EducationWorld October 2019

Lifteime Achievement in Education Leadership Award 2019: Dr. Saroj Suman Gulati

Within the new steel-n-glass city of Gurgaon (Haryana) which has emerged as a 21st-century hub of the IT (information technology), ITES (IT-enabled services) and automobile manufacturing industries, the Blue Bells Group of three CBSE-affiliated primary-secondary schools founded by Dr. Saroj Suman Gulati, has acquired an excellent reputation for providing high-quality K-12 education to the progeny […]

Lifteime Achievement in Education Leadership Award 2019: Paul Machado

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Born in Udyavar, a small village of Karnataka’s Udupi district into an eight-member family of a farmer, and a graduate of St. Philomena’s College, Mysore and Bangalore University, Paul Machado has been serving the South Mumbai community as principal of the all-boys Campion School (estb.1943) since 2003. Under his dedicated leadership, Campion has evolved into […]

Lifteime Achievement in Education Leadership Award 2019: Dr. Gunmeet Bindra

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One of India’s most respected K-12 educationists, women’s empowerment champion and exemplary role model, Dr. Gunmeet Bindra is the first woman principal of a routinely top-ranked all-boys legacy boarding school — Welham Boys, Dehradun (estb.1937).

A commerce and education postgrad of the Delhi School of Economics and Calcutta University, Bindra was conferred an honorary doctorate by […]

Lifteime Achievement in Education Leadership Award 2019: Sanjeev Bolia

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Sanjeev Bolia is the promoter-managing director of the Kolkata-based Afairs Exhibitions & Media Pvt. Ltd (AEM, estb.1994), India’s premier education expositions company. During the past 25 years, he has curated 700-plus education expositions in India and over 150 abroad, to showcase India’s top-ranked vintage boarding, international day-cum-boarding and wholly residential schools in 27 metros and […]

Lifteime Achievement in Education Leadership Award 2019: Nissar Ahmed

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Nissar Ahmed, chairman of the Bangalore-based Presidency Group of Institutions (PGI) which comprises seven K-12 schools, two pre-university colleges, one undergraduate arts, science and commerce college and Presidency University with an aggregate enrollment of 30,000 students mentored by 1,000 faculty members, has emerged as one of the most respected education entrepreneurs of the southern seaboard […]

EW India school rankings 2019-20 awards

Over 1,500 education leaders including promoters, trustees, principals and senior teachers of India’s top-ranked day, boarding and international schools congregated in Delhi on September 28-29 to celebrate the country’s most admired primary-secondary schools – and for the first time — in nine neighbouring countries – Summiya Yasmeen

The EducationWorld India School Rankings (EWISR) 2019-20 Awards festival […]

EducationWorld Grand Jury Awards 2019

The annual EducationWorld Grand Jury Awards were introduced in 2016 to acknowledge and felicitate schools — especially newly-promoted, low-profile primary-secondaries — which excel under parameters other than the 14 under which schools are rated and ranked in the annual EducationWorld India School Rankings which are based on field-based countrywide interviews. In June-July advertisements in EducationWorld, […]

EduStar Awards 2019, Mumbai

The second edition of EduStar Awards that prides itself as being the only award constituted ‘For the Teachers, By the Teachers’ took place on 14 September 2019 at the Mumbai’s Phiroze Jeejeebhoy Towers that houses the iconic 144 year old Bombay Stock Exchange, the country’s largest securities market in India with over 6000 listed stocks. While the EduStar awards acknowledged 36 innovative school teachers, […]

Girl children champion

New York-based Shib Shankar Dasgupta is the idealistic founder of Shreeja India (estb.2017), an NGO working to prevent child marriages, human trafficking and violence against girl children in West Bengal through football-based education and development programmes. Currently, Shreeja provides football coaching to 120 tribal girls aged 10-18 years in 12 villages of the state’s Birbhum […]

Reading habit evangelist: Dalbir Kaur Madan

Educator and reading habit evangelist Dalbir Kaur Madan is founder of the Delhi-based OneUp Library, Bookstudio and Learning Lab (estb.2011) which offers children access to a vast repository of books and curated educational content in addition to linguistic, social and cognitive experiences in child-centred reading and learning environments.

OneUp also offers library services to households and […]

Creative arts educator: Jigyasa Labroo

Delhi-based Jigyasa Labroo (27) is the innovative founder of Slam Out Loud (SOL, estb.2016), a not-for-profit social enterprise which provides co-curricular creative arts including poetry, storytelling and theatre education to children of socio-economically disadvantaged groups. SOL has reached 50,000-plus children countrywide to date, through collaborations with several artistes including author Anupa Lal, poet Kyle Louw […]

Storytelling teacher: Shreya Biswas

Professional storyteller Shreya Biswas is founder of the Bangalore-based Katharangam (estb.2013) which offers specially curated storytelling workshops to school teachers, NGO professionals, corporates and students to enhance their teaching, business and communication skills. Also a patron of the Bangalore Storytelling Society (estb.2013) and advisor of Chennai’s annual International Storytelling Festival, Biswas has thus far taught […]

English proficiency missionary: Sanjay Gupta

Sanjay Gupta is the Gurgaon (India)-based global CEO of EnglishHelperInc, a Massachusetts (USA)-headquartered social enterprise that is using technology to improve the English language proficiency of children in government schools.

Newspeg. In July, EnglishHelper signed an agreement to introduce its Right to Read programme in 65,000 government schools of Maharashtra over the next two years. The […]

Draft NEP 2019 technology confusion

Although setting up an autonomous NETF is not a bad idea, a better idea would be for the Central and state governments to confer autonomy to education institutions, says Anil Mammen.

Since a policy is seldom the same as a policy draft, we need to read the draft National Education Policy 2019, which is under consideration […]

NEP 2019 draft: Accountability lacuna

A sound accountability system can be built by adopting one of two measures — a financing framework where funding follows students or funding public schools on the basis of learning improvements

Three years ago in 2016, in a monograph titled New Education Policy: Principles, Priorities & Practices, Centre for Civil Society argued that India needs an […]

Ananya N Swamy

Ananya N. Swamy (14), a Chikkaballapur (Karnataka)-based class IX student of the CISCE (Delhi)-affiliated BGS World School, is making waves in the national and international memory sport circuits. At a Memory Championship for Professionals staged in Tunisia on March 24 this year, she was adjudged the winner of all ten events of the competition. Moreover, […]

Kaamya Karthikeyan

A class VII student of Mumbai’s CBSE-affiliated Navy Children School, Kaamya Karthikeyan is getting used to experiencing that top of the world feeling from early age. On August 24, Kaamya scaled the summit of Ladakh’s Mt. MentokKangri II (6,250 metres above mean sea level) — her highest peak thus far — after a gruelling eight-hour […]

Kansas State University, USA

Spread across four campuses in the agriculture heartland of the US, K-State is ranked among the country’s Top 200 national universities and Top 100 public varsities in the Best Colleges Rankings 2019 of the US News & World Report

Founded in 1863, Kansas State University (aka K-State) is one of America’s oldest and top-ranked publicly-funded higher […]

The Green Acres Academy, Mumbai

The co-ed day TGAA, Chembur (estb. 2013) has quickly established a reputation as a progressive 21st century school providing students well-balanced child-centred education employing the latest IT-enabled pedagogies – Dipta Joshi

Nestling in a leafy green oasis in the Chembur suburb of Mumbai, is the futuristic campus of The Green Acres Academy (TGAA, estb.2013), promoted by Rohan […]

West Bengal – Second exodus

Since 2011 when the Trinamool Congress (TMC) led by firebrand Mamata Banerjee was swept to power bringing 34 years of uninterrupted rule over the populous (91 million) eastern seaboard state of West Bengal of the CPM (Communist Party of India-Marxist)-led Left Front government to an ignominious end, Banerjee’s poriborton (revolutionary change) promise has not been […]

Tamil Nadu – New board exams

A September 13 order of the incumbent AIADMK government to introduce board exams for students in classes V and VIII (in addition to existing school-leaving board exams for classes X and XII) from the current academic year 2019-20, set the dovecotes of the state’s academy aflutter. But a strong volley of protests from educationists and […]

Maharashtra – Neglected teachers agitation

Apart from having a finger in every sector of economic activity, India’s powerful control-and-command bureaucracy has a penchant for classification and categorisation. In 2001, babus of the Maharashtra state government created a category of ‘permanent non-aided’ schools.

These are primary, secondary and higher secondary schools managed by private trusts, societies and NGOs on ‘permanent non-aided’ basis […]

Timely biography – Gandhi: The years that changed the world

Gandhi: The years that changed the world – Ramachandra Guha,
Penguin random house, Rs.980, Pages 1109

Surprisingly, this monumental 1,109-page biography of Mahatma Gandhi covering the years 1914 — when after having tried and tested the principles of ahimsa and satyagraha to attain political ends in South Africa, he returned to India — and 1948, the year of […]

Delhi – Empty statistics

At a central advisory board of Education (CABE) committee meeting convened on September 21 to deliberate the 484-page National Education Policy 2019 (NEP) draft report of the K. Kasturirangan Committee (released for public debate on May 31), the Union HRD ministry took time off to release the All India Survey on Higher Education (AISHE) 2018-19 […]

Republic of Letters anguish – Battling for India: A citizen’s reader

Battling for India: A citizen’s reader – Edited by Githa Hariharan & Salim Yusufji
Speaking Tiger, Rs.399, Pages 338

This book is a necessary compilation that comes from an embattled republic of letters in a nation slowly being desiccated by the philistinism of its politics.

The great merit of the book is its comprehensive nature as it focuses […]

Faux privatisation

One sliver of cheering news within the pall of gloom and despondency in which the BJP government at the Centre has enveloped the high-potential Indian economy is that it has taken the overdue decision to licence companies and firms to run private trains on the 68,000 route km network of the public sector monopoly Indian […]

Timorous Times

After almost four decades in the media, one has arrived at the dismal conclusion that it’s a haven for jealous mediocrities. There’s no tradition of acknowledging a good story of another publication. Instead it’s normative to just swipe and plagiarise the work of rival publications and convert it to one’s own use.

This observation is prompted […]

RJ: India needs you!

The appointment of three Indian origin members of Parliament in the UK as cabinet ministers in the new government of prime minister Boris Johnson has caused considerable heartburn within your editor. As a law student in London over four decades ago, I was fairly active in British politics, first as an office worker for the […]

Mahatma Gandhi’s prescription can revive Indian education

Gandhi implicitly understood that to attain his social reform objectives and abate Hindu-Muslim antagonism aroused by the Partition of the subcontinent on religious lines, education of the population was a necessary precondition. Therefore he expended long years in ideating and developing his prescription of basic education – Dilip Thakore

In grand-scale national celebrations orchestrated by the BJP-NDA […]

Assam – Piramal Foundation launches ALP

Hailakandi (Assam), September 1. The Mumbai-based Piramal Foundation (estb.2006) — the philanthropic division of the Ajay Piramal-led group of companies — is all set to launch an accelerated learning programme (ALP) for slow learners in 100 government schools of the Hailakandi district, Assam in collaboration with the state government.

“ALP will help teachers enhance learning outcomes […]

Great initiative

I am delighted to note that the annual EducationWorld India School Rankings has gone global with the introduction of the EW Global School Rankings 2019-20 (EW September). This will enable parents in our neighbour countries to also make well-informed school choices.

Bindu Narang
Bangalore

Ranking review request
We are shocked to learn that Candor International School is […]

Revive India’s free enterprise tradition

The swingeing corporate income tax cuts announced by Union finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman on September 20 were long overdue. They should have been announced in the first Union budget of the BJP-led NDA government 2.0 which swept General Election 2019 with a massive majority in May. Instead the BJP which effectively calls the shots in […]

Letter from the Editor: 150th birth anniversary of Gandhi

It is appropriate that from October 2 — the sesquicentennial (150th) birth anniversary of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948) — onward, the nation will commence year-long celebrations to commemorate undoubtedly the greatest Indian of all time. Master political strategist, an individual who constantly sought self-purification in thought, word and deed, social reformer, lover of humanity and […]