The reform and upgradation of Indian education which is the prerequisite of saving the nation’s huge and utterly vulnerable population of 415 million children — a cause to which EducationWorld is irrevocably committed — is impossible without reform and upgradation of the service and working conditions of the estimated 5 million teachers countrywide.

The list of complaints against the teacher’s community isn’t short. There is a common perception that the great majority of teachers in schools and academia are highly unionised clock-watching time-servers who have taken to this vitally important profession as a last resort, after failing to land government or corporate jobs. Moreover there’s the damning statistic that on any given day an estimated 25 percent of teachers across the country — that’s 1.25 million — are absent from duty.

But it’s arguable that India’s huge — but not huge enough — teachers’ community is more sinned against than sinning. The plain unvarnished truth is that the pay, working and service conditions of the overwhelming majority of the teaching community are pathetic. Given that one-fifth of the country’s 900,000 primary schools are single teacher institutions, another one-fifth don’t have a proper school building, 58 percent don’t provide drinking water, 70 percent are strangers to toilets and sanitation and that the average teacher-pupil ratio is 1:63, long holidays and Fifth Pay Commission scales notwithstanding, this beleaguered community’s lot is less than enviable.

Despite this as any grateful citizen will vouch, there is no shortage of painstaking, dedicated teachers committed to their profession and students. I believe it’s important to search them out and hold them up as exemplars to the rest of the academic community. Cash-strapped because of the myopia of advertisers and subscribers, we were obliged to undertake a nationwide search for a visionary corporate to endow and sponsor our annual teachers awards. Thanks to one of the most admirable leaders of Indian industry Fakir Chand Kohli — for many decades the chief executive of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) India’s largest information technology services company, and widely regarded as the father figure of India’s booming and high-potential IT industry — and his worthy successor S. Ramadorai, our search ended last year with TCS (which has an excellent track record of commitment to education) stepping forward to sponsor our annual TCS-EducationWorld Teachers Awards. The process and methodology by which India’s best teachers were chosen for these inaugural awards is the subject matter of our inevitably first-of-its-type cover story.

Everyone knows that the global dominance of American industry is intimately connected with the excellent institutions of higher education that the USA has nurtured. But did you know that the remarkable rise from the ashes of defeat and nuclear annihilation of World War II of contemporary Japan is intimately connected with its private universities and the strong bonds they have forged with Japanese industry? Well, I didn’t until I researched our special report feature for this issue which examines the foolish indifference of Indian industry to academia.

Moreover there are our other news and comment pages packed with information. And anyone who makes a plausible case that there is any other publication in Asia which provides as much novel, researched information relating to education, will get a Rs.1,000 cheque from my personal account.

-