Gayathri Muthukumar (17), a class XII student of the National Public School, Indiranagar, Bangalore, is the newly crowned Season Seven champion of the Indian National Brain Bee 2014 — an all-India competition open to class XI students. Launched by the Mumbai-based Seven Hills Hospitals, the objective of this annual competition is to inspire youth […]
Sudheshna Sinha and husband Sujit are co-founders of Shikshamitra (‘Education Mate’), an alternative school and education resource centre (estb. 2005). A psychology graduate of Calcutta University with a special needs education diploma from Mumbai University, Sudeshna has worked in special and mainstream schools for over seven years. An IIT-Kanpur alumnus with a doctorate from Princeton […]
Arghya Banerjee is founder of The Levelfield School in Suri (pop. 80,000) in the Birbhum district of West Bengal. The school was promoted in 2010 by the Levelfield Trust whose mission and objective is to “level the playing field” and make quality education accessible and affordable to middle class households in tier-II and III urban habitations.
Newspeg. In […]
Chennai-based V. Karthikeyan and wife Veena are the promoter partners of Passaro Books (estb. 2012), a proprietary firm which imports pre-owned books from the UK for children in the 1.5-12 years age group.
Newspeg. Passaro Books runs retail and online bookshops with over 50,000 titles, and has created quite a buzz in this port city, which prides itself on its intellectual […]
Delhi-based Akshay Munjal, a science and business management alum of Bradford University, UK, and Pepperdine University, USA, is executive director of the spanking new state-of-the-art, BML Munjal University (BMU) spread over 50 acres in Manesar (Gurgaon), on the periphery of Delhi.
Newspeg. Named after Brij Mohan Lall Munjal, the founder-chairman of the Hero Group of 20 companies (annual revenue: […]
The intent of this education reform route map spanning the entire spectrum from preschool to PhD education, is to provoke debate within the somnolent groves of Indian academia and the intelligentsia to transform the nation’s demographic liability into an asset
IF INDIA’S ACADEMY had a conscience and sense of responsibility, August 15, when the nation celebrates […]
An estimated 300,000 recognised/unrecognised private schools countrywide with a massive enrolment of 60 million children are endangered because of non-compliance with infrastructure norms prescribed by the Right to Education Act, 2009. Unsurprisingly 1.2 million dysfunctional government schools are exempt
SIX MONTHS AGO, the Kailash Public School in Sehna village (pop. 20,000) in Punjab’s Barnala district experienced the […]
The newly inducted Modi sarkar urgently needs to take the NECCE policy draft approved by the UPA-II government forward. Thanks to a small minority of educators and educationists including pioneers who braving opprobrium, promoted metropolitan preschools several decades ago, the Mumbai-based Early Childhood Association (ECA, estb. 2010) and not least EducationWorld, which has convened four global […]
Under this model, rapidly expanding in the US, government transfers the management of its schools to proven education NGOs and/or private educationists, paying them the per student cost incurred by it
EVERYBODY WHO KNOWS THE first thing about the near-collapsed Indian education system, knows that its deadweight — which has dragged not only post-independence India’s education […]
The small minority of India’s top-rung legacy boarding and new genre international schools are on a par with the best private schools in the West. But the majority of secondaries are under-developed by global standards
THE GLARING qualitative gap which is evident between post-independence India’s private and government preschools and primaries, is unbridged in secondary education, […]
The price the Indian economy has paid for under-investment in VET has been catastrophic. Shopfloor productivity in industry is one-third to one-tenth of China and OECD countries.
