Mumbai’s new genre international schools

Launched with massive budgets ranging from Rs.10-50 crore, the commercial capital’s latter-day five-star schools which offer fully wired campuses, expat headmasters and affiliation with offshore examination boards, are beginning to eclipse the city’s vintage secondaries. Indra Gidwani reports from Mumbai Although globally famous as resurgent India’s commercial capital, synonymous with Bollywood, the stock exchange, premier corporates and fashion houses, perhaps because of prohibitive real estate prices, the island city of Mumbai (pop. 13 million) is less than renowned for quality education institutions, particularly its schools. The city’s handful of vintage high profile schools such as Cathedral & John Connon (estb.1860), St. Mary’s (estb.1540), Campion (estb.1943) etc have reigned as Mumbai’s most difficult-to-access secondaries for half a century. Now somewhat belatedly, the city of gold’s school education scenario is about to experience a radical makeover. During the past four years India’s commercial and entertainment capital has witnessed the promotion of over 35 new genre ‘international’ schools. Launched with massive budgets ranging from Rs.10-50 crore, Mumbai’s latter-day five-star schools which offer fully-wired campuses bristling with hi-tech equipment and teaching aids, expat headmasters and affiliation with highly reputed offshore examination boards, are beginning to eclipse the city’s vintage secondaries as the first choice of the new upwardly mobile middle class. The city’s first new genre international school — the Dhirubhai Ambani International School, promoted by Nita Ambani (wife of Mukesh Ambani, chairman of Reliance Industries (annual sales revenue: Rs.110,886 crore)) — admitted its first batch of students in 2003. Since then on average in this city of fast-track private enterprise, ten new genre international schools have been promoted every year, dizzy real estate prices and land scarcity notwithstanding. Indeed, somewhat belatedly some of Mumbai’s most well-known business families — the Goenkas, Podars, Somanis, and Ajmeras — as well as other private entrepreneurs have hopped aboard the school education bandwagon. Among them: the Podar World School (estb.2004) and B.D Somani International School (estb.2006). Next year, two high profile international schools — the Aditya Birla Group promoted New Era School (Cambridge) in South Bombay and Oberoi International School in Goregaon — are scheduled to admit their first batches, and in 2009, industrialist and page 3 celebrity Yash Birla intends to open the doors of the Sunanda Birla International School on South Bombay’s plush Napean Sea Road. According to the state government’s directorate of education in Mumbai, over 90 proposals for inaugurating new schools have been submitted in the past two years (2005-2007) and are pending clearance. Although the great majority of educationists of the socialist mindset may disapprove of this boom in capital-intensive, 21st century schools boasting excellent infrastructure, ideal teacher-pupil ratios and foreign examination board affiliations, the demand for globally benchmarked quality school education within fast-track Mumbai’s new aspirational middle-class is generating considerable excitement in India’s commercial capital. The city’s rapidly multiplying HNIs (high net worth individuals) are only too aware of the value of high quality English medium education and are ready, willing and able to pay tuition fees ranging between Rs.1-8 lakh per year. “Though…