The condition of the great majority of infant citizens of the democratic, socialist and secular Republic of India whose uncaring 200 million-strong middle class harbours super-power ambitions and a seat at the high table for the nation, is so wretched that even those who are obliged to witness it in detail are likely to be traumatised. It’s painfully shocking but true that 48 percent of the country’s 140 million children under five years of age are forced into a bleak existence, suffer severe malnutrition and consequential stunting and danger of brain damage. Moreover, the overwhelming majority of them are denied professionally-administered early childhood care and education (ECCE), vital for their growth and development into self-respecting, contributing citizens.
A former business journalist, your editor was awakened to the critical importance of ECCE in 2005 by the Los Angeles-based educator and philanthropist Lowell Milken, co-founder of Knowledge Universe, perhaps the world’s largest K-12 company which owns over 2,500 preschools in the US, UK and South-east Asia, and a shareholder of the parent company of this publication. Since then, EW has not only been monitoring and rating and ranking the country’s best pre-primaries/preschools, but has also convened four ECCE Global Conferences featuring the world’s most respected early childhood education professionals, with the next one scheduled for January 23, 2015 in Mumbai.
I believe EducationWorld’s Pauline conversion and sustained advocacy of ECCE has borne some fruit. Our annual league tables rating and ranking India’s most respected preschools on several parameters of ECCE excellence are eagerly awaited by young parents and early childhood educators as well. Moreover, last September (2013) at the fag end of its barren, scandalous ten-year term in office at the Centre, the Congress-led UPA government approved a National Early Childhood Care and Education (NECCE) policy draft of the Union ministry of women and child development, which makes it mandatory for all 1.6 million anganwadis — nutrition centres for new-born infants and lactating mothers established by the Central government under its Integrated Child Development Services programme, 1975 — to also provide professionally-managed ECCE to children at the bottom of the country’s iniquitous socio-economic pyramid.
Meanwhile in this Christmas issue of EW, we present detailed league tables, the outcome of over 200 field professionals of the Delhi-based market research and opinion polling company C fore quizzing over 3,128 young parents of pre-schoolers, and principals/teachers in ten cities countrywide on the relative merits of best pre-primary schools delivering professionally-administered ECCE. It’s easy and trendy to dismiss private ECCE institutions as a minuscule, elitist phenomenon. But if you read about the education, finance, human and other resources their promoters, principals and teachers have invested in shaping and nurturing them, you might believe — as I do — that they are heroic individuals and educators.
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