THE LATEST HONOUR bestowed upon the seven-year-old music prodigy Taksheel Buddhadeo is an entry into the India Book of Records for participation in 200 on-air broadcast (radio, television) programmes — the highest number by any school student in India.
Taksheel has been practicing Indian classical music and the harmonium from the time he was three. Continuous […]
Pinaki Ganguly is the incumbent secretary of Sri Sri Ramkrishna Vivekananda Vidyapith, a new K-II school established by the Rural Organisation for Social Establishment (ROSE) in Charida, a tiny village (pop. 2,500) in West Bengal’s most backward Purulia district. The school with an enrollment of 77 students (45 boys and 32 girls) instructed by four […]
Rajesh Bhatia is the founder-managing director of Tree House Education & Accessories Ltd (estb. 2006), and promoter of one of India’s largest self-operated preschool chains with 444 (including 340 company-owned) centres. The publicly listed company employs 1,848 staff including 1,758 teachers in 55 cities and towns countrywide, and recorded a revenue of Rs.121 crore in […]
FORMER INDIA tennis player and coach of many Davis Cup stars, and co-founder of Bangalore’s top-ranked The Magical Years (TMY) preschool, Krishna Bhupathi is all set to launch The Village School (TVS), a primary-secondary which in the fullness of time will roll out into a fully-fledged Cambridge Assessment International Examinations (CAIE), UK-affiliated class I-XII co-ed […]
The great sin of sustained neglect of primary, secondary and higher education in post-independence India has been compounded by continuous neglect of vocational education and training. But a quiet skills revolution is gathering momentum countrywide
TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY India’s dysfunctional education system, defined by crumbling infrastructure, multi-grade teaching, massive dropouts, truant teachers and abysmal learning outcomes, is […]
In the final leg of campaigning for the 16th General Election to be held from April 7-May 12, the issue of education provision and reform is conspicuously missing from the public discourse
UNSURPRISINGLY AND IN keeping with post-independence India’s myopic political tradition, education of the world’s largest child and youth population — 600 million Indians are […]
A Bangalore-based social enterprise has developed a unique VET model which has the potential to transform hundreds of millions of rural youth into employable living-wage earners
A modestly appointed four-bedroom house converted into an office in Jayanagar, a green and pleasant suburb of Bangalore, is the head office of Head Held High Services Pvt. Ltd (H3S, […]
Centurion University’s Gram Tarang initiative has provided employment-yielding vocational training to 40,000 rural youth in the insurgency-infected Red Corridor districts of Odisha
In 2006, a team of professional educationists comprising professors Dr. Mukti Kanta Mishra, D.N. Rao and D. Nageshwara Rao took over the Jagannath Institute for Technology and Management, a failing engineering college in Parlakhemundi, […]
Over the past 17 years, this trust has provided free-of-charge vocational education including advanced computer training and English language learning to 18,000 children and youth with disabilities
Although post-independence India’s record of providing globally comparable quality education to the world’s largest child population (480 million) is pathetic, its record of provisioning special education for the country’s […]
Illiterate gatherers of forest produce transformed into businesswomen
The evolutionary outcome of a 1992 World Bank Institute project to design microenterprise management curriculums and delivery methodology for poor, illiterate and semi-literate women producers in backward states of India, the Intel-Udyogini School of Entrepreneurship (I-USE) was established as a block-level training institution with a 2009 grant of […]
Founded in 2006, LabourNet has developed a sustainable end-to-end 4 E solution — empowerment through education, employability and employment — for the informal sector labour
The low-profile Bangalore-based Movement for Alternatives for Youth Awareness (Maya, estb.1989) is a “development organisation working to address systemic issues of child labour through building empowered human institutions of the poor”. […]
In the run-up to General Election 2014, on November 13 last year Child Rights and You (CRY), the well-known Mumbai-based NGO, released a Child Rights Manifesto as part of its ‘Vote for Child Rights’ election advocacy campaign. The manifesto calls upon all political parties to accord top priority to child welfare and education in their […]
