Education News

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 […]