Editorial

Declare 2021-22 as zero academic year

In the rarefied environment of Lutyen’s Delhi about to experience a landscape makeover with the hindutva-inspired Central Vista new Parliament building and in business-as-usual state capitals, there seems to be no awareness that in the vast hinterland, the country is experiencing an Education Emergency.

In early January, primary-secondaries, which had cautiously reopened last October, following an […]

Positive discrimination is not appeasement

As the tempo of electioneering in five states including the bellwether Uttar Pradesh (pop.215 million), which will be electing their legislative assembly representatives before March 10, gathers momentum, there’s rising responsibility for leaders of all political parties — especially the ruling BJP at the Centre with a massive majority in Parliament — to come down […]

Don’t shut down schools again

The inevitable arrival in india of the new highly transmissible Omicron variant of the novel Coronavirus, aka Covid-19, which since it mysteriously originated in Wuhan, China back in November 2019 and surfaced in the subcontinent in early 2020 forcing an unprecedented sealing of industry, business and commerce for over six months, has set alarm bells […]

Return to governance basics

With the highly contagious Omicron variant of the novel Coronavirus which made its India debut last month forecast to peak in early February, Republic Day celebrations are again likely to be subdued this year.

Although initial indications are that Omicron is less lethal than the Delta variant which peaked last summer, its high transmissibility may require […]

Create enabling conditions at home

There’s undoubtedly something rotten in the state of India. The recent appointment of Parag Agrawal, an alumnus of IIT-Bombay as the US-based chief executive of Twitter Inc, USA and successor of Jack Dorsey, the promoter-chairman of this multi-billion dollar hi-tech social network corporation, is being hailed as a great triumph of India and IIT-B in […]

Good ends nullified by bad means

The dramatic repeal of three contentious agriculture reform Acts of Parliament, viz, Farmers Produce Trade and Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation) Act, 2020; Farmers (Empowerment and Protection) Agreement on Price Assurance and Farm Services Act, 2020; Essential Commodities Amendment Act, 2020, by way of prime minister Modi’s national television broadcast on November 19, has evoked mixed […]

Degeneration into a gougers nation

A dismaying national character flaw that has manifested itself with painful impact during the crushing Covid-19 pandemic is that post-independence India — a country of free men and women expected to hold the moral high ground envisioned by Mahatma Gandhi and leaders of the freedom movement — has degenerated into a nation of price gougers. […]

Time to end prolonged PSE love affair

The total priivatisation on October 8 of Air India, the public sector national airline, which during the past 68 years since it was nationalised in 1953 has recorded a cumulative loss of Rs.70,000 crore, is a milestone in the half-hearted national development history of post-independent India. That this perpetually bleeding airline has been re-purchased by […]

Trust deficit will kill NMP programme

The national asset monetisation Pipeline (NMP) programme announced in the Union Budget 2021-22 is detailed in a document released to the public on August 23 by NITI Aayog, the Union government’s think tank (established in 2014 by the BJP/NDA government to replace the Soviet-style Planning Commission). Under this initiative, leases of several public sector ‘brownfield’, […]

Stop private schools harassment

In a landmark verdict passed on September 16, the Karnataka high court reaffirmed an earlier judgement of the Supreme Court in Indian School, Jodhpur vs. State of Rajasthan (Civil Appeal 1724 of 2021) upholding the right of private school managements to determine the tuition fees chargeable by them. A writ petition was filed by several […]

Polyglot engineering education dangers

The central government’s greenlight to 14 engineering colleges in eight states to offer engineering degree programmes in five regional languages (Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi and Bengali) from the new academic year 2021-22 is further proof of myopic politicians rushing in where they should fear to tread.

On July 29 —the first anniversary of the release of […]

Case for presidential governance system

In the 75th year of political freedom from almost two centuries of exploitative British rule, the world’s most populous democracy is running out of steam. Institutions established as the republic’s pillars of democratic governance are crumbling because of political irresponsibility and public indifference. Neither the executive, Parliament, police-judicial system nor the media — the so-called […]

India’s fast hollowing democracy

The death of fr. stan swamy in a Mumbai hospital on July 5 has shone a powerful searchlight on the rot pervading the country’s law and order and justice systems. That the justice provision and administration system has collapsed is widely known. A mountainous 30 million cases are pending in shabby courts of law across […]

Impressive only by Indian standards

Thirty years after the defining Union budget of July 24, 1991 announced overdue liberalisation and deregulation of the Indian economy by abolishing industrial licensing and anti-monopolies legislation, slashing import duties, relaxing rules relating to international trade and substantially released the animal spirits of the country’s millions of natural entrepreneurs, cabined, cribbed and confined by half […]

Girl children dropping out danger

It doesn’t make headline news. but evidence is emerging that the shutdown of all pre-primary and K-12 schools countrywide for over 15 months for fear of children being infected by the novel Coronavirus, is likely to blight the future of tens of millions of India’s children, especially the girl child.

