India’s best day-cum-boarding schools 2019-20

In the co-ed day-cum-boarding schools 2019-20 EW league table, there is a constant churn with schools from new, better planned cities giving vintage, established schools in metros stiff competition. When day schools become popular with parents and students in any city, they experience public pressure to transform into day-cum-boarding institutions to enable access to children in far-flung districts of a state, or even distant suburbs of India’s ever expanding, ill-planned metros and larger cities. Currently, there are 40 cities across the country with more than 1 million inhabitants and some metros such as Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata grudgingly host over 12 million residents. Therefore in several metros where there is lebensraum, top-ranked day schools have transformed into co-ed day-cum-boarding schools which cater to children from distant districts of India’s country-size states and increasingly distant urban suburbs. The island, land-starved city of Mumbai is perhaps the sole metro that doesn’t host a high-quality day-cum-boarding school. The wisdom and/or expertise of constructing bridges to the mainland — a mere 5 km as the crow flies — has not dawned upon the suffering citizens of India’s commercial capital. With an increasing number of schools offering the option of day and residential schooling, co-ed day-cum-boarding schools are springing up across the country. Consequently, the annual EW league table of the best co-ed day-cum-boarding schools is in a constant churn with schools from new, better planned cities giving vintage well-established schools in metros stiff competition. Nevertheless the league table of India’s most respected day-cum-boarding schools has been dominated by two centrally located vintage institutions in Delhi — Modern School, Barakhamba Rd (MSBR) and Delhi Public School, R.K. Puram (DPS-RKP) with the two alternatively voted the country’s best every year. This year, MSBR has pipped DPS-RKP to win the best seat at the top table of India’s most preferred day-cum-boarding schools. Although on the critical parameters of teacher competence, teacher welfare and development and academic reputation, DPS-RKP is awarded higher scores by the EW sample respondents, with highest ratings under the parameters of co-curricular and sports education, leadership and infrastructure, MSBR is awarded a total score of 1,266 (of a maximum 2,000) cf. DPS-RKP’s 1,265. “Given the vigorous efforts of our faculty and students to excel in academics, co-curricular activities and sports, our #1 ranking this year is well-deserved. The hard work of our teachers and staff to reclaim our #1 position has borne fruit. It is also the result of all our stakeholders including our board of trustees’ insistence and support for sustained excellence over the decades, that has made this top-ranking a natural expectation for MSBR,” says Dr. Vijay Datta, a biology and engineering postgrad of Rajasthan University with a doctorate in life skills and emotional intelligence management awarded by the Regional Institute of Education, Ajmer. Moreover Datta acquired valuable teaching and admin experience at the blue-chip Mayo College (1991-2011) and Army School, Dagshai (2011-14) prior to being appointed principal of MSBR in 2016. Datta is especially pleased that MSBR is ranked #1 in this…