Against the backdrop of a difficult and challenging pandemic year for India’s teachers, the online CENTA Teaching Professionals Olympiad (TPO) 2020 attracted entries from 25,000 teachers in India and 30 countries abroad – Summiya Yasmeen One year on since the Central government ordered shutdown of all education institutions including preschools, schools, colleges and universities to check the spread of the virulent Covid-19 pandemic which has caused 128 million infections and 2.8 million fatalities worldwide and 12 million and 162,000 in India (March 30), the country’s 9 million school teachers have emerged as heroes of the pandemic-battered education system. When schools were ordered to shut down overnight without notice in March 2020, the teachers’ community, especially of 450,000 private schools which host 47.5 percent of the country’s in-school children, responded with unexpected speed to switch to new digital information communication technologies (ICT) to continue their pupils’ education online. Despite their previous record of being slow to warm to the IT revolution that has transformed teaching-learning around the world, the upside of the killer pandemic which has ruined millions of livelihoods and lives countrywide, is that India’s teachers community across the learning spectrum from KG-Ph D has become ready and willing, even if not entirely able, to embrace new digital technologies to teach the world’s largest child and youth population. Against this backdrop of a difficult and challenging year for India’s teachers, announcement of the CENTA® Teaching Professionals Olympiad (TPO) 2020 results on March 5, was enthusiastically welcomed by educators and school managements countrywide. Promoted and organised by the Bengaluru-based Centre for Teacher Accreditation (CENTA) Pvt. Ltd (estb.2014), a company that tests and certifies teacher competencies, the Centa TPO 2020 attracted entries from 25,000 teachers of 8,000 schools in India and 30 countries abroad, including the UAE. On March 5, 100 of Centa TPO’s 1,000 winners were felicitated online in a two-hour awards ceremony during which globally respected education leaders including Dr. James Tooley, vice chancellor, University of Buckingham (UK); Ashish Dhawan, chairman, Central Square Foundation, Delhi; Prof. Geeta Gandhi Kingdon, professor, University College, London; and Vikas Pota, founder, T4 Education, UK, announced TPO 2020 winners in 16 subjects. Moreover Summiya Yasmeen, co-founder and managing editor of EducationWorld, announced the Top 10 schools/organisations with the largest number of winners. Centa TPO 2020, which in effect awarded and celebrated the country’s best teachers, was supported by the Reliance Foundation, EducationWorld, Oxford University Press, University of Buckingham, Tech Mahindra, Central Square Foundation, T4 Education and Lenovo. “Centa was promoted seven years ago to transform teaching into an aspirational profession by testing and certifying teachers’ competencies to support their professional development and career progression. Simultaneously, Centa enables schools and organisations to distinguish themselves based on the quality of their teachers. One of our flagship initiatives is the annual Centa TPO — launched in 2015 — which rigorously tests teachers competencies in a competitive international Olympiad, available in 16 subjects. . Teachers who score beyond the minimum threshold — approximately 2,000 this year — are awarded…
One of the few upsides of the Coronavirus pandemic is that foreign travel curbs and extensive testing of outbound and incoming travellers, has cured not a few nouveau citizens of vacations-abroad mania. Perhaps because of drastic foreign exchange purchase controls imposed on citizens for over four decades in the heyday of neta-babu socialism to conserve “precious foreign exchange”, after liberalisation of the economy in 1991 and especially in the new millennium, India’s burgeoning middle class started holidaying abroad with a vengeance. In pre-pandemic 2019, an estimated 27 million Indians — including your correspondent — travelled abroad on vacation. That’s three times the number of tourists who visited India that year. The unexpected pandemic has cured the foreign travel fervour of our countrymen. Suddenly it’s become apparent that exploring our own sub-continent has all the charm of travelling in Europe and then some. For one, there is as much ethnic, cultural, heritage and topography diversity in India as in Europe and the US put together. Moreover with all state capitals and tourism sites now linked by shorter and cheaper air hops and road and rail links, and globally bench-marked hotels mushrooming everywhere, it makes greater sense to vacation within the country. And the greatest plus point of domestic holidays is the infinitely superior and warm service visitors get in local destinations. Vastly superior to the grudging, surly service one gets in under-staffed, over-priced hotels and restaurants abroad. This latter-day discovery of India has become a widespread phenomenon. Certainly your editor won’t be vacationing abroad for a long time.
The resignation of insightful and widely admired public intellectual Dr. Pratap Bhanu Mehta, star columnist of the multi-editions Indian Express, from the faculty of the high-profile crowd-funded Ashoka University (AU), Sonipat (Delhi NCR), has severely dented the carefully curated reputation of this new genre private liberal arts university. AU was promoted in 2014 with the objective of providing liberal arts education with “highest level of academic integrity”. In 2017, its trustees and management were able to persuade Oxford and Princeton alum Mehta, then president of the Delhi-based think-tank Centre for Policy Research, to come aboard as vice chancellor on condition that he would be free to write his weekly column for the daily. However, quite obviously Mehta’s anti-establishment weekly column in the Express notable for its unsparing criticism of the BJP/NDA government, was too forthright for the noveaux riche trustees of this professedly independent university. In 2019, Mehta stepped down as vice chancellor and more recently resigned from the faculty after he was informally informed by the promoter-trustees that he had become a “political liability” for AU. Since then, all hell’s broken loose with academics abroad, and faculty and students of AU up in arms. Your editor who travelled a long way to AU’s Sonipat campus five years ago to write a cover feature on this high-minded private university’s debut, isn’t surprised by this turn of events. Right then, it became apparent that the trustees who manage the university want to have their cake and eat it too. Since this publication was not quite in the pink at that time, it was agreed that AU’s regular lensman would shoot the cover photograph. However, after the issue was out, AU’s billionaire trustees who practice a curious mix of philanthropy and penny-pinching parsimony, declined to pay their pricey photographer’s Rs.32,000 bill. After a somewhat unseemly argument, the bill was paid in full by this publication. Similarly, it’s very likely that the AU trustees recruited Mehta with tall promises, but became weak-kneed about honouring them.
On the issue of regulation of the tuition and other fees of private independent (‘unaided’) schools by state governments which has become a hot button subject lately, the stand of your editors has been clear and unambiguous. The decision to determine chargeable fees is of school promoters/management and is a contractual agreement between parents of candidate children who accept the offer of institutional managements to educate their children. The Supreme Court of India agrees. In the landmark T.M.A. Pai Foundation Case (2002), an 11-judge bench held that all citizens have a fundamental right to engage in the vocation of education and earn a reasonable surplus on their investment in education institutions. However, implicit in the judgement is that school managements should negotiate fee increases with formal or informal parents associations. But some school promoters don’t seem to be aware of this directive implicit in the landmark T.M.A. Pai Case. Right now the new millennium CISCE (Delhi) and IB (Geneva)-affiliated Neev Academy, Bengaluru (NAB, estb.2005) is experiencing a flight of students following unilateral imposition of a 50 percent fees hike in the new academic year beginning July. NAB is the first K-12 school promoted by Lupin Labs heiress and Harvard Business School alumna Kavita Sabharwal. Sabharwal’s imperious “my way or the highway” decision, to steeply hike 2021-22 fees unmindful that the Covid pandemic has depressed the incomes of a substantial number of even the school’s high net worth parents, has disillusioned a minority of parents whose children were of the school’s first batch, and some of them have pulled their children out to enrol them in less pricey international schools. “Even partial scholarships are an unknown concept in this hard-headed business enterprise. However, brand names such as Gucci and Ferragamo are very well-known,” says a bitter parent who has pulled her teenage daughter out after ten years in NAB. The learned justices of the Supreme Court chose their words with care. There is a difference between vocation and business.
