Top-ranked schools of Karnataka

The annual EducationWorld India School Rankings (EWISR), which rates and ranks the country’s Top 1,000 primary-secondary schools, is the world’s largest school rankings survey. To compile the 13-plus league tables of the EW India School Rankings 2018-19, 120 field personnel of the Delhi-based market research company Centre for Forecasting & Research Pvt. Ltd (C fore) interviewed 12,000 sample educationists, principals, teachers and senior students countrywide and persuaded them to rate schools in 14 categories (to avoid apples and oranges comparisons) on 14 parameters of education excellence including faculty competence, academic reputation, infrastructure, etc. The EWISR 2018-19 league tables spread over 300 pages were published last September.

Although EWISR 2018-19 also provides state and city rankings, national rankings are given pride of place in this annual exercise initiated in 2007. Yet national rankings are of limited interest to parents and students in India’s 29 states and seven Union territories, most of which are larger and more populous than most European countries. City and state rankings in that order are of greater import, especially for stakeholders in day schools.

Therefore to mine the huge volume of valuable data contained within EWISR 2018-19, we have constituted a special analytics task force to highlight the top-ranked primary-secondary schools in India’s major states. This month we focus on the southern states of Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Telangana.

The south-western state of Karnataka (pop. 69 million) has rapidly metamorphosed into India’s premier hub of new information technology enabled services, innovation and R&D in the new millennium. In particular, Bangalore (pop. 10 million) has established a rock-solid reputation as the Silicon Valley of India by virtue of hosting the world’s fourth largest IT/ITES industry and the offices of global IT behemoths Microsoft, Dell and Texas Instruments, among others. Karnataka’s ITES revolution has generated over 2 million jobs and attracted highly-qualified IT professionals from across the country and abroad to the garden city.

With the third largest economy of the Indian Union of states, Karnataka’s GDP of Rs.12.68 lakh crore (2017-18)is growing at 7 percent per annum. Of the state’s total exports revenue of Rs.54,800 crore, IT and electronic goods sales abroad contribute 39 percent.

Its booming IT and ITES industry apart, Karnataka also hosts some of the country’s largest public sector enterprises, including Hindustan Aeronautics, National Aerospace Laboratories, and Bharat Heavy Electricals, all based in Bangalore. Moreover, the garden city also hosts premier science and technology research centres including the Indian Institute of Science, Indian Space Research Organisation, Central Power Research Institute and the Central Food Technological Research Institute. The state also leads the nation in biotechnology with India’s largest biocluster of 158 of the country’s 320 major biotechnology companies headquartered here.

Karnataka’s large upwardly-mobile middle class population engaged in the IT and other new-age industries has generated huge and rising demand for high-quality English-medium schools including high-end international schools in Bangalore and the tier II-III cities of Mysore, Mangalore and Belgaum. Unsurprisingly, Karnataka hosts the second largest number of Cambridge International (UK)-affiliated primary-secondary schools (42) and several dozen international schools affiliated with the International Baccalaureate (Geneva) examination board.

Presidency School, Bangalore North

Greenwood High International School, Bangalore

Inventure Academy, Bangalore