THE MADRAS HIGH COURT witnessed high drama on March 7, when a batch of 41 students studying nursing in government colleges threatened to jump from the seventh floor of the additional law chambers in the high court premises unless given assurance of employment in the state’s government hospitals. After almost an hour of persuasion by […]
THREE YEARS ON AFTER IT ended 34 years of rule of the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM) led-Left Front government in West Bengal (pop. 91 million) with a landslide majority in the state legislative election of 2011, the Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress government has yet to redeem its promise to restore West Bengal’s universities — […]
THE FRAMING OF SEDITION charges against 67 Kashmiri students of the private Swami Vivekananda Subharti University (SVSU), Meerut, following an Indo-Pak Asia Cup cricket match played in Dhaka last month, has raised political temperatures in Lucknow and Uttar Pradesh on the eve of General Election 2014.
While witnessing a live telecast of the match on campus […]
EVER SINCE THE LANDMARK right to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, 2009, which devolved part of the constitutional obligation of the State (Central, state and local governments) to provide free-of-charge elementary education to all children in the 6-14 age group onto private schools, became law on April 1, 2010, relations between the Karnataka government […]
EVEN AS ADMISSIONS HAVE BEGUN for the current academic year starting June/July, confusion about rules and regulations governing admission of tiny tots aged three-four years in Delhi’s estimated 6,600 composite private schools offering nursery education has not cleared despite a rain of legislation, litigation, clarification notifications and rules drawn up by the Delhi state government, […]
THE NINTH ANNUAL STATUS OF EDUCATION Report (ASER) 2013 — the sole national survey measuring learning outcomes in rural government and private primary schools (classes I-VIII) conducted by the acclaimed Mumbai-based NGO Pratham — depicts a downtrend in learning outcomes in rural India, which hosts 67 percent of the national population. This annual survey assesses […]
GUJARAT’S THREE-TEAM CHIEF MINISTER and now prime ministerial candidate of the opposition BJP for the general election scheduled for this summer, Narendra Modi has had to endure severe criticism for his failure to maintain law and order during the communal riots which swept the state in 2002 when over 3,000 citizens — mainly of the […]
WHEN WEST BENGAL’S FIREBRAND chief minister Mamata Banerjee ended 34 years of uninterrupted rule of the CPM (Communist Party of India-Marxist)-led Left Front government rule in the state — during which quasi-literate CPM apparatchiks filled all institutions of education driving teaching-learning standards to new lows — in May 2011, she aroused great expectations in West […]
THE SHOWPIECE OSMANIA UNIVERSITY, Hyderabad (estb.1918), a prime bone of contention between the feuding protagonists of a breakaway Telangana from Andhra Pradesh (pop. 84 million) and proponents of a unitary state, may not be as valuable a prize as popularly believed. A task force of the Delhi-based University Grants Commission (UGC) which visited and inspected […]
THE RAIN OF WOES POURING DOWN ON THE STATE OD UTTAR PRADESH (pop. 200 million) — the Muzaffarnagar riots, legislators globetrotting at public expense and exacerbating breakdown of law and order — has been compounded by the release of the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2013, published by the nationally reputed Mumbai-based education NGO […]
A Report Prepared by EY India — a subsidiary of the former Ernst & Young, UK, the world’s third largest professional services (auditing, consultancy, tax advisory) firm (revenue: $25.3 billion or Rs.154,330 crore) — for the 9th FICCI Higher Education Summit 2013 convened in Delhi on November 12-14, predicts that India’s higher education system will emerge as […]
Through a low-profile official resolution dated October 18, the Maharashtra state government has created a new office of Commissioner of Education (EC) to oversee the work of eight educational direct-orates, four of which are autonomous. S. Chockalingam (IAS), Inspector General of Registration & Controller of Stamps, took additional charge as EC on October 22. In effect the […]
