EducationWorld July 16

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 their choice.” 1920. The Muhammadan Anglo Oriental College, promoted by Sir Syed Ahmad Khan and members of the Muslim community in 1877, was upgraded into a university through the AMU Act, 1920 enacted by the British India government. An endowment of Rs.30 lakh by the Muslim community was imposed as a precondition of the British India government enacting this legislation. 1951. Post-independence, the Congress government amended the AMU Act, 1920 to make hitherto compulsory religious instruction optional. 1965. The Congress government at the Centre amended the AMU Act, 1920 to abolish the governance and administrative powers of the University Court. This amendment prompted one S. Azeez Basha to file a writ petition in the Supreme Court contending that it abridged the right of minorities to “administer” their institutions without interference as guaranteed by Article 30(1) of the Constitution of India. 1967. In S. Azeez Basha vs. Union of India (1968 SCR 833), the Supreme Court ruled that AMU isn’t a minority institution because it had been ‘established’ by an Act of the British India government, and not by the Muslim community. 1981. Parliament enacted the Aligarh Muslim University (Amendment) Act, 1981, overruling the Supreme Court’s verdict in the Azeez Basha Case and confirmed the minority status of AMU. 2005. One Dr. Naresh Agarwal and several non-Muslim students filed a writ petition in the Allahabad high court challenging the reservation of 50 percent of seats in AMU’s Jawaharlal Nehru Medical College for Muslims. In Dr. Naresh Agarwal & Ors vs. Union of India (WP. No. 15504 of 2005) the court ruled that the conferment of minority status by Parliament through the AMU (Amendment) Act, 1981 was ultra vires and unconstitutional. 2006. AMU, the Central (Congress-led UPA-I) government, AMU Old Boys Association and Muqeet Chaudhary, an AMU alum, filed appeals in the Supreme Court against the Allahabad high court judgement. 2016. Attorney-general of India Mukul Rohatgi announced withdrawal of the Central government’s appeal against the Allahabad high court judgement. 

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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, an unemployment tsunami is sweeping across the subcontinent. Yet, the mass unemployment phenomenon countrywide is not solely the onus of the Central and state governments. Government failure to privatise bleeding public sector enterprises and improve ease of doing business conditions for industry, commerce and entrepreneurs combined with intellectual inertia and obsolescence on campus India is raining misery and disillusionment on millions of youth countrywide as the case histories given below vividly illustrate. • Last September, when the Uttar Pradesh state government advertised in the print media to recruit 368 office peons, a job which requires the minimum qualification of primary school (class V) completion and the ability to ride a bicycle, it received 2.3 million applications. Among the applicants were 150,000 graduates, 24,969 postgraduates and 255 applicants with Ph D qualifications. The job pays Rs.16,000 per month. • According to a news report (August 21, 2012) in The Independent (UK), in 2003 when the Municipal Council of Greater Bombay (BMC) advertised for 30 rat catchers — individuals required to hunt and kill some of the reportedly 88 million rats foraging in the garbage dumps and sewers of the city — the corporation received over 2,000 applications, including one from a college graduate. A decade earlier, another BMC ad for 70 rat-catchers attracted 40,000 responses, half of them from college/university graduates. The job pays about Rs.15,000 per month subject to a minimum of 25 rats being killed each night. • In January this year when the municipal corporation of Amroha (pop.217,587), in the Bareilly district of Uttar Pradesh (which includes the town of Rae Bareilly, the favoured Lok Sabha constituency of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty which has produced three prime ministers) advertised for 114 road sweepers (safai karamcharis), it received 19,000 applications, mostly from BA, B.Sc, MA, B.Tech and MBA degree holders. Meanwhile, the state’s Valmiki (Dalit) community organisations representing sweepers have protested, demanding the posts be reserved for the community. No educational qualifications are required for these jobs which pay Rs.17,000 per month. • According to a report in the Mumbai-based daily DNA (March 10), advertisements for recruiting 4,883 police constables in Maharashtra, including 1,275 in Mumbai, were placed in the print media in late January. In response, over 700,000 applications were received. Among the applicants for this job which requires a minimum qualification of class XII, were 152,000 graduates (including 1,061 graduate engineers). The post pays Rs.17,000 per month plus modest perquisites.

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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. In 2012, it published a study titled Making Industry-University Partnerships Work — Lessons from Successful Collaborations. The publication includes over a dozen case studies of successful corporate-university partnerships under several thematic heads — Partnerships that Impact Teaching & Learning (Microsoft-Cisco-Intel-University of Melbourne; Aalto University: International Design Business Management Programme; BP’s Energy Biosciences Institute with University of California, Berkeley; and Audi’s Ingolstadt Institute of TU Munich); Partnerships that Develop New Funding Streams (Imperial Innovations Group PLC and Imperial College, London); Partnerships that Rethink the Role of Research Universities (University of California’s Industry-University Cooperative Research Program, and Partnerships that Go Strategic (IBM-ETH Zurich; SKF-Imperial College, London; IBM-Imperial College, London; GE Global Research Munich; Siemens-TU Berlin, MIT; Nokia-Aalto University, UC Berkeley). “When companies and universities work in tandem to push the frontiers of knowledge, they become a powerful engine for innovation and economic growth. Silicon Valley is a dramatic example. For over five decades, a dense web of rich and long-running collaborations in the region have given rise to new technologies at a breakneck pace, and transformed industries while modernising the role of the university,” write the authors of this valuable study, which is highly recommended to leaders of India Inc and vice chancellors and faculty of India’s under-performing universities. The paper also offers “lessons” derived from the study on ways and means to intensify industry-academia collaboration in the public interest. Excerpts: University leadership is vital. University presidents need to make industry-university partnerships a strategic priority and communicate the message regularly to the entire academic community. Long-term strategic partnerships with built-in flexibility work best. The most fertile starting point for a partnership is one that allows industry to do something it can’t do itself. The world’s leading technology multinationals have dozens, if not hundreds, of strategic partnerships with universities. But increasingly, the trend is to narrow the focus on a handful of strategic partnerships that aim higher, receive significantly greater funding and last longer. Start with a shared vision and develop a strategy. The first step to a healthy partnership is assessing the core academic strengths of the university and the core research competence of the company to identify promising opportunities for collaboration. Put the right people in charge — those who cross boundaries. People determine the success or failure of industry-university partnerships. To attract industry involvement, universities must have people capable of building and managing partnerships. Kick-start the dialogue — encourage cross-fertilisation of ideas. Universities should create opportunities for academics and company researchers and executives with shared interest to come together and develop a dialogue. Don’t get hung up on intellectual property. Develop a broad overarching framework agreement and work out details on a case-by-case basis. A…

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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. In the first study commissioned by the State Council of Educational Research and Training (SCERT), 761 parents/guardians of children (459 from urban and 302 from rural households) voted private schools way ahead of government schools on several parameters ranging from cleanliness of toilets and availability of drinking water to provision of teaching-learning resources and adherence to time tables. The second study conducted by the District Institute of Education and Training (DIET), administered a 90-minute multiple-choices test to teachers in 74 government schools in Lucknow, the administrative capital of UP. Surprisingly, 70 percent of the 296 teachers tested scored less than 50 percent in Hindi, the national lingua franca and dominant language of Uttar Pradesh. Paradoxically, a lesser 62 failed (less than 50 percent) the English language learning and comprehension test. State education officials are curiously nonchalant about the damning outcomes of these studies. “According to the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER), while in 2006, 30 percent of UP’s children were enrolled in private primaries, by 2014 this number had crossed 50 percent. We have always known that private schools are better regarded. The study confirms this belief. More alarmingly, it reveals the extent of public disenchantment with government schools,” admits S.B. Singh, director of SCERT, Uttar Pradesh. The SCERT study also reveals that private schools have a definite edge over government schools as English is the medium of classroom instruction, whereas in the latter English is merely a subject. Of the guardians interviewed, 81 percent were of the opinion that English-medium education is critical for the success of their children. Academics in Lucknow ascribe the poor communication and pedagogical skills of teachers to the proliferation of substandard teacher training institutes in the state which offer training to 168,000 pre-service teachers every year, and the failure of successive state governments to invest in in-service training programmes. The failure of teacher training institutes (80 percent of them privately promoted) coupled with the unbridled growth of low-cost private budget schools (of which there is no official count) as also the state government’s reluctance to make investments in in-service training, are formidable hurdles to raising educational standards According to S.K. Singh, a Lucknow-based academic, though private budget schools “often, though not always”, perform better in terms of measured learning outcomes, it’s because teachers in government schools are confronted with very unfavourable conditions. “Classes are larger, student needs more diverse and most children are first generation learners from impoverished households,” says Singh. Although instances of government schools out-performing private schools are not unknown — the Central government’s 850 Kendriya Vidyalayas and 598 Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalayas are noteworthy examples — the plain truth is that per child expenditure in these schools is almost…