Cameron Saunders (The Book Review) One of the most prominently featured characters in Barbara Demick’s new book is called Gonpo. Born in 1950, a year after Mao Zedong declared a ‘New China’, she is the daughter of a King in Amdo, a region on the eastern end of the Tibetan Plateau in what is modern-day Sichuan. When the Red Army arrives later in the 1950s, her father is deposed and sent to Chengdu to be neutralized and re-educated. During the Cultural Revolution, he will commit suicide after his wife, the queen, disappears. Gonpo, meanwhile, with her bad class background and suspect ethnic status, is sent to the end of the earth — arid Xinjiang — for a decade. There, she will fall in love with a Chinese boy, eventually settling back East in his native Nanjing. When the liberal 1980s arrive, she becomes a star teacher and then a tool of a Communist Party that seeks to publicise Tibetan success stories. The Panchen Lama, mainland China’s most powerful Tibetan, takes a liking to her and arranges for her study in Dharamshala. While there (with half her family still in China), the Tiananmen Square massacre changes the mood of politics at home. She stays in India, where she can be found today, an elected representative to the Tibetan government-in-exile. Gonpo’s story is typical of what Demick, a longtime correspondent of the Los Angeles Times, strives to achieve in her work: assembling a cast of characters from a small locale to tell the story of a people as a whole. Her first book, Besieged, followed lives spent on a street in war-torn Sarajevo. Her second, Nothing to Envy, explored the fate of six North Koreans from a coastal city as they struggle to navigate life under the repressive totalitarian regime. In Eat the Buddha the locale is Ngaba, in Amdo, a town known by the Chinese for its unruliness. A decade ago in a period of exceptional social tension, it earned the dubious appellation of the self-immolation capital of the world. Following lives that revolve around this municipality — teenage monks from the local monastery, nomads moving about its outskirts, scrappy entrepreneurs quick to embrace the market economy, a princess — Demick gives us a history of this town and, by extension, of Tibet as a whole. A pawn of the British in the days of the Great Game, after dissolution of His Majesty’s empire following the end of the Second World War, Tibet finds itself without a patron (unlike, say, the Mongolians who had the Soviets to shepherd them into statehood), and as a result, subject to an emboldened, highly militaristic Maoist China bent on expansion and consolidation. The new government in Beijing, after initially playing nice, soon exposes its duplicity and brutality. All of the tragedies of the early decades of Communist China — trigger-happy Red Army revolutionaries, the Great Leap Forward famine, and the Cultural Revolution — are experienced by Tibetans in wanton suffering. The liberalisation of the 1980s…
Dilip Thakore If Shashi Tharoor, Member of Parliament and author of 16 masterly English language non-fiction books of deep erudition and three fiction titles, had been born a white Christian American, he would surely have completed at least one term in the White House by now. A successful politcian, accomplished literateur, exceptional wordsmith skilled in the cut and thrust of parliamentary and intellectual debate and gifted with personable charm, a white Tharoor would have been the natural successor of John F. Kennedy, arguably the most charismatic president in the history of the United States. Unfortunately for him — but fortunately for latter-day India, Tharoor is a brown Indian. And unlike many of our countrymen would rather serve in heaven than rule in hell, he chose to become an Indian citizen and proud Hindu of the liberal school of this ancient creed, which has made a big comeback in its most illiberal avatar, in 21st century India. Unsurprisingly, Tharoor has emerged as the most articulate public intellectual and critic of the BJP which swept the General Elections of 2014 and 2019, and inspired by the regressive Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the shadowy ideological mentor organisation of this all-conquering political party, is trying its best to transform contemporary India into an intolerant, majoritarian Hindu nation. This conscientiously researched, brilliantly written book is divided into six sections. It opens with the Idea of Nationalism, traces its rise around the world and highlights the historical truth that nationalism is a relatively recent 18th century phenomenon that arose out of the American (1776) and French (1789) revolutions. The second section, The Idea of India which has six chapters, traces the history of the Indian subcontinent, an agglomeration of over 500 kingdoms and princedoms owing fealty to Imperial Great Britain which ruled for almost two centuries before a united India emerged after the freedom struggle. Since then (1947), it has evolved into the world’s most populous democracy, governed according to the mandate of an extraordinarily liberal Constitution — a “living document”. In the third section of this 462-page book, the learned author focuses light on The Hindutva Idea of India espoused by RSS/BJP. In sum, it is to reverse the legacy of the founding fathers of the nation who painstakingly crafted our uniquely egalitarian and inclusive Constitution, and transform it into a Hindu majoritarian rashtra or “Hindu Pakistan”. Section four highlights the on-going “battle of belonging” and ‘Modi-fication’ agenda of the RSS/BJP and their hand-picked prime minister Narendra Modi to erode the country’s democratic institutions, impose Hindi as the lingua franca, demote the Muslim community, encourage (“soft signal”) religious and communal bigotry and enshrine the Hindu rashtra, by invoking ancient glories. The fifth section of this absorbing history-cum-sociology polemic titled The Anxiety of Nationhood discusses the fractures manifesting in India’s unique national development project which began 70 years ago with an underdeveloped country starting to write a new history as an egalitarian, one-man-one-vote democracy. It compares and contrasts the RSS/BJP’s intolerant hindutva philosophy with Mahatma Gandhi’s inclusive…
In December 2019, the French investigative journalist Iban Rais was in the student bar of ESSEC Business School, consistently ranked as one of the leading institutions of its kind in the world, when he saw something that shocked him. Looking down over the bar was a stuffed deer’s head, a hunting trophy nicknamed Big Buck. Except it was almost impossible to see Big Buck, because the deer was covered in female students’ underwear. “You could not even see the nose or the head,” he recalls. Several students told Rais, who is soon to publish a book about sexual assault in elite French universities, that during raucous parties, bartenders would stop the music and halt serving drinks until female students had thrown their underwear over Big Buck. In the past month, a dam has broken in France, with hundreds of students coming forward on social media to share stories of sexual harassment, assault and rape on campus, particularly at Sciences Po in Paris, the grande ecole that is a training ground for the country’s political elite, and a separate network of institutes of the same name spread across the rest of the country. France is obviously not unique in facing a reckoning over sexism and sexual violence on campus, nor is the problem confined to its most prestigious institutions. In the US, for example, the 2015 film The Hunting Ground traced the story of rape victims – and their struggle to be taken seriously by university officials – on campuses there. French elite universities, meanwhile, do not deny a problem exists, but insist that they have been working to tackle it for years. But critics say the grandes ecoles’ extreme elitism and dominance of top jobs in politics and business — which is so notorious that it prompted president Emmanuel Macron in 2019 to promise to shut down one school in response to the “yellow vest” protests — plus their obsession with reputation and, in some cases, private legal status, has made the problem worse. “It’s a huge wave that’s coming,” says Rais. “I think in France, it’s worse than in other countries because of the culture of silence.” Quantifying the scale of sexual violence on French campuses is hard, but the numbers that do exist are troubling, to say the least. After Rais published an exposé in January 2020 alleging sexual violence and homophobia at three of the country’s top business schools — HEC Paris, ESSEC and EDHEC Business School — more than 500 students and graduates signed a petition saying they had suffered under the culture he described. For his upcoming book, he spoke to about 20 victims of sexual assault or rape from these three schools. A more comprehensive overview comes from the Student Observatory for Sexual Violence in Higher Education, set up two years ago by Iris Marechal, a Masters student at HEC, after she sensed an “omnipresence of sexual violence” at the business school, with “sexism in classes” and “sexual assault during parties”. One in 20…
China is ramping up its efforts to poach Nobel laureates from universities around the world to establish laboratories in the country. But questions are being raised whether this initiative will have a trickle-down effect to boost basic scientific research. After several cities across China embraced the idea, it received a major boost when Beijing said it would start recruiting laureates to run laboratories and innovation centres. The scheme is a key plank of the city’s next five-year plan, which was passed on February 27, and it will encourage other provinces to follow suit. Beijing may be hoping to emulate the success of the south-eastern city of Shenzhen, which since 2016 has built 11 Nobel laureate labs in partnership with universities and companies, including the Grubbs Institute, named after the chemist Robert Grubbs and hosted by the Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech), and the Warshel Institute for Computational Biology named after the biochemist Arieh Warshel and hosted by the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Shenzhen offered initial funding of 100 million yuan (Rs.111 crore) to each lab on a renewable fixed-term agreement of five years with the laureate obliged to work there for “no less than 30 days per year”. Ka Ho Mok, vice president and professor of comparative policy at Lingnan University, Hong Kong, sees the Nobel initiative as being “part of China’s broader strategy to enhance its global competitiveness through research and the rise of science, along with other efforts including bringing back top Chinese graduates who have worked in major universities globally”. Simon Marginson, professor of higher education at Oxford University, agrees. “China uses foreign engagement not to borrow ideas from elsewhere, but to build its own capacity in basic sciences,” he says. “China’s basic science is now very strong in the physical sciences and is improving in biological and biomedical sciences, but there is always the hope… that more can be achieved at the highest level.” Among the most prominent examples of laureate labs is the Shenzhen Geim Graphene Center, founded in 2017 at the Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School and named after Sir Andre Geim, who shared the 2010 physics Nobel for his work on graphene. The lab has more than 200 researchers, including Masters and Ph D students. Wider debates within academic science question whether the Nobels reflect scientific excellence fairly, and highlight that a laureate’s best work is often several decades behind them by the time they are honoured. (Excerpted and adapted from Times Higher Education and The Economist) Also read: Japan: Unique research institution