The great expectations of educationists, academics and parents in West Bengal, aroused by the Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress which ended 34 years of rule of the CPM-led Left Front government in 2011, have since been dashed by the ad hoc changes decreed by several committees and commissions. Dominated by the state’s mercurial chief minister who […]
With admission deadlines fast approaching, and young middle class parents across Tamil Nadu preparing to line up in serpentine queues for application forms to admit their wards into the lower kindergarten (LKG) classes of the state’s 5,934 matriculation schools, a November 11 circular issued by the Directorate of Matriculation Schools has created consternation and added […]
The glory days of the 90-year-old Lucknow University (LU, estb. 1920), the alma mater of some of the big success stories of post-independence India — former President Shankar Dayal Sharma, journalist Vinod Mehta, cardiologist Dr. Naresh Trehan and scientist Birbal Sahni — seem to be over. Plagued by continuous and incremental government interference, surly student […]
The already tardy implementation of the right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (aka RTE) Act, 2009, in Karnataka has hit yet another roadblock with the Central government slashing funds for the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA, ‘Education for All’) programme. The Congress-led UPA-II government at the Centre has cut the state’s RTE-SSA grant for 2013-14 to […]
“I will run RJD with my son, like Congress is run by Rahul-Sonia.” Rabri Devi, wife of former Bihar chief minister and RJD chief Lalu Prasad Yadav after he was convicted in the fodder scam case (India Today, October 14)
“Innovation and creativity are a part of the American culture, a natural trait of an immigrant society. […]
A performance audit for the year 2012-13 of the Central government-sponsored Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS, estb.1975) in Gujarat tabled in the legislative assembly on October 3, has embarrassed the three-term chief minister and Bharatiya Janata Party’s officially anointed 2014 prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi. In his audit report, the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) […]
Over 80,000 high school teachers of 20,000 state government and government aided secondary schools in Karnataka are all set to strike work in mid-November to force the six-month-old Congress state government led by chief minister M. Siddaramaiah, to raise their pay to the Sixth Pay Commission scales of Central government schools. At a meeting organised […]
With the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs (CCEA) on October 3 approving Rashtriya Uchchatar Shiksha Abhiyan (RUSA), a Central government-sponsored scheme for upgrading the higher education system in India’s 29 states and seven Union territories, new hope has risen in official circles that the “sick child of Indian education’’ — the tertiary education system as […]
Spared the heavy-handed and usually obsolete regulations of Central and state government educrats and itching palms of school inspectors for 65 years since independence, privately-provided nursery and preschool education is about to be included within the regulatory ambit of government.
On September 20, the Union cabinet approved a draft National Early Childhood Care and Education (NECCE) […]
The condition of the education system in West Bengal (pop. 91 million) is near its nadir. Acts of indiscipline and general lawlessness are now a daily occurrence in this state which led the subcontinent’s education awakening and renaissance of the mid 19th century. All hopes of the political transformation of West Bengal following the electoral […]
After prolonged hesitation, on September 15 the Maharashtra State Council of Examinations (MSCE) declared that it “proposes” to conduct a statewide Teacher Eligibility Test (TET), as mandated by s.23 (1) of the Right to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, 2009, in November. Maharashtra (pop.112 million) is among the last states to implement TET (conducted […]
Gujarat Vidyapith (university), an Ahmedabad-based K-Ph D education institution promoted by Mahatma Gandhi in 1920 as a nationalist alternative to the Western education system in the heady days of the freedom struggle, is caught in a clash between the traditional and modern.
