Institutionally, iDiscoveri Education Services, the subject matter of our cover story in this issue, and EducationWorld, have run parallel lives. Both these sui generis institutions were promoted on the cusp of the new millennium with the common objective of reforming India’s moribund education system to improve and upgrade the country’s huge human resource endowment, and clean up the stagnant waters of Indian education. By the dawn of the new millennium a global consensus had emerged — as incorporated in the United Nations Millennium Development Goals — that the wealth of nations is measured not by the abundance of their natural endowments, but by the quality of their human resources. Therefore suddenly at the turn of the century, there was a blinding national awareness that the nurseries of human capital are the country’s taken-for-granted educational and research institutions. Thus they need to be revitalised and upgraded to deliver real — rather than ritual — learning to the world’s largest child population.

While in the garden city of Bangalore, this awareness prompted the promotion and publication of EducationWorld, far away in Paris, France it induced Ashish Rajpal, an alumnus of XLRI, Jameshedpur and marketing director of the French foods multinational Danone, to give up his enviable perks-laden job and head for the Harvard School of Education, to study under the tutelage of multiple intelligences guru Dr. Howard Gardner. In 2002 after a Masters in education, Rajpal returned to India to work with Youreka Outbound Pvt. Ltd, an experiential education company he had co-promoted in 1996, and co-promote the Delhi/Gurgaon-based iDiscoveri Education Services Pvt. Ltd.

Since then iDiscoveri has evolved into arguably India’s most creative and innovative primary education content and curriculum provider with a national clientele of 300-plus schools, in which over 100,000 primary (class I-VII) students are following the company’s revolutionary  Xseed curriculum designed by its highly-qualified 40-strong CDR (Content, Design and Research) division. iDiscoveri’s growth and development strategy — with huge implications for the future of Indian education — is detailed in our stimulating and inspirational cover story.

Likewise our special report feature also spotlights an important issue in Indian higher education. With only 11 percent of youth in the age group 18-24 able to access higher education institutions (cf. 60 percent in the US and almost 30 percent in China), India needs private sector initiatives in tertiary education. Yet the country’s deemed universities imbroglio — the Union HRD ministry has peremptorily expressed an intent to revoke the deemed (autonomous) status of 44 mainly privately-promoted higher education institutions in an affidavit filed in the Supreme Court — has sent out all the wrong signals to education entrepreneurs and foreign universities waiting to enter Indian higher education. With the condemned deemed varsities all set to strike back when hearing of the writ petition on the issue resumes on March 8, a lot of skeletons are likely to tumble out of the dank cupboards of the HRD ministry and the University Grants Commission.