Despite being born with only 10 percent vision, Delhi-based Rakshit Malik (18) was ranked #3 nationally (in the physically challenged category) in the class XII school-leaving examination of the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) which has 17,000 affiliated schools countrywide. CBSE’s pan-India results were declared on May 21. This humanities student of Amity International […]
For the paradox of an acute shortage of skilled personnel and a rising tide of unemployed youth which defines the Indian economy, the country’s academy is increasingly – and – rightly being faulted: Dilip Thakore
Although according to spokespersons of the ruling BJP-led NDA government in New Delhi the Indian economy has the highest rate of […]
Deep within the Gudalur valley, bounded by the Mudumalai, Wyanad and Bandipur tiger reserves, the Viswa Bharati Vidyodaya Trust has developed a school which is attracting the neglected children of Adivasi tribes into primary education
“What use is your education to us? It will only take away our children. Your schools talk about changing the environment […]
While the Supreme Court has stayed an Allahabad high court judgement which has struck down the minority status of AMU, the Central government’s withdrawal from the appeal is being interpreted as the BJP/NDA government’s betrayal of the Muslim community Arati Bhargava
Even as all major political parties have started to gear up for next year’s […]
Arati Bhargava interviewed AMU vice chancellor Lt. Gen (Retd.) Zameer Uddin Shah over e-mail. Excerpts:
The Central government has expressed its intent to withdraw its appeal in the Supreme Court against the 2006 Allahabad high court judgement striking down AMU’s minority status. What’s your reaction?
I was shocked and disappointed when I learnt about attorney-general Mukul Rohatgi’s […]
Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) has had a chequered history with Parliament amending the parent AMU Act, 1920 several times, and frequent disputes with the courts over its minority status. A summary:
Article 30 (1) of the Constitution. “All minorities, whether based on religion or language, shall have the right to establish and administer educational institutions of […]
Even as the country’s leaders, cutting across all political parties, take two steps forward and one step back on the issue of full-throttle liberalisation and deregulation of the Indian economy to unleash the bottled-up entrepreneurial energy of private industry to create jobs and real learning opportunities for India’s 242 million young citizens aged between 15-24, […]
The Science/Business Innovation Board (AISBL, estb.2007) is a Brussels-based not-for-profit scientific association which conducts original policy research, engages with policymakers and the press, and generally works to improve the climate for innovation in Europe. Its members include the ESADE Business School, INSEAD, Microsoft, BP, SKF, Foley & Lardner LLP, Aalto University and Imperial College, London. […]
Two recent studies, one on the better public perception of private schools and another highlighting the incompetence of government school teachers in Uttar Pradesh, have once again beamed a harsh spotlight on the pathetic quality of education dispensed in 169,000 government and aided schools in the country’s most populous (215 million) state.
With Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress (TMC) back in power in Writers Building, Kolkata, for a second consecutive term in the eastern seaboard state of West Bengal (pop.91 million) after winning 211 of the 294 seats in the recently concluded state legislative assembly elections, the West Bengal intelligentsia has mixed feelings about the electoral verdict.
Maharashtra (pop. 114 million), India’s most industrialised state, is all set to introduce a new statewide common exam to improve the learning outcomes of 1.7 million class IX children in the 21,000 secondary schools affiliated with the Maharashtra State Board of Secondary and Higher Secondary Education (MSBSHSE). This proposal was mooted at […]
The report of the five-member committee chaired by former Union cabinet secretary T.S.R. Subramanian, constituted last October by the Union ministry of human resource development (HRD) to draft a National Policy on Education (NPE) 2016, which was presented to Union HRD minister Smriti Irani on May 28, has quickly run into a storm.