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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. While it cannot be denied that during the first five years of TMC rule, the state’s crumbling infrastructure — a legacy of 34 years of rule of the Communist Party of India (CPM) in the state (1977-2011) — has improved, freebies such as rice at Rs.2 per kg, corruption scandals, and ‘syndicate raj’ (cornering of public contracts by TMC cadres) have driven government finances deep into the red. This apart, an issue troubling the bhadralok (educated middle class) is the continuous decline of West Bengal’s once hallowed education institutions now infamous for rampant campus violence, political interference, exam malpractices and scams. Taking cognizance of these apprehensions of the influential bhadralok, on June 18, the second TMC administration announced several new initiatives to boost higher education. Among them: free wi-fi service in the state’s 400 colleges, stringent rules to prevent ragging and common syllabuses for all colleges and universities to give students from the state proper preparation for all-India competitive examinations and job interviews. While these initiatives have been welcomed, a June 22 declaration by state education minister, Partha Chatterjee, that the government is mulling a proposal to recruit retired teachers to fill teacher vacancies in government schools, has proved a damper. This is because teacher recruitment for 92,000 state government schools has been stymied since 2012 following a series of scams in recruitment tests and pending court cases, marring the employment prospects of thousands of youth who aspire to become government school teachers. The irony is that currently, there are 70,000 notified vacancies in government primaries and 18,000 for class IX-X teachers. With recruitment at a standstill, the average teacher-pupil ratio in government schools has risen to 1:59 against the 1:35 prescribed by the RTE Act, 2009, which is worsening the already poor quality education delivered in government schools. Consequently, even though the newly sworn-in TMC government’s June 18 initiatives have been welcomed by academics in Kolkata, the teacher recruitment imbroglio has cast a cloud over the state’s education sector. Clearly, if retired teachers are re-inducted into the school education system, the hopes of thousands of young, open-minded and presumably more innovative teachers will be dashed. Therefore, educationists in Kolkata are demanding a clean-up of the TET (Teacher Eligibility Test) exam system. According to Tulsi Masant, convenor of the DL.Ed (Diploma in Elementary Education) Students Forum, which has played a pivotal role in exposing TET malpractices, there’s no need for the government to recruit retired teachers as there are 180,000 trained TET (2013)-qualified teachers still unemployed. “The state government should immediately clear the appointments of these qualified teachers whose eligibility has not been questioned in the pending court case. With 180,000 trained and eligible candidates awaiting…

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Maharashtra: New common exam 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 a meeting of officials of the education department and Maharashtra State Council of Educational Research and Training in Pune on June 4. Under the proposal, MSBSHSE, which has hitherto been testing and certifying school-leaving class X and XII students, will also set class IX papers for all subjects. However, although MSBSHSE will set the class IX common question papers, the exams will be conducted by affiliated schools which will also evaluate students’ answer papers. “Schools aren’t doing proper objective evaluation of class IX students resulting in an average of 10 percent being detained as they are adjudged unprepared to write the class X board exam in the following year. But, almost half these detained students are able to pass the class X exam when they write it privately. We want to prepare class IX question papers to enable schools to objectively judge which students are likely to pass or fail,” says Nand Kumar, Maharashtra state education secretary. Private school principals and managements say that only a small minority of schools — 2-3 percent — unwarrantedly detain students and education officials should pull them up rather than impose another common exam on students and schools. In any event, the promotions policy guidelines of the education ministry make it difficult for schools to fail/detain class IX students. “Government guidelines encourage schools to award grace marks and use the ‘combined passing’ format which allows students with below pass mark scores in some subjects to combine scores across six subjects to get a pass marks average,” says Achama Mathew, CEO of Bombay Cambridge Gurukul, which runs five state board-affiliated schools with an aggregate enrolment of 9,074 students. Adds Nikhat Jafferey, principal of Mumbai-based Hansraj Morarji Public School: “The root cause of poor class IX and X exam results is the no-detention in classes I-VIII provision of the Right of Children to Free & Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, 2009.” Quite clearly, the rationale of introducing a common test for all class IX children in MSBSHSE-affiliated schools is to prepare students to do well in the board’s class X and XII public exams. In 2015-16, the pass percentage of students writing MSBSHSE’s class X exam dipped to 89.56 percent from 91.46 percent in 2014-15. Another reason is to improve the image of MSBSHSE. In NCERT’s National Achievement Survey (NAS) 2015, which measured the real learning outcomes and cognitive skills of a representative sample of class X students of schools affiliated with 33 school examination boards including the CISCE and CBSE, MSBSHSE school students failed (below 50 percent) in four (English, maths, science and social science) subjects. They passed only in major Indian language (Marathi) with a score of 62 percent.…

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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. This is hardly surprising since Subramanian, an alum of the Imperial College, London and Harvard University who served as cabinet secretary during the tumultuous  noughties (1996-98), has a mind of his own unlike most bureaucrats, and isn’t afraid to speak it. Moreover, he is reputed not to have buried any bodies or incriminating evidence during his long career (1961-1998) which could be leveraged to toe any particular line. Therefore, one of his first demands was to make the report available to the public for debate and discussion, a suggestion refused by Irani on the ground that the report is “the property of 110,000 villages, over 5,000 blocks, over 500 districts, and 20 states, which have entrusted it to us with the confidence that any recommendation that comes to the Centre will be shared with them before it is made into a draft policy”. Unfazed and stating that “an informed public discussion which can provide valuable inputs for the final exercise to be undertaken in the (HRD) ministry,” Subramanian called a press conference in Delhi on June 23 and suo motu released the 230-page report of the committee which has made 90 recommendations for incorporation into the National Policy on Education, 2016. “It will not be an exaggeration to say that our education system is in disarray… it is imperative for India to change the methods of imparting education, to nurture and develop the qualities that can lead to a meaningful future — both for the individual and society,” says the introduction of the impressively detailed report. Most of the major recommendations of the Subramanian Committee have been repeatedly advocated by EducationWorld (estb.1999) and to that extent, are reflective of the positive impact of this pioneer publication on public education policies. Among them: repealing the no-detention until class VIII provision of the Right of Children to Free & Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, 2009 and introducing examinations after class V; provision of early childhood education for children in the four-six age group; introduction of vocational education from class VIII onwards; raising the annual outlay for education (Centre plus states) to 6 percent of GDP “without further loss of time”; granting greater financial and academic autonomy to higher educational institutions, and allowing top-ranked foreign universities to establish campuses in India. Some of the novel suggestions made by the committee include establishing an all-India education service on the model of the Indian Administrative Service; compulsory testing of teachers and renewal of their teaching licences every ten years; compulsory accreditation of all higher education institutions every three years; and restricting role of the University Grants Commission to disbursal of scholarships and fellowships to deserving and needy students. Union HRD minister Smriti Irani’s…

