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…