Page 34 - EW November 2024

Cover Story

YEARS (1999-2024)

.
.
MONITORING INFLUENCING SHAPING

INDIAN EDUCATION

For the past 25 years your editors have persevered to track, record
and constructively criticise lackadaisical initiatives of the Union and
state governments to raise teaching-learning standards in pre-primary,
primary, secondary and higher education which were — and are — lagging
far behind global norms

Dilip Thakore & Summiya Yasmeen
W your promoter-editors dull habit and worse, to human development. Teachers and

HEN 25 YEARS AGO
academics proved to be almost totally indifferent, forcing
launched EducationWorld
change of direction to institutional sales. We reasoned that
— The Human Develop-
schools and higher education institutions established with
multi-crore investment in infrastructure would easily dis-
ment Magazine — we
confidently expected it to
But even a quarter century after uninterrupted publish-
be a runaway success. Who
ing, only a fraction of India’s 1.6 million schools (includ-
wouldn’t be interested in cern the logic of subscribing to a copy for the library.
reading about the education and development of India’s ing 450,000 private schools), 45,000 colleges and 1,168
children and youth — the world’s largest human resource universities, have registered as subscribers. And it speaks
pool? At that time, the number of primary-secondary volumes about the market intelligence and enquiring minds
schools countrywide was estimated at 1.16 lakh, the num- of the academic community that the great majority of the
ber of junior and undergrad colleges at 11,831, universities country’s K-12 teachers and academics in higher education
at 236 and number of teachers and academics at 3 million. are blissfully unaware of the existence of the country’s pio-
We reckoned that if even 25 percent of these publics be- neer and #1 education print and online magazine. Clearly,
came subscribers, EW would become the largest circulation education is very low on the national development agenda.
magazine in India, and advertising would come rolling in. In the early years of the new millennium, this publica-
Within a few months, we were rudely educated about tion was kept afloat by equity investment by London-based
the resistance of all these publics to innovation, change of angel investor Shyama Thakore and Dr. Ramdas Pai

34 EDUCATIONWORLD NOVEMBER 2024