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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 education boards. It felt akin to reading about an Indian soccer ‘star’ reviewing strategy and tactics totally ignoring the hard fact that we stand #163 in FIFA (Federation of International Football Associations) rankings. Furthermore, it’s ironic that despite the fact that the National Achievement Survey 2015 has in effect declared the CISCE board the ‘best’ in India, there remains, as voiced by chief executive and secretary, Gerry Arathoon himself, a deep insecurity about the exodus of CISCE students to CBSE schools for higher secondary education. CISCE has announced that it will now follow the CBSE curriculum and examination pattern for science and mathematics. This exodus and ‘modification’ of CISCE’s syllabus/question pattern is a result of the misconception that the CBSE syllabus is more ‘conducive’ for candidates who aspire to succeed in the IIT-JEE (joint entrance examination). But nothing can burst the all-pervading academic Indian bubble of delusion that dismisses global rankings, or is just blinded by plain old ignorance. Robindra Subba Director, The Himali Boarding School, Darjeeling World of difference EducationWorld (June) has created history again by ranking India’s 33 school examination boards by interpreting data from NCERT’s National Achievement Survey 2015. I’m not at all surprised CISCE is ranked the country’s #1 examinations board. My own children followed the CISCE syllabus in school and as an English teacher in Mar Thoma College, Tiruvalla, Kerala for three decades I can easily tell the difference between students from CISCE and other schools. Prof. Bejoy Varughese Principal, Mar Thoma Residential School, Tiruvalla, Kerala Teacher training need Your cover story on NCERT’s National Achievement Survey 2015 (EW June) exposes the dark side of India’s school education system. It’s a disgrace that the average national score of class X students in standardised objective tests was below pass mark — less than 50 percent. It shows that students are completely unprepared to answer questions which test their problem-solving and cognitive skills. Unfortunately, their training in schools has equipped them with mere capability to reproduce memorised answers. Though you have rightly emphasised the urgent need to reform the syllabus formulation system to promote HOTS (higher order thinking skills) of students, this won’t be possible unless considerable investment is made in teacher training and development. The world’s best syllabus will yield negligible results unless it’s delivered creatively and efficiently by well-trained teachers. I hope Union HRD minister Smriti Irani has taken note of the NAS results, and that the imminent New Education Policy will give sufficient importance to syllabus commonality across the country’s 33 exam boards. Chiranjeevi Srivastava Delhi Grades inflation exposed The results of the National Achievement Survey 2015 (EW June) are a marked contrast to the unbelievably high scores recorded…

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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 student (Ruby Rai) who bested 510,000 arts students to top the state board’s class XII exam with a score of 444/500, described one of her subjects as “prodigal science” and opined that it’s about “cooking”. But for the exposé by informal journalists on social media, this scandal would never have come to light. With videos exposing the utter ignorance of these exam toppers going viral on social media, the state government was forced to order an enquiry and re-test. Since then the chairman of BSEB Lalkeshwar Prasad Singh has resigned while the examiners who assessed the answer papers are under investigation. In this connection, it’s also pertinent to recall that last year a photograph of parents and relatives scaling the walls of a four storey building to aid students writing BSEB’s class X exam had gone globally viral. It would be foolish to believe that open, uninterrupted and continuous corruption in education which characterises benighted Bihar (pop.99 million) is confined to that state. Thousand ways of cheating and gaming school and college exam systems have permeated Indian education. This is reflected in rock-bottom real learning outcomes reported by the annual primary education audits of NGO Pratham’s Annual Status of Education Reports, and NCERT’s National Achievement Survey 2015. Moreover in higher education, surveys of NASSCOM and Aspiring Minds highlight the unemployability of college/university graduates which translates into rock-bottom productivity of Indian industry and agriculture. Yet if corruption in education is so widely prevalent countrywide, the public mind-set which tends to regard cheating in exams as harmless pranks of exuberant youth is to blame. Indeed, almost a decade ago a typically anti-social Bollywood comedy titled Munna Bhai MBBS in which a gangster qualifies as a medical practitioner by having his college entrance exam written by an impersonator, was a huge hit and won several national awards. The dangerous end-justifies-the-means message this blockbuster passed on to the millions of illiterate and ill-educated who constitute the majority of the citizenry, completely bypassed the celebrated producer/director of the film as also the country’s inert intelligentsia. The plain truth dear readers, is that the prime purpose of schooling and higher education is not to pass examinations, but to prepare children and youth for the world of work where knowledge application and problem-solving capabilities, rather than paper qualifications, matter. Regrettably, neither the country’s myopic political class, nor foolish citizens have quite grasped this elementary verity.  Appointments wrecking institutions Despite reportedly being awarded degrees by Bombay and Delhi universities — details of which are shrouded in mystery — prime minister Narendra Modi, whose BJP-NDA government at the Centre completed two years in office on May 14, seems unaware that building strong institutions headed…

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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 business magazines, it was rare for the opinions of academics to feature on our pages, and rarer still for business magnates to make any reference to industry-academia cooperation or interaction. My routine perusal of increasingly boring contemporary business magazines and publications indicates this stand-off hasn’t changed.  The mutual indifference of industry and the academy has extracted a stiff price from the Indian economy. India Inc is notoriously averse to research and innovation as a result of which its productivity is rock-bottom by international standards. Similarly starved of sponsored research stimulus and funding, the research and citations record of time-serving academics is also abysmal. Over the past half century neither Indian industry nor the academy has produced any big bang product or process innovation. It’s shameful that automobile, computer, internet, cell phone and even labour-saving household and kitchen devices and other killer products and innovations — of which Indian consumers are enthusiastic consumers — were invented elsewhere.  It’s especially demoralising to learn that indigenous fighter jet Tejas has been 30 years in the making, and that even an indigenous parachute designed by the DRDO (Defence Research and Development Organisation) for over 12 years, flopped recently. And about the inability of industry or the academy to design a low-cost plough and other farm implements for the country’s utterly neglected rural majority, the less said the better.  If the record of corporate India for research and innovation is bad, the academy’s is worse. None of the country’s 37,000 colleges and 800 universities is ranked among the Top 100 in the annual World University Rankings league tables of the reputed London-based rating/ranking agencies QS and Times Higher Education. And as detailed in our cover story herewith, most of them recklessly certify hapless graduates who are unemployable in industry, which is paradoxically suffering an acute shortage of well-educated and skilled personnel. Hence in our cover feature of this issue, we stress that greater industry-academy cooperation is imperative for resolving the huge and snowballing challenge of youth unemployment confronting the nation.  In the special report, Delhi-based columnist Arati Bhargava traces the history of Aligarh Muslim University promoted as the Muhammadan Anglo Oriental College in 1877 by social activist Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, to modernise and mainstream youth of the minority Muslim community, and its long struggle for minority status. Why is the minority tag so important for AMU, the Muslim community and the country?  This is explained in unprecedented detail in this special feature.

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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, Sanawar (LSS, estb.1858), also routinely ranked among the Top 3 co-ed boarding schools. Peter Mclaughlin, an alum of the London School of Economics who had headed international schools in the UK and Egypt before he was appointed headmaster of TDS in 2009 after a global search, has put in his papers. Moreover after a long hiatus, Vinay Pande, who served as faculty at TDS for 19 years, has been appointed principal of the Lawrence School, Sanawar, where he had begun his teaching career. To this list, one might add Mayo College, Ajmer (estb.1875), although the new principal, the formidable Lt. General (Retd), Surendra Hari Kulkarni PVSM, AVSM, VSM, took charge over a year ago. Although EW (estb.1999) was the first publication to acknowledge the valuable contribution these vintage schools have made towards developing the nation’s human capital stock, the admiration was less than mutual. It was only after 2007, when your editors introduced the annual EW India School Rankings in which public opinion recognised the superior education provided by these islands of primary-secondary excellence, that their lofty headmasters deigned to acknowledge this pioneer publication. And while Praveen Vasisht, the long-serving principal of LSS, wrote some columns for EW and was inclined to share the frustrations of having to manage a board packed with government babus, Mclaughlin earned the jokey appellation of Perfidious Albion — a descriptive he didn’t quite appreciate — for having reneged on a contract to sign up every TDS parent as a subscriber. Nor was he amused by your editor’s narration of the no doubt apocryphal story of a Scotsman run over by a taxi while pursuing a pound coin in Regent St, London. Coroner’s verdict: Death due to natural causes. Crab culture complaint Most people — including media scribes — are probably unaware, but June 13 was a historic day in Indian journalism. In the insightful column he contributes to the Times of India, ad guru and social commentator Santosh Desai was allowed to acknowledge the existence of rival dailies Indian Express and also the Hindustan Times. This is a historic departure — although it could be a sub-editor’s oversight — from the established practice of Indian journalism and its competitive culture, under which every publication feigns ignorance, probably born out of contempt, of the existence of all rival publications, real or imagined. Hitherto, it was quite de rigueur for mighty media pundits to debate with phantom, unspecified enemies. Thus despite being promoted with the highest motive of raising Indian education to global standards, which would help the sales of newspapers, the isolationist mind-set of Indian media and the crab culture of editors, have denied this once-struggling publication even the tiniest…

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Jayshree periwal 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.   For or against the RTE Act’s 25 percent reservation for underprivileged children in private schools? Although I feel passionately for underprivileged children, I believe bundling students from widely diverse socio-economic and educational strata makes the underprivileged feel more disadvantaged.  Should education outlay be doubled by cutting defence expenditure? I would direct this question to macroeconomists. However, there is an urgent and undeniable need to increase resources for education.  Your favourite Nobel laureate. Rabindranath Tagore — thinker, educator and true patriot.  Your leadership style. I have always believed that at best, leaders are first among equals. The best leaders create new leaders by trusting others and letting them bloom. Your favourite book on education. For senior students, Excellent Sheep by William Deresiewicz; for parents Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother and for educators The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery.  How satisfied are you with the growth and development of the Jayshree Periwal Group of preschools and primary-secondary schools? We have 20,000 students passing through the portals of JP Group of schools every day. Today, our students have become top civil servants, technology company leaders, successful entrepreneurs, artists, musicians, designers, doctors and engineers. That inner satisfaction is my raison d’etre.  Pessimistic or optimistic about the future of education in India? Optimistic. India has the greatest minds and hearts in the world and we shall overcome our problems and difficulties.

