The BJP is a well-organised electoral juggernaut, it is ruthless in using state power to intimidate opponents… But a formidable opponent and repression often galvanize an Opposition, not make them comatose. But the Opposition is not held back by the power of the BJP. Its besetting sin is its own excruciating littleness.
-Pratap Bhanu Mehta, public […]
-Baishali Mukherjee (Kolkata)
West Bengal’s stop-go government school teacher recruitment process stretching back to 2015 ,which has been subject to continuous street demonstrations, court injunctions and sporadic appointments — as regularly reported by your correspondent — came to a head on July 22-23 when the Enforcement Directorate, a financial frauds investigation unit of the BJP-controlled Central […]
-Nishant Saxena (Lucknow)
On july 24, residents of Lucknow (pop.3.8 million), the administrative capital of the Hindi heartland, BJP-ruled state of Uttar Pradesh, woke up to bold face newspaper headlines and screaming television news anchors proclaiming that seven out of 18 students who attained the top score of 99.75 percent in the recently-completed class XII ISC […]
-Reshma Ravishanker
The Karnataka BJP government’s 26 position papers on National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, which is being rolled out nationally after being kept on hold during the Covid-19 pandemic disruption, submitted in early July to the National Council for Educational Research & Training (NCERT), have sparked outrage within the academy.
Submitted in response to the Union […]
Ashokrao Thorat, vice president, MRSSM
More than 60 marathi-medium private aided school managements have filed writ petitions before the Nagpur bench of the Bombay high court demanding complete autonomy to appoint teachers. Currently, there are a total 66,750 primary-secondary schools statewide with an aggregate enrolment of 5.25 million children mentored by 450,000 teachers. Private-aided […]
-Autar Nehru
Delhi deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia
Perhaps the sole political party in India whose leadership believes that provision, upgradation and universalisation of school education is an election-winning issue is the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) which was born out of social reformer Anna Hazare’s futile anti-corruption crusade of 2012. In 2015, AAP led by […]
“The RSS has done this at their shakhas for years now, catching hold of children at a very young age, implanting in them the story of a narrow ‘Akhand Bharat’, killing their scientific temperament and replacing it with extreme edicts — an action plan entirely based on the idea that young brains are more malleable…”
-M. Somasekhar (Hyderabad)
In sharp contrast with BJP governments at the Centre and in several states which are acquiring a reputation for neglecting and even dumbing down early childhood and primary-secondary education, Telangana’s state government headed by high-profile chief minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao and his son and heir-apparent the US educated K.T. Rama Rao, is winning […]
Karnataka’s school textbooks revision row shows no sign of dying down and could become a major issue in the state legislative assembly elections scheduled for next summer. Despite the state’s BJP government having consented to make addenda to new textbooks already distributed to class VI-X students for the academic year 2022-23 which began on May […]
-Baishali Mukherjee (Kolkata)
A teacher recruitment scandal dating back to 2016 continues to haunt the state’s Trinamool Congress (TMC) government, now in its third term in office.
On May 18, a single-judge bench of the Calcutta high court ordered a CBI probe into the process of the West Bengal School Service Commission (WBSSC) for recruiting teachers for […]
-Dipta Joshi (Mumbai)
Dramatic events on the political stage in end-June which culminated in the resignation of chief minister Uddhav Thackeray and end of the tripartite Shiv Sena, Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) and Congress party coalition government after 31 months in office, has clouded the future of 2,088 aspirants for the coveted position of assistant professors […]
-Autar Nehru (Delhi)
Despite widespread criticism of the BJP government at the Centre and the Union education ministry for lethargic implementation of the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, which was presented to Parliament and the nation on July 29, 2020, early childhood care and education (ECCE) professionals are deriving some comfort from the roll-out of the […]
So, is Covid-19 over? No, it’s most certainly not over. I know that’s not the message you want to hear, and it’s definitely not the message I want to deliver. This virus has surprised us at every turn – a storm that has torn through communities… and we still can’t predict its path, or its […]
-R. Kasturi (Bhubaneswar)
A confrontation between the odisha government and Delhi-based University Grants Commission (UGC) has prompted the Supreme Court to issue a stay order against the state government and Odisha Public Service Commission from proceeding with recruitment of professors and lecturers for the state’s 11 universities and affiliated colleges.
