Unjust discrimination
Your special report ‘SOS: Save 300,000 budget private schools’ (EW August) is an eye opening account of how the country’s poor are educating their children. It’s tragic how budget private schools which have sprung up as a response to poor quality government schools, are being shut down by insensitive and indifferent education officials. The purpose of the Right to Education Act, 2009 is to ensure, not deny, the delivery of quality education to every child in the country.
Caught between unaffordable high-end private schools and the lack of basic facilities — including teachers — in government schools, poor parents have found a better option in budget schools, which deliver half-decent primary-secondary education for modest fees. Most important, they provide English education which all parents want, to prepare their children for today’s workplaces.
Private school promoters need to be aided to meet the infrastructure and teacher-pupil norms of the RTE Act in a non-punitive environment. The law cannot be different for government and private schools.
Amar Tripathi
Delhi
Empty rhetoric?
Thank you for presenting a comprehensive education routemap for the new Narendra Modi-led NDA government (EW August). If Modi truly wants to build a new India, he must accord top priority to education reform. As you rightly point out, from preschool to Ph D, upgradation of standards is an urgent national imperative.
Though in his election speeches, Modi promised that education and skills development would be given high priority, since assuming office he has not announced any big plan to revive Indian education. Neither has Union HRD minister Smriti Irani presented a concrete plan of action to improve and modernise Indian education across the spectrum.
Please send a copy of your August issue to the HRD minister so that she and her team can understand and address the real issues of Indian education.
Bimal Chatterjee
Kolkata
Timely warning
Your editorial ‘Academy must resist saffronisation’ (EW August) is prescient. As the cultural and moral mentor of BJP, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) exerts enormous control and influence over the BJP-led NDA government. It won’t be long before NCERT embarks on the revision of school history and social science texts to reflect RSS perspectives and ideology. This has already happened in Gujarat where state board school texts propagate the hindutva agenda.
The teachers’ community, to whom you have issued a timely warning, must resist all motivated tinkering of school curriculums which will undermine the nation’s plural tradition and plant the seeds of intolerance and discord in the minds of impressionable students.
John D’Souza
Bangalore
Wrong leader
Thank you for the institution profile of the Cathedral and John Connon School (EW August). However, there is an error in the write-up — Mohammed Ali Jinnah was never a student of this school as conveyed by your correspondent. Please rectify this mistake.
Meera Isaacs
Principal, Cathedral and John Connon School, Mumbai
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, not M.A. Jinnah, was a student of CJCS. The error is regretted — Editor
Unwarranted exclusion
Compliments to you for the brilliant issues of EducationWorld which you have been bringing out over the years, especially the annual EW India School Rankings. Your initiative in ranking schools is a milestone in itself.
However, I would like to draw your attention to the fact that in last year’s (2013) rankings, some new schools in Bhopal of inferior quality and performance were included in your league tables while quality schools including the institution which I head — Bal Bhavan School — were left out. Maybe we were not contacted, or we did not reach EducationWorld since we did not know the criteria set for inclusion.
For your information, Bal Bhavan School has set a record for securing excellent board exam results and sending a large number of students to the IITs and civil services. Please include our school in this year’s rankings. This will enable the country to know about us and our achievements.
H.L. Chopra
Bhopal
Bal Bhavan School, Bhopal is included in the EW India School Rankings 2014 featured in this issue under the co-ed day schools category. Please see pg. 112 — Editor