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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 The Great Partition (2007). History from below was the project of subaltern historians during the 1980s, which was a paradigm shift in the study of history itself, by giving due attention to excluded and marginalised voices and recognising their important contribution to our society. The Raj at War does not claim to be one such text but it is written on similar lines. The Second World War changed the dynamics of international politics, toppling hegemonic colonisers from power and weakening their influence everywhere. It had equal consequences on the domestic politics of many would-be independent nations. The British Raj was at war from 1939 to 1945. Its colonies provided foot soldiers, princes provided financial support and all of British India was at war. The heartwrenching narratives in The Raj at War suggests that the war brought misery to the Indian subcontinent, and innocent civilians suffered for the cause of liberation of Europeans from the Axis Powers. Khan’s claim that “Britain did not fight the Second World War, the British Empire did”, is on scrutiny throughout the book, consistently documented by the contribution non-expert civilians made to win the war for the Empire. Khan has highlighted the contribution of nurses, road builders, seamen, schoolgirls, Bengal famine victims, Nepalese, Burmese and Gorkhas. Khan’s earlier book The Great Partition, which was about the creation of India and Pakistan, led her to probe the way war changed the fate of the Indian subcontinent. Before 1939, it wasn’t clear whether the mission of the Muslim League would be fulfilled, or even whether India would get her independence. For Jinnah, the war came as a “blessing in disguise”. It shaped the debate and paved the way for partition. Midnight’s Furies: the deadly legacy of India’s partition by Nisid Hajari houghton mifflin; Price: Rs.1,419; Pages: 304 Midnight Furies by Nisid Hajari is a detailed account of India’s partition analysing the historicity of the event on both sides of the cartographic divide. Hajari gives a vivid account of how leaders of the Congress as well as Muslim League manoeuvred for their share in the power structure as well as for territorial division. Today’s communal politics, the unresolved Kashmir issue and the role of the RSS then and now, are all the fallout of partition.  The demarcation of boundaries by Sir Cyrill Radcliffe was short sighted, and certainly not impartial. Sardar Patel’s role in the unification of the princely states through carrot-and-stick diplomacy was marred by the recalcitrancy of the Nizam of Hyderabad and the Nawab of Junagadh, and indecisiveness of the Maharajah of Kashmir. Patel’s soft attitude towards the RSS which was on the rampage in Punjab, Delhi, Bengal and Jammu showed their militant…

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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 crisis,” as the secret of his success (Bottom Line, January 15, 1997). To illustrate the effectiveness of this principle, Jackson describes a crisis in a 1994 playoff game in which Scottie Pippen refused to play what was left of the game when teammate Tony Kukoc was called up to take the last game-determining shot with 1.8 seconds remaining. In the locker room after the game, Jackson stepped back and allowed the team to handle the situation. Veteran Bill Cartwright stepped in and managed the crisis with great effectiveness. “I allowed my players to resolve the crisis and reaffirm their common goals,” he writes, illustrating that by stepping back, he orchestrated an act of empowerment by doing less. It’s difficult to separate authority and responsibility. Authority without responsibility leads to tyranny, whereas assignment of responsibility without authority results in coaches experiencing impotence. For coaches to be effective, they need to be invested with authority and responsibility. Although the legitimacy of a coach’s power resides in the designation itself, his/her effectiveness flows out of the relationship she is able to build with her players and followers. Since empowerment, by my definition, necessitates overall authority and responsibility, the question arises: “How can coaches use their power in ways that allow them to feel in charge of their lives?” On the surface, it would seem the only way coaches can acquire power is by the authority vested in them by administrators who control hiring and firing, salaries, and policy-making. However, coaches can also be empowered by their students, parents and, even by themselves. Leaders including coaches, can exercise varieties of power. Legitimate power, that is power by virtue of their position in the organisation, gives coaches the right to direct, reward and punish, and informal power which they derive from followers, i.e, players/athletes assigned to them. In youth and school sports, followers also include players’ parents. The best and most effective coaches enjoy legitimate and informal power if they are looked up to as role models and for the knowledge and skills they bring to the playing field. The appointing authorities and followers should be confident that coaches have the capability to bring out the best in each player. To appreciate how power and responsibility freely given or withheld can empower or demoralise coaches, here are some examples. Example 1. Well-meaning, but unprepared parents are often asked to coach a team because no one else is available. In such circumstances, experienced players in the team will be reluctant to give the coach the respect she needs to lead. This will inevitably demoralise such coaches. Lesson #1. Coaches need expertise to win the respect of followers and players. Without respect, coaches can’t…

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  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 charge at the newly-promoted NIIT University (NU). What is at the top of your agenda in this new assignment? NIIT University’s four core founding principles of industry-linked, technology-based, research-driven and seamless learning have built a solid foundation for this university of the future. My mission is to establish NIIT University as an institution of excellence which will redefine higher education in India. At the top of my agenda is fostering a research mind-set, and partnering with industry leaders, especially in sunrise industries, to develop study programmes aligned with the skill-sets required by the new knowledge economy. Despite NIIT Ltd’s excellent record in skilling an estimated 35 million IT industry professionals over the past three decades, NIIT University isn’t ranked among the Top 50 in the latest EducationWorld India Private University Rankings 2016. Where would you rank NIIT University? NIIT University has made a conscious decision to disregard rankings for the first ten years of operations. We believe institution-building is a long process and we need to focus on building a strong foundation on which we can build a higher education institution of global repute. Having said that, we have made significant strides in offering industry-linked education by entering into strategic alliances with leading corporates including ICICI, ESRI, IBM, WNS, PwC and Federal Bank. The university has also become a hot bed for budding entrepreneurs with over a dozen start-ups active on our campus. Moreover, we have engineered perhaps the greenest, eco-friendly university campus countrywide which has received several national awards. A common criticism of India’s university graduates is that they are not employable because their learning is too theoretical/textbookish. Given NIIT University’s parentage, it has the potential to produce industry-ready graduates. What’s your comment? The current education system is defined by a wide chasm between industry and academia. Very little of what is learnt in colleges and universities can be put into practice in corporates and businesses. In most education institutions, the curriculum is theoretical and students aren’t taught to apply theory in industry settings. Therefore right from the start, one of the core principles of NIIT University is to offer industry-linked education. To this end, we have constituted an industry advisory board (IAB) which will help us build a strong, engaged and active relationship with Indian industry. Quality of faculty is widely perceived as the Achilles heel of India’s higher education institutions. How impressed are you with the faculty of NIIT University? It’s undeniable that Indian higher education is suffering a severe shortage of adequately qualified faculty. This is reflected in the general lack of enthusiasm and passion for teaching/learning and research within the faculty as well as student communities. Regrettably, teachers…