From access to basic equipment, technology and quiet working spaces to childcare burdens and job cuts, the pandemic has exacerbated existing disparities among individuals, communities, institutions and countries. Increased attention on inequalities has also sparked hope that systems and structures will change and that academia will become more inclusive. Universities in emerging economies could be among the beneficiaries. Gerard Postiglione, emeritus professor of higher education at the University of Hong Kong and coordinator of the Consortium for Higher Education Research in Asia, says two trends which started before Covid-19 but have since accelerated, may help emerging countries in this regard. One is the rapid acceleration of technology, which “makes it possible for developing countries’ universities to enter global knowledge networks” in a way they have not previously. Another is the increasing drive among top universities, higher education systems and governments in developed countries to solve global problems, which makes institutions in other parts of the world even more attractive and useful partners. But a THE analysis also highlights the challenges that developing nations in Africa, Asia and Europe will need to overcome, with scholars warning that the pandemic may only increase the gap between research quantity and quality in more and less advanced systems. The THE Emerging Economies University Rankings was born out of a desire to be more equal. It was designed to highlight countries that were often overlooked in the global league table and to provide universities in such nations a chance to benchmark themselves against peers operating in similar economic environments. The methodology of the World University Rankings (WUR) was tweaked for this spin-off to reflect the development priorities of universities in emerging economies. The Emerging Economies WUR methodology gives more weight to knowledge transfer and international outlook and less to research influence. (Excerpted and adapted from Times Higher Education and The Economist)
To the delight of campaigners and some parents, Covid-19 has de-popularised school-leaving exams. With support from the Trump administration, all 50 states cancelled accountability testing last March, freeing 51 million public (government) school pupils from the annual rigmarole. The SATS optional essay-writing section and separate subject tests were discontinued this year. The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), an exam measuring the academic performance of OECD member countries, and the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), a nationwide exam administered to a sample of American pupils, have been postponed as well. With opposition building for years against standardised testing in public schools, could this be the end? On February 22, the Biden administration said exams had to be held, but results would not be used to grade schools. Ordinarily, the federal government obliges states to hold public schools accountable for their pupils’ test scores. Schools with poor results may see their budgets reduced, as part of that exchange of exam results for dollars. Some states and districts have used poor results to close schools and fire teachers. Teachers in tough places often think this is unfair. And Covid-19 has strengthened the point that much of what goes into a test score is, frankly, well beyond the control of teachers. However, the Fordham Institute in a recent report warns that abandoning testing could be disastrous. Cancelling tests again would make it hard to know how schools fared during the pandemic. “I would personally be in favour of more effort to get as many kids as possible tested, so that we know what is going on,” says Cory Koedel, who co-wrote the report. “I think some kids are probably doing ok. And some kids are doing really terrible. And I don’t think we know exactly who’s who.” Others disagree. Derek Briggs of the University of Colorado Boulder’s School of Education questions the benefit of testing students during these trying times. “Isn’t it reasonable to assume that every student has had a suboptimal learning experience?… All students are going to need some serious help over the next year to make up for what’s been a pretty tough year and a half,” he says. That thought delights parents and teachers who have been waging war against standardised exams for years. The Opt Out movement gained national attention in 2015 when New York State participation dropped by 20 percentage points because families refused the exams. Thirteen states received warning letters from the Obama administration for failing to test at least 95 percent of pupils that same year. The activists in the Opt Out movement want to see others held responsible for student learning, not just teachers. “The notion that we can ascertain… the extent to which (pupils are) doing poorly as a function of what’s happening in schools, as opposed to everything else that’s going on in their lives right now is absurd,” says Daniel Koretz of Harvard’s School of Education. One compromise would be for a representative sample of children to sit the tests.…
Why are American universities pre-eminent in global higher education? Previous explanations have included the country’s massive economy, its enormous budget for scientific research and its history of immigration. But a scholar suggests that the answer could be something more prosaic: the fact that they are governed largely by their alumni. Shailendra Raj Mehta, president and director of MICA, an Ahmedabad (India)-based higher education institution specialising in strategic marketing and communication researched the members of governing boards at leader private and public US universities and found that the majority are predominantly made up of alumni, while several consist entirely of former students. Mehta argues this is why older institutions have managed to sustain excellence over long periods of time and why newer universities build prestige quickly. Higher-ranked universities and institutions with bigger endowments generally have a larger share of alumni on their boards, according to the research presented at a webinar organised by the Centre for Global Higher Education on March 2. Prof. Mehta says the alumni governance model was pioneered by Harvard University in 1865 as a way for the institution to regain control after being managed by the legislature of the state of Massachusetts. Within ten years, its endowment tripled, and it tripled again in the subsequent two decades, he adds. “This is important because the control of Harvard has rested securely in the hands of those who know most about it and care most about it — viz, its alumni,” he says. “By contrast, the other models of governance for universities — viz, control by the state, control by trusts, control by faculty and control by the market – are all fraught with peril.” “The prestige of the university directly reflects on its alumni. Conversely, no body of individuals is affected more directly than alumni if the university slides down in quality,” he says, adding that alumni are also more likely to make philanthropic donations if the institution is in the hands of other alumni because “they know that the funds will be well spent”. (Excerpted and adapted from Times Higher Education and The Economist) Also Read:United States: End of public exams?
Sarojini Rao is the principal of Indus International School & advisor, Indus Startup School, Bengaluru 21st century India is re-discovering its entrepreneurial roots. It is now among the world’s top 5 countries for the number of start-up enterprises. However, according to a 2017 IBM Institute for Business Value and Oxford Economics Study, 90 percent of Indian startups fail within five years. Though most promoters ascribe this high failure rate to inadequate funding, the majority of them fail because of deficiency of entrepreneurial competencies, particularly creativity, risk-taking and ‘antifragility’. The resilient entrepreneur bounces back to square one. On the contrary, antifragile entrepreneurs thrive in chaos and emerge stronger than before. Although politicians and bureaucrats who have promoted over 500 public sector commercial enterprises countrywide seem unaware, every business enterprise is a risk-bearing venture. Therefore, fear of failure is not unusual. But the distinguishing feature of successful entrepreneurs is that they have risk-bearing capability, and aren’t afraid to fail. They understand that the first rule of business — or indeed any enterprise — is ‘nothing ventured, nothing gained’. Unfortunately, despite the subcontinent’s long and successful history of private enterprise, in contemporary Indian society there’s considerable stigma attached to failure arising from risk taking. Therefore, the general preference of the middle class is for safe and secure employment, especially in government jobs where long tenure, steady promotion and inflation-proof salaries and perquisites adding to several multiples of per capita income, are guaranteed. Yet the national development effort requires a large and ever growing number of entrepreneurs — job creators rather than seekers — to step forward to promote greenfield enterprises, philanthropic trusts and charities and social welfare organisations. In the 21st century milieu, the country’s schools and colleges must foster an entrepreneurial culture to encourage children to become risk-taking entrepreneurs unafraid of failure. Case studies need to be collated and entrepreneurial stories celebrated and disseminated. The first step towards resuscitating our historically strong tradition of private enterprise is to overcome fear of failure which is pervasive in Indian society. School managements should encourage students to practice design thinking and to apply knowledge to real-life situations to creatively and collaboratively solve problems. Design thinking is a solutions-based pedagogy developed to find innovative solutions to problems. It was developed by IDEO (an international design company) based on models ideated in the Stanford Design School. In simple terms, design thinking means collaborative effort to identify problems, and generating creative solutions. I believe the design thinking process (DTP) should be integrated into every subject in all classes, starting with one subject per grade. By practicing DTP, teachers can compact several periods of teacher and textbook-driven teaching into meaningful experiences for students. As a result, the latter will be stimulated to research, collaborate, brainstorm, ideate, reflect and develop valuable life competencies. DTP is a life skill at the macro level and an instructional strategy at the micro level. To create an ecosystem that encourages students to become risk-takers and overcome fear of failure, evolved educationists recommend heterogeneous teams…