As this issue of EW goes to press, only the Congress, CPI-M and Trinamool Congress Party (TMC) have officially released their manifestos for General Election 2014. The BJP and Aam Aadmi Party manifestos are expected to be out only in the first week of this month. The promises and pledges made in relation to education […]
One of the great conundrums of post-independence India’s national development effort is why for over six decades and counting, successive governments at the Centre and in the states have grossly neglected early childhood, primary, secondary and higher education right across the spectrum. Surely it’s always been self-evident that unless we have a well-educated population, the […]
BY THE TIME YOU READ this despairing editorial, polling in General Election 2014 will have commenced with the world’s largest electorate of 814 million citizens having begun the month-long process of voting away their future. For discerning observers of the political landscape despair is inevitable, because in mid-May a coalition government defined either by kleptocracy, […]
YOUR COVER STORY ‘India’s premier school boards league’ made interesting reading (EW March). India is perhaps the only country worldwide which has 34 school examination boards, each prescribing education of varying quality. Though college managements are required to give equal weightage to grades of all exam boards, it’s well known they accord greater premium to […]
CHAOS OVER NURSERY admissions in Delhi is becoming more confounded with parents resorting to fraud and trickery to get children admitted into the nurseries of the city’s estimated 6,600 composite schools, which ensures a smooth passage in school education for the next 12 years.
After an investigation by the state government’s education ministry unearthed that, “out […]
IT’S A CURIOUS PARADOX of india’s most industrial — and arguably most corrupt — state that vacancies in the state’s engineering colleges have spiralled above 34 percent from less than 1 percent in 2009, while simultaneously 94 additional colleges with an intake capacity of 67,181 additional students have become operational. A 21-member committee led by […]
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 […]
“It doesn’t escape me for one moment that so much joy in my life is thanks to so much pain in someone else’s.”
Lupita Nyong’O, accepting the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for playing Patsey, a real-life slave girl in 12 Years a Slave (Time, March 17)
“We never want to run a government for the rich. We […]
Jammu & Kashmir
Fake appointments fraud
THE STATE Vigilance Organisation (SVO) of the Jammu & Kashmir government has filed charges against several persons including four senior officials of the education ministry for faking appointments in Budgam district. “A case was registered against six persons after an inquiry revealed that they hatched a criminal conspiracy to make ghost […]
PEAESON INDIA has launched GlobalEnglish, a cloud-based, on-demand English language learning programme of ETEN, the test preparation education venture of the company. Hitherto GlobalEnglish was available only to subscriber education institutions. With this development, any student keen on signing up for the study programme can visit the nearest Pearson ETEN centre and purchase an individual […]
In the EducationWorld India School Rankings 2013, All Saints High School, Hyderabad is ranked among the country’s Top 100 (#90) co-ed day schools
One of the oldest educational institutions in Hyderabad (pop. 7 million), the coveted and disputed joint capital of the recently promulgated states of Telangana and Seemandhra, All […]
University of Stirling, UK, Scotland’s first university in over four centuries has quickly established itself a national and international reputation
Founded by Royal Charter in 1967, the University of Stirling is Scotland’s first new varsity in over four centuries — after the University of Edinburgh (estb. 1582). During the past 47 years it […]
WITH HIS FLUENT groundstrokes and sharp volleys, Nikshep BR (16) is the newest sensation on Bangalore’s jumping tennis scene. Last October, this early teen was crowned Under-16 national tennis champion at the Fenesta Open National Tennis Championships 2013 of the Delhi Lawn Tennis Association. Nor is this the only trophy on his family’s mantelpiece. Thus […]
With the coming of age of Indian art, a new vocation of art curator has emerged as a career option for artistically inclined youth
With the rapid expansion of post-liberalisation India’s middle class, art galleries and exhibitions are mushrooming across the country, prompting huge and rising demand for works of art (paintings, sculpture, objets d’art). Contemporary […]
After completing my BCA (bachelor of computer applications) degree, what would you recommend for postgraduation — MCA, MBA or M.Sc (IT)?