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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 free. The youngest pupils go home by noon with little or no homework. Tens of thousands of visiting wonks have taken similar notes since 2000, when Finland came at or near the top for reading, maths and science in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), an influential triennial test of 15-year-olds in 60 or so countries. Teenagers consistently score higher only in Japan, Singapore, South Korea and the richest parts of China. But unlike these places, Finland is said to have cracked schooling without working its pupils into the ground. Inside the country, however, educators are worried. PISA scores fell in 2009 and 2012 (the next results will be published in December). Data suggest the slide began around the turn of the century. Children of immigrants tend to score worse, but native Finns’ scores have dipped, too. The problem is worst among girls from non-Finnish-speaking households and native boys: one in eight 15-year-old boys cannot read at the level necessary to keep studying. A separate problem is that when Finnish children are in school, they are surprisingly glum. About half of 14-15-year-olds feel their teachers don’t care about their lives. Finnish pupils are more likely than the average OECD student to say that their classroom environment is bad for learning. Tuomas Kurtilla, the country’s ombudsman for children, says 20-25 percent of Finnish girls aged 14 and 15 receive school counselling. Pasi Sahlberg, a former education ministry official, frets that Finnish education is repeating Nokia’s error: failing to innovate when on top. Literacy has traditionally been prized, says Sirkku Kupiainen of the University of Helsinki; until about 50 years ago the Lutheran church often would not marry Finns unless they could read. But between 2000-2009, the share of 15-year-olds reading more than 30 minutes per day fell from a half to a third. Teachers bemoan the siren song of the smartphone. Finland is hardly alone in facing shifts in youth culture, notes Tim Oates of Cambridge Assessment, a testing company. Some countries, like England, have responded by tightening discipline. But Finland is taking a sensitive and “pupil-led” approach. In August, its 313 municipalities will roll out their versions of a new national curriculum meant to restore the “joy and meaningfulness of learning”. Sceptics have two main concerns. The first is inequality. Finland’s gap between rich and poor pupils is smaller than in most OECD countries, but it has widened since 2000. Kurttila says well-off parents are renting flats near good (government) schools and entering pupils for competitive music classes to game the system. Critics of “phenomenon-based learning” say it will make things worse by reducing the time poorer pupils spend on core subjects. Opponents also…

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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 that an individual’s life chances in China are usually mapped out, often in ways that are deeply unfair. To give more students access to higher education, the government has increased its investment in the sector five-fold since 1997. The number of universities has nearly doubled. In 1998, 46 percent of secondary-school graduates went on to university. Now 88 percent of them do. About 7 million people — roughly one-third of those aged between 18 and 22 — now gain entry to some form of higher education institution each year. China’s universities offer more opportunity for social mobility than in many other countries, says James Lee of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. But the social backgrounds of those admitted have been changing. Until 1993, more than 40 percent of students were the children of farmers or factory workers. Now universities are crammed with people from wealthy, urban backgrounds. That is partly because a far bigger share of young people are middle-class. But it is also because rural students face bigger hurdles getting into them than they used to. The problem lies with inequality of access to senior high schools, which take students for the final three years of their secondary education. Students from rural backgrounds who attend such schools perform as well in the university entrance exams as those from urban areas. But most never get there. Less than 10 percent of young people in the countryside are admitted into senior high schools compared with 70 percent of their urban counterparts. The result is that a third of urban youngsters complete tertiary education, compared with only 8 percent of young rural youth. As in India, schools in the countryside are far weaker academically than urban ones. Local governments invest less in them per student than they do in cities. Urban parents tend to be better educated and thus better able to help children with their studies. Rural pupils often suffer from a “poverty of expectations”, says Jean Wei-Jun Yeung of the National University of Singapore: they are not encouraged to think they can succeed, so they don’t try to. In China, meritocratic exams have been revered since imperial times, when any man could sit them to enter the civil service. For centuries, they enabled the poor yet talented to rise to high office. The gaokao is similarly intended to be a great leveller. But society has become increasingly divided between those with degrees and those who never even went to senior high. That will mean growing numbers for whom social advancement will remain a distant dream.

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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, piled high and stuffed with fillings. Undergraduates spend up to two years in paid placements, alternating between a term in the workplace and a term in the classroom. Advocates say the model is creating graduates who are being snapped up by some of the world’s top-ranked companies at a furious rate. The University of Waterloo, based about an hour to the west of Toronto, boasts the world’s largest cooperative programme, incorporating 60 percent of its students. “If you go to Silicon Valley, they are hiring from Stanford, Berkeley and Waterloo,” says Graham Carr, vice president of research and graduate studies at Concordia University in Montreal. “It’s unbelievable.” A Wall Street Journal article in early May waxed lyrical about Waterloo graduates’ success, citing a 2015 report from a firm called Startup Compass that found they were the second most frequently hired in Silicon Valley after those from the University of California, Berkeley. Tony Munro, international recruitment and partnerships manager at Waterloo, explains that the idea is not just for computer science or engineering students. History and fine arts students find experience in galleries, marketing, public relations and other similar industries, he says. As well as going out to other companies, Waterloo also employs cooperative students in its own labs. Cooperative students earn an average of C$15,000 (Rs.7.86 lakh) per term, says Munro. For this reason, they graduate with less debt than their non-cooperative counterparts, a 2011 study by the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO) found. Students reported being more satisfied with their education, and the placements gave employers a way to pre-screen potential employees. However, the HEQCO report also found that some students reported being not given enough work or feeling bored. One academic at Waterloo told THE that because their courses are stretched to five years, cooperative students are sometimes too tired by the end of it to go into graduate study. They have also seen how much money they can make in tech firms. Still, although Waterloo’s system is still the biggest and most feted, other Canadian universities are ramping up their efforts. Concordia’s Carr wants to scale up his own cooperative programme, “but it takes a really institutional approach”, he cautions. The work of maintaining relationships with large numbers of employers and coordinating placements is huge: at Waterloo, it takes 150 staff in an entire building on campus to manage the cooperative effort.

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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 the technology installed in them. When they surveyed 212 second-year undergraduates at a Russell Group institution to find out what they felt would most enhance their learning experience, less than 5 percent said that better designed buildings are a priority. The study, published in the Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management, acknowledges that investment in new buildings may have proved to be a useful marketing tool for UK universities, which collectively spent more than £2.5 billion (Rs.24,085 crore) on their estates in 2014-15. But authors Steven Jones, Michael Sutcliffe, Joanna Bragg and Diane Harris say that universities cannot afford to “sit back, confident that their lavish capital expenditure programmes are delivering the best possible experience”. “The sums being spent by universities on new buildings are eye-watering, but the jury is still out on how much difference they really make to students’ learning,” says Dr. Jones, a senior lecturer at the Manchester Institute of Education. “The danger is that once the ribbon is cut at the grand opening event, staff and students are left to figure out for themselves how the new spaces can be used to best pedagogical effect.” In a series of interviews, lecturers noted that flexible learning spaces rely heavily on the assumption that students are autonomous learners, and this isn’t always the case. “It takes a kind of maturity and independence that we’re not currently expecting in undergraduates,” said one interviewee. Many students commented that university estates are visually impressive and that they appreciate collaborative learning spaces, but they don’t quite understand what should be going on in these areas. Technology also emerged as a concern, with academics repeatedly expressing fear about lacking the skills, or technical support to fully utilise new technology in learning spaces. Students experience similar problems, with several describing using their phones or laptops to record lecture slides because of difficulties of accessing them online. “The research suggests that lots of assumptions may be being made about how university buildings are interacted with, and that these assumptions need to be tested more robustly,” says Jones.

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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. Much of R&D spending is wasted. In Egypt, government officials and scientists don’t talk much, so money is poorly allocated. Incentives are skewed too. Promotions for professors depend on whom they know rather than what they discover. The bigger deficit, however, is that private companies barely spend on R&D, which accounts for much of the cash in other countries, says Nazar Hassan of Unesco. Chinese companies, for instance, spend almost four times more than their government, and American corporates more than two-and-a-half times. Israeli firms are global leaders, contributing at least 75 percent of the country’s total R&D outlay. By contrast in much of the Arab world, the private sector’s contribution is less than 5 percent. Rana Dajani, a Jordanian scientist, reckons the biggest problem is “the lack of an environment that encourages free thinking and exploration”. Schools emphasise rote learning. Rulers stifle political debate. Many areas of research are hampered not only by oppressive politics, but also by a perceived clash between Islam and science. Medicine is one area that can be controversial, particularly in fields of research that involve embryos. Yet such barriers are not insurmountable. After years of consultation with scientists and theologians, Jordan passed a law in 2014 allowing stem-cell research. Among its provisions was that embryos can only be created from the sperm and eggs of married couples. To allay concerns that it might lead to abortions (which are banned in the kingdom), only state institutions may do such stem-cell research. Others are also making progress. Morocco’s technology parks and incubators have helped it become the Arab world’s leading exporter of high-tech products and software. It applies for the second-largest number of patents, after Egypt, despite its much smaller population (33 million). Private innovators are trying their hand at tech startups, albeit in low-risk niches such as online retailing or Arabic versions of apps developed elsewhere. Careem, for instance, is the Saudi version of Uber, an American car-hailing app. Ms Dajani notes that Arab scientists and innovators achieve far more abroad than at home. (For example, Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, was half-Syrian). To foster creativity, the Middle East needs to allow more critical thinking. Such freedom might have other benefits, too.

