Congratulations on your 13th anniversary issue (EW November)! The EducationWorld team must be commended for throwing a much-needed spotlight on education trends, issues, and policies. I have been a regular reader of the magazine and compliment you for continuous improvement in content, design and overall quality.

The comprehensive cover story ‘India’s top-ranked versus Best in West’ is superbly written covering the entire spectrum from preschool to higher education. I entirely agree with the analysis that India’s best preschools and higher education institutions are way behind their western counterparts, particularly in teacher competence and infrastructure provision. Perhaps the only saving grace is our top private schools which offer near-comparable academic and co-curricular education.

The main reason behind the low ranking of India’s education institutions is that they lack the academic and financial freedom needed to raise teaching-learning standards to global norms. The heavy hand of government is always in the way, obstructing them with obsolete rules and regulations. Unless Central and state governments stop interfering, India’s private sector schools, colleges and universities will never attain world-class status.
Arun Subramaniam
Chennai 

Some superpower!

The 13th anniversary issue features excellent content (EW November)! Kudos to your team for publishing a great education magazine.

However, while EducationWorld celebrates its 13th anniversary, your cover story and special report provided little cause for jubilation. That India’s best schools and universities are laggards trailing the best in West, is a sad indictment of our education system. In a fast globalising world, our education institutions cannot afford to be big fish in a small pond; they have to be internationally competitive and match the world’s best. Otherwise our products and services won’t be competitive in world markets.

More depressing than the cover story is your special report (‘India’s good, bad and ugly states’). It’s shameful that 65 years after independence, the majority of India’s states fare miserably on NUEPA’s Educational Development Index which applies domestic yardsticks. They have neglected primary education to the extent that the majority of 1.25 million government schools in the country don’t provide basic amenities such as girls’ toilets and drinking water, forget about ‘luxuries’ like libraries, laboratories, playgrounds, and computers. Contrast this with our politicians’ loud claims about India’s superpower status!
Priya Deshpande
Mumbai

Excellent anniversary essays

I read your 13th Anniversary issue (EW November) with consuming interest. Congratulations for presenting India with an education magazine which is unique even by global standards. You and your team deserve the thanks and gratitude of all people who are sincerely concerned about the nation’s development in the 21st century.

I especially appreciated the excellent anniversary essays published in your commemorative issue. All of them and particularly the insightful Teacher-2-Teacher column of Dr. Jonathan Long, were enlightening and should be mandatory reading for all principals and teachers who still subscribe to Mr. Gradgrind’s interpretation of education.

I also enjoyed reading the cover story comparing India’s best education institutions with those in the West. Accurate and on-the-ball assessment.                                                                     
Anil Kumar Ghosh
Kolkata

Depression antidote

I refer to the editorial ‘Cavalier invocation of sedition law’ (EW October). The political cartoon as an art form is the best antidote to depression, almost invariably prompting a smile. Why can’t our politicians understand that cartoons are not meant to degrade anyone? They are meant to be taken lightly and laughed at.

In textbooks, cartoons provide students with comic relief. Unfortunately the country’s new generation of ultra-sensitive politicians are offended by them. For the sake of propagating an art that deserves to be encouraged as it depicts life in a lighter vein, such politicians should be ignored.
Mahesh Kapasi
Delhi

Marvellous accomplishment

It has always been a pleasure to read your magazine, and I must specially commend you on the brilliant job done in handling the school rankings at a national level (EW September, EW India School Rankings 2012). Given the complexities of India’s education system and the transitory phase it is in today, the all-India, states and civic categorisation of schools, selection of parameters and analyses were nothing short of a marvel. You have raised the expectations bar, and discerning readers are in no doubt about the accomplishment.
Ashish Garg on e-mail 

Unanswered question

In the EW India School Rankings 2012 (September), the rating of residential schools and day schools seems to have been done with meticulous observation and detailed data interpretation. But one question still remains unanswered till date: if your ratings for ranking schools is based on infrastructure, teachers, parental involvement, academic achievements, co-curricular activities etc, how and when was the survey done from your end? Our neighbouring schools have informed us that there were personal visits to their school premises by your representatives for first-hand reporting and interaction.

In the circumstances, why was our school left out? We would like to extend an invitation to your representatives to visit our school for a guided tour. I am sure you’ll find DPS, Kalinga with its motto “Service before self” a school with a difference. Nestled between Bhubaneswar and Cuttack in a pollution-free environment on a lush green campus, it provides a unique learning environment for sustainable development. No school of eastern India can boast an infrastructure equal to ours.

