Educationworld India Preschool Rankings 2017-18

To compile this year’s league tables of India’s most admired preschools, 100 field personnel of the Delhi-based market research company C fore interviewed 8,002 sample respondents comprising preschool principals, teachers and parents with at least one child in preschool in 16 cities countrywide to rate and rank proprietary and franchised pre-primaries separately – Dilip Thakore & Summiya Yasmeen In the 18th anniversary issue of EducationWorld published last month (November), your editors candidly confessed that EW, which published its first issue in November 1999 on the eve of the new millennium — a time of great hope and euphoria — in a modest way with the ambitious mission statement to “build the pressure of public opinion to make education the #1 item on the national agenda”, has for a variety of reasons — the vested interest of the political class in mass illiteracy and quasi-literacy, indifference of the intelligentsia, influential middle class and mainstream media to public K-12 education — failed to attain this mission.  Eighteen years later, 21st century India continues to unashamedly host the world’s largest population of illiterates, school dropouts and pool of unemployable school and college/university graduates. Despite several high-powered national commissions starting with the Kothari Commission (1966) and ending with the T.S.R. Subramanian Committee (2016) having recommended raising the national (Centre plus states) annual outlay for public education to 6 percent of GDP, post-independence India’s investment in public education has averaged 3.5 percent for the past 70 years. Against this the global average is 5 percent with the developed OECD nations allocating 7-10 percent of their annual GDP towards public education. The price of sustained neglect of mass education — commonly accepted as the foundational bedrock of national development — has been heavy. The country’s population has tripled since independence, industrial and agriculture productivity measured in terms of output per employee and crop yields per hectare, is arguably the lowest worldwide and sanitation and public healthcare standards are rock-bottom.  However although this publication hasn’t been able to sufficiently arouse political will and public conscience to confer the invaluable gift of primary-secondary education upon India’s hapless children, we have played a major role in impacting the critical importance of early childhood care and education (ECCE) upon the indifferent public. After the Los Angeles-based educationist-philanthropist Lowell Milken who in the early years of the new millennium owned KinderCare — the largest chain of private pre-primaries in the US — threw a lifeline to this struggling publication in 2005, your editors were awakened to the vital importance of delivering professionally administered ECCE to children below age five. Starting in 2010, this publication has convened seven international conferences (latterly converted into national conferences after it became obvious that the gap in ECCE between developed OECD and even South-east Asian nations and India is too wide) in Mumbai and Bangalore to create greater awareness of the basic principles and best practices of ECCE. This was necessary because until then, early childhood education was widely synonymous with unstructured play and baby-sitting. Moreover,…