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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 the leaders of the protests which, last November, forced the University of Missouri’s president to resign. The protesters believe they are pursuing social and racial justice, in part by changing the way America remembers its past — debates that are convulsing the country at large. For others the right at stake is freedom of speech, a principle imperilled around the world. As Nicholas Christakis, a Yale professor, caught up in the turmoil, puts it: “If we can’t get that right at our elite universities, we’re doomed.” How far these values are compatible, and whether their advocates can listen to each other, are quandaries these events have dramatised. Still, the main grievance racking American campuses is alleged racism. Several student groups demand more pluralistic curriculums, cultural-awareness training for staff, more diverse faculties and extra facilities for minorities. Students and their sympathisers think free speech is sometimes invoked to deflect these claims; or, so Princeton’s Black Justice League maintains, as a “justification for the marginalisation of others”. Echoing debates over memorials across the nation, many students have demanded that the slavery-tainted names of college buildings be changed. Some Princetonians want the public-policy school to honour someone other than Woodrow Wilson, a president who was a segregationist, albeit an idealistic promoter of world peace. Some Yalies object to Calhoun College commemorating a pro-slavery ideologue and statesman. These requests are regarded by others as efforts to sanitise history. Announcing its recent decision to retain Calhoun’s name, Yale said that doing so would serve as a teaching aid. Princeton, too, has chosen to keep Wilson’s name, though a dining-hall mural of him, smiling and holding a baseball, has been scrubbed out. Both made compensating offers of explicatory artwork and exhibitions, while Yale promised to name a new college after Pauli Murray, a civil-rights leader. At the heart of this dispute is the role of the university itself. Should it shield youngsters from the fraught world they will soon enter or, by exposing them to its affronts, prepare them for it? This has a corollary: whether a student is an adult, or an in-betweener needing special protection and privileges (such as the right to spend a lot of time in the library and getting drunk). All of the above, say diplomatic university bosses. Some students, though, seem to emphasise incubation over preparation; hence their requests for more reprimands and intrusion, for supposedly improving bans and rules. What really distinguishes them from their predecessors, say their critics, is not solipsism, impatience or a certainty that can slide from admirable passion into self-righteousness, but the expectation that all their problems should be magicked away. Whereas, as Dr. Christakis says, universities “cannot readily deliver…

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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 K-12 education worldwide. The biggest takeaway from my China visit is the high quality of government schools and respect accorded to teachers by Chinese society. Andrea Pasanetti, CEO of Teach for China, which started as a charity and is now a teacher training enterprise, outlined the enormity of the challenge confronting the PRC government. The school-going population of China is equal to the entire population of the USA. Despite this, the government has enacted legislation under which it is obliged to provide free and compulsory school education for nine years to 300 million children. Inevitably, this required a massive teacher training effort. By 2016, the PRC government successfully trained millions of teachers with the result that single-teacher schools, still a feature of rural India, is a thing of the past. According to Pasanetti, although 90 percent of PRC’s schools are government-owned, they are air-conditioned and equipped with labs, libraries and hostels. Each building is earthquake resistant and in remote villages, the school building is the largest community centre. The Chinese have also introduced technology on a massive scale in K-12 education and it’s compulsory for every school to have a broadband connection. China will soon inaugurate its first charter school and government school teachers are now better paid than ever before, with salaries ranging between Rs.50,000-1.5 lakh per month. During my sojourn in the world’s most populous country whose GDP is five multiples of India’s, I also visited China’s biggest flagship primary-secondary government school — RDFZ in Beijing. With 6,000 students and 800 teachers on its muster rolls, apart from regular academic programmes it offers 200 optional ‘beyond’ programmes and 100 research areas. ‘Beyond’ signifies beyond the curriculum and is similar to the special interest clubs of Daly College. RDFZ also offers students a choice of 15 foreign languages. Sited in the middle of an innovation hub comprising over 100 colleges, RDFZ is able to draw on them for specialist teachers for ‘beyond’ programmes. In RDFZ, we witnessed educational technology which would be the envy of any American university. The laboratories are very busy and staffed with highly qualified and respected teachers with the more accomplished students designated as mentors to guide other students. However, students — and all young people — in China are still unfamiliar with English. Awareness that English is the universal language of business and diplomacy dawned very late in China and Indian industry and academia have an advantage before China closes the gap. The advantage of a single-party political system became apparent when we were addressed for over an hour by Hao Ping, vice minister of education of PRC. In India, the compulsions of politics seldom allow the right…

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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), Delhi conducts a Combined BiotechnologyEntrance Exam on behalf of 34 universities (whose M.Sc biotechnology programmes are supported by the Union government’s department of biotechnology) as well as a Combined Entrance Exam for admission into M.Sc (Agri) biotech and M.VSc degree programmes. In addition, several other universities offer Masters degrees in biotechnology. You could also consider signing up for a two-year M.Tech programme in biotechnology. The eligibility requirement is a B.Tech/B.Pharm/M.Sc degree in relevant disciplines and a valid GATE score (mandatory) for admission into the IITs and other reputable institutions. The integrated Ph D programme offered by the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore and Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) is another option. The eligibility requirement is a first class B.Sc or an equivalent degree in biological sciences. The future is very bright for biotech postgrads and a career in research is financially rewarding as well. I’m a second year B.Sc student interested in a career in astronomy/astrophysics. Please provide details of institutes offering postgraduate programmes in this discipline. Sunil Kelkar, Pune For the M.Sc astrophysics degree programme, you could shortlist Swami Ramanand Teerth Marathawada University, Nanded and for M.Sc astronomy, you could apply to Osmania University, Hyderabad and Punjabi University, Patiala. Andhra University and University of Pune also offer degrees in M.Sc space sciences with specialisations related to astrophysics. Gujarat University, Ahmedabad offers a postgrad diploma in space science. Astronomy/astrophysics is also a subject within the M.Sc physics programme offered by several reputed universities, including the University of Mumbai. Your target should be to follow up the Masters degree with a Ph D in astrophysics/astronomy. I’m a final year BAF (bachelor’s in accounting and finance) student. What are the best postgrad subjects I can sign up for? Aruna Rao, Bangalore You could opt for commerce-related subjects such as banking, insurance, accountancy, finance and cost accounting or even pursue law, library science, management, humanities, education, social work, hospitality, travel and tourism, etc. But before making a higher study choice, self-evaluate your aptitudes and capabilities. I want to enroll in a B.Sc (aviation) study programme after completing class XII (science) next year. Does the degree programme incorporate training for a commercial pilot’s licence (CPL)? Rakesh Sharma, Mumbai A B.Sc (aviation) programme is offered by the Institute of Aviation and Aviation Safety, Mumbai. To qualify, you need Plus Two (maths and physics) certification, and fluency in English. CPL training is also included in the course. However, CPL holders are also eligible to enroll in the B.Sc course. Since they have already completed their CPL course, fees vary. Mumbai University is also launching its own B.Sc (aviation) course from 2016-17. The university’s Garware Institute of Career Education and…

