Even as west bengal’s humongous teacher recruitment scam in which bribes aggravating Rs.400-500 crore changed hands is being investigated by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), the West Bengal Board of Primary Education (WBBPE) has scheduled a new Teacher Eligibility Test (TET) on December 11. This year, 690,931 candidates will write the 150-minutes exam at […]
With the tempo for state legislative assembly elections scheduled for next May building up, Karnataka’s ruling BJP government is pulling out all stops to ensure that it is returned to power in this southern state which is critical for the BJP high command — now in its second term at the Centre — to make […]
Maharashtra — india’s most industrialised state which accounts for almost 25 percent of the country’s annual industrial production — has experienced huge political upheavals in recent times. On June 30, the Shiv Sena, Nationalist Congress Party and Congress coalition government which had assumed office in 2019 was toppled in a coup engineered by the BJP […]
In a landmark 3-2 majority judgement delivered on November 7, the Supreme Court of India upheld the 103rd Constitutional Amendment, 2019, under which the BJP government at the Centre introduced additional 10 percent reservation in public higher education institutions (HEIs) and government jobs for economically weaker sections (EWS) from the general category.
We aim to ensure that children of poor parents become doctors and engineers even if they are not educated in English (medium). We want to ensure that no one is left behind due to the lack of knowledge of the English language. The New Education Policy of the Centre will pull the country out from […]
India’s most well-administered state until the historic liberalisation and deregulation of the Indian economy in 1991 transformed its sleepy administrative capital of Bangalore (renamed Bengaluru in 2014) into the country’s Silicon Valley and a bustling commercial metro, Karnataka (pop.68 million) has experienced accelerated descent into pervasive corruption and misgovernance. Since last November, when […]
West Bengal’s mega Rs.400-500 crore teacher recruitment scandal, which has placed education minister Partha Chatterjee and his actress mistress Arpita Mukherjee in jail cells after nearly Rs.100 crore in cash and title deeds of 12 properties were seized from the latter’s four upscale apartments in Kolkata on July 23, is still making headlines […]
The national curriculum Framework (NCF) 2022 was formally launched on October 20 with the presentation of the National Curriculum Framework for Foundational Stage (NCFFS) for children in the three-eight age group. NCFFS is the first of four frameworks scheduled to be launched under NCF 2022. The other three, expected to be announced soon, […]
“Skill is the currency of the century. Economic actors have a more important role than imagined. An educated and skilled workforce attracts investment, enhances productivity and is critical for moving up in the value chain. Academia and industry must collaborate for better outcomes.”
Vikas Singh, economist & columnist on reforming Indian higher education (Businessworld, September 24)
Academics and media pundits in lucknow, the administrative capital of Uttar Pradesh — India’s most populous (215 million) state — which is an also-ran on all socio-economic development indices, are pleasantly surprised by a spurt of positive activity in the education sector.
With children having enthusiastically returned to classes after the prolonged lockdown of […]
West Bengal’s unprecedented teacher recruitment and related scandals which have blocked the appointment of much-needed teachers in the state’s 92,000 government schools for over a decade, are in the process of being unblocked.
On September 26, Justice Abhijit Gangopadhyay of the Calcutta high court issued a slew of orders directing the West Bengal School […]
Reeling under attacks from the opposition Congress party which has launched a highly effective ‘Pay CM — 40 percent accepted here’ poster campaign across the state to highlight rampant corruption in the state (last November the Karnataka State Contractors’ Association wrote directly to prime minister Narendra Modi complaining that government […]
Primary school teachers in Maharashtra’s 65,734 government-run zilla parishad (ZP) rural schools are simmering with anger. The state government’s education ministry has directed all teachers to display A4 size photographs of themselves in their classrooms. Additionally, Prashant Bamb, a member of the legislative assembly (MLA) of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has […]
India’s political class is arguably the most obtuse of any country worldwide. Whereas politicians world over are well aware that education of children is the highest priority of parents, for post-independence India’s politicians and political parties, education of generation next is a peripheral low priority issue. Party manifestos […]
The once well-governed southern state of Karnataka (pop.68 million) is rapidly transforming into ‘broken windows’ society. In 1982, American academics James Q. Wilson and George Kelling ideated their Broken Windows theory. They posited that if civic neglect and official corruption in any society or neighbourhood remains unpunished, an outbreak of serious crimes and […]
Although there’s no denying that Christian missionaries have made a great contribution to the growth and dissemination of English-medium school and higher education, there’s rising awareness within the country’s influential middle class that priest-educators, i.e, men and women of the cloth also discharging academic roles and duties, are becoming obsolete.Bound by strict laws […]
Eight months after large-scale tampering and malpractices were reported in the Teachers’ Eligibility Test (TET) 2019-2020 written by 3.43 lakh aspirant school teachers, the Maharashtra State Council of Examinations (MSCE) disqualified 7,880 candidates who wrote the exam and banned them from writing any future TETs. In the list of proscribed aspirant primary school […]
A 2017 decision of the AAP (Aam Aadmi Party) Delhi state government to conduct online admissions of pre-primary and class I children from economically weaker sections (EWS) admitted free-of-charge into private schools under s.12 (1) (c) of the RTE Act, 2009, has generated conflict between the state government’s Directorate of Education (DoE) and […]
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.
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 […]
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 […]
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.
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 […]
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…”
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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.
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.
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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.
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 […]
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 […]
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