Both your cover story and editor’s letter (EW June) made compulsive reading. The latter because it lays bare the dismal state of Indian education in light of international standing and the former as the ubiquitous, all too familiar, resigned acceptance of an examination board that is the ‘best’, in a quagmire of mediocre, often substandard […]
The fortuitous exposure of the rank ignorance of four students who topped the intermediate (Plus Two) arts and science stream exams conducted by the Bihar School Examinations Board (BSEB) in March, is an indicator of outright corruption and inefficiency which has permeated the country’s education system. Transformed into celebrities and interviewed on social media, the […]
Curiously, there’s been a deep disconnect between Indian industry and academia for over four decades, with neither the leaders of India Inc nor wiseacres of the academy being aware that the national interest demands their active engagement and cooperation. I recall that over three decades ago when I was editor of the country’s first two […]
It’s a season of change in some of India’s top-ranked private boarding schools. Several legacy residential schools across the country have new incumbents in the office of principal/headmaster. Among them: The Doon School, Dehradun (TDS, estb.1935), routinely ranked the country’s #1 all-boys boarding school in the annual EducationWorld India School Rankings and the Lawrence School, […]
Director-principal, Jayshree Periwal Group of Schools, Jaipur
Where would you place education on your national list of priorities?
#1 because development is education and education is development.
Thinker/philosopher you admire the most.
Bill Gates is a great thinker/philosopher. He had the courage to follow his dream and then donated most of his wealth to global society.
The Raj At War: A People’s History of India’s second world war by Yasmin Khan bodley head; Price: Rs.2,022; Pages: 432
The Raj at War: People’s History of India’s Second World War by Yasmin Khan, associate professor of history at Oxford University and winner of the Royal Historical Society’s Gladstone Prize, 2007, is another magnum opus after her […]
Phil Jackson, the highly successful coach of the Chicago Bulls and Los Angeles Lakers (now the president of the New York Knicks) whose approach to coaching basketball stars has been profoundly influenced by Eastern philosophies, lists the management and motivational principle “know when to step back and let people find their own solution to a […]
Dilip Thakore interviewed Dr. V.S. Rao, interim vice chancellor of the top-ranked Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS), Pilani till mid-July and president-designate of NIIT University (estb. 2009), over email and the telephone. Excerpts.
After a long innings at BITS-Pilani, which has built a huge reputation as India’s #1 private engineering university, you are taking […]
There are no cars in the car park at Hiidenkivi Comprehensive School; most pupils walk or cycle to school. Inside, they sit at tables of four in groups of mixed abilities. They have a say in what they learn and where: many work slouched against a wall in the corridor. Tests are rare. Lunch is […]
No car may honk nor lorry rumble near secondary schools on the two days in June when students are taking their university entrance exams, known as gaokao. Teenagers have been cramming for years for these tests, which they believe (with justification) will determine their entire future. Yet it is at an earlier stage of education […]
A British sandwich course, which gives students a stint in industry during their studies, is a bit like a plain old cheese and pickle sarnie — a year of work in the middle of three or four years of academic study.
But the Canadian equivalent — called cooperative education — instead resembles a sextuple-decker club sandwich, […]
Huge investment in university estates and impressive infrastructure doesn’t necessarily result in an improved learning experience for students, according to a new study. Researchers at the University of Manchester and Kingston University have found that staff and students are often uncertain about how to maximise the educational potential of newly built flexible teaching spaces and […]
Arab countries produce 5.9 percent of the world’s GDP, but the region’s governments account for less than 1 percent of total global R&D spending, according to Unesco. Bahrain spends just 0.04 percent of GDP; Egypt spends 0.7 percent. By contrast, India spends about 0.8 percent and Britain 1.6 percent.
Visiting some American universities these days feels like touring the scene of an earthquake, or a small war. Though administrators insist the protests across campuses in the past year were therapeutic, grievances seethe. Fears for jobs, and of harm — both reputational and physical — endure. “The campus is traumatised,” says Reuben Faloughi, one of […]
In end April, I was in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as a G-20 delegate together with the heads of well-known schools such as Marlborough and Wellington (UK), Kings and Geelong (Australia) and Appleby (Canada).
During our week-long visit to Beijing and Hangzhou, we interacted with numerous people guiding the phenomenal progress being made in […]
I’ll be completing my B.Pharma next year. I am interested in research, particularly in biotechnology. Am I eligible for a postgrad programme in biotechnology?
