Where would you place education on your national list of priorities?
Good quality school education is vital for nation building. India has emerged as one of the world’s fastest growing economies. Therefore our biggest challenge is to ensure that our young population is educated holistically so that the demographic assets of today do not transform into […]
Fresh from its triumph in persuading the Union HRD ministry to amend the Right to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009 (aka RTE Act) to entitle the country’s estimated 10 million children with disabilities to free and compulsory inclusive education, and for them to be included in the definition of “poor neighbourhood children” whom private […]
As a former business journalist, it’s natural for me to be interested in the progress and development of the US-based Microsoft Corporation — the world’s most valuable (market cap: $240 billion or Rs.1080,000 crore) corporate enterprise — since for innovation, project implementation and getting products and services to market, there are few companies in the […]
Dilip Thakore interviewed Ravi Venkatesan, the Bangalore-based chief executive of Microsoft India (who was abroad) through e-mail. Excerpts:
It’s well-known that education and healthcare are high priority objectives of your parent Microsoft Corporation Inc, USA. How important are these socio-economic issues for MicrosoftCorporation (India)?
Microsoft Corporation began with the dream of a PC on every desk and in every home. Thirty years ago, this […]
When Pune-based Shrinivas Bhats mother gifted him a replica of the first coin issued by independent India in 1947, he was just eight years of age. But it catalysed an enduring passion for coins collection which has now grown into a valuable treasure chest of 5,000 distinct and separate coins from around the world, winning […]
The number of overseas students in the US is continuing to rise, with recent growth driven by a surge in recruitment from China. According to figures released in mid-November, the number of Chinese students in the US rose by 30 percent last year, an increase seen as evidence of growth in the Asian nations middle […]
An international study published on December 7 indicates that the reading skills of British secondary school pupils have fallen behind those of children living in France and Germany. Attempts to raise standards to match the best — South Korea and Finland, among members of the OECD, a club of rich nations — have yielded little. […]
The recent initiative of the government of India to reform school education has witnessed some bold measures launched by the Union human resource development (HRD) ministry. One such initiative is the continuous and comprehensive evaluation system (CCE), introduced in the countrys 10,000-plus schools affiliated with the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE). While the ministry […]
It might be alarmist to say so, but the accumulating body of evidence seems to suggest that mischief is afoot in the form of an orchestrated conspiracy to murder Indias democratic system of governance. The conclusion of the winter session of Parliament on December 13, during which due to daily disruption of both houses of […]
Of late the Indian Institute of Cartoonists (IIC), Bangalore (estb.2001), a first-of-its-kind 2,000 sq.ft gallery sited in the garden citys tony M.G. Road has gone into overdrive, staging exhibitions display-ing the doodles of several of the countrys small but influential community of newspaper and magazine cartoonists. A few months ago it showed the work of […]
For over 25 years, V. Ranganathan (72), a retired automobile engineer, cherished the dream of educating underprivileged young children in rural Tamil Nadu. But it was not until his retirement in 2002 that he could realise his dream, when he established the Vidyarambam Trust, a non-profit organisation which provides basic, free-of-charge education to poor and […]
A passion and commitment to deliver quality education has transformed Suman Gulati, the sexagenarian founder principal and director of the Gurgaon-based Blue Bell Group of Schools (BBGS) into a celebrated role model edupreneur in private school education. An uprooted refugee after the partition of India in 1947, Gulati graduated from Dayal Singh College, Karnal with […]
Registered in the year 2000 following the merger of William H. Gates Foundation (estb. 1994) and the Gates Learning Foundation (estb.1997), the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was constituted as a charitable trust with a transfer of the stock (equity shares) of Bill and Melinda Gates valued at $16 billion (Rs.72,000 crore) in Microsoft Corporation. […]
Against the dismal backdrop of stasis in Indian education, the widening and deepening involvement of Microsoft Corporation — the world’s most valuable corporate enterprise — with Indian K-12 and higher education sectors, comes as a ray of sunshine piercing the gloom. Dilip Thakore reports
For India’s moribund education sector, within which over 250 million children and youth and an estimated […]
For India to realise its demographic dividend it is imperative that a significant proportion of the countrys workforce, currently employed in the informal sector, upgrades its skill-sets and shifts to more productive and secure occupa-tions. The relative supply of workers with vocational skills has been on the decline since the early 1990s. Although India has […]
“You were talking about the other ministries I am involved in, but I can tell you that this (the HRD ministry) is my first love and my last love… because there is nothing more important than building Indias future.”
Union HRD minister Kapil Sibal, who has recently been given additional charge of the telecom ministry, […]
The Union HRD ministrys decision to confer greater autonomy on the IIMs should have come long ago (cover story ‘IIMs: Overdue auto-nomy bonus, EW December). Over the past four decades the pioneer ‘ABC IIMs in Ahmed-abad, Bangalore and Calcutta have established excellent reputations, with their grad-uates being offered mind-boggling pay packages by top companies. They […]
The Allahabad High Court has rejected the anticipatory bail plea of Tripti Tyagi, a school teacher accused of instructing Class 2 students to slap their .....Read More
Over 40,000 pre-primary schools across Gujarat shut down on Tuesday to protest the state government’s newly introduced guidelines. The schools’ owners and administrators presented their .....Read More