With the Central government denying them MSME status, state governments slashing tuition and other fees and parent communities unwilling to pay contracted fees, India’s 450,000 high-performance private schools are under siege – Dilip Thakore The incubation of the Coronavirus aka Covid-19 virus in the exotic wet meat markets of neighbouring China in November 2019, and its rapid trans-continental transmission for over 15 months has extracted a terrible toll worldwide in terms of lost lives and livelihoods. Even though a vaccine to combat the deadly virus has been developed in record time, Covid-19 has claimed 2.7 million lives around the world and has devastated the economies of over 100 countries forced to declare prolonged industry, business and service sector lockdowns to prevent the spread of this highly infectious airborne virus. Inevitably, given the geographical proximity of the People’s Republic of China to India, Covid-19 has also visited havoc upon the Indian economy and population. Even as reports of a second wave of spikes are coming in from several industry hub states — Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Punjab — the Coronavirus has infected 11.8 million citizens and taken a toll of 161,000 lives during the past year when arguably the world’s most draconian national lockdown of business, industry and education institutions was declared on March 25, last year. This lockdown has extracted a heavy price from the economy. The country’s GDP which was budgeted to increase by 5 percent to Rs.235.89 lakh crore in the year ended March 31, 2021, is likely to shrink by an unprecedented 17.38 percent to Rs.194.81 lakh crore (revised estimate), and already high unemployment has risen to an estimated 37 million. The severe damage suffered by India Inc and the economy during the pandemic has been extensively researched and the best minds of the country are engaged in devising policies and strategies to repair it. However, the pandemic and year-long closure of all education institutions countrywide has also inflicted heavy and as yet unquantified damage in terms of loss of learning, drop-outs from school and widespread child malnutrition. In particular, 85 million youngest (0-5 age group) children are unable to access nutrition and early childhood education in the country’s 1.6 million government-run anganwadi centres (AWCs) and 132 million children in 1.2 million government primaries are being deprived of their daily free-of-charge mid-day meal. Curiously while entire divisions of economists, business analysts and media pundits have devised detailed strategies to haul industry, business and the economy back on the rails, there is helpless inertia in academia about ideating ways and means to repair the huge loss of learning suffered by the world’s largest child and youth population. This education-focused publication which has repeatedly warned about the silent crisis brewing in Indian education (see EW January-March cover stories on www.educationworld.in) is a lonely voice in the wilderness, ignored not only by unheeding governments at the Centre and states, but also by the academy, parents and educators communities. The dimensions of this brewing crisis in Indian education are mountainous.…
Krishna Prasad (Visakhapatnam) Hemesh Chadalvada is the latest teen wonder to join the brigade of celebrated social innovators. On the eve of Republic Day (January 26) this year, the 14-year-old was among 32 children conferred the Pradhan Mantri Rashtriya Bal Puraskar (PMRBP) award by prime minister Narendra Modi in a virtual felicitation ceremony for his newest innovation — a smart wristband which tracks the exact location of Alzheimer’s patients. The award includes a handsome amount of Rs.1 lakh plus a laptop/computer. The younger of two siblings of Kishore Kumar, a sound engineer and owner of Technostic Creations, a recording studio, and homemaker Sandhya, and a class IX student of the CBSE-affiliated Jubilee Hills Public School, Filmnagar, Hyderabad, Hemesh picked up the nuances of computer programming in class VI. “Jubilee Hills Public is a fully-wired school which utilises and encourages learning of new technologies. However, the Internet has been my biggest mentor,” recalls Hemesh Chadalvada, whose list of innovations includes a roads pothole detection system, car accident alert device, robots for the elderly and a Smart first-aid kit. Hemesh Chadalvada started ideating his award-winner smart wristband device because his grandmother suffered from Alzheimer’s disease whose main symptoms are memory loss and confusion caused by progressive degeneration of the brain, common among the elderly. In India, an estimated 4.1 million citizens are afflicted by Alzheimer’s and often lose their bearings and can never be found. Encouraged by his parents and using his brain power, this young inventor started developing the smart device two years ago. “My plastic Smart wristband has been approved by the Bengaluru-based Alzheimer’s and Related Disorders Society of India and the society has asked me to develop a smaller version so they can roll it out nationally,” says this gifted teenage inventor. Looking ahead, Hemesh Chadalvada is set upon a career in engineering. “My ultimate dream is to become an entrepreneur focused on developing products and services which will help vulnerable people in society to better their lives,” he says with disarming idealism. Also read: Bhavya Raninga & Nihar Shah
Runa Mukherjee Parikh (Ahmedabad) Anand (Rajkot)-based mint fresh agriculture science graduate Radhika Ghetiya (22), has made media headlines in Gujarat for bagging a record 12 gold medals including the vice chancellor’s best student medal — the highest honour — for her performance in the four-year B.Sc (Agriculture Hons) final exam. The medals were awarded to her at the high-powered convocation of Anand Agricultural University (AAU) staged in early February. The elder of two children of Dr Lalit Kumar Ghetiya, associate professor of entomology at Navsari Agricultural University, and homemaker Nita, Radhika is delighted that history has repeated itself. “When my father graduated from Junagadh Agricultural University in 1992-93, he was also conferred the vice chancellor’s best student medal,” she says with quiet satisfaction. Although the less preferred choice of school-leavers, Radhika has no regrets about opting for an agriculture science degree programme. “My achievements are an appropriate response to all those who mocked my decision to sign up for agriculture education. Farmers feed the nation. Therefore, it’s important that well-educated professionals enter the agriculture sector to drive up yields and productivity,” says this aspirant agriculturist. Dr Vinaya Kumar HM, assistant professor of agriculture at AAU, believes that Radhika will add value to the agriculture community. “Radhika is very clued-up about the rural economy. She debates ground-level issues with knowledge and intelligence. I believe she has what it takes to transform into an agriculture entrepreneur who will take the nation forward,” says Kumar. Driven by the mission to revolutionise agri-farming practices, Radhika has signed up for a postgrad agriculture statistics degree programme at AAU. “My undergrad degree which included a year’s internship with several agricultural firms including Gujarat State Fertilizer Corporation Agrotech Ltd was very enriching. A postgrad in agriculture statistics will equip me with data analysis and processing skills. India has twice the acreage of arable land as China but only half the production. By applying scientific innovations and advanced technologies, we can not only adequately feed all Indians but several countries of the developing world,” says this young farming entrepreneur in the making.
Its rigorous academic programmes and high-quality research have earned this prosperous island nation’s oldest university the reputation of Asia’s premier higher education institution – Dipta Joshi The National University of Singapore (NUS, estb.1905) is the island nation’s oldest and most internationally reputed higher education institution. Its rigorous academic programmes and high-quality research have earned it the reputation of the premier centre of higher education in Asia. In the QS World University Rankings 2021 NUS is ranked #11, while the Times Higher Education ranks it #25 in its WUR 2021. Spread across three contemporary campuses in Singapore, NUS has also established 11 overseas colleges in China (Shanghai, Shenzhen and Beijing), Israel, Sweden (Stockholm), United States (Silicon Valley and New York), Canada (Toronto), Switzerland (Lausanne) and Germany (Munich). Founded in 1905 as a modest medical school by a group of local businessmen, this 115-year-old institution has changed hands (and names) several times before the National University of Singapore was established following the merger of the University of Singapore and Nanyang University in 1980. NUS is especially reputed for its high-impact research in engineering, social sciences, natural science, life sciences and biomedicine. It hosts an awesome 29 research institutes and three of Singapore’s five Research Centres of Excellence. Currently, NUS’ 17 multi-disciplinary colleges offer 300 undergraduate and postgrad programmes to 43,885 students from over 100 countries mentored by 2,314 faculty. Notable alumni include Kofi Annan, former secretary-general of the United Nations; Benjamin Sheares, former president of Singapore, and Margaret Chan, director-general of the World Health Organisation, among others. To check the spread of the still rampaging Covid-19 pandemic, NUS currently provides a mix of online and offline classes to students. Singapore. Once a British colony and untidy port, over the past five decades since it became a politically independent island nation, Singapore (pop.5.69 million) has miraculously metamorphosed into Southeast Asia’s most prosperous, modern and well-administered country notable for civic discipline and high per capita income (US $92,270). Also South-east Asia’s business and financial nerve centre, it boasts an excellent public transport system and public parks, museums, restaurants, nightclubs and tourist destinations including the verdant Botanic Gardens — a Unesco World Heritage site. Singapore’s climate is tropical — warm and wet most of the year. December is the coolest month and May the warmest with average temperatures ranging between 220-33o celsius. English is the language of administration, business and technology. Other languages spoken are Malay, Chinese (Mandarin) and Tamil. Campus facilities. In Singapore, NUS sprawls across three campuses — Kent Ridge, Bukit Timah and Outram — all set amid green groves. The Bukit Timah campus is sited contiguous to the Botanic Gardens and Outram campus adjacent to Fort Canning Park. The main Kent Ridge campus is spread across 150 hectares and houses the university’s academic, research and admin buildings, student residence halls, sports and other recreational facilities. This campus is linked by the College Link Bridge to University Town (UTown) which hosts the Yale-NUS College, Singapore’s first fully residential liberal arts college. The Bukit…
