India’s top co-ed boarding schools 2019-20

It’s an indicator of the mindset change in favour of new genre, culturally rooted co-ed boarding schools that upper middle SEC ‘A’ sample respondents have voted vegetarian fare guruji institutions the Top 3 countrywide. Although post-independence India’s K-12 education system — especially the country’s 1.20 million government schools — has been run into the ground, fortunately, despite the imposition of rigorous licence-permit-quota rules and regulations upon them by the education-agnostic neta-babu brotherhood, a substantial number of the country’s 320,000 private independent (aka unaided) schools have survived as islands of excellence in a sea of mediocrity. This is especially true of the few hundred legacy boarding schools established during the pre-independence British raj era, among the few positive outcomes of almost two centuries of ruthlessly exploitative imperial rule over the Indian subcontinent which mercifully ended in 1947. Sited in the country’s salubrious hill stations built for the progeny of British administrators and army officials, and modelled upon England’s famous public (i.e, private, exclusive) boarding schools, these institutions — some of them established over 150 years ago — have not only survived, but also improved with the introduction of new pedagogies, indigenous cultural refinements and modern infrastructure. As such, they have made a great and largely unsung contribution to the development of post-independence India’s middle class which is leading the national development effort to close the gap between India and the developed industrial nations of the West. Although the country’s legacy boarding schools are routinely disparaged as islands of privilege by trendy lefties and jholawalas who despite the implosion of communism and rejection of socialism worldwide continue to dominate the public discourse in contemporary India, ab initio since EducationWorld was launched two decades ago, your editors have always regarded them highly as institutions worthy of support and replication. Therefore, in the pioneer annual EducationWorld India School Rankings introduced in 2007 — which has since evolved into the world’s largest and most comprehensive primary-secondary schools evaluation survey — a special section has been reserved for rating and ranking the country’s vintage co-ed, boys and girls boarding schools separately, to eliminate apples and oranges type comparisons. And surely, it’s a mark of progress that of the country’s boarding schools sufficiently well-known to merit inclusion in the EW league tables, the largest cohort is of co-ed boarding schools. It’s also undoubtedly a marker of the degree to which educators, principals, teachers, fees-paying parents and senior school students have revised their colonial mind-sets that for the past seven years since the annual EWISR league tables were refined to rank day, boarding and international schools separately and these broad categories were further sub-divided into co-ed, boys and girls and day-cum-boarding, that the Rishi Valley School, Chittoor (Andhra Pradesh) has been consistently ranked India’s #1 co-ed boarding school. Conceptualised and established by indigenous, pioneer environmentalist, philosopher and educationist J. Krishnamurti (1895-1986), the 12,213 sample respondents polled have voted RVS (estb.1926) #1 by a wide margin, this year as well. Dr. Anantha Jyoti, principal of this class IV-XII CISCE-affiliated…