Despite damning start-of-the-year Annual Status of Education Report 2018, QS and Times Higher Education World University Rankings highlighting the pathetic condition of India’s education system from pre-primary to Ph D — and continuous whistle-blowing by EducationWorld for almost two decades — education reform is a peripheral issue in General Election 2019.
Although as usual, all political […]
“Weakening institutions, making way for commercialisation of higher education and slashing support for educational welfare are some of the obvious examples of the short-sightedness herein. Notwithstanding the rhetoric, the present government’s report card on education has more misses than hits.”
Academics Shivali Tukdeo and Subhankar Chakraborty in ‘BJP’s record on education runs afoul of its own […]
A recent amendment at the time of school admissions to the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, 2009 Rules, has disillusioned thousands of socio-economically underprivileged families in Karnataka (pop. 60 million).
Under s. 12 (1) (c) of the RTE Act, children of poor households (with incomes below Rs.3.5 lakh per year in […]
Against the backdrop of hectic campaigning for the 17th General Election with West Bengal’s ruling Trinamool Congress (TMC) party led by chief minister Mamata Banerjee expecting to bag all of the state’s 42 seats in the Lok Sabha, around 450 youth have been on a hunger strike since February 28 in the heart of Kolkata, […]
The steady decline in class i enrolments in Tamil Nadu’s 23,395 class I-V government primaries and 7,597 class I-VIII upper-primaries (aka middle schools) has prompted the incumbent E.K. Palaniswamy-led All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) government to introduce formal preschool education (lower and upper kindergarten) in 2,381 spruced-up anganwadis attached with upper primaries across […]
The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government’s decision to reserve 16 percent of capacity in postgrad programmes of Maharashtra government’s 14 medical colleges for the Maratha community under the socially and educationally backward classes (SEBC) category, and another 10 percent for economically weaker section (EWS) students mandated by the Central government on January 9, has […]
A report card which compares the education delivery record of the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government at the Centre with promises made in its Election Manifesto 2014, shows the coalition in poor light.
The RTE Forum, a coalition of civil society groups which monitors implementation of the Right of Children to Free & Compulsory Education […]
“I daresay that humanity hasn’t matured.”
Pope Francis, acknowledging Catholic priests’ sexual abuse of nuns after a mass in Abu Dhabi (February 5)
“My resignation is not an attempt to be heroic or to make a statement. It is simply the only thing I felt anyone in this position must do. It is not just for […]
As the country waits for the Chief Election Commissioner Sunil Arora to visit the troubled state of Jammu and Kashmir on March 4-5 after which he will announce the Lok Sabha election schedule, West Bengal’s fiery chief minister Mamata Banerjee, who is a prime ministerial possibility should the united anti-BJP parties (mahagathbandhan) win General Election […]
In the new globalised world, it was inevitable that the freedom of speech on campus debate, which is sweeping across university campuses in the US and Europe, would be echoed in India.
On February 12, a motley group of 20 students of the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) gathered in the university circle to protest an invitation […]
Despite the landmark right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, 2009 mandating that every child aged 6-14 should be in primary/elementary school, 70,016 of the estimated 14.4 million children in the southern state of Karnataka are out of the formal education system, according to a Union human resource development ministry survey released […]
An indefinite strike called by the Joint Action Council of Tamil Nadu Teachers’ Organisation and Government Employees Organisation (JACTTO-GEO) on January 22, supported by over 700,000 government school teachers and public sector employees ended with a whimper on January 30. The incumbent Edappadi K. Palaniswami-led All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) state government firmly […]
Faced with a steady exodus of students from its 1,192 schools, the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (MCGM) — the wealthiest local government in the country (budget: Rs.30,692.59 crore for 2019-20) — has drawn up an ambitious plan to revamp them. To attract and retain children, the budget for this fiscal is 6 percent higher […]
There’s a virtual unanimity among political pundits and educationists that no political party countrywide is as committed to improving and upgrading K-12 public education as the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), which has an overwhelming majority (67 out of 70 seats) in the Delhi state legislative assembly. Despite this huge majority, the AAP government has not […]
“Can a woman give birth to 100 children in one lifetime? Mahabharata says, 100 eggs were fertilised and put into 100 earthen pots. Are they not test tube babies? We had hundreds of Kauravas from one mother because of stem cell research and test tube baby technology. It happened a few thousand years ago. This […]
After almost a quarter century, a major politician in Karnataka has taken the powerful Kannada language lobby in the state head-on.