This confrontation dates back to last year […]
-Baishali Mukherjee (Kolkata)
Fifteen long-pending writ petitions dating back to 2016 challenging the process of recruiting 10,000 teachers for West Bengal’s 92,000 government schools are experiencing some traction. On April 7, Justice Abhijit Gangopadhyay of the Calcutta high court ordered a CBI enquiry into the allegedly fraudulent teacher recruitment process.
This order was challenged by the state’s […]
-Reshma Ravishanker (Bengaluru)
Following 82 weeks of lockdown because of the Covid-19 pandemic, 74,000 schools affiliated with the Karnataka state board reopened for on-campus offline learning on May 16 — three weeks earlier than scheduled. But right at the start of the new academic year 2022-23 while children are yet to receive new textbooks, a massive […]
-Dipta Joshi
A prolonged feud between Maharashtra’s tripartite (Shiv Sena, Congress and Nationalist Congress Party) MVA government and BJP-appointed state governor Bhagat Singh Koshiyari has thrown a spanner in the works of Savitribai Phule Pune University (SPPU, estb.1949).
Following the retirement of vice-chancellor Nitin Karmalkar on May 18, the VC’s office of the 73-year-old university (ranked #2 […]
Indian students in the US
-Autar Nehru
A long-pending proposition endorsed by the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 to internationalise isolationist Indian higher education has received some traction. On May 2, the Delhi-based University Grants Commission (UGC) — the apex body for higher education regulation — notified the University Grants Commission (Academic Collaboration between Indian […]
“Our states have been formed on linguistic basis. So, the concerned state language or mother tongue is supreme. Everyone should understand and respect that.”
Basavaraj Bommai, Karnataka chief minister on the controversy about making Hindi the national language (April 23, Times of India)
“The party line across the secular universe, is, you can’t afford to be […]
-Shivani Chaturvedi (Chennai)
Swept to power in the legislative assembly election held in April 2021 with a comfortable majority of 159 seats in the 234-member assembly, Tamil Nadu’s Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) government has declared war against the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 approved by the BJP/NDA government at the Centre.
The DMK government finds NEP 2020’s […]
-Baishali Mukherjee (Kolkata)
Somewhat surprisingly, the sixth edition of the Bengal Global Business Summit (BGBS) 2022, hosted by the state’s Trinamool Congress (TMC) government on April 20-21, attracted participation of 4,300 delegates from 42 countries, including businessmen, politicians and academics from the US, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Vietnam, Netherlands, Finland, Morocco, Bangladesh and Bhutan. During […]
-Reshma Ravishanker (Bengaluru)
With state legislative assembly elections less than a year away, rank and file activists of the BJP — even if not the top brass of the party — are targeting Muslim and Christian minorities in Karnataka (pop.65 million), widely acknowledged as the BJP’s gateway into peninsular India. Plainly the objective of the BJP […]
Kasturi Ray (Bhubaneshwar)
Among india’s 28 states, the eastern seaboard state of Odisha, formerly Orissa (pop.46.3 million), is an outlier. Unlike other states of the Indian Union in which political action is fast and furious, Odisha has enjoyed political stability and orderly governance under the ruling Biju Janata Dal (BJD) headed by Doon School and St. […]
-Dipta Joshi (Mumbai)
More than 1,200 english-medium schools have closed down in Maharashtra during the past two years due to financial hardship. The majority of them are financially independent budget private schools (BPS) levying tuition fees of Rs.30,000 per year or less. They became unviable during the prolonged government mandated pandemic lockdown of all education institutions […]
-Debasish Roy (Noida)
Although students in india experienced the world’s highest learning loss because of the most prolonged shutdown of education institutions from pre-primaries to universities during the Covid-19 pandemic, the number of enrolments and awards for Ph D degrees rose significantly.
