a secret and now, just to serve its political agenda of appeasing subsidy-seeking parents, the AAP government wants to inflict the…

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Congratulations for raising awareness of early childhood care and education (ECCE). EducationWorld has done a great service by impacting the vital importance of ECCE upon the public through conferences and especially the EducationWorld India Preschool Rankings (EW December) and awards. Re the new categories (franchised, owned and part of high school) into which all preschools have been divided for ranking this year, I don’t understand why EducationWorld felt the need to make this segregation. The quality of ECCE and the common parameters on which all have been ranked have nothing to do with a preschool being franchised, owned or feeder of a high school. Under the new classification system, many Podar Education Network preschools which are owned or attached with high schools, have been placed in the franchised category and vice versa. Although most parents aren’t bothered whether a preschool is franchised or owned, they definitely want to know who they’re dealing with. So if a parent has been told that a learning centre is owned and EW classifies it as franchised or other category preschool, they would feel cheated and infer that important information was withheld. Please instruct the company which conducts your survey to ensure each preschool is placed in the proper category. Swati Popat Vats President, Podar Education Network, Mumbai The new taxonomy makes broad classifications. In the cases of preschool chains in which some institutions are owned and others franchised, it’s very time consuming to ascertain the exact status of each school. Therefore companies/chains with a mix of owned and franchised preschools are classified as being in the franchised category — Editor   Faulty logic After the stupendous performance of Pathways schools in the EducationWorld India School Rankings 2015, we had great expectations that our preschools would also be highly ranked. But this legitimate expectation was belied. The reason for our disappointment is the new preschools classification system adopted this year. In 2014, Pathways Early Years, Sector 49 was ranked #3 in Gurgaon. This year we expected to be ranked higher as the team had put in a lot of hard work in the past academic year. But due to the new classification system our ranking has gone down to #7. The logic of this new system is faulty. Just because Pathways Early Years is owned by the management of Pathways schools, it doesn’t need to be ranked in the composite schools category. Pathways Early Years is a standalone preschool and is independent of the composite Pathways schools. Your new taxonomy will not only demoralise our team but will affect the image of Pathways Early Years externally as well. Dropping from #3 last year to #7 is a drastic fall and change of the classification system is unlikely to be accepted as an excuse. I request you to please reassess the new system next year. Jasmeet Chouhan Sarla Holdings Pvt. Ltd Gurgaon   Ranking mystery We are surprised that the ranking of Bamboola Playschool, Chennai has dropped in the EW Preschool Rankings 2015 (EW December). Bamboola…

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On January 26 the nation will celebrate its 65th Republic Day. That’s the day on which over six decades ago, the Constituent Assembly of India, comprising the sub-continent’s most eminent political leaders, intellectuals and legal professionals who had spent almost three years to draft, debate and shape the Constitution of India, declared the country a sovereign Republic, and presented the final draft of the Constitution under which newly independent India would be governed and administered.   Republic Day is a very important day in the annual calendar of the nation. It prompts — or should prompt — all right-thinking and responsible citizens to seriously reflect upon the condition of the Republic and evaluate the extent to which the ideals set out in the Constitution have been achieved, and if not, why not. Beyond the grand Soviet-style military parade and march past staged on Rajpath, Delhi on January 26 every year, it’s a day of stock-taking, reflection and honest assessment of the state of the nation.  This is what we have attempted in the cover story of the first month of the new year written in anticipation of Republic Day. Unfortunately, 65 years after the Constitution was presented to the people with great hope and expectations, the bitter truth is that none of the basic ideals — justice, liberty, equality and fraternity — are anywhere near realisation. Although it’s often argued that 65 years in the life of a nation is a very short period, the plain truth is that our Republic has been bypassed and bested by several dozen countries which were more disadvantageously positioned in terms of natural and human resources than India in 1950. It’s painful but necessary to acknowledge that currently the Indian Republic is ranked #130 in the international league table of the UNDP’s annual Human Development Report, and is among the world’s bottom-ranked countries on almost every parameter devised to assess the progress and development of nations. In my considered opinion, the neglect of public education — especially primary education ab initio — is the mother cause of the pandora’s box of ills that plague the Republic today. Regrettably, the vital issue of ways and means of providing high-quality, universal public education has been continuously fudged. I believe that deep debate of this issue is overdue, and is the prerequisite of re-energising the spluttering national development effort. Meanwhile, also driven by the belief that the parents’ community is a partner of principals and teachers in education, with this first issue of the new year, we present ParentsWorld, a supplementary publication of EducationWorld. Launched as a prototype, for financial and logistic reasons, ParentsWorld is being mailed to select subscribers and will be available to newsstand purchasers of EducationWorld. Non-recipients interested in ParentsWorld, please write-in to our head office. Indian education is in crisis. Join with us in 2016 to make it the #1 item on the national agenda.  

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