Page 8 - Anirudh Gupta

HISTORY

milestones

he DCM Group’s service to Indian education began 74 years ago in 1946 on the eve
T of India’s independence and partition of the subcontinent, when visionary educa-
tionist M.R. Dass promoted the Decent Children Modern High School in Ferozepur Can-
tonment. It was Punjab’s first English-medium school with faculty drawn from Europe.

“Unfortunately after Partition most families of Ferozepur migrated to the newly formed
Pakistan. At that time we were operating from a small house in the cantonment. There-
fore, we relocated the Decent Children Modern School to a new site 12 km inside the
border, renamed it the DC Model High School and admitted our first batch of 60 K-V
children in October 1947. Since then despite the disadvantages of being sited so near
the Pakistan border — during the Indo-Pak wars of 1965/1971, we had to shut down the
school and on some occasions such as the Pulwama and Uri surgical strikes we had to
seek protection of the Indain Army’s Quick Reaction Teams — we have been firm in our
resolve to persist with providing high-quality education promised by our founders to
the people of Punjab. This commitment prompted us to promote our third internation-
ally benchmarked Dass & Brown World School in Ferozepur in memory of our founders
M.R. Dass and Mrs. C. Brown,” recalls Gupta.

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220 | 21 Leaders Transforming Indian Education