Current edition
EW India School Rankings 2018-19 – Top 1000
To conduct the EWISR 2018-19 survey, field personnel of the Delhi-based C fore interviewed 12,214 SEC ‘A’ fees-paying parents, school principals, teachers and senior school students in 27 major cities and education hubs across India – Dilip Thakore & Summiya Yasmeen During his 82-minute Independence Day speech delivered from the ramparts of Delhi’s Red Fort last month, prime minister Narendra Modi announced the imminent rollout of a path-breaking Ayushman Bharat health protection scheme which will provide health insurance coverage of Rs.500,000 per year to 100 million below-poverty-line households countrywide, and promised a new era of growth and prosperity for India in the years to come. However, the word ‘education’ wasn’t mentioned even once in his long and impassioned speech. Curiously, prime minister Modi or his speech writers don’t seem to be aware that root-and-branch reform of India’s moribund K-12 and higher education systems is the prerequisite of all socio-economic reform initiatives, including Swacch Bharat, Make in India, Double Farmers’ Incomes etc that the BJP/NDA government has initiated during the past four years. Yet prime minister Modi’s indifference to education is not exceptional. For the past seven decades since independence, education — especially K-12 public education for the world’s largest child population — has been on the back-burner of successive governments at the Centre and in the states. Despite several high-powered national commissions starting with the Kothari Commission (1966) to the T.S.R. Subramanian Committee (2016) recommending that the annual expenditure (Centre plus states) on public education should be pegged at a minimum 6 percent of GDP, it has averaged a mere 3.5 percent and has never exceeded 4 percent. This explains why contemporary India indifferently hosts the world’s largest number of adult illiterates — over 300 million — and an equivalent number of under-educated youth who lack the minimal education and skills to earn enough to make a half-decent living. But even though the neta-babu brotherhood, which runs the Central and state governments, and all political parties with their batteries of economic advisers are yet to discover that high quality public and private education is the critical prerequisite of national development, this knowledge has impacted the public with huge force following the Millennium Declaration of the United Nations signed by 192 countries including India to ensure “every child in primary school and learning” by 2015. And perhaps also because EducationWorld — The Human Development Magazine was launched in 1999 with the stated mission “to build the pressure of public opinion to make education the #1 item on the national agenda”. Since then, there’s been tremendous churn in Indian education from early childhood to Ph D. The market response to failing government schools are the country’s unique private budget schools (PBS) promoted by go-getting edupreneurs (education entrepreneurs) driven by a combination of enlightened self-interest and social activism. These schools which provide — or claim to provide — much-prized English-medium education offer low-income families an alternative to dysfunctional government schools which also tend to be averse to teaching English, notwithstanding the stark reality that…
Extraordinary bundle of contradictions
– Rahul Singh, former editor of the Reader’s Digest and Indian Express Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, who passed away recently in London at the age of 85, was one of the most insightful, even if most controversial, writers of our time. A high-caste Brahmin descended from indentured labourers who had migrated from eastern Uttar Pradesh to Trinidad in the West Indies, Naipaul experienced a hard childhood until he won a scholarship to Oxford University, UK. Although he hated Oxford, he made England his home after graduating with a degree in English literature. But he never felt at home there. His rootlessness bothered and perhaps even agonised him, but it also prompted his development into an extraordinary writer of great acuity and perspicacity. As an outsider he was able to observe and analyse societies, especially third world countries, with rare, penetrating insights. What he witnessed and conveyed in his writing upset and offended many people. But he believed in telling the truth as he saw it, uncaring of consequences. Naipaul was never politically correct. Throughout his life, he insisted on describing Africans and African-Americans as Negros. He boldly remarked that Africa and its people had no future. “Africans need to be kicked, that’s the only thing they understand,” he once wrote. Likewise, mocking Indian women who wear bindis on their forehead, he said it signalled “I have nothing in my head”. He also described the notorious fatwa of Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini on Indian-origin writer Salman Rushdie for penning The Satanic Verses (1988) as “an extreme form of literary criticism”. His first book on India, An Area of Darkness (1964), an unsparing critique of socialist Nehruvian India, was banned by the government. In this book, he detailed a morning train journey, during which he witnessed people openly defecating beside railway tracks, without bothering to conceal themselves. Naipaul was aware that the raw truth can be hurtful, but he believed it needed to be told regardless of outcomes. He was repelled by much of what he saw in India, its squalor, corruption and pervasive poverty. The irony is that when he visited India for the first time in 1964, he was full of curiosity and eager to learn more about the land of his forefathers. I suspect he half thought that he might settle down in India to become more ‘rooted’. Fortunately, he did not and the world of letters and literature is richer for it. In 2001, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. His 30 books comprised memoirs, travelogues, novels and history. An Area of Darkness was followed by two more books recording his impressions of India — India: A Wounded Civilization (1977) and India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990). While Wounded Civilization was almost as scathing as An Area of Darkness, Million Mutinies was surprisingly mellow, even optimistic about India. After these books, Naipaul turned his severe gaze on militant Islam. His two frank and forthright books Among the Believers (1981) and Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction (1997), outraged most…