PERHAPS BECAUSE of deep-rooted prejudices buried in the pernicious Hindu caste system, hands-on vocational education which would have upskilled the population, didn’t receive any worthwhile attention during the first […]
Although the country boasts 37,000 colleges and 735 universities, the fundamental problem of post-independence India’s higher education system is excessive Central and state government control
UNSURPRISINGLY ALL THE accumulated sins of omission and commission of the past six decades in preschool, primary and secondary education have risen to an ugly froth in India’s higher education system. […]
AS AUGUST 15 draws near and the newly-elected prime minister Narendra Modi prepares to deliver his first Independence Day address to the nation from the ramparts of the Red Fort, Delhi, he has a great opportunity to outline a new programme for the redevelopment and rejuvenation of a nation eager to make amends for errors […]
The Right to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, 2009, which came into force in 2010, inter alia prescribes minimum infrastructure, teacher-pupil ratio and other norms for all schools. S.18 stipulates that no private schools shall function without a recognition certificate from the “appropriate government”, which will be awarded only if schools fulfill the infrastructure […]
“I chose a (budget) private school because of its good quality of education. The teachers give a lot of attention to students. In the local government school, children don’t learn anything. We don’t mind paying fees if our child is being prepared for a better life. I studied at a government school but didn’t learn […]
Indian education is poised uncertainly at a historic crossroads. On the one hand, there are great expectations of the 60 days old BJP-led coalition government at the Centre swept into office on a tidal wave of aspirations for economic development, after ten years of disappointing rule by the Congress-led UPA coalition which failed to fulfill […]
EVEN AFTER CONCEDING that the Union Budget 2014-15 presented to Parliament and the nation on July 10 by new finance minister Arun Jaitley, is a truncated statement of accounts for the next seven months of the current financial year of the 60-days-old BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government, it’s a great disappointment. There’s hardly any […]
I READ YOUR LETTER FROM the editor and cover story ‘Public education: PPP blueprint’ (EW July) with interest and completely agree with you.
There’s something fundamentally wrong with the philosophy of the RTE Act, 2009. Rather than focusing on upgrading government schools, the government is bent on passing the buck to educate India’s children to private […]
THE 60-DAY-OLD narendra Modi-led NDA-II government is set to consolidate all skill development programmes currently administered by 21 ministries and departments of the Central government, under a newly-created Union ministry of skill development and entrepreneurship (SDE). With the Union Budget 2014-15 presented to Parliament by finance minister Arun Jaitley on July 10, having allocated an […]
THE HEINOUS RAPE OF a six-year-old girl child of the upmarket CISCE-affiliated Vibgyor High School in Bangalore on July 3 allegedly by two school-appointed gym instructors, has shaken the garden city’s community of parents. Since the ghastly crime was reported to the police on July 14 by the girl’s father, the city has witnessed strident […]
LIBERAL APPREHENSIONS that the sweeping victory of the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) in General Election 2014 would result in tampering and messing with school curriculums, are proving to be justified in Gujarat where a BJP government has been in power since 2001.
On June 30 the Gujarat State School Textbook Board (GSSTB) issued a circular […]
AFTER PREVARICATING for four years and delaying payments due to managements of 8,000 private unaided schools which admitted children from poor households in their neighbourhoods, the Maharashtra state government has approved disbursal of the fee reimbursement due to them. Under a July 16 notification, the state government has increased the formerly promised tuition fee reimbursement […]
SHORTLY AFTER THE trinamool Congress party, which ended the 34-year uninterrupted rule of the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM)-led Left Front coalition in West Bengal (pop. 91 million) in the summer of 2011, was installed in Writers Building, Kolkata, a 19-member school syllabus reform committee was appointed by chief minister Mamata Banerjee to sanitise school […]
A JUNE 30 CIRCULAR of the delhi-based Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) directing all its 15,000 affiliated schools countrywide to celebrate Sanskrit Week from August 7-13 has provoked hatred, ridicule and contempt in Tamil Nadu (pop: 72 million).
According to the circular, “the celebration of Sanskrit Week would provide a medium for popularising Sanskrit and […]
FEAR OF FAILURE, LACK OF cooperation from family, inability to control anger, sleeplessness, and poor communication skills. These are just some of the problems suffered by class X students of government schools in Uttar Pradesh — India’s most populous state (200 million) — according to a first-of-its-type study conducted by the State Council for Educational […]
“The expansion of public services and social support in India, such as it is, has little to do with any nostalgia for Nehruvian socialism. It is a natural development in a country with a modicum of democracy.”
Jean Dreze, well-known developmental economist, on criticism of social sector spending (The Hindu, July 8)
“If we are going […]
Bihar
All is well
Addressing the state’s legislative assembly on July 3, Bihar’s education minister Brishen Patel said the government will provide water bottles and backpacks to all government school children free of charge. “We are considering water bottles and backpacks for students of government schools so they need not suffer from an inferiority complex in comparison […]
CRICKET ICON Sachin Tendulkar launched the Kaspersky Kids internet safety programme of Kaspersky Lab India — a subsidiary of the Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab — at the Ryan International Group of Institutions (RIGI) campus in Mumbai on July 23.
