Page 120 - EW November 2023

Special Report

India’s most admired India’s belated skilling India’s liberal arts renaissance 26 NGOs Enabling Indian
engineering colleges revolution This cover feature high- Education
The inaugural EW ranking The great sin of sustained lighted a clutch of new If India’s K-12 education
of engineering colleges neglect of primary, sec- globally benchmarked system hasn’t collapsed
and private B-schools was ondary and higher educa- private liberal arts univer- completely, it’s due to the
published. Since then, this tion in post-independence sities springing up across efforts of the country’s pri-
survey has evolved into the India has been compound- the country. It welcomed vate schools and estimated
annual EW India Higher ed by continuous neglect these new genre private 2 million NGOs. In this
Education Rankings. In of vocational education universities for address- first-of-its-type story we
EWIHER, the country’s and training. Our story ing the neglect of arts and highlighted the contribu-
Top 300 private and gov- reported on a quiet skills humanities education in tion of 26 of the country’s
ernment universities, Top revolution gathering mo- post-independence India. most well-known NGOs
500 private/government mentum countrywide and (EW January 2015) which are transforming
autonomous and non- Central/state governments Indian education for the
autonomous colleges, and and edupreneurs finally better. (EW August 2016)
Top 100 private engineer- waking up to the need
ing colleges and B-schools to disseminate VET on a
are rated and ranked massive scale to make the affiliated with 31 state
across 15 parameters of country’s youth employ- exam boards, is wreck-
higher education excel- able. (EW April 2014) ing K-12 education and
lence. (EW June 2013) dividing India. This EW
story argued for restoring
equivalence between the
quality of primary-second-
ary education in schools
affiliated with national and
offshore exam boards and
the state exam boards, and
recommended ending the
Sub-standard Textbooks great textbooks commis-
and state governments Wrecking K-12 Education sioning, printing and pub-
are tying up the nation’s The deep divide between lishing rackets which have
private schools in swirls of the quality of textbooks flourished in the states for
red tape even as admission prescribed by elite schools over half a century. (EW
queues lengthen outside affiliated with pan-India August 2017)
Licence-Permit-Quota Raj their gates. This cover and offshore exam boards
Crushing India’s Private Schools story blew the whistle on such as CISCE, CBSE,
Instead of focusing their the neta-babu conspiracy Cambridge (UK) and IB
attention on the country’s to dumb down India’s (Geneva) and the slap-
dysfunctional 1.2 million private schools through dash, sub-standard text-
government primary-sec- myriad levelling-down books imposed upon the To read EW turning point lead
ondaries, politicians and rules and regulations. majority of hapless chil- features visit EW Archives on
bureaucrats of the Central (EW April 2016) dren enrolled in schools www.educationworld.in

120 EDUCATIONWORLD NOVEMBER 2023