For ICT and other industry professionals from all over the country, the blooming English-medium preschools of Bangalore have come as manna from heaven. Here are Bangalore’s most loved preschools 2017-18 Always a stronghold of English language learning despite the efforts of frogs-in-a-well Kannada language chauvinists who have ruined the public education system of Karnataka (pop. 61 million), private English-medium schools have continued to bloom in this once garden city — since transformed into a potholed garbage city — which has emerged as the ICT (information and communication technologies) capital of India, and arguably Asia. The ICT boom has attracted IT professionals and engineers from all over the country and prompted transnational IT/ICT companies such as Microsoft, Dell and Texas Instruments among others, to establish their India offices in Bangalore. These professionals have little time or patience for the convoluted arguments of the country’s education pundits who can’t seem to grasp the basic reality that Indian citizens need strong English language skills to communicate with each other, let alone with the rest of the world, and continue to plug vernacular languages as media of instruction in early childhood and primary education. For these professionals of the ICT industry which has created over 2 million jobs in this city, the blooming English-medium preschools of Bangalore — mercifully pre-primary education has thus far remained free of the Midas-in-reverse attentions of the state’s notoriously extortionist education bureaucracy — have come as manna from heaven. Indeed, some of the garden/garbage city’s top-ranked preschools are as good as any in the world in terms of child care and pedagogical practices. Therefore, the annual EW India Preschool Rankings generate considerable excitement and enthusiasm within the teachers and parents communities of the city. And although Bangalore hosts hundreds of pre-primaries operating in every nook and corner, the number sufficiently well-known to be rated on ten parameters of preschool education excellence — competence of teachers, teacher welfare, infrastructure, individual attention to students, value for money, parental involvement, innovative teaching, child safety and hygiene, leadership quality and special needs education etc — add up to only about 75-80. These sufficiently well-known preschools with citywide reputations are rated and ranked separately in two categories — owned/proprietary and franchised. Owned/proprietary preschools The Top 5 table of the 39-strong league table of Bangalore’s sufficiently well-known owned/proprietary preschools in 2017-18 is a mirror image of last year’s. Nor is there much of a change in the Top 10 league table except that the previously unranked Vidyasagar Preschool, the lower-profile feeder pre-primary of the low-profile Vidyashilp Academy ranked #5 among the city’s primary-secondary day schools in the EW India School Rankings 2017-18, is ranked #8 this year. In particular, the Neev group of high-end preschools led by its flagship Neev, Indiranagar (estb. 2005), are dominant with three of the group’s four pre-primaries ranked among the Top 5. The Indus Early Learning Centres of the Bangalore-based Indus Trust, promoter of the garden city’s highly venerated International Baccalaureate (Geneva)-affiliated Indus International School (estb. 2003) ranked the country’s #1 international…