Established in 2009, Universal Business School, Karjat is a wholly residential B-school, two hours drive from Mumbai, dispensing contemporary international business management education in association with several globally top-ranked offshore universities – Dipta Joshi Spread across 40 acres in a pristine valley near Karjat, a two-hour drive from India’s commercial capital Mumbai, the Universal Business School (UBS, estb.2009) is a wholly residential B-school dispensing contemporary international business management education to 480 students from 20 countries. Ranked among Mumbai’s Top 5 B-schools by the Times of India and The Week, UBS has established an excellent reputation for its experiential undergrad BBA programme, postgrad diploma and executive development programmes delivered in association with top-ranked foreign universities including the Cardiff Metropolitan University, UK; Northeastern Illinois University, Chicago; Lincoln University, USA; Swiss School of Management, Italy and INSEEC Business School, France. Founded by the late Gurdip Singh Anand (1942-2019), a highly-respected business management educator with teaching experience in the country’s top-ranked B-schools including Jamnalal Bajaj Institute of Management Studies, S.P. Jain Institute of Management Research (SPJIMR) and Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies (all in Mumbai), together with son Tarun, former chairman and MD of Thomson Reuters, South Asia, UBS boasts a stellar board of governors. Among them: Madhav Kalyan, MD & CEO, JP Morgan, South Asia; Motilal Oswal, chairman, Motilal Oswal Financial Services, and Dr. Indira Parikh, former dean, IIM-Ahmedabad. The school’s 30-strong faculty is highly qualified with seven of them serving as advisory council members of the globally-respected Harvard Business Review. “In UBS, our prime objective is to provide contemporary, experiential and industry aligned business management education to enable our students to mature into ethical, global business leaders capable of building strong and resilient organisations while adhering to the highest standards of corporate governance,” says Tarun Anand, an alum of the Tuck Business School (USA), Michigan Ross School of Business (USA), IE Business School (Spain) and SPJIMR (India). Currently, UBS offers the undergrad BBA and BA degree programmes, postgrad MBA and PGDM (postgrad diploma in management) in collaboration with Cardiff Metropolitan University, UK; Masters in business analytics with the University of Dallas, US; the MBA programme of the Swiss School of Management, Italy; and a Global MBA (Cardiff, IIM-Indore and UBS). Other international higher ed partners include INSEEC Business School, France and University of Economics, Bulgaria. With the Covid-19 pandemic still rampaging across the country and around the world, the school is offering its executive programmes in the digital mode, while 300 students who returned to campus in February are attending in-person classes. “The defining feature of UBS is not only what we teach but how we teach. The UBS Board of Governors comprising 60 CEOs, directors, and business leaders of top-ranked corporates reviews the school’s academic andragogies and processes twice each year to ensure that our curriculums are in sync with changing industry dynamics and our faculty is up-to-date with latest international pedagogies and business practice. Moreover, we ensure academic rigour through innovative projects and mandatory research assignments by developing students’…
Bengaluru, March 4. Simplilearn — a San Francisco-based global digital skills training provider, announced a partnership with IIT-Kanpur to offer an exclusive Professional Certificate Program in Blockchain Technology. Delivered via Simplilearn’s learning model, this intensive program is designed to provide learners with a clear competitive advantage through an ideal blend of conceptual training and applied learning. “Given the enormous scope of blockchain, organisations across industries are now absorbing this technology. The global blockchain market size is expected to grow from US $3 billion in 2020 to US $39.7 billion by 2025, at an impressive CAGR of 67.3 percent during this period. In light of this, we are happy to collaborate with IIT-Kanpur to offer a comprehensive program on blockchain technology. This in-depth program will provide extensive knowledge of blockchain concepts and will enable learners to boost their career prospects in several industries,” said Anand Narayanan, chief product officer of Simplilearn. Imagine Cup India winners New Delhi, March 10. Microsoft Inc announced the India winners of the 2021 edition of the company’s Imagine Cup innovation challenge for students and technology enthusiasts. The India winners, Team Detected of the G.H. Raisoni College of Engineering, Nagpur, and Team Intelli-Sense from the Vellore Institute of Technology will proceed directly to the world finals of Imagine Cup scheduled to be held online in April. Imagine Cup is a global competition designed to empower students to apply artificial intelligence and other technologies to solve some of the world’s most critical social and sustainability problems. The 2021 India edition attracted 353 team and 10,000 individual entries from across the country. The knowledge partner for the India edition of Imagine Cup 2021 was the National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC). “Microsoft’s Imagine Cup competition is a commitment to create a culture of innovation among students, enabling them to use technology for solving critical social and sustainability problems. I wish our winning teams luck as they prepare for the global stage,” said Anant Maheshwari, president, Microsoft India, speaking on the occasion. Tejas teacher training initiative Mumbai, March 19. Tejas, an innovative teacher training project delivered by the British Council in association with Tata Trusts and the Maharashtra state government, has been successfully completed. The project’s objective was to train government primary school teachers across Maharashtra to improve their English language proficiency. The project trained 51,000 teachers in 36 districts of Maharashtra, teaching 1.4 million children in public schools. The Project Tejas completion ceremony was attended by Ms Varsha Gaikwad, minister of school education of the government of Maharashtra; Barbara Wickham, director (India) of the British Council; Dr. Jovan Ilic, director (West India) of the British Council; Amrita Patwardhan, head of education, Tata Trusts, among others. Women skilling initiative Bengaluru, March 9. The Beijing-based multi-national Lenovo Group Ltd announced a partnership with the Washington (USA)-based TechnoServe International Foundation (TIF) to empower women in technology by upskilling them in STEM (science, technology, engineering & mathematics) subjects for careers in industry. With an investment of Rs.2.5 crore, they will provide holistic skills training…
New Delhi, March 30. The first annual general body meeting of the Delhi Board of School Education (DBSE) — the latest of India’s 31 state examination boards — was held to discuss registration and constitution of the board. Establishment of DBSE was given Delhi government approval on March 6 following which the board was formally registered on March 19. In the first phase, 25 government schools in Delhi state will be affiliated with DBSE in the academic year 2021-22. “The main objective of DBSE is for the assessment system to become a ‘partner of learning’ and not an ‘authority of testing’. Moreover, we want to encourage a growth mindset among students, which can be strengthened by making it a part of regular assessment,” said Manish Sisodia, deputy chief and education minister of the Delhi government, speaking on the occasion. J & K IIM-J’s happiness centre Jammu, March 30. Union education minister Ramesh Pokhriyal formally inaugurated Anandam, a happiness centre, at the Indian Institute of Management (IIM)-Jammu. “Incorporating happiness within B-schools academic curriculums is a very crucial step towards empowering the nation. Anandam is aligned with the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 which aims to achieve holistic well-being and stress-free campuses,” said the minister, speaking on the occasion. Arunachal Pradesh First tribal school Itanagar, March 21. Chief Minister Pema Khandu inaugurated Nyubu Nyvgam Yerko, the state’s first formal indigenous language and knowledge systems school, in East Kameng district. “This first-of-its-type school will promote and preserve indigenous traditions, culture and languages. A sum of Rs.3 crore has been allocated for development and upkeep of the school,” said the chief minister, addressing media personnel. In his media briefing, the chief minister acknowledged the contribution of the Donyi Polo Cultural and Charitable Trust for conceptualising and designing the school and Pai Dawe for donating land for this gurukul-inspired institution. “My government is committed to preserving the indigenous culture of Arunachal. The Department of Indigenous Affairs has been established specifically for the purpose,” he said. Moreover, the CM also publicly thanked the Vivekananda Kendra Vidyalaya Group for assuming responsibility to provide formal education to students of the school. Punjab Mass teacher transfers Chandigarh, March 24. Chief Minister Amarinder Singh ordered a digital mass transfer of 10,099 government school teachers as per the provisions of the Teachers Transfer Policy, 2019, said an official government notification released by education minister Vijay Inder Singla. “The teachers’ transfer policy has been instrumental in ensuring that high quality teachers are available to all government schools statewide and all vacancies are filled,” said the education minister, speaking on the occasion. Moreover, he added that computer teachers and education volunteers were included within the ambit of the Teachers Transfer Policy. Gujarat Massive teacher vacancies Gandhinagar, March 24. Against the sanctioned strength of 671 principals in state government secondary schools, 564 posts are vacant. Simultaneously, 1,470 posts of the sanctioned 2,120 science, mathematics and English teachers are unfilled, Bupendrasingh Chudasama, the state’s education minister, informed the state legislative assembly. Tabling budgetary demands of…
