INDIA’S FIRST FEMALE karting enthusiast Mira Erda (14) is blazing a trail on national and international motor racing circuits. Winner of five championships since she debuted in 2010, this Vadodara-based teen who graduated to the junior class reserved for karters in the 14-18 age group ” at age 12, is set to race in the […]
ALTHOUGH INDIA™S MEDIA and particularly the press, has earned a global reputation for its independence and fearless reportage, it has its downside. For one, it™s infested with insecure, perhaps even paranoid, media moguls and journalists down the line who pretend other news channels and newspapers don™t exist. Moreover, the Indian media has justifiably acquired the […]
Vice chancellor, Chitkara University and chairperson, Chitkara International School, Chandigarh
Where would you place education on your list of national priorities?
At the very top. Providing a child with education is to equip her to lead a fulfilling life. It™s an eternal lantern for generations to come.
How best to upgrade government schools and colleges?
INDIA HAS THE LARGEST POPULATION of children and youth worldwide. Its young manpower, if educated and skilled, could help and support several ageing nations in the near future. A favourable demography comprising 650 million citizens below 35 years of age, or 54 percent of a massive 1.2 billion population below 25 years, are indeed astonishing […]
œHARMONY IS THE MOST valuable of all things, said Chinese philosopher Confucius two and a half millennia ago. There™s little of it in evidence in the frosty relationship between the founding director of the Confucius Institute at the University of Oregon, Bryna Goodman, and her fellow historian, Glenn May.
Their offices are separated by a […]
THE NUMBER OF INDIAN students starting university courses in the UK has continued to fall after almost halving over two years, according to a new report. A survey of more than 100 institutions by Universities UK (UUK) shows that despite growth in overall overseas recruitment in the latest academic year, enrolments appear to have further […]
THE NUMBER OF STUDENTS completing higher education in Brazil has fallen for the first time in a decade. There was a 5.7 percent drop in the number of graduates in 2013 compared with 2012 ” the first decline in the number of university leavers since 2003. About 991,000 students graduated in 2013, a drop of […]
A spy among friends: kim philby by Ben Macintyre; Bloomsbury; Price: Rs.399; Pages 352
THE SECOND WORLD WAR and the Cold War which followed were the great eras of spies and secret agents glorified by Ian Fleming™s James Bond and John le Carre™s Smiley. A Spy Among Friends details the cloak and dagger activities of three […]
EVIDENCE IS EMERGING OF A decline in the power of US universities in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2014-2015, despite the California Institute of Technology™s claim on the top spot for the fourth consecutive year. The west coast institution heads a Top 10 for 2014-15 that still consists almost entirely of US-based universities, […]
EDUCATION IS FLUSH WITH DATA comparisons, from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) run by the OECD, a mainly rich-world think-tank, which ranks 15-year-olds in core subjects every three years, to TIMSS and PIRLS, tests of younger pupils™ mathematics, science and reading levels administered by national research institutions. But such tests can™t tell governments […]
SEXUALLY ILLITERATE and repressed Indian academia and society in which the older generation suffers ˜sexual envy™ on a mass scale and a society in which it™s generally accepted that girls/women who dress ˜provocatively™ are inviting sexual molestation and assault, could learn a lot from US academia™s initiatives to protect the rights of women students in […]
WITHIN A DECADE, technology has so completely transformed the lives of people worldwide that it™s hard to imagine life without it. It has changed the way we communicate, socialise, cook, shop, entertain ourselves, store and use information. Inevitably, technology is also changing the way children learn. Driven by technology, educators are exploring innovative ways in […]
AN ALUMNUS OF IIT-Madras and Stanford University, Prof. Anant Agarwal is the celebrated professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA and chief executive of edX, the path-breaking massive open online courses (Moocs) provider which offers the exciting prospect of the world™s best classroom lectures and coursework becoming […]
AMBITIOUS STUDENTS AIM HIGH FROM a surprisingly early age. Aspirational teenagers as young as 15-16 are already planning for careers with big name multinational corporations. Their targets predominantly are corporate organisations in the financial services, new media, and the creative sectors whose activities increasingly define our daily life. According to CNN Money™s 2013 survey ˜World™s […]
I™m a second year BE (electronics) student. After graduation I want to work with ISRO. Please advise.
Mani Iyer, Chennai
Focus on completing your engineering degree programme and aim for at least a first division. Visit www.isro.gov.in to know more about how graduates are recruited. Be prepared to face tough competition.
I™m a final year […]
With 20 percent of global GDP being expended on infrastructure and construction projects, the demand for professionally qualified PMs is set to explode
IN THE NEWLY-EMERGENT competitive global economy, project management is a skillset for which there™s huge and rising demand, given that an estimated 20 percent of the world™s GDP is being expended on […]
The fiercely guarded academic autonomy of these institutions of excellence is anathema to the country’s politicians. Therefore from time to time efforts are made by government to pack their governing boards
THE ONLY HIGHER EDUCATION institutions anywhere near global standards established in post-independence India are the country’s Top 8 (out of 16) Indian Institutes of Technology […]
Enterprises of great pith and moment launched to transform the world’s largest population of children and youth were proclaimed, analysed and discussed threadbare, to little avail. Although in the new millennium, the needs and rights of the country’s 450 million child citizens are receiving greater attention, they remain the world’s most malnourished, under-educated and under-protected […]
DESPITE CONSIDERABLE SOUND AND fury, there™s been no explicit education policy formulation in post-independence India notwithstanding the National Adult Education Policy (NAEP, 1978), National Policy on Adult Education (NPAE, 1981) and National Policy on Education (NPE, 1986), all of which were described as policy initiatives. In effect, education development in India during the past 64 […]
BY ALL MEASURES, THE interaction between Indian school children and prime minister Narendra Modi on Teachers Day (September 5) was an unprecedented success. It was ˜first ever™ on many counts ” but perhaps most importantly in its scope and format.
