The forthcoming season of peace and goodwill is also a period of considerable anxiety for legions of young parents aware of the critical value of high quality and professionally administered early childhood education, for orderly growth and development of their children into successful and socially beneficial adults. This is the time when the country’s top nurseries and preschools begin to issue admission forms to parents anxious to enroll their little ones into early education. And with the much-too-few top-ranked preschools admitting an average of 40 children per year to maintain favourable teacher-pupil ratios which permit individual attention, the mad annual scramble for preschool admissions is expected to assume manic proportions. Here are the India Preschool Rankings for the year 2013:

“During the past two decades, appreciation of the worth and value of professionally delivered learning in the formative years has grown by leaps and bounds within urban India’s fast-expanding middle class. With double income parents now sending children as young as 18 months to ECCE (early childhood care and education) centres, the demand for preschools — especially professionally managed ECCE centres — is way behind supply. Therefore for young parents in metros, particularly Delhi and Mumbai, the next two months are likely to be a period of anxiety,” warns Abha Adams, former director of Delhi’s top-ranked The Shri Ram School (1993-2006) and currently education adviser of the also high-ranked Step by Step School, Noida.

At the risk of being accused of blowing our own trumpet, a substantial degree of the credit for generating public awareness of the vital importance of professionally administered early childhood care and education in India can justifiably be claimed by Education-World. Since this publication was launched 14 years ago with the mission to “build the pressure of public opinion to make education the #1 item on the national agenda”, we have been continuously advocating greater government and household investment in education in general, and ECCE in particular.

In a paper titled Policies to Foster Human Capital (2000), Dr. James Heckman, awarded the Nobel for economic sciences that year, presented a wealth of data to illustrate that social returns for every dollar invested in ECCE are significantly higher than subsequently in the education continuum. “The real question is how to use available funds wisely and the best evidence supports the policy prescription: invest in the very young,” wrote Heckman.

Inevitably while OECD countries have reacted expeditiously to contemporary research studies and are currently spending between 1.4-2.3 percent of their GDP on ECCE, in India until very recently official and general belief was that children should not be burdened with early learning and given the freedom to engage in unstructured play until 3-4 years of age. This mindset perhaps explains why while every sector of the economy is subject to Central and/or state government control and strict supervision, ECCE is wholly exempt from official scrutiny and regulation. The country’s 1.35 million anganwadis — early childhood nutrition and maternal care centres promoted under the Central government’s Integrated Child Development Services programme — offer mere basic nutrition and maternal care with minimal emphasis on education. Moreover, only 75 million of the country’s 158 million children under age five are accommodated by anganwadis for which a provision of Rs.17,700 crore — Rs.2,360 per capita — was made in the Union Budget 2013-14.

Consequently the onus of  providing vitally important ECCE has devolved upon the   country’s much maligned private education providers. But after a slow start, and particularly following the partial liberalisation and deregulation of the Indian economy in 1991, according to official government data, the number of preschools countrywide has increased to an estimated 300,000 which prepare 10 million mainly middle and upper class children for the formal education system. They constitute a mere fraction of the 128 million children in the age group 1-4 who should be receiving ECCE in formal preschools.

This is a colossal wastage of high-potential human resources in an era when awareness of the critical importance of ECCE has permeated not only developed OECD countries, but the middle income group nations of Asia as well. It is pertinent to note that in South Korea, all infants between ages 1-4 are in preschool and that the People’s Republic of China has set a national goal of ensuring that 80 percent of children in the age group 2-4 are recipients of formal preschool education by 2020.

Presumably prompted into action by the rising demand within the urban middle class for quality preschool education — a sector  growing by 35 percent per year — and Education-World’s persistent advocacy of universal ECCE (this publication initiated the multi-city annual EducationWorld Preschool Rankings in 2010, and since then has convened three unprecedented EducationWorld Early Childhood Global conferences addressed by ECCE experts from around the world), on September 20 the Union cabinet approved a National Early Childhood Care and Education (NECCE) policy drafted by the Union ministry of women and child development (WCD).

Stating that the “cardinal principles” on which the policy draft is based are “universal access, equity and quality in ECCE,” the policy recommends transformation of all 1.35 million anganwadi centres (AWCs) into AWCs-cum-creches “with adequate infrastructure and resources for ensuring a continuum of ECCE in a life-cycle approach and child related outcomes” — a long-standing demand of EducationWorld. Subsequently on September 27, WCD has reportedly sent state governments a circular prescribing minimum floor space area (35 sq. metres per classroom with 30 sq. metres of outdoor space), teacher-pupil ratio (1:20), teacher qualifications and primary medium of instruction (mother tongue) applicable to all (i.e. private) preschools.

The draft NECCE Policy has spooked the promoters of the country’s 300,000 private preschools who have hitherto been spared the heavy hand and itching palms of government education officials and notorious school inspectors. However Swati Popat Vats, president of the Podar Education Network and chairperson of the Mumbai-based Early Childhood Association (ECA, estb. 2010), which has a national membership of 970 preschools, welcomes this initiative which transforms the country’s 1.35 million AWCs into full-fledged nurseries and preschools with “healthy” minimum classroom and outdoor spaces prescribed by the draft policy.

Likewise Atul Thakkar, associate vice president of the Mumbai-based Anand Rathi Financial Advisors which has extensively researched India’s private — including preschool — education in a detailed study titled India Education — A $45 billion Private Education Opportunity (December 29, 2011), is unperturbed by the prospect of  government intervention in the hitherto unregulated ECCE sector via the NECCE policy draft. “For the Central and state governments, preschool education is unfamiliar territory in which there is a huge shortage of appropriately trained teachers. Therefore this sector which according to our estimates has an aggregate enrollment of 10 million children, an annual revenue of $2 billion (Rs.12,570 crore) is likely to continue to record a compounded annualised growth rate of 35 percent for the foreseeable future. Government regulation if and when it materialises is likely to be liberal,” predicts Thakkar.

Against this backdrop of a growing recognition of the importance of formal early childhood education in all segments of society — government included — and an imminent tidal wave of admission applications from anxious young parents for the most convenient and appropriate preschools for their infants, we present league tables ranking the top 10-20 most respected preschools in 10 cities inter se. For the purpose of rating and ranking ECCE centres, an average of 200 parents with preschool-going children and 60 principal/teachers in each city were asked to rate a list of high-profile nurseries/pres-chools (selected by EducationWorld) on a ten point scale against ten parameters of excellence by field researchers of the well-known Delhi-based market research and opinion polls company Centre for Forecasting and Research Pvt. Ltd (C fore).

“The overall sample size of SEC (socio-economic category) A  parents and teachers interviewed aggregated 2,705 countrywide. Scores awarded by sample respondents under each parameter were aggregated to rank preschools in each city,” says Premchand Palety, founder-director of C fore (estb. 2000).

To read the EW India Preschool Rankings 2013 please visit 
http://www.educationworld.in/rank-preschool/2013/