“There needs to be recognition that socialism is not the only ideology that has copyright on welfare. When the economy does not do well and wealth isn’t generated, then social good suffers and so does the welfare state. So, we have now called the bluff that wealth creation is in conflict with welfare.”— Nirmala Sitharaman, Union finance minister, on the Union Budget 2021-22 (The Hindu, February 22) “The government has no business to be in business. It is the government’s duty to support enterprises and businesses. But it is not essential that it should own and run enterprises.” — Prime minister Narendra Modi on privatisation (indiatoday.in, February 24) “The regime seems afraid of a new generation finding its relevance and articulation around ecology and environmentalism… Suddenly planetary issues, from climate change to the future of farming or the fate of the tribe — each a critical human rights issue — have been defined as anti-national.” — Shiv Visvanathan, well-known sociologist, on the arrest of young environment activists on charges of sedition by the BJP/NDA government (Telegraph, February 24) “By various metrics, China is now 10-15 years ahead of India. It reached India’s current per capita income 15 years ago. Similarly, on the Human Development Index, it is 15 years ahead of India. And on the more complex Union Nations Index for Sustainable Development Goals, India is unlikely to get to China’s current index level in another decade.” — T.N. Ninan on the India-China development gap (Business Standard, February 27) “Our babus have not evolved as fast to fit in with the new economic aspirations of India. In fact, ‘babu’ has now become a mildly derogatory word suggesting someone old-fashioned, who creates red-tape, slows things down and enjoys tormenting others with their power.” — Chetan Bhagat, author and columnist, on reforming the Indian Administrative Service (Times of India, February 28)
Reshma Ravishanker (Bengaluru) Even as several parts of the country are bracing for a second wave following a massive surge in Covid-19 cases, parents of primary school children in Karnataka (pop.63 million) are divided on the issue of sending their children back to school. An online survey conducted last month (March) by the Vidyarthigala Nade Shaleya Kade (VNSK, ‘Students’ march towards school’), a Bengaluru-based NGO comprising educationists, doctors, teachers, and parents, indicates that 82.24 percent of households are in favour of commencement of on-campus classes for primary school children in the next academic year beginning July 2021. Of the 3,165 parents interviewed, a majority of 2,603 wanted schools reopened for primary children. On the other hand, another study conducted by LocalCircles, an online platform, indicates that 72 percent of households in Bengaluru and 62 percent statewide are unwilling to send their children to school until a substantial percentage of the state’s population is vaccinated and the Covid-19 pandemic subsides. The LocalCircles online survey covered 9,687 respondent households countrywide including 1,971 in Karnataka. These households have incomes of above Rs.3 lakh per annum. Dr. V.P. Niranjanaradhya, senior fellow at Universalization of the Equitable Quality Education Programme of the National Law School of India University, Bengaluru, and prime mover of the VNSK survey, says the two surveys reflect the differing aspirations of low-income and high-income households. “The majority of sample respondents in our survey comprised low-income families. Government anganwadis and primary schools provide a safer environment for children than their cramped homes in crowded localities. Moreover, children are assured of a free-mid-day meal in government anganwadis and primaries. That’s why our survey which focused on low-income households, shows an overwhelming preference for reopening of schools,” he explains. The diametrically opposite conclusion of the LocalCircles survey which indicates that 62 percent of parents in the state prefer their children to learn from home is because of the profile of respondents. All parents interviewed had annual household incomes above Rs.3 lakh with half reporting incomes of over Rs.6 lakh. Quite obviously, these households are well-equipped with Internet connectivity and digital devices (computers, laptops, Smart phones) with children enrolled in upscale private schools that have smoothly transitioned to online learning. Unsurprisingly, they prefer their children to learn from home until the worst of the pandemic is over. With poor, income-stressed, and working class households clearly in favour of reopening of public and affordably priced budget private schools — these households/families constitute a majority in Karnataka — the dithering of the BJP government of the state has dismayed educationists. On January 29, ten months after all education institutions nationwide were ordered to be shutdown, the state government permitted in-school classes for senior and higher secondary (classes IX-XII) students. Almost a month later, it allowed on-campus classes for VI-VIII children. However with Karnataka experiencing a second surge in Covid-19 positive cases in March, most upscale private schools have reverted to online classes with the state’s 49,637 government schools reporting 30-40 percent attendance in classes VI-VIII even as…
Aditi Maheswari (Bhopal) Despite ‘ragging’ — an archaic initiation ritual during which new entrants into schools and colleges are teased and bullied by seniors having been banned by the Central and state governments and inviting the wrath of the Supreme Court — acts of ragging are punishable by fines of up to Rs. 50,000, jail terms ranging from six months to ten years — this brutal rite of passage, refuses to die out. In an unprecedented judicial verdict on February 5, a session court in Bhopal sentenced four women pharmacy students of the RKDF Medical College, Bhopal, to five years imprisonment for abetting the suicide of a first-year student following continuous ragging. Additional sessions court judge Amit Ranjan also imposed a fine of Rs.8,000 on the convicts. According to the prosecution, the convicted students mentally and physically tortured Ankita Sharma driving her to suicide by hanging on August 7, 2013. In a suicide note, the deceased named the four senior students and also indicted the college management for not paying heed to her complaints and failing and neglecting to stamp out this humiliating practice. Shortly after Sharma’s tragic suicide, a PIL (public interest litigation) was filed by a medical student in Indore, and the Madhya Pradesh high court served notice on the state government to implement the Raghavan Committee’s report (2007) and Supreme Court directives to curb ragging in education institutions statewide. The PIL petition listed corrupt practices including ragging that are rife in 23 medical and 15 dental colleges of Madhya Pradesh (pop.73 million). Admitting the PIL on September 2, 2013, a division bench comprising acting Chief Justice K.K. Lahoti and Justice Subhash Kakade served notices on Barkatullah University, Bhopal, the district collector and RKDF Medical College, where the accused students and the deceased were studying. However, neither the Congress (Dec 2018-March 2020) nor the incumbent BJP government has addressed the ragging ritual which is practicised widely across the state. According to data compiled by the Aman Movement, which manages an anti-ragging helpline for the Delhi-based University Grants Commission, although ragging cases in higher education institutions countrywide have fallen sharply from 40 percent in 2009 to 4 percent, 132 ragging complaints were filed in MP in 2019. This is the highest number of complaints filed from any state since the Aman Movement started receiving complaints a decade ago. To curb the incidence of this pernicious college initiation rite which often has serious consequences, educationists and human rights activists are calling for specific anti-ragging legislation from the state government on lines of the Maharashtra Prohibition of Ragging Act, 1999. “Andhra Pradesh has its own state legislated anti-ragging law, titled Andhra Pradesh Ragging Prohibition Act, 1997. Consequently, while Andhra had only 29 ragging complaints last year, in MP, 132 ragging complaints were registered. There is a need to have a state enacted anti-ragging law,” says Deepak Gour, a Bhopal-based lawyer. Clearly, an idea whose time has come. Also read: Delhi: Another ragging casualty
Baishali Mukherjee (Kolkata) It seems to be the season for top-level resignations from blue-chip higher ed institutions. Soon after the highly respected public intellectual Dr. Pratap Bhanu Mehta and Dr. Arvind Subramaniam, former chief economic advisor of the BJP/NDA government, put in their papers at the ambitious, privately-promoted Ashoka University in Delhi NCR on March 15, Dr. Anju Seth, the first woman director of the vintage top-ranked Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta (IIM-C, estb.1961), sent her resignation letter to the prime minister’s office and IIM-C’s board of governors. The board is chaired by Shrikrishna Kulkarni, the great-grandson of Mahatma Gandhi and former managing director of Panasonic India and founder-president of Fanuc India. In her resignation letter dated March 21, Seth accused Kulkarni and the board of “maligning and denigrating her publicly.” A highly qualified alumna of Delhi University, IIM-C itself and awarded a Ph D in business strategy by the Stephen M. Ross School of Business, Michigan University, USA, Seth was recruited from Virginia Tech (USA) where she is a tenured professor of business management, in Novermber 2018 for a four-year term. “I am deeply anguished at not being able to fulfil this mandate and help turn around IIM-C to a world-class institution with a distinctive Indian heritage. This situation has arisen because of a breakdown in confidence escalating over the past four months between me as director and CEO and you (Kulkarni) as chairman of the board. To the best of my ability, I have been conducting my responsibilities as director and CEO in the best long-run interests of the institute with a focus on urgent reforms, forward-looking decisions and in the interest of all stakeholders,” wrote Seth in her resignation letter accessed by the Economic Times. Although Seth’s resignation letter went viral on social media, Kulkarni, members of the board of governors, and faculty have maintained a studied silence on the issue. Nevertheless, according to off-the-record conversations with faculty and alumni it’s clear that Seth swiftly transformed into a new broom in a tearing hurry to sweep this essentially faculty-run institute clean. She discerned “open breach of government guidelines in matters of procurement and recruitment of personnel” and “legacy issues related to lack of transparency or accountability, misuse of public funds, a weak financial situation,” and charged Kulkarni and the board with “undue interference” which impeded her reform initiatives. But Seth’s aggressive reforms agenda not only cheesed off the board of governors but also the faculty of this vintage B-school which is routinely ranked with IIM-Ahmedabad and IIM-Bangalore as the best B-school in India. Quite clearly neither this widely respected B-school’s board nor its faculty believe that IIM-C needs urgent and radical “urgent reforms”. Last December 60 of IIM-C’s faculty wrote to the Union education ministry complaining that under Seth’s leadership, there was “decline in academic and research environment” and “systematic undermining” of the academic council, the institute’s principal curriculum framing and governance body. Evidently, the board and faculty have no regrets about Seth’s resignation a year before…