I put forth two submissions:

• Collecting details from a website does not reflect a true picture of an institution

• There should be a SWOT analysis from your end, by asking each school to fill up a detailed questionnaire.
Girija Chand
Principal, DPS Kalinga
Bhubaneswar

Madam, your understanding of our institutional assessment methodology is flawed. C fore field researchers don’t visit schools; they poll a base of informed community representatives comprising parents, teachers and educationists to rate and rank schools; i.e. we poll ‘customers’, not ‘manufacturers’ — Editor

Gone bananas rankings

Your september issue of 111 pages (sans advertisement) glorifies India’s schools with many names at the top soothing many Bangaloreans’ hearts (cover story EW India School Rankings 2012). But alas, it didn’t soothe mine, nor am I enthused by the single number ranking given to schools.

The single number ranking is akin to a beauty pageant queen’s score of 96 (sum of the perfect 36-24-36), but fails to answer the question “Is 104 better than 92?” Pedagogy is much more complex and requires more detailed examination.

Absent in this listing are the demographics of the student population — the incomes of their parents, the educational level of their households, urban and village differentiation, etc. Admittedly, the rankings help rich people locate schools for their children to get maximum bang for buck. But is this what education is about?

It’s instructive to look at land grant colleges in the US and the state schools of California whose model was later taken to Texas and New York in the 1960s. A school and its faculty should be judged by how many students it admits irrespective of income or parental background, and the levels of excellence they achieve when they graduate.

Mr. Thakore, in your crisply written letter from the editor, you justify your rankings by comparing it with election results and triumphantly crow about the database size going up all the way to 3,070. EducationWorld owes its readers an explanation on precisely what the data means and why apples and bananas have been compared to conclude that Bharat needs a spherical banana.

Next time, take the trouble to highlight some village schools which admit ‘all’ students and transform them into good and decent citizens of the world. Talk about underpaid village school teachers who “waste their sweetness on the desert air”.
Krishnamachar Sreenivasan
Indian Institute of Technology, Ropar, Punjab

India School Rankings suggestions

I read your issue featuring the professional and conclusive EW India School Rankings 2012 (EW September) with great interest. The all-encompassing parameters are well chosen. This enormous survey should be used by educationists and school heads to improve their institutions. It’s also very useful for parents with children in preschool, and anxiously looking for guidance to help them choose the best primary-secondaries.

It’s also satisfying to see that schools my family has been associated with for several decades have been included in your league tables. Bombay Scottish, where both my children studied, is No. 3 in Mumbai; Vidya Niketan, Bangalore, where my wife was the first principal, is 4th in Bangalore, way above Bishop Cotton Boys and Girls — the most sought after schools in the 1990s — currently ranked 8th and 9th respectively. And my alma mater Don Bosco, Matunga is ranked 11th in Mumbai and Maharashtra — highly ranked despite following the state board curriculum.

Overall, the 2012 rankings indicate a tilt towards schools which offer broad and liberal education, particularly those which follow the late J. Krishnamurti’s education philosophy. However, parents make school choices based on the affiliating board. So state and city rankings of schools following the same or similar curriculum system could be added to the survey.

Lastly, if one has to take the purpose of this study a notch higher, I am willing to lead a pilot project to help my alma mater Don Bosco to improve its ranking. 
Koshy Philip
Bangalore

Koshy Philip was visiting faculty at IIM-Calcutta and IIM-Bangalore — Editor

Accelerating the judiciary

I’ve been reading your anguished editorials and comments over the past several years about India’s slow-moving judiciary, unending backlog of cases and inadequate number of judges. I want to bring to your notice a recent Right to Information (RTI) petition which reveals there are over 4.32 million cases pending in the high courts (December 2011), and 262 vacancies for high court judges.

It’s been reported several times about how litigants have died during the pendency of court proceedings. The Patna high court expressed its anguish when a magistrate took nine months to pronounce a judgement: “The magistrate who cannot find time to write a judgement within reasonable time after hearing arguments ought not do any judicial work at all. This court strongly disapproves of the magistrate making such a tremendous delay in the delivery of his judgements.”

While the problem of inordinate delay looks intimidating, it can be solved by establishing additional fast track courts, and filling up all judicial vacancies. The government recently approved setting up of a ‘National Mission for Justice Delivery and Legal Reforms’ to improve judicial access by reducing delays and arrears, and enhancing accountability through structural changes. The confidence of a common litigant tends to be shaken if there is excessive delay between hearing of arguments and delivery of judgements. Justice must not only be done, but must manifestly be seen to be done. 
Kush Kalra
Saharanpur
Uttar Pradesh