In what can be termed as a welcome move by the Human Resource Development (HRD) ministry, wherein all central universities have been directed to put up large boards on the campus informing students about anti-discrimination officers.

The boards will carry all relevant information about the officers as well as the internal complaints committee thereby enabling the students where to lodge complaints in the new academic session.

This move is significant especially when significant number of higher education institutes have faced agitation the latest being NIT-Srinagar. The decision regarding this was taken at a meeting of all the vice- chancellors chaired by HRD minister Smriti Irani in February this year. A compliance report have been asked to be sent to the ministry by all the 40 central universities in the country.

All universities have been asked to provide information to students about the prevention of sexual harassment committee.

At the conference of vice-chancellors’ it was decided to put in place a transparent proactive mechanism for grievance redressal of the university community, including students, staff and faculty. It was also decided to appoint an anti- discrimination officer.

Earlier in March, the UGC had also asked all universities and colleges to have a special page on their website wherein students can register complaints of caste discrimination.

In the last two years, seven out of 19 Indian Institutes of Management (IIM) has increased the tuition fees out of which IIM Lucknow has hiked its fees almost by 30 percent.

As per data shared by HRD Minister Smriti Irani in the Lok Sabha, IIM Ahmedabad and Shillong have increased their fees by five percent and IIM Lucknow by 29.6 percent. Other IIMs like Kozhikode also made a fee escalation to 23.1 percent followed by Trichy (20), Ranchi (19) and Calcutta (17.3) respectively.

The minister has indicated that this hike in the fee rates will not affect the poor and the needy students adversely as the institutes have provisions such as full waiver of the tuition fee and maintenance allowance.

The Garden city, Bengaluru, being well-known for its spirit of entrepreneurship as well as the development in education, has come up with “Genius Micro Schools”, focused on technological education.  The school, which will focus on kindergarten to class 8th students, was launched by Advitya Sharma, the co-founder of Housing, a popular property site.

The concept of “Genius Micro-schools” is based on US based AltSchool. The Genius Micro-schools will have entrepreneur Teacher, who can run the Micro-schools from home via a technology that has been specially designed for learning needs, interest and pace of every child.  The product aims to create a knowledge graph of every child and change the content, practice, homework accordingly, optimising the learning experience.

The teachers can run micro-schools with about 5-8 students. Moreover, teachers would be trained to utilise technology and optimise time.

Several test preparation apps and portals which focus primarily beyond class eight education have raised risk capital from investors as students move away from offline classroom teaching model to online courses.

Encouraging more and more women towards entrepreneurship, Kidzee has plans to open up more pre-schools centres across India. Till now, Kidzee has been able to create 1,500 women entrepreneurs, across 550 cities, who are specially trained by the company to tend to the young ones.

Kidzee has been focussing on nurturing the ‘unique potential’ in every child. The brand is also involved in making people aware of early childhood needs. As 90% of the brain’s development takes place from the age of 0 to 6 years, it is essential to focus on the young brains.

Regarding expansion, Kidzee follows an all-franchise model, wherein the franchisees are required to invest in setting up schools, while the company provides all the required teaching aids and infrastructure standards.

Another interesting policy, worth mentioning is that, Kidzee allows only women to become franchisees, with the staff at each schools also comprising only women. This may be because women respond to early childhood needs better.
Each school may be built over a minimum area of 2,500 sq feet, and would require an investment of Rs 10-15 lakh, which will be borne by the franchisee.

The Himachal Pradesh government announced 17 skill development projects worth Rs. 166 crore have been approved under the”National Rural Livelihood Mission” (Ajivika Scheme). Under this Project 50 thousand rural youth would be trained in various trades over a period of three years.

While laying the foundation stone of the Central Institute of Plastic Engineering and Technology (CIPET), chief minister Virbhadra Singh expressed hope regarding the manpower passing out of CIPET through the conduct of various short term courses and formal diploma courses in the field of Plastic Engineering Technology and that they would be capable to secure job in the plastic industry and would also be able to set up their own enterprises.

In order to provide skilled labor to the entrepreneurs foundation stone of Rs. 102.32 crore Tool Room/ Technological Development Centre (TDC) of Small, Medium and Micro Enterprises was laid at Baddi in February this year, to train the youth as per needs of the industries.

Courses like Bachelor of Vocational Education will be started in 10 colleges and other short term courses will be started in other government colleges.

The Madhya Pradesh state higher education department is to start open counseling for admission of students in private BEd colleges from this year. This step comes amid requests from private colleges running BEd courses specially those which have suffered poor enrollment of students in terms of number of seats available.
Out of 60,000 registered students nearly 80 percent appeared,in the first ever online examination conducted by Madhya Pradesh Professional Examination Board (MPPEB).

Madhya Pradesh (MP) has roughly 56,000 seats for B.