Dipta Joshi (Mumbai) The year-long shutdown of all education institutions countrywide to protect children and youth from the Covid-19 pandemic has thrown the finances of the overwhelming majority of the country’s 450,000 private schools into disarray. Even in upscale private schools, cash flows have been adversely affected because a minority of parents who suffered salary cuts or deferment or even job losses are unable to pay children’s school fees. This black swan event i.e, the pandemic, has been made worse for the country’s private schools by the Central government’s failure to classify them as MSMEs (micro small and medium enterprises) entitled to several pandemic reliefs (interest payment moratoria, soft loans etc), and state governments recklessly slashing school fees and imposing fee ceilings. The financial difficulties of private school promoters/managements have created M&A (merger and acquisition) opportunities for well-funded offshore education corporates and REITs (real estate investment trusts). To get around clumsy laws replete with loopsholes, drafted by government bureaucrats prohibiting for-profit corporates and entrepreneurs from promoting or owning education institutions, astute lawyers have devised several strategies to enable private school promoters to earn surpluses for investment in institutional upgradation and promotion of new greenfield schools. Typically, an asset management for-profit limited liability company is registered by a private school promoter. The physical assets — land, buildings, equipment — of a given school/college, are sold to the asset management company and leased back to the school which (from fees paid by students) pays the company an annual/monthly lease rent. Payment of rent for leased premises doesn’t fall within the definition of commercial activity for schools. However, the necessity to negotiate and devise complex contracts to get around legislation and case law which forbids “commercialisation of education” has generated its own problems. In 2016, the Hyderabad-based Cerestra Infrastructure Trust (estb.2015) which describes itself as an “edu-infra partners and institutionalised edu-infra sale and leaseback” company, entered into an agreement with Dr. Vinay Jain, promoter-director of the Mumbai-based Witty Group of Institutions which owns four K-12 schools, to acquire a 51 percent stake in VJTF Infraschool Services (Mumbai) Pvt. Ltd (VJTFI), the asset management company of Witty International School (Mumbai), for Rs.97 crore to be paid in two installments — Rs.47 crore on signing of the agreement and the remaining Rs.50 crore within one year. Under the terms of the agreement, subject to payment of the full amount, the school management committed to pay a fixed lease rental to VJTFI. According to Jain, Cerestra paid Rs.47 crore upfront for purchase of its 51 percent stake in VJTFI. However, it failed and neglected to pay the remaining Rs.50 crore for over three years, a default which prompted Jain to terminate the agreement of sale of 51 percent equity of VJTFI to Cerestra on December 24, 2020. “Subsequently, we learned Cerestra had not taken the required permission to enter into the 2016 agreement from SEBI (Security Exchange Board of India). It had cheated, misrepresented and given wrong representations and warranties to us and wrongly acquired 51…
Avtar Nehru (Delhi) The resignation of prof. Pratap Bhanu Mehta from the political science faculty of Ashoka University (AU) on March 15, has stirred the academy in India and abroad and shaken the carefully curated reputation of this seven-year-old university positioned as the country’s first wholly — American Ivy league-style — liberal arts university. When Mehta was appointed vice chancellor of this institution in 2017 and two years later demoted himself to mere faculty, he brought formidable scholarship (alum of Oxford (UK) and Princeton (USA), teaching experience at Harvard, and as president of Delhi-based think tank Centre for Policy Research), to AU. Perhaps more important, as consulting editor and weekly columnist of the multi-editions Indian Express, Mehta has established a reputation as the country’s foremost anti-establishment public intellectual. In his resignation letter, Prof. Mehta wrote: “After a meeting with founders, it has become abundantly clear to me that my association with the university may be considered a political liability. My public writing in support of a politics that tries to honour constitutional values of freedom and equal respect for all citizens, is perceived to carry risks for the university. In the interests of the university, I resign.” Two days after Indian Express broke the story of Mehta’s resignation, Arvind Subramanian, former chief economic advisor (2014-2017) of the incumbent BJP/NDA government at the Centre and professor in AU’s department of economics, also put in his papers in protest. These high-profile resignations not only hogged national and international media headlines but have also sparked a fierce debate on academic freedom and university autonomy in contemporary India, where the BJP leadership is quick to classify all criticism of the government as anti-national, and to slap sedition charges on critics. Former Reserve Bank of India governor Raghuram Rajan was among the first to react. “Ashoka’s founders have succumbed to outside pressure to get rid of a troublesome critic. Free speech is the soul of a great university. The founders have bartered away its soul,” says Rajan. Widespread criticism of the university’s administration has undoubtedly dented the reputation of this highly respected varsity ranked India’s #3 private university in the EducationWorld India Higher Education Rankings 2020-21, and particularly of its trustees and administration. The faculty and students who hitherto regarded themselves as a privileged elite, are also up in arms. Ninety faculty dons of the university in a letter to the university vice chancellor Malabika Sarkar, wrote: “We are greatly troubled by this scenario. Even more troubling is the possibility that our university may have acceded to pressure to remove Prof. Mehta or to request, and accept, his resignation.” Students — half of them on varying need-based scholarships — under the aegis of its Student Government, have addressed a three-point demand — public acknowledgement by the founders of what Prof. Mehta has indicated; an open meeting with faculty and students and divesting administrative powers and roles from founders of university to elected representatives of faculty and vice chancellor. According to latest reports, Sarkar has given…
Congratulations for presenting a well-researched analysis of the Union Budget 2020-21 (‘Bare cupboard for world’s most high potential children’, EW March). Slashing the Centre’s allocation for public education by 6 percent in the pandemic year, during which all education institutions were shut down for almost ten months, is a telling indicator of the low priority accorded to human capital development by the BJP/NDA government at the Centre. The overwhelming majority of children in government schools, especially in rural areas, have no access to online learning, and experts predict that it will take decades to make up for the massive loss of learning they have suffered. It’s scandalous that the budget contains no provision to enable government school children to purchase digital gadgets or access online learning. It’s doubly curious that Union finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman didn’t think it apposite to provide resources in the budget for implementation of the National Education Policy 2020 released in July last year by her government with great fanfare. Sarvesh Sarangi Pune Missed liberalisation opportunity Thanks for your hard-hitting cover story on the Union Budget 2021-22 (EW March). I appreciate your exposing the double standards of the BJP which professedly believes in free-markets and private enterprise. This is BJP’s second government at the Centre and it has not lifted a finger to liberalise the heavily regulated education sector. On the contrary, its education policies are a continuation of Congress policies and continue to discourage private edupreneurs from promoting schools, colleges and universities. As you rightly say, if the government doesn’t have the money to invest in upgrading Indian education, it should move out of the way and open doors to private capital. Jignesh T on E-mail Inspiring special needs school YOUR EYEWITNESS reports including your latest ‘Model school for special needs children’ (EW March) never fail to inspire. Chettinad-Sath Sadhana, Chennai, is doing a fantastic job amidst all challenges of the pandemic to continue the learning of special needs children. It’s also creditable that the institute is now focused on delivering life skills development and skills training programmes to enable children to lead financially independent lives. Reema Srivastava on E-mail More than money I was pleased to read that the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) — India’s wealthiest local government — has put its money to good use and launched ten greenfield CBSE-affiliated schools (Education News, EW March). The children of the poor deserve equal opportunity and access to high-quality schools affiliated with CBSE and other pan-India exam boards. However, given the past record of BMC in managing its state board affiliated schools, I am skeptical about the success of this initiative. It’s not enough for the corporation to invest in infrastructure such as digital classrooms, computer labs, science labs, playgrounds and libraries, it needs to focus on recruiting and training high-quality teachers and efficient principals committed to delivering quality education. This is what will determine whether BMC’s new CBSE schools will succeed. Hemant Rathore Mumbai Misprinted rankings The rankings of Hyderabad Public School, Begumpet are…
The silver lining of the devastating Covid-19 pandemic, which despite take-off of the national vaccination campaign, is surging in some parts of the country, is that it has made the neta-babu brotherhood aware that adoption of the socialist development model under which the State dominates the “commanding heights of the economy” was the biggest mistake in Indian history. The empty treasuries of the Central and state governments are testimony to the bankruptcy of the neta-babu economic development model. As a result while the newly-elected Biden administration in the United States has provided a $1.9 trillion pandemic relief package for America — a sum equal to more than half the GDP of India in 2019-20 — the numerous relief packages of the BJP/NDA government at the Centre aggregate Rs.3 lakh crore ($41 billion) for a population that’s 3x of the US. Nevertheless an upside of the Covid blight which has felled the Indian economy, is that even if belatedly, the BJP leadership has rediscovered its ideological moorings and announced an intent of wholesale privatisation of the country’s black hole 348 government-owned public sector enterprises (PSEs). In particular it has declared firm intent to privatise the country’s 12 banks which were nationalised way back in 1969, starting with two large (unnamed) PSE banks in 2021-22. This latter declaration of intent should be especially welcomed as during the past half century public sector banks (PSBs) mismanaged by business-illiterate bureaucrats and over-promoted clerks, have inflicted incalculable damage upon the Indian economy, and are primarily responsible for its slow growth and under-development during the past 50 years. This charge is evidenced by recent data published by the Switzerland-based Bank of International Settlements (BIS) and the World Bank. According to BIS, in 2019 total bank credit to non-financial enterprises in India by the banking sector overwhelmingly dominated by PSBs, was a mere 87 percent of GDP. And in July 2020 (during the pandemic lockdown) it plunged to 56 percent. In sharp contrast, in China the ratio was 205 percent; South Korea 197; USA 150; UK 158 percent. World Bank data confirms the risk-aversion of India’s public sector banks. In China, the bank credit to GDP ratio (2019) was 164 percent and South Korea 151 percent cf. India’s 50 percent. A combination of politically directed lending, chronic ineptitude and risk-aversion for over half a century, starved Indian industry — particularly MSMEs (micro small and medium enterprises) — of credit, the prerequisite of economic growth. Unsurprisingly, lazy, overpaid and technologically and productivity challenged bank employees enamoured with the status quo called a two-day national strike (March 15-17) to protest the proposed denationalisation of PSBs. No right-thinking citizen should support them or tolerate government back-sliding on the issue of privatisation of PSBs. Also read: Time to end prolonged PSE love affair
The controversial resignation on March 16 of Dr. Pratap Bhanu Mehta from the faculty of the high-ranked Ashoka University (AU, estb.2014) has provoked universal condemnation of the promoter trustees of this new genre, crowd-funded private liberal arts university established to maintain the highest standards of academic independence and institutional autonomy for which the Oxbridge universities and Ivy league colleges of the US are renowned. In his letter of resignation, Mehta wrote that after a meeting with the founder-trustees of AU, it became “abundantly clear” to him that his association with the university as professor of political science had become a “political liability” for the institution. In an indirect reference to the BJP/NDA government at the Centre, Mehta wrote that “my public writing in support of a politics that tries to honour constitutional values of freedom and equal respect for all citizens is perceived to carry risks for the university. In the interests of the university, I resign”. The backstory of Mehta’s resignation is that during the past decade, Mehta, an alum of the blue-chip Oxford (UK) and Princeton (US) universities and former president of the Delhi-based Centre for Public Policy Research which he nurtured into the country’s most respected think tank, has emerged as the nation’s foremost public intellectual. His incisive reflections on politics, the Constitution and law published in the multi-edition Indian Express has a nationwide readership running into millions. However, it is unsparing in its unbridled criticism of the BJP/NDA government led by prime minister Narendra Modi. The brunt of Mehta’s animus towards the BJP in particular, is that it is a Hindu majoritarian political party hell-bent on promoting the militant hindutva philosophy/ideology of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the ideological mentor organisation of the BJP committed to transforming India into a Hindu rashtra in which Muslim and other religious minority communities will be demoted to second class citizenship. By definition, the prime duty of the founder-trustees of the university is to protect the interests of the institution in which they have invested huge resources and nurtured into a premier liberal arts university in record time. In retrospect, they grievously erred in inviting the high-profile anti-establishment Mehta to come aboard the university in 2017 as vice chancellor and two years after he voluntarily resigned that position, retaining him as a faculty member even after the BJP — which it’s common knowledge is no respecter of constitutional niceties — swept General Election 2019. In the circumstances, with the trustees having painted themselves into a corner and well aware of the great damage that the bull-in-a-china shop BJP could do to this great project, Mehta did the right thing by putting in his papers. In the final analysis, Mehta was obliged to make a choice between his fundamental right to free expression, and preservation and progression of a great university built to last. It was the correct choice in the larger public interest.
The public, especially the great Indian middle class, has a curious love-hate relationship with private schools. On the one hand, almost every household in the country aspires to educate its children in private schools which are not only a status symbol, but provide passports for upward mobility and financial security. However once they have ensured the admission of their progeny into private schools of their choice (or second choice), not a few parents transform into hostile witnesses and often into persecutors of institutional managements. Instead of co-operating with the school’s administration and teachers to jointly educate their children, they transform into carping critics and fault-finders. And even though private school promoters and managements have made heroic efforts to switch to online classes to continue the education of their students during the Covid-19 pandemic, parents groups and associations demanding fees waiver and concessions have mushroomed countrywide. Despite parents being well-aware that schools have incurred substantial expenditure for installing digital connectivity and hardware, and training teachers to conduct online classes. And state governments, which are less than enamoured with private — especially affordable budget private — schools that are continuously attracting government school students, are happy to oblige. Almost all of them have issued notifications and directives slashing private school fees while simultaneously issuing stern warnings against laying off teachers and staff. Contrary to popular perception, India’s private schools don’t educate the children of a thin upper crust. According to a study conducted by the Central Square Foundation last year, 47.5 percent of the country’s 260 million in-school children are enrolled in 450,000 private schools across the country. Yet despite their critical role in the pre-primary to class XII education system, the Central government has denied private schools MSME (micro small medium enterprises) status which would have qualified them for interest payment moratoria, soft loans and other concessions to tide over the pandemic. Therefore the troubles and travails of private schools is the subject matter of our cover story in this issue. The plain truth is that if a large number of India’s private schools go under, the K-12 education system will self-destruct. Our second lead feature focuses on the recently concluded CENTA Teaching Professionals Olympiad (TPO) 2020, which attracted 25,000 entries from 8,000 schools in India and abroad. That so many in-service teachers are testing themselves in this annual competitive contest open to all teachers worldwide, is good news. It’s an indicator this community is beginning to appreciate the virtues of continuous improvement and skilling. Moreover, this EW spring issue also has several commentaries on the controversial resignation of widely respected public intellectual Pratap Bhanu Mehta from the faculty of the high-potential, new- genre liberal arts Ashoka University.
Private varsity governance pitfalls
– Shiv Visvanathan is a professor at O.P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat (Haryana) and a member of Compost Heap, an academic think tank One of the drawbacks of academic controversies is that they surface without articulation of genealogy, or context. They erupt as scandal, evoke a few personalities, allow a trail of gossip, and fade quickly. The recent controversy around Ashoka University (AU) has that drawing room flavour. It will cease to command attention or meaning soon. The genealogy of Ashoka University can be traced back to the writings of Patrick Geddes, India’s first sociologist recognised as the inventor of town planning. Geddes wrote about the modern university in an inimitable way. He argued that a university is incomplete without dissenting academics. The holism of the university as an intellectual powerhouse needs the creative power of dissenting perspectives. Thus, every Western university system grew by absorbing intelligent dissenting viewpoints within its environment. This is precisely the balance that Pratap Bhanu Mehta provided as an autonomous and dissenting force within Ashoka University. In this particular case which forced Mehta’s resignation as vice chancellor in 2019 and as professor of political science on March 15, one should bear in mind that Ashoka’s financiers have always been ambivalent about dissent. They should have known it is normative in the university system. Nor is Mehta’s resignation a unique case for AU, promoted seven years ago with high aspirations. In 2017, the AU management fired a young lecturer for his public stand on retaining the special status of Kashmir, claiming it threatened the university. Even more embarrassing was the resignation of Prof. Meena Surie Wilson, head of AU’s women’s leadership cell. A brilliant professional with deep roots in Asia and the US, Surie discovered that the cell was without real content. As she sought to write its curriculum, she discovered the university trustees wanted to use money officially allocated to her department for other purposes. She challenged it quietly but firmly and chose to resign over the issue in 2018. The integrity and dignity of that protest should not be forgotten. If Prof. Surie challenged the ethical integrity of Ashoka, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, a formidable public intellectual, became an example of political and intellectual autonomy, a status unacceptable to its founder-trustees, who envisioned AU as an investment opportunity rather than a truly independent liberal arts university. The follow-up resignation of Arvind Subramaniam, former chief economic advisor of the BJP/NDA government at the Centre who had signed up as AU faculty, highlights this structural weakness. There is a second facet of this controversy that needs underlining. This situation is not peculiar to AU. It is common to a whole chain of universities ranging from Jamia Islamia, Aligarh, Delhi, Hyderabad and JNU which are desperately struggling for academic and intellectual freedom within an insidious political environment. This issue goes beyond colourful personalities like Mehta to the basic character of universities as intellectual terrain. The threat to emasculate the autonomy and diversity of the university has been one…