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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 as the demand for qualified teachers is on the rise, the noble profession of teaching — once the refuge of timeservers who couldn’t land a job in any other white collar vocation — has undergone a sea change in terms of greater social prestige and better remuneration packages. The first step to upgrade the status of the teachers’ community was taken by the Union government’s Sixth Pay Commission (SPC), 2008 which sharply raised the pay-scales of teachers in Central government schools by 100 percent with retrospective effect from 2006, forcing state governments and top-ranked private schools to follow suit. Consequently, SPC salaries prescribed for primary teachers in Delhi in the Rs.23,000-30,000 per month bracket have become the new benchmark for government and private schools countrywide. Moreover, even as teachers’ pay in the country’s 1.10 million government schools was substantially enhanced by SPC, the emergence of upscale new-genre five-star international schools in post-liberalisation India has transformed K-12 teaching into an attractive career option. Defined by globally benchmarked infrastructure and affiliation with offshore examination boards such as IBO, Geneva and CIE, UK, the country’s estimated 600 international schools are paying top dollar for qualified and well-trained teachers. Study programmes To qualify as a K-12 school teacher, a first degree topped with professional teacher training certification is required. Full-time two-year B.Ed study programmes are offered by several Central and state universities countrywide including the Delhi, Bangalore, Mumbai, Calcutta and Annamalai universities with the latter offering a popular distance (correspondence) programme. The Indira Gandhi National Open University, Jamia Milia Islamia Centre for Distance and Open Learning and Karnataka State Open University, among others also offer B.Ed through correspondence. Check out the National Council of Teacher Education website (www.ncte-india.org) which provides a detailed list of recognised institutions offering B.Ed programmes. With the Sixth Pay Commission prescribing Rs.23,000-30,000 per month for primary teachers in all Central government schools, state governments and private schools have had to sharply increase teachers’ pay. A primary school teacher in a CISCE/CBSE-affiliated day school can expect Rs.25-30,000 per month, trained graduate teachers in middle school Rs.30-40,000 and senior school teachers Rs.40-80,000. Moreover, the Seventh Pay Commission has recommended a 23 percent increase payable with retrospective effect from January 1, 2016. Professional profile “High-quality teachers are critical to improving learning outcomes and standards in school education. Not only have pay scales risen substantially in government and private schools, in terms of professional development, teachers are being given multiple opportunities to learn continuously. Consequently, the teaching profession is an exciting vocation for those who want to become lifelong learners,” says Ashok Pandey, a well-respected educationist and incumbent principal of the CBSE-affiliated Ahlcon International School, Delhi (estb. 2001).…

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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 universities from around the world had convened at the Conference of Asia Pacific Association for International Education, 2016 to debate the theme ‘Are Rankings Destroying Universities?’ Thus, as the world debates the utility of the World University Rankings popularised by London-based Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) and Times Higher Education (THE), the HRD ministry has introduced the NIRF system for rating and ranking India’s higher education institutions. The arguments advanced for the NIRF league tables are that they provide benchmarks in an environment where higher education institutions compete for students, faculty, finance and researchers, and they build accountability and quality assurance into the higher education system. Emerging as a subnational phenomenon in the US in the early 1900s, university rankings developed into a national practice in 1959, and were transformed into the annual World University Rankings (WUR) by QS and THE in the new millennium. Today, there are ten global college/university ranking-systems and more than 150 national and specialist ranking systems worldwide. The rationale for conducting institutional ranking surveys is that students, schools, industry, employers and funding agencies need them. Institution ranking league tables provide purportedly valuable markers of academic reputation, quality of research, and overall public perception which prompts internationalisation of higher education institutions. However, as it became apparent at the Asia Pacific Conference 2016, there are critics who maintain that current ranking systems measure widely diverse institutions with a common yardstick while ignoring relevant criteria such as institutional vision and mission. Another criticism is that academic quality is a complex subject measured by simplistic methodologies. Moreover, rankings tend to encourage practices that sacrifice teaching-learning on the altar of parameters accorded greater weightage e.g, research publications. Value-additions to teaching-learning, impact of research on teaching, benefits of research and extension activities aren’t accorded weightage in metrics developed to rate education institutions. Consequently, the real contributions that education institutions make to socio-economic development remain unmeasured. All league tables ranking higher education institutions measure quality through proxies. For example, students’ entrance test scores are taken as a measure of academic quality. However, they are reflective of the quality of primary-secondary education rather than the higher education experience. Similarly, faculty-student ratios reflect resource mobilisation efficiency rather than teaching quality and are also dependent on type of institution i.e, public or private. Further, measuring resources (like number of library collections) or institutional expenditure on various activities is not a true measure of education quality, because newly established institutions, especially in developing countries, suffer a historical disadvantage. Another obsession that has influenced ranking systems is measuring research productivity through number of publications and citations in refereed journals. But this parameter merely indicates peer reviewed papers and ignores the social and economic…

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Educationworld CISCE & CBSE schools academic rankings 2016 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 premier school-leaving (classes X and XII) examination boards — have illogically and irrationally refused to make institutional performance data public. Therefore EducationWorld has been driven to obtain this information which is valuable to parents and students, through other means.  In this undertaking, we are fortunate to have received the cooperation of Prashant Bhattacharji, a Hyderabad-based data analyst and promoter of the education website www.thelearningpoint.net. For the past several years, Bhattacharji has extracted and analysed publicly accessible information from the websites of schools and exam boards, to compile league tables.  The EducationWorld School Academic Rankings 2016 rank the country’s Top 100 schools affiliated with the pan-India CISCE and CBSE boards according to their average scores in school-leaving exams. CISCE schools are ranked inter se according to their average score in the class X (ICSE) and class XII (ISC) exams. CBSE-affiliated schools are ranked inter se on the basis of their average score in the class XII exam, since the board’s class X exam is optional for schools and students. Moreover, the CBSE rankings are based on the scores of 7,100 affiliated schools (out of a total of 9,000). The exam scores of the remainder were inaccessible.  This year, we have added a new column — median score, i.e, the average score of the mid-point student of each school. If an even number of students wrote the exams the median is calculated taking the mean (average) of two mid-ranked students.  “Globally, the median is a widely used metric while reporting test scores. In most cases, the average is a relatively misleading reflection of class performance, because the scores of bottom performers drag down the average. Also in a departure from past practice when schools were ranked on their English plus best three subjects scores in class XII exams, this year all schools are ranked according to their scores in five subjects to facilitate institutional performance comparison regardless of exam board affiliation. League tables fully disclosing board exam scores promote inter-school competition, give teachers due recognition if their students perform well, and enable parents to choose the best schools for their children,” says Bhattacharji, an alumnus of IIT-Kharagpur. NB: There may be marginal variations between the actual score and tabulated data for reasons explained on www.the learningpoint.net. In case of major discrepancies email [email protected]

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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 their way south. They swept through the defeated states buying up assets and transforming them into fortunes. Named after the cheap baggage they carried, these ‘carpetbaggers’ were disparaged as vultures, come to feast off the defeat of the confederacy states. That’s what Donald Trump is: a carpetbagger come to grab the remains of the Republican Party. Reeling from assaults by an assortment of extreme right wing groups that began to flourish during the administration of George ‘Dubya’ Bush, the party has fallen down an ideological mineshaft. Pulled in many directions by neocons, evangelists, white supremacists, soldiers of fortune, gun nuts and religious bigots, it seems to have lost its bearings. From this miasma, Donald Trump has emerged to claim the presidency of the United States and the right to control not just the most powerful financial system of the world, but also the world’s mightiest military machine with global projection capabilities and the most destructive nuclear arsenal known to mankind. But Trump is an unrestrained megalomaniac who has an opinion on every issue with nobody aware what he stands for, except showmanship. Likewise, India’s BJP icon and prime minister Narendra Modi seems willing to embrace the most egregious forms of bigotry, something America and India are finding hard to deal with. Unlike Trump, Modi already controls the resources of a $2 trillion economy, the world’s largest armed forces and a nuclear weapons stockpile of which little is known about its size, technological sophistication and chain of command. In that sense, Modi is way ahead of Trump. For those of us who are shocked and awed by the rise of Modi, it seems depressingly possible that Trump could win the US presidential election in November this year. Modi springs from a revivalist Hindu sect and has transformed bigotry into a winning election strategy. A narrow worldview bred by prejudice against Marx, Muslims and Macaulayites, hindutva, his bigoted agenda, was asserted by denigrating opponents and then weaving a fantastic web of deception promising an imminent El Dorado. However, there’s one crucial difference between them. Trump emerged from the decline of the mainstream Republican Party that began with Richard Nixon down through Reagan and the two Bush presidencies. He simply seized the opportunity, carpetbagger-style, to catapult himself into the reckoning. Like it or not, he mocked the Republicans: I am your party nominee by acclamation of the white detritus, the type of people you wouldn’t admit into your country clubs or the towers I built for you; the type of people my grandfather’s Seattle liquor saloons catered to at the turn of the 19th century. For his part, Modi also cocked a snook at India’s established liberal democracy.…

