One of the differentiating characteristics of EducationWorld which has received widespread public approval — this publication completed 14 years of uninterrupted publishing last November — is that within our specialisation, i.e education, we have consciously made a wide and liberal interpretation of the subject. Thus, we not only write about excellent education institutions and public policies which help or hinder the spread of preschool to Ph D formal learning, but also about product and service providers who facilitate implementation of new pedagogies and processes, and disseminate information in the public interest.
Despite the hollow claims of politicians and supra nationalists, the plain truth is that because of sustained neglect, under-investment and reckless interference, especially by state governments, Indian education is in the doldrums. Yet paradoxically, the Indian education system also hosts excellent institutions from nurseries to a handful of universities with globally comparable teaching standards. In particular, India boasts several dozen private English medium legacy boarding schools with histories of over 150 years which have been attracting children of the Indian diaspora — including your editor — for over half a century. Moreover following liberalisation and deregulation of the Indian economy in 1991, a host of new genre international schools affiliated with highly respected offshore examination boards such as CIE (UK) and IBO (Geneva) have mushroomed across the country. Offering excellent infrastructure, English medium curriculums and vast lebensraum for games and sports, they have not only captured the imagination of affluent Indian households but have also drawn students from neighbouring countries and beyond.
If in recent times these schools — and a growing number of privately-promoted institutes of professional education which have adopted global norms — have acquired pan-India and international reputations, a considerable share of the credit should accrue to the Kolkata-based Afairs Exhibitions & Media Pvt. Ltd. Since it was hesitantly promoted in 1994, the company has matured in the new millennium into the country’s largest education exhibitions and fairs enterprise, which enables schools and colleges to showcase themselves in 27 cities countrywide and eight countries abroad. In particular its travelling India and International Premier Schools Exhibition (IIPSE) and its hybrid The Great India Education Fair (TGIEF) which presents Indian schools and colleges abroad, have generated great enthusiasm because they offer valuable information and interaction services to parents in India and neighbouring countries searching for institutions offering globally benchmarked English medium education at all price points.
How and why Afairs has enabled the growing number of India’s best schools to improve student body diversity and scale up operations across India and abroad, is recounted in our first cover story of the new year. Also check out our special report feature which gives a roundup of yet another uneventful year in which neither the out-going Congress-led UPA government in New Delhi nor any state government have made serious efforts to arrest the slide of standards in publicly-funded education institutions. The multiplying initiatives of private education providers are the only bright spots on the dense black clouds hovering over the country’s beleaguered institutions of learning. Happy New Year!