Srinivas Murthy, Chennai
MCA, MBA, and M.Sc (IT) are all excellent qualifications for employment. But your choice should be based on your aptitude and interests. MCA is an excellent programme if you aspire to make […]
FOR THE country’s 228 million school-going children, the imminent summer vacation offers numerous opportunities to explore, learn, read and absorb supplementary and experiential education, which is at best sporadic during school terms. It’s a good time for children to enrich their school curriculums by learning important life skills such as leadership, public speaking, conflict resolution, […]
Sudhir Reddy is managing director of the Hyderabad-based Jay Robotix Pvt. Ltd, a company engaged in manufacturing customised robots for the defence services and Indian industry.
Newspeg. Jay Robotix is all set to launch Robox, an experiential STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) learning package mapped with the curriculums of major exam boards, to enable learning of […]
OF THE 658 schools in Chicago, only 126 are charter schools — publicly funded but independently run and largely free of union rules. Fifteen more are due to open this year. More notable, though, is that four of the most recently approved charters are in areas where the city recently decided to close 49 public […]
ALMOST ONE IN five of the world’s central bankers has been educated at a UK university, according to a report that stresses the “soft power” that Britain gains from educating the world’s elite. It calls on the government to commission research on how British education affects the UK’s influence globally. It would like to see […]
GOETHE UNIVERSITY Frankfurt, established in 1914 as Frankfurt University, was the creation of a Jewish philanthropist and owed much of its growth to Jewish support and academics. But under the Nazis, a third of its staff and students were forced out. The infamous Nazi scientist Dr. Josef Mengele, known as the ‘Angel of Death’ for […]
THE GOVERNMENT OF CANADA has a message for people in other countries who might consider coming to its universities to study: “It’s not all snow and ice here!” At least, that’s one of the messages Canada is sending out on websites and social media networks and in other types of marketing in a relentless bid […]
ACROSS THE RIVER from the congested metropolis of Manaus, nothing but dense green forest lines the banks of the River Negro in the Brazilian Amazon. Manaus, the capital of the state of Amazonas and host city to England’s opening match against Italy in the forthcoming Fifa World Cup, is an urban oasis surrounded by more […]
A MOTTO OF PEKING University, one of China’s leading academic institutions, is “freedom of thought and an all-embracing attitude”. But in recent months it was not all-embracing enough to allow Xia Yeliang, an outspoken economics professor, to keep his job. Economics was not the subject on which Xia was most forthright. He was a signatory […]
THE WORLD OF SPORT and games provides a treasure trove of true stories of courage, endurance, compassion and camaraderie. The recent Winter Olympics in Sochi which concluded on February 23 has done just that.
Anton Gafarov. In the men’s final cross country skiing event, Russia’s Anton Gafarov crashed halfway down a hill, badly damaging his ski. […]
St. Xavier’s College Kolkata to start 3 new PG courses in bio-sciences Mita Mukherjee St. Xavier’s College, Kolkata has decided to introduce three new postgraduate courses in biological sciences from this year ... 
How Kaplan GRE Test prep materials can help you score high on GRE The Graduate Record Examination (GRE) scores are a requirement alongside other credentials for admission to graduate programs. Currently administered by ... 
Trivandrum International School In a state which has earned a global reputation for development through education, Trivandrum International School (TIS) has been promoted ... 
Shimla: Four students injured during practical exam in chemistry lab Four class 12 students of a government school in Shimla were injured on Monday when an explosion occurred while they ... 
Critical mass in Indian education
– J.S. Rajput is a former director of NCERT and NCTE
A NEW GOVERNMENT will be sworn into office in New Delhi by mid-May after an aggregate sum of Rs.30,000 crore will have been spent — according to a study of the Centre for Media Studies, Delhi — by an estimated 10,000 candidates in the electoral […]