On September 12, an estimated 250 of the vidyapith’s 4,300 students staged a protest fast before the registrar’s […]
Karnataka’s mid-day meal scheme, which provides hot cooked lunches to 6.1 million children in 55,113 state government and government-aided primary schools, has come under a cloud following the horrible deaths of two six-year-olds within the space of ten days in September. On September 17, a class II girl child was burnt to death after she […]
Despite being ruled by former film star-turned chief minister J. Jayalalithaa who shook more than a leg on the silver screen during her heyday, a rising wave of puritanism is sweeping over campuses in the industrially and educationally advanced southern state of Tamil Nadu (pop.72 million), ranked third nationwide in the Union finance ministry’s latest […]
“Language diversity should not be seen as a development liability, but as an economic asset.” Ganesh Devy, scholar-activist, on the People’s Linguistic Survey of India (Outlook, September 9)
“Pens and books are the weapons that defeat terrorism.” Malala Yousafzai, 16-year-old Pakistani education activist who survived a 2012 Taliban assassination attempt, presiding over inauguration of Europe’s largest regional […]
Since it was voted to power in West Bengal (pop.91 million) with a landslide majority in May 2011 which ended 34 years of uninterrupted rule of the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM)-led Left Front govern-ment in the state, a top priority of the Trinamool Congress (TMC) government, especially its fiery chief minister Mamata Banerjee, has […]
“I want education for the sons and daughters of the Taliban and all the terrorists and extremists.” Malala Yousafzai, Pakistani teenage education activist, addressing UN Youth Assembly (July 13)
“Modi says we “hide behind the burqa of secularism”. Preferable, surely, to the khaki shorts of intolerance and hatred that he now tries to hide?” Shashi Tharoor, Union HRD […]
The world over the process of admission into colleges and universities is simple. Students complete admission forms, provide required documentation, submit to interview and/or entrance exams, agree to pay prescribed fees and are admitted or rejected by college/university managements. But under Indian-style socialism distinguished by disrespect for property rights and driven by government need to […]
The tragic death of 23 children of the Dharmasati Gandaman School, Chhapra, in Saran district, Bihar, after consuming the pesticide-contaminated school mid-day meal on July 16 and numerous scary stories of this type, suggest the rot in India’s school mid-day meal scheme — the world’s largest, covering 120 million children — is systemic. Two days […]
Are students in Gujarat losing interest in professional (engineering, business management, etc) education, or is the country’s industrially fastest growing state experiencing a glut of professional education institutions?
State education department officials are keeping their fingers crossed as the admission process for professional courses in Gujarat moves into the final stages amid fears that the vacancies […]
The Delhi state government is set to finalise a historic decision to allow recognised private unaided schools in the national capital to run two shifts. Addressing media personnel on July 5, education minister Prof. Kiran Walia said a government-appointed panel has drawn up rules and regulat-ions for the citys top-ranked private schools to double their […]
Even as passage of the Foreign Educational Institutions (Regulation of Entry and Operations) Bill introduced in 2010, is blocked in Parliament by opposition parties, India-US collaboration in higher education is proceeding on a parallel track. Several important agreements to enhance cooperation in higher education were signed during the second Indo-US Higher Education Dialogue held in […]
Although Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi, now in his third term in office and recently confirmed as the leader of the national poll campaign of the BJP in the general election due next year, is an individual liberals love to hate, there’s no doubting the Gujarat strongman’s propaganda capability. On June 13, the entire Modi […]
Somewhat belatedly the Mumbai police seems to have discovered the technique of using plain-clothes police personnel or undercover agents — an elementary policing technique foreign even to highly-qualified IPS (Indian Police Service) officers. On June 7, officers of the Thane rural police uncovered a huge fake certification racket run by the well-known Mumbai-based Swami Vivekananda […]
When Kiran Kumar Reddy (KKR), a low profile member of the legislative assembly was appointed chief minister of the south-eastern coastal state of Andhra Pradesh (pop. 84 million) following the sudden resignation of then chief minister K. Rosiah, who had taken charge after the death in an air crash of Congress chief minister Y.S.R. Reddy […]
It’s the start of the new academic year in Tamil Nadu (pop. 72 million) and harvest season for touts, agents and representatives of top managers, owners and promoters of government and private colleges and universities, who routinely demand huge sums for exercising their discretionary powers to admit ineligible but wealthy household students into their classrooms. […]
“If the government moves away from development to treat this strictly as a law and order problem, it is not going to be a solution. It will only worsen the problem, as experience so far has shown.”
E.A.S. Sarma, former bureaucrat, on Maoist terror (Outlook, June 10)
“The next election will not be between the Congress […]
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