Even in higher education institutions where the number of Ph D admissions took a minor […]
-Autar Nehru (Delhi)
A long-standing demand of serious scholars intent upon acquiring multidisciplinary qualifications and skills has finally been conceded. On April 13, the University Grants Commission (UGC), the apex-level regulator of Indian higher education, issued a circular to universities permitting pursuance of two degrees simultaneously in undergraduate as well as postgraduate education (barring Ph D) […]
“All of us who believe in @INCIndia are hurting from the results of the recent assembly elections. It is time to reaffirm the idea of India that the Congress has stood for and the positive agenda it offers the nation – and to reform our organisational leadership in a manner that will reignite those ideas […]
Shivani Chaturvedi (Chennai)
The announcement by the University Grants Commission (UGC) of the Central Universities Entrance Test (CUET) as mandatory for admission into all undergraduate programmes of the country’s 45 highly-prized Central universities from the start of this academic year 2022-23, has provoked strong opposition in Tamil Nadu (pop.79 million). The state’s political class across the […]
Baishali Mukherjee (Kolkata)
With all schools in the state reopening from February 16 after a 23-month lockdown, classrooms across Bengal are coming to life. But judging by the reports published in local vernacular dailies, a large number of benches in the state’s 50,000 government primary schools are empty. During the pandemic lockdown, with a great majority […]
Reshma Ravishanker (Bengaluru)
The high cost of the prolonged pandemic-induced 82-week schools closure in India — the most prolonged of any major country worldwide — is becoming manifest. Even though education activists have been ringing alarm bells that over the past two years several thousands of children have dropped out of the education system and have […]
Dipta Joshi (Mumbai)
The Maharashtra education ministry’s drive to match government and government-aided schools’ student enrolments with their UID (unique identification number) aka Aadhaar card registrations, has opened a Pandora’s box. Of the 2.1 million students enroled on the ministry’s online portal, SARAL, 1.9 million have fake Aadhaar cards while another 2.9 million have been enroled […]
The out-of-the-blue announcement of a Central Universities Entrance Test (CUET) for admission into undergraduate programmes of all 45 Central government universities from the start of this academic year (2022-23), has sparked a nationwide debate on its impact on higher secondary school education, the future of school examination boards and board exams, homogenisation of K-12 education […]
“The English language continued to remain dominating (sic) in our country because we were colonised. Parents fear that if their children will not learn English, they won’t have a future. Once we give them better options in regional languages, this hesitancy will go away.”
Dinesh Prasad Saklani, newly appointed director of the National Council of Educational […]
-Shivani Chaturvedi (Chennai)
After a gap of nearly two years, 3,000 aided and 12,000 unaided private schools across Tamil Nadu reopened nursery classes on February 16, following an official order of the DMK-led state government permiting nursery classes, kindergarten, and playschools statewide to restart. This order has brought much needed relief to pre-primary schools, which had […]
-Baishali Mukherjee (Kolkata)
With the daily count of Covid-19 cases in West Bengal dipping from 24,000 cases per day in mid-January to 500 on February 13, the state’s hyper cautious Trinamool Congress government announced reopening of all primary and upper primary schools with effect from February 16 — after a 23-months lockdown. The government also greenlighted […]
Reshma Ravishanker (Bengaluru)
Against the backdrop of Karnataka (pop.69 million) becoming the first state countrywide to start implementing the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 beginning with higher education last September, the Karnataka Private School Managements Teaching and Non-Teaching Staff Coordination Committee (KPMTCC), which has 7,000 member schools, hosted a two-day national symposium to deliberate the ‘Regulatory […]
-Dipta Joshi
On February 27, as Maharashtra celebrated Marathi Language Day on the birth anniversary of popular poet, Kusumagraj, 64,000 mostly Marathi medium private aided schools announced they would abstain from conducting the state government’s forthcoming class X and class XII board exams on their premises. The managements of these schools are on the warpath against […]
Autar Nehru (Delhi)
If parents and students in India experienced the world’s most prolonged lockdown of schools during the Covid-19 pandemic, the national capital’s citizens claim they experienced the longest schools’ lockdown within India. Now with Covid-19 reduced to a mere epidemic, it’s official that Delhi’s 5,500 K-12 schools which educate 4.5 million children, will restart […]
“This is a country where in a range of exams marks are calculated to the seventh decimal place to decide who will get selected. Every single place where we have an exam, from IIT to CLAT, is pressure ridden because of the law of numbers. So the idea that this exam will be a relief […]
The Tamil Nadu government school teachers Association (TNGSTA) has submitted a petition to chief minister M.K. Stalin to cancel the state’s unique class XI board exams. This exam is scheduled to be written in March-April by 1 million students enrolled in 39,300 government and government-aided schools affiliated with the Tamil Nadu Board of Secondary Examinations […]
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