According to the National Family Health […]

Avoid Sino-India War at all costs

Even as 12 rounds of talks are stalled between top Chinese and Indian troop commanders in eastern Ladakh, where patrols from both countries clashed on the banks of lake Tsang Po in May 2020 resulting in the death of 20 jawans of the Indian Army and an unspecified number of Chinese soldiers, media reports indicate […]

Failed Development Project Ruminations

The silver lining of the prolonged lockdown of industry, business and normative life in over a dozen of India’s 29 states to prevent the spread and transmission of the deadly Coronavirus pandemic rampaging across the country, is that it has provided all good men (man embraces woman) and true, with time to deeply reflect upon […]

Sustained Education Neglect Outcome

Political pundits, academics, sociologists and media pundits have offered numerous explainations for the second tsunami of the Coronavirus pandemic. It is several times worse than the first wave which forced the lockdown of industry and business for over six weeks from March 25, 2020. Education institutions including preschools, schools and colleges have been under strict […]

Heavy Price Of Petty Bargaining

The sharp spurt in numbers of Covid-19 positive cases, fatalities, sudden shortage of vaccines, hospital beds and associated equipment threatens to reverse the limping recovery of the Indian economy from a year ago when a total lockdown was imposed by the Central government.

Although politicians tend to blame the people, the second wave of the pandemic […]

Don’t backslide on PSB privatisation

The silver lining of the devastating Covid-19 pandemic, which despite take-off of the national vaccination campaign, is surging in some parts of the country, is that it has made the neta-babu brotherhood aware that adoption of the socialist development model under which the State dominates the “commanding heights of the economy” was the biggest mistake […]

Pratap Bhanu Mehta’s right choice

The controversial resignation on March 16 of Dr. Pratap Bhanu Mehta from the faculty of the high-ranked Ashoka University (AU, estb.2014) has provoked universal condemnation of the promoter trustees of this new genre, crowd-funded private liberal arts university established to maintain the highest standards of academic independence and institutional autonomy for which the Oxbridge universities […]

Circumspection on Sino-India border issue

Recent intemperate and ill-considered statements of Rahul Gandhi (RG), de facto chief of the Congress party, on the military stand-off on the sensitive India-China border issue, signal that it’s high time RG retires from politics in which he has sporadic interest. Following a statement made in Parliament on February 10 by Union defence minister Rajnath […]

Overdue endorsement of private enterprise

Even if belatedly, the leadership of the BJP has begun to differentiate itself from the Congress Party which ruled free India for over half a century during which it grafted inorganic socialism learned by Jawaharlal Nehru, post-independence India’s first prime minister in fashionable drawing rooms of the idle rich in Bloomsbury Square, London, upon the […]

Why President Biden must succeed

On january 20, america awoke to a bright new dawn. A new chapter has begun in the history of the United States of America (pop.331 million), the world’s oldest democratic nation (estb.1776). Joseph (‘Joe’) Biden, former vice president of the US during the presidency of Barack Obama (2009-2017), with a respectable 40-year track record in […]

If you can’t invest step aside

By the time you read this editorial, the Union Budget 2021-22 will have been done, dusted and presented to Parliament and the people. Although the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 presented last July firmly resolved to double the national (Centre plus states) annual outlay for education to 6 percent — a recommendation first made and […]

Repeal & re-enact agriculture legislation

The on-going farmers’ agitation on the borders of Delhi NCR, now in its 44th day (January 8), has thrown a spanner into the recovery process of the Indian economy in the wake of the devastation caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Unfortunately, there is a great deal of confusion about the agriculture liberalisation and deregulation legislation. Together […]

Covid threat also offers opportunities

For the indian economy the recently concluded year 2020 has been an unprecedented annus horribilis. Over 18 million employees in private industry have been rendered jobless and an estimated 100 million (of 300 million) citizens who had been pulled out of extreme poverty since the economic liberalisation and de-regulation of the dirigiste centrally planned Indian […]

Settle China-India border urgently

Discovery of an entirely new village sited 2 km on the Bhutanese side of the Sino-Bhutan border, a mere 9 km from the China-India standoff in the Doklam area in 2017, is proof that the Sino-India border dispute is by no means over.

Under a treaty signed in 1949, Bhutan is an Indian protectorate with India […]

Restart schools right now!

With education institutions, especially pre-primaries and K-12 schools, shuttered for over nine months since mid-March because of fear of infection from the Coronavirus, aka Covid-19 pandemic, pitiful tragedies are being played out in millions of households across the country. The majority of India’s 480 million children are not only suffering loss of learning, but also […]

Wake-up call & season for introspection

It’s the ultimate insult to the neta-babu brotherhood which despite the landmark liberalisation and deregulation initiative of 1991, continues to micro-manage the Indian economy.

In the International Monetary Fund’s latest World Economic Outlook 2020 published last month, India’s GDP is set to contract by 10.3 percent because of ham-fisted mismanagement of the Covid-19 crisis and Bangladesh […]

Well begun but unfinished long march

Two decades and a year ago, your editors embarked on a historic and perhaps in retrospect, too ambitious a mission. The first issue of EducationWorld — The Human Development Magazine, was ceremonially launched on November 1, 1999 by the late Prof. N.S. Ramaswamy (1926-2012), a great institutions builder and founding director of the National Institute […]

Criminal neglect of child nurturance

The 65-page National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, proclaimed on July 29, has set ambitious goals. Yet with each passing day, there’s additional apprehension about policy implementation capabilities of the bureaucracy and red-tape ensnarled government machinery, to deliver its exciting promises.

In particular, there’s rising concern about the capability of the Central and state governments hamstrung […]

Agriculture Bills need careful scrutiny

The disruptive ruckus in the Rajya Sabha on September 20 over the passage of three Bills whose objective is to liberalise, deregulate and revitalise India’s moribund agriculture sector, was unwarranted and irresponsible. It’s incontrovertible that the farm sector in which 60 percent of India’s 1.35 billion citizens are employed, but which contributes only 16 percent […]

Parochial politics endangering unity

Adamantine in its obstinate refusal to fully liberalise and deregulate the Indian economy by consigning the socialist era licence permit-quota regime to the dustbin of history, the neta-babu brotherhood is endangering the unity of India. With unemployment ballooning across the country as the desultory rate of economic growth has been worsened by the Covid-19 induced […]

Foolish resurrection of settled issues

Despite a long and troubled history of rejection, Hindi language chauvinism is on the march again in BJP-ruled India. Prime minister Narendra Modi and members of the Union cabinet seem unaware that 56 percent of the nation’s population is unacquainted with Hindi. On August 9, Ms. Kanimozhi Karunanidhi, a member of Parliament from Tamil Nadu, […]

Reversing India’s descent into anarchy

It’s easy and normative to dismiss as a case of just desserts, the suspicious gunning down by policemen of gangster Vikas Dubey on July 10 in Kanpur, where a week earlier he had reportedly killed eight policemen in a late night ambush. Such encounter killings — police personnel gunning down suspected criminals on grounds of […]

First positive report on private schools

The private schools in India report (PSIR) 2020, jointly released by the Delhi-based Central Square Foundation and Omidyar Network India on July 22 proclaims — for the first time — the huge contribution that India’s much maligned private schools have made to the national development effort.

The official line supported by the academy and media […]

No case for schools closure extension

With the unlock 2.0 strategy of the country announced by the Union government on June 29, it’s now official. All education institutions which have been closed since mid-March will be obliged to remain shut until July 31. This means that children in preschool-class XII in north and western India where the school year begins in […]

Concede some ground to buy time: Galwan River Valley

The troop skirmishes in the Galwan River Valley sector of the 3,488 km undemarcated India-China border which extends from Aksai Chin in the north-west all the way to Arunachal Pradesh in the northeast, that resulted in the brutal clubbing to death of a colonel and 20 men of the Indian Army on June 15, is […]

Silver lining of feeble stimulus package

The reportedly Rs 20 lakh crore post-Covid-19 economy stimulus package announced by prime minister Narendra Modi in a national televised broadcast on May 12 has greatly disappointed India Inc and most monitors of the Indian economy because of its opacity and promise of loans strewn across Central government programmes, and token grants for stimulating aggregate […]