Shanker Iyer, Chennai
Since biotechnology is a multidisciplinary field, students of a spectrum of bioscience subjects, including B.Pharma, are eligible to study it at the postgraduate level. The Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), […]
Once the refuge of graduates who couldn’t land a job in any other white collar vocation, primary-secondary teaching has undergone a sea change:Swati Roy
There are an estimated 9 million teachers employed in the country’s 1.4 million primary-secondary schools. Despite this, according to the Delhi-based RTE Forum, there’s a shortage of 500,000 school teachers countrywide. Even […]
Brig (Dr.) R.S. Grewal is vice chancellor of Chitkara University, Himachal Pradesh
In April, the Union human resource development (HRD) ministry published its inaugural league table ranking India’s Top 100 universities under its uniquely indigenous National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF). Coincidently a few weeks earlier on March 2 at Melbourne University, presidents and vice chancellors of […]
Mangalore-based Ajay Gopi (19) has been selected for the Youth Ventures programme of the US-based Ashoka Innovators for the Public (formerly Ashoka Foundation). Ajay has designed a social entrepreneurship venture incorporating aquaponics technology, which will employ rural youth and benefit farming communities. As a member of Ashoka’s Youth Venture programme initiated last September, Ajay will […]
These league tables rank India’s Top 100 CISCE & CBSE schools on the basis of highest average and median scores in the recently concluded board exams
For several decades, the Delhi-based Council for the Indian School Certificate Examinations (CISCE) and Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) — India’s […]
American historian Eric Foner of Columbia University is a Pulitzer Prize winner. His area of specialisation is the reconstruction and rebuilding of the south after the American civil war (1861-1865). Sensing lucrative opportunities in the confederacy of the so-called slave states that lay prostrate after the four-year civil war, many northern soldiers of fortune made […]
A top-ranked private research university, University of Miami, USA offers 116 bachelors, 105 Masters and 63 doctoral programmes to 16,000 students – SUMMIYA YASMEEN
Established in 1925, the University of Miami (UM) is a top-ranked private research university with an aggregate enrolment of 16,000 students instructed by 3,040 faculty. In its America’s Best Colleges 2016 Rankings, […]
Sited in the educationally under-served Bhimbhar suburb of Siliguri in Darjeeling district, Fr. LeBlond School has earned an excellent reputation for values-based affordable residential education Paromita Sengupta
Sited on a ten-acre campus nestling within green tea gardens and pineapple plantations in the foothills of the Himalayas in Bhimbhar suburb of Siliguri (pop.700,000), Darjeeling district, the CISCE-affiliated K-12 […]
The US Green Building Council (USGBC) inaugurated its first Indian LEED Lab programme — a multidisciplinary immersion study course to educate and prepare students to become green building leaders and sustainability-focused citizens — in the Knowledge Institute of Technology (KIOT), Salem, Tamil Nadu, on June 29. LEED is the most widely used […]
Super 30 Patna, a voluntary organisation which provides free-of-charge tuition to 30 students annually from poor households to write the highly competitive IIT-JEE every year and has an 86 percent admissions record, has undertaken to coach bottom-of-the-pyramid students in Uttar Pradesh as well.
“At the invitation of UP chief minister Akhilesh Yadav, […]
“India needs more entrepreneurs with almost a million people joining the workforce every year. If we don’t groom the job-creators (entrepreneurs), we will have a bigger problem on our hands in the future.”
Sunil Kanoria, president of Assocham, on clearing the “NPA (non-performing assets) mess” of banks to boost entrepreneurship (Outlook, June 6)
The Congress state government in Karnataka (pop. 66 million) is in a catch-22 situation over the issue of shutting down government primary schools with rock-bottom enrolment. On June 1, the state’s Directorate of Public Instruction (DPI) issued a “merger” (read closure) circular announcing the merger of 2,959 government schools in 34 academic districts (including 98 […]
Ronita Torcato Due consideration will be given to starting environmental courses in universities across the state, assured Maharashtra Governor CP Radhakrishnan, in response to a .....Read More
The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) is considering introducing two levels—standard and advanced—for science and social science in Classes 9 and 10, officials said. .....Read More