Employing new media technologies in a live town-hall setting, an authentic, inspirational and at times […]
DESPITE ITS HUGE 1.25 billion population, India wasn™t able to win even one gold medal at the London Olympics 2012. Not a single Indian university is ranked among the Top 200 in the World University Rankings 2013-14 league tables of the highly-respected rating agencies QS and THE. Why? Because both sports and education are dominated […]
INDIA’S EDUCATION SYSTEM is complex, brimming with problems and challenges. In tertiary education there are several higher education institutions supported by the Central government, some of whom provide high quality education. Moreover, a large number of universities are supported by governments of India™s 29 states and seven Union territories in addition to several privately funded […]
A constituent institution of the US-based Laureate Education Inc, Glion Institute of Higher Education offers undergrad and postgraduate programmes in hospitality management to 1,619 students from over 90 countries
SPRAWLED ACROSS TWO CAMPUSES in Switzerland, a country internationally reputed for its hospitality education tradition, the top-ranked Glion Institute of Higher Education (GIHE, estb. 1962) offers undergraduate […]
The trustees and promoters of Atul Vidyalaya, Valsad that is among Gujarat Top 20 school seem to have spared no expense in providing state-of-the-art infrastructure to realise their progressive objectives
HOUSED WITHIN A THICKLY wooded 24-acre campus carved out of the 1,200-acre industrial estate of Atul Ltd, a publicly listed chemicals manufacturing company on the outskirts […]
Pranavan Sathanakrishnan, Sneha Priya and Harish Sampathkumar recent (2012) engineering graduates of the top-ranked College of Engineering Guindy, Anna University have chosen to decline high-paying jobs to promote the Chennai-based SP Robotic Works Pvt. Ltd (SPRW, estb. 2012) and Aikaa Automation Pvt. Ltd (AAPL, 2014). SPRW manufactures robot components and offers robotics education to school […]
THE EU-INDIA SOCIAL SCIENCES and Humanities Platform (EqUIP), a new programme aimed at giving impetus to European Union-India research collaboration, was launched in Delhi on October 14. EqUIP is a ‚1.5 million (Rs.11.5 crore) project funded by the European Commission and will link 12 European research funding organisations with key funding agencies in India, to […]
Arunachal Pradesh
Teacher transfer committees
THE STATE government has constituted two committees headed by the directors of elementary education and school education departments to study œgenuine problems confronting teachers in the mass transfer of 567 teachers in September from East Siang district, the Arunachal government™s secretary for education, Bamang Felix informed media personnel in Itanagar […]
œCleaning up the country cannot be the sole responsibility of sweepers. Do citizens have no role in this? We have to change this mindset. If people of India can reach Mars with minimal expenditure, why can they not keep their streets and colonies clean?
Prime minister Narendra Modi launching the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (Clean India […]
WITH COLLEGE CAMPUSES in west bengal and kolkata in particular in a state of ferment reminiscent of the Naxalite agitations of the 1960s with bandhs, gheraos and student insurrection a routine feature, the prolonged students™ protest at Jadavpur University (JU) pressing for an independent investigation into the molestation of a woman student inside a hostel […]
PREDICTABLY PROPAGATION of hindi and Sanskrit by Hindi zealots of the educationally backward BIMARU (Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh) states with the tacit support of bigwigs of the BJP-led NDA government at the Centre, has provoked a backlash in anti-Hindi peninsular India.
On September 18, the AIADMK government of Tamil Nadu (currently led […]
AN OUT-OF-THE-BLUE proposal of the Karnataka state government to cap tuition fees chargeable by private schools across the board — pre-primary, primary, secondary, and higher secondary — has created a furore within the state’s 11,475 private unaided (financially independent) schools. A “draft fees structure” posted on the website of the department of public instruction (DPI) […]
A SYMPOSIUM ORGANISED BY the Akhil Bharatiya Itihaas Sankalan Yojana (ABISY) ” a subsidiary organisation of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) founded in 1978 with the objective of rewriting Indian history from a nationalist perspective ” in Delhi on October 5, has sent a chill down the spines of liberal academics countrywide. It has resurrected […]
Appeal to edupreneurs
CONGRATULATIONS TO EDUPRENEURS spearheading the promising initiatives featured in your cover story ˜Big bang initiatives revolutionising Indian education™ (EW October). From curriculum enrichment and experiential learning to robotics, music education, and sports and fitness programmes, their initiatives are slowly but surely adding value and substance to conventional school education. However, it seems […]
ALTHOUGH NEWLY-ELECTED prime minister Narendra Modi has blindspots and several deep prejudices which could abort his ambitious plans to develop laggard India into an economic super-power, there™s no denying he™s got his priorities right. Hard on the heels of his maiden Independence Day (August 15) speech emphasising the importance of clean and useable toilets, particularly […]
THE SUBJECT MATTER of the cover feature on the 15th anniversary of this sui generis newsmagazine is perhaps unprecedented in Indian journalism, and has proved a more arduous task than anticipated. To facilitate readability, the history of Indian education essayed in this milestone edition of EducationWorld, has been divided into 22 narratives ” big issues […]
The Indian Council for Medical Research (ICMR) has identified two Cases of Human Metapneumovirus (HMPV) in Karnataka, both in infants aged three and eight months .....Read More
Delhi Police have arrested seven individuals, including five juveniles, in connection with the murder of a 14-year-old school student in east Delhi’s Shakarpur area, an .....Read More