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First LEED Lab programme 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 green building rating worldwide with LEED certification providing independent verification of a building or neighbourhood’s green features. “LEED Lab is an important educational programme to make students ready for green jobs of the 21st century,” said Mahesh Ramanujam, chief operating officer of USGBC and president of Green Business Certification Inc, USA, speaking on the occasion. “By educating a new generation of builders, KIOT will help to build a sustainable ecology in India. The country needs buildings that perform better and improve and enhance human health. I thank the leadership of KIOT as both our organisations will nurture and train a workforce that will become essential to addressing India’s future building needs.” Hyundai’s skilling contribution At a media conference in Delhi on June 6, Hyundai Motor India Ltd, the country’s second largest car manufacturer, announced that it has expanded the scope of its agreement with 25 Central government-promoted Industrial Training Institutes (ITIs) to contribute to the Union government’s Skill India Programme. The expansion of Hyundai’s association with ITIs follows successful completion of a pilot programme launched by the company in 2012. Almost 95 percent of graduates from Hyundai’s Skill Development Programme (2012-2015) have been recruited by Hyundai dealerships. “Our alliance with ITIs and other vocational institutes, is aimed at reducing the skills deficit on the shop floors of India’s automobile industry. With this partnership, we are confident Hyundai will bridge the skilled manpower gap and help the auto industry to achieve global competitiveness,” said Rakesh Srivastava, senior vice president of Hyundai Motors India. Rural learning initiative The education ministry of Maharashtra and ConnectEd Technologies, an education-technology start-up promoted to provide hyper-scalable, rural-focused solutions, launched a new campaign named EkShiksha in Mumbai on June 16. The campaign will inspire socially-responsible corporates, NGOs, school managements and grass-root educators to eliminate educational inequity and provide world-class education to children enrolled in Maharashtra’s rural schools. Under the EkShiksha campaign, rural schools will be equipped with ConnectEd Technologies’ robust, solar-powered Smart classroom systems designed to work in demanding rural conditions enabling “educators to easily integrate tailor-made multimedia educational content into conventional teaching practices,” to improve learning outcomes. “I hope corporates, NGOs, school managements and teachers will support EkShiksha and the dynamic, young team of ConnectEd Technologies’ spearheading it,” said Vinod Tawde, education minister of Maharashtra, on the occasion. Akshay Patra’s dream project The Bengaluru-based Akshaya Patra Foundation (APF) has launched a new ‘Giving Every Dream a Chance’ project on a pilot basis. The programme was formally inaugurated by Sudha Murthy, chairperson of the Infosys Foundation, on June 11 in Bengaluru. The pilot project is a sponsored programme which will provide continuous support to 100 children, conduct mentorship programmes to nurture…

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Uttar Pradesh Super 30’s UP debut 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, we will coach 30 poor students in UP for IIT-JEE this year,” Super 30 founder Anand Kumar said in Lucknow on June 9. The exam for selecting 30 candidates from UP will be held in 11 venues statewide on June 19, he added. On the occasion, Kumar lauded several new schemes of the UP government, particularly kanya vidyadhan (scholarship programme for girl children). Gujarat Rainwater harvesting programme With several parts of Gujarat hit by severe water scarcity this summer, chief minister Anandiben Patel initiated a rainwater harvesting programme and directed government officials to construct underground tanks to store rainwater in all government primary schools. The programme will be monitored by ministers and bureaucrats who will visit schools across the state. This programme was announced by the chief minister while addressing top officials and ministers at a review meeting in Gandhinagar on June 3, ahead of the state’s shala praveshotsav (school enrolment) and kanya kelavani (education for girls) campaigns. The chief minister also underlined the importance of educating primary school children about the country’s freedom fighters through information booklets printed by the government. Madhya Pradesh Successful tribal students programme Twenty-one students from tribal districts, schooled under the state government’s chhoo lo aasman (reach for the sky) school education programme targeted at children from remote areas, have cracked the IIT-JEE (Advanced) examination — reputedly the toughest public entrance exam countrywide. Therefore they are eligible for admission into the country’s 23 Indian Institutes of Technology and 31 National Institutes of Technology. “Using state government funds, we monitored everyone from teachers to lab assistants and ensured proper training was given to them. Infrastructure and laboratory facilities were also upgraded and improved,” Madhya Pradesh higher education commissioner Umakant Umrao informed the media in Bhopal on June 19. The programme provides tribal students free-of-charge education in Smart classrooms with access to supplementary video lectures of subject experts in city schools. Adds B. Gyaneshwar Patil, collector of Baitul district: “We used technology to effectively monitor attendance and quality of classroom teaching.” Jharkhand First women’s engineering college Chief minister Raghubar Das laid the foundation of the state’s first engineering college for women in the Gola block of Jharkhand’s backward Ramgarh district, on June 14. Das also inaugurated a state-run polytechnic college in Ramgarh. Speaking on the occasion, he said women’s empowerment is one of his government’s focus areas and the engineering college for women will boost their chances of employment within India and beyond. According to the state government’s higher and technical education secretary A.K. Das, the Delhi-based National Building Construction Corporation Ltd has already started constructing the college campus on a 16.8-acre plot at an estimated cost of Rs.104.37…

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“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 kerfuffle about when a report commissioned by the government ought to be released, immediately or after states have commented on it, is a storm in a teacup. Of far more concern should have been why it was given to mostly retired bureaucrats, rather than academics and experts, to prepare.” Jay Panda, BJD member of Parliament, on membership of the committee to prepare the draft National Education Policy 2016 (Times of India,  June 8) “One way of looking at Raghuram Rajan story: War on crony capitalism is over. Full normalcy restored. Capitalism lost, cronies won.” Shekhar Gupta, well-known journalist, on Raghuram Rajan’s announcement that he will not accept a second term as governor of the Reserve Bank of India (June 18) “We can find our voice in the world again, a voice that is commensurate with the fifth-biggest economy on Earth.” Boris Johnson, former London mayor, after the UK voted ‘Leave’ in a referendum to exit the European Union (June 24) “For a full half-century India’s hapless public have faced a continuing deterioration of our higher education system. The blame must be laid squarely at the door of the UGC (University Grants Commission) which has all along enjoyed unbridled power in the regulation of universities with scant accountability. Its small-mindedness has succeeded in turning the Indian university into a wasteland, and it has got away with it.” Pulapre Balakrishnan, economics professor at Ashoka University, demanding public audit of the UGC (The Hindu, June 27)

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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 in Mysuru district which hosts chief minister Siddaramaiah’s legislative assembly constituency) with less than ten enrolled students. But faced with an outcry from social activists, in less than a week’s time DPI withdrew the circular stating that “the government is yet to take a decision on the issue”. Shockingly in the recently concluded academic year 2015-16, 534 government primaries recorded zero additional enrolment, while 13,000 primaries had fewer than 25 students on their muster rolls. This is hardly surprising, given that the state’s 45,654 government primary schools are notorious for abysmal infrastructure, poor learning outcomes, vernacular medium instruction, and chronic teacher absenteeism. With even bottom-of the-pyramid households spurning free-of-charge education and mid-day meals-providing government schools, DPI officials had shortlisted the 2,959 schools for “merger” to save taxpayers’ money from going down the drain. But this belated decision provoked orchestrated outrage from the usual suspects — Kannada language champions and Left academics. Leading the attack is Dr. V.P. Niranjanaradhya, fellow at the Centre for Child and the Law at Bangalore’s National Law School of India University, who fears that the government is likely to close 22,170 schools by 2019-20. “By not doing anything to arrest the slide in the quality of education and improve infrastructure in government schools, the state is only providing parents more reasons to pull their kids out of these institutions and admit them to private ones,” writes Niranjanaradhya in Times of India (June 24). Undoubtedly, it’s the state government’s consistent failure to upgrade quality of education dispensed in its 45,654 free-of-charge primaries which is forcing parents to enroll their children in fees-levying private schools. According to the latest Elementary Education in India published by the Delhi-based National University of Educational Planning and Administration (NUEPA), 32.67 percent of government primary schools in the state don’t have a boundary wall, 86.8 percent don’t have computers and 50 percent lack playground facilities. Moreover, 32,000 posts of teachers are vacant in government primaries. To these deficiencies add the state government’s two-decades old Kannada/mother tongue medium of instruction policy under which all government schools are obliged to teach classes I-V in the vernacular medium. With even the poorest of poor households now aware of the importance of English learning, it is hardly surprising there’s a mass exodus to private schools offering English medium education, even if of indifferent quality. According to the Annual Status of Education Report 2014, published by the well-known Mumbai-based NGO Pratham (estb. 1994), private school enrolments of children in the age group four-16 in rural Karnataka have steadily increased from 16 percent in 2006 to 25.5 percent in 2014. Dr. A.S. Seetharamu, former professor of education at the Institute for Social and Economic…

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