-The Hindu Effective spending, reworking the affiliation system and breaking academic bureaucracy are key to better universities Although Indian higher education suffers from many dysfunctionalities and the system overall is characterised by “pinnacles of excellence in a sea of mediocrity”, it does reasonably well by some international comparisons. Here are a few examples: — India is a global leader in terms of GDP spent by public and private sources on higher education. India...

-The Times of India While the cost of private education has always been prohibitive, education in government-run institutions has also increased sharply in the last one month with the HRD ministry taking the decision to hike under-graduate fees in IITs by 80%. Earlier, the fees for Kendriya Vidyalaya students increased three-fold from Rs 4,500 to Rs 12,000 annually. The KV fee hike impacts 11 lakh students in 1,090 schools. The last fee...

-The Times of India In an alarming indictment of the quality of training given to prospective school teachers, over 99% aspirants failed to clear the Central Teacher Eligibility Test (CTET) 2012. The results of the competency test conducted by the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE), declared on December 27, 2012, showed that less than 1% of the 7.95 lakh who appeared managed to clear the exam. In fact, since the exam...

-The Financial Express Mexico City: The world's happiest people aren't in Qatar, the richest country by most measures. They aren't in Japan, the nation with the highest life expectancy. Canada, with its chart-topping percentage of college Graduates, doesn't make the top 10. A poll released yesterday of nearly 150,000 people around the world says seven of the world's 10 countries with the most upbeat attitudes are in Latin America. Many of the seven do...

-The Hindu Rural newspaper Gaon Connection, recently launched in Uttar Pradesh, seeks to project the hinterland as it really is For long the national media has been accused of shutting its door on rural news. And by now, the largely city-centric media has won the argument too that news about villages and small towns just do not bring them the advertisers. So we are in an age when the ‘business of media’...