Under a RIGI-Kaspersky agreement, Kaspersky Lab will deliver online safety education through various touch points, including a daily […]
“CIVILIAN DRONES are just a few years away from becoming commonplace,” says high-tech innovator Yashaan Cooper (20). In May, this robotics enthusiast together with Rohit Saluja and Vishank Bhatia — all second-year electronics and communications engineering students of the Birla Institute of Technology & Science, Dubai — were shortlisted in the students’ category to compete […]
Ranked #1 in Maharashtra and Mumbai in the EW India School Rankings 2013, this vintage school, Cathedral & John Connon School, Mumbai (estb. 1860) has acquired a national reputation
One of Mumbai’s landmark institutions and the must-go-to K-12 school of the old elite of India’s commercial capital, the Cathedral & […]
Routinely ranked among the world’s Top 200 universities, University College Dublin (estb. 1854) hosts more than 5,000 international students from 124 countries
Founded in 1854, the University College Dublin (UCD) is Ireland’s biggest varsity with an aggregate enrolment of 30,000 students and 1,300 faculty. A research-intensive institution, UCD is one of the two […]
THE world wide web (aka the internet) has enabled access to knowledge like no medium has ever done. As an entire universe of knowledge opens up, educators and educationists have no choice but to follow suit. Hitherto, organised education or academia had near total control over the dissemination of knowledge. However, the role of educators […]
The demand for qualified mixologists — specialist bartenders who create magical cocktails and provide entertainment — is far outstripping supply
With hotels, bars, restaurants, discotheques and night clubs springing up all over the country even as the wine and dine soirees of India’s multiplying rich and famous are becoming more flamboyant and imaginative, new careers are […]
I’m a BAMS (bachelor of ayurvedic medicine and surgery) graduate practising in Pune and simultaneously studying law (LLB). Can I practise as a medico-legal consultant?
Shailesh Patil, Pune
I suggest you check with a law firm that deals with medico-legal cases or even your law college whether you qualify to practise on completion of your degree […]
Chetan Mahajan IS the president of HCL Learning Ltd (HCLL, estb. 2010), a wholly-owned subsidiary of Noida-based HCL Infosystems Ltd (estb. 1976; annual revenue: Rs.8,297 crore), the well-known IT behemoth. HCL Learning offers ICT (information and communications technology)-enabled mapped curriculums and supplementary development services for K-12 schools, as well as training and education solutions to higher […]
Uniquely among the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China & South Africa) countries, India has a competitive advantage. Not only in the education sector, but also in the world of employment, with a potentially beneficial fallout for India’s balance of payments.
Every nation across the world is stronger, more vibrant and attractive if it is able to […]
THE INDIANA JONES warehouse. That’s where William Pannapacker claims much of the output of students and staff in the liberal arts ends up — in the figurative obscurity represented by the seemingly infinite, but sealed off, government storeroom where the fictional archaeologist’s discovery — the Ark of the Covenant — is placed at the end […]
IN EAST ASIA, history textbooks are barometers of nationalism, and arguments over them are proxies for disputes between states. So it’s hardly surprising — at a time when territorial disagreements are breaking out all round the South China Sea and East China Sea — that the region is witnessing a new chapter in a long-running […]
IN THE UNITED STATES, suspicions about private, for-profit universities’ high cost and dubious quality abound. Elsewhere in the Americas, though, the story is far more positive.
After equally hectic expansion, Brazil’s for-profit institutions have three-quarters of the country’s higher education market — with fees kept low and quality rising fast. And since a degree boosts wages […]
Karnataka: Poor SSLC results put students at disadvantage in PUC admissions - Reshma Ravishanker The results of Karnataka’s SSLC exams will be disadvantageous for state syllabus students seeking admissions into Pre-University ... 
10 oldest cities in the world Every city in the world has a story to unfold. The ancient cities have all the more tales engulfed with ... 
Delhi’s most preferred preschools 2016-17 Last year The Magic Years — Delhi’s #1 proprietary preschool for several years — was bested by Step by Step ... 
Indian women spend more time on education & finance apps: Bobble AI Report The Indian e-commerce industry witnessed an uptick in women smartphone users since the beginning of 2022 but interestingly when it ... 
Delhi University’s FYUP imbroglio
– Rahul Singh is the former editor of Reader’s Digest and Indian Express
NOBODY COMES OUT smelling roses in Delhi University’s four year undergraduate programme (FYUP) imbroglio, following which the programme — hastily introduced last year (2013) — has been reversed in the new academic year. Neither the previous Congress-led UPA-II government, nor its successor the […]