The state’s ruling JD (S)-Congress government, which was sworn in on May 23, 2018, is determined to provide English-medium education in 1,000 government elementaries to stop the steady exodus of children from the state’s 44,000 […]
With general election 2019 just a few months away, in a major show of strength Trinamool Congress (TMC) supremo and West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee convened a massive ‘united opposition rally’ in Kolkata on January 19 to highlight the “misrule” of the Bharatiya Janata Party which is in office at the Centre and 16 […]
There’s an unwarranted self-congratulatory mood within Maharashtra’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), particularly in the education ministry, following the national release of Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2018 on January 15. On several metrics children in rural Maharashtra’s 42,000-plus primary schools performed better than the national average. While the national average for children in […]
The 13th Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2018 — the labour of love of 30,000 volunteers (mainly college students) mobilised by the globally-respected Mumbai/Delhi-based NGO Pratham Education Foundation (estb.1994) — released in New Delhi on January 15, has caused a storm in the teacups of the small number of academics, intellectuals and media pundits […]
A ground zero reality which communists, socialists and assorted lefties, who despite the collapse of communism worldwide continue to dominate India’s academy, refuse to acknowledge is that there is a steady exodus of pupils out of government schools, especially public primary-secondaries run by state and local governments.
The reality which education bureaucrats and ideologically obstinate academics […]
A curious anomaly of indian primary-secondary education is the literally heavy burden that even tiny children have to bear because they are obliged to lug a heavy load of text and notebooks to and from schools every day. In Maharashtra following several PIL (public interest litigation) writ petitions filed against the state government for failure […]
The southern state of Karnataka which hosts the country’s largest number of medical colleges (51), is set to introduce a 15 percent reserved quota for non-resident Indian (NRI) students — following the example of private medical colleges — in its 17 government medical colleges. Thus far, government medical colleges only admitted meritorious students from the […]
A slew of public notices, rules and regulations issued by the Delhi-based University Grants Commission (UGC) — the apex higher education supervisory organisation — relating to open and distance learning (ODL) have raised the hackles of the 13 government and seven deemed (private) universities in Tamil Nadu (pop.72 million), which offer distance education programmes.
The UGC […]
With general election 2019 round the corner, chief minister and undisputed supremo of the ruling Trinamool Congress (TMC) party Mamata Banerjee who harbours national ambitions, is pulling out all stops to woo the electorate of West Bengal to consolidate her support base.
West Bengal’s quota in the Lok Sabha — the lower house of Parliament in […]
“School readiness blah blah blah, school readiness, but I think schools should first be made ready to welcome every child.”
Uma Mahadevan, principal secretary, women and child welfare, Karnataka government, on twitter (December 16)
“Do we need another Education Policy? The problem with education is not prescription. It is with application. How about a monitorable action […]
“Not reading specific ideas or text can be a layman’s way of dealing with contrarian thoughts. The academic style of demolishing an idea is by presenting a more logical and robust theory or idea.”
Dilip Mandal, senior journalist, on Delhi University’s proposal to drop three books written by Dalit activist Kancha Ilaiah from its MA syllabus […]
In the western seaboard state of Maharashtra — India’s most industrialised state — the tuition fees of government and private aided schools are prescribed annually by the state government. In 2011, against the backdrop of parents complaining against arbitrary fee hikes by the state’s private unaided schools, the state government enacted the Maharashtra Educational Institutions […]
After an interregnum of six years, the Delhi-based Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE, estb.1962) — the country’s largest pan-India school examination board — issued revised affiliation and regulatory byelaws for its 20,299 affiliated schools in October.
Revision of the board’s byelaws (first notified in 1988 and revised in 2012) was ordered by its parent Union […]
On November 5, a Karnataka state government order has notified ten of the country’s 29 major languages for the purposes of qualifying as linguistic minority-promoted primary schools. They are Urdu, Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, Marathi, Tulu, Lamani, Hindi, Konkani and Gujarati.
For the country’s 320,000 privately promoted schools, the religious or linguistic minority tag confers several advantages. […]
Linguistically proud dravidian governments which have ruled the south-eastern seaboard state of Tamil Nadu (pop. 72 million) since the mid-1960s, after the disastrous attempt of the then almighty Congress party to impose “Hindi imperialism” on the southern states proved a dismal failure, have continued since then to insist on Tamil being the compulsory first language, […]
Born 20 years ago in 1998, the All India Trinamool Congress (TMC) is the only Indian National Congress breakaway party to experience steady political success. It has twice formed governments in West Bengal (pop. 91 million) and its supremo Mamata Banerjee has been a Union cabinet minister three times in her political career of 25 […]
A year after it produced its SDG 4.7 review report titled Rethinking Schooling at the 39th session of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco) held in Paris, the Delhi-based Unesco-Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Education for Peace and Sustainable Development (MGIEP) released a policy brief document of the review report on October 16. […]
The vintage mumbai university (MU, estb.1857) has been at the receiving end of a fusillade from the Bombay high court for “abdicating” its responsibility of conducting independent law examinations and suo motu introducing a proposed 60:40 evaluation pattern in affiliated law colleges from the current academic year. Hearing writ petitions filed by students and law […]
Popularly known as the rte quota, the compulsory admission of children from poor neighbourhood households into private non-minority day schools under s. 12 (1) (c) of the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, 2009 has always been a sore point in Karnataka. Under this provision, private unaided schools — other than […]
Against the backdrop of an estimated 31 million youth registered as unemployed in official employment agencies across the country and the BJP/NDA government at the Centre having abandoned all claims to generating 12 million new jobs per year, students in the country’s 39,000 colleges and 900 universities are becoming increasingly militant. The eastern seaboard state […]
Three years after the jayalalithaa-led all india Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) government of Tamil Nadu promulgated India’s first code of regulations for play schools (aka pre-primaries/preschools), and also drafted an activity-oriented syllabus for children in the 1.5-3.5 years age group, the incumbent E. Palaniswamy-led AIADMK government released a new draft syllabus for the state’s […]
“Teacher education programmes should underline active engagement in public life, and dispositions and sensibilities for living in plural societies with a commitment to social cohesion and solidarity.”
Seema Sarohe, assistant professor of education, University of Delhi on the role of teacher education programmes (Economic and Political Weekly, October 6)
“Yes, we are broken. We are now mere […]
Last month two significant and keenly anticipated elections for control of the Delhi University Students Union (DUSU) and Jawaharlal Nehru University Students Union (JNUSU) produced contrasting results which are being interpreted as forerunners of General Election 2019 scheduled for next summer.
The 135,000 (44 percent turnout) members of DUSU who voted on September 12, returned candidates […]
In maharashtra — india’s most industrialised state (pop.114 million) — 25,000 college and university teachers have been on an indefinite ‘cease-work’ strike since September 25. They are protesting poor pay scales and a huge number of teacher vacancies in the state’s government- funded higher education institutions.
The Maharashtra Federation of University & College Teachers Organisation (MFUCTO) […]
The political power and influence of the students’ community in the eastern seaboard state of West Bengal (pop.91 million) has been historically acknowledged right from the heyday of the anarchic Naxalite movement of the 1970s — often romanticised as the golden age of student politics in Bengal. Moreover in Bengal, Gandhian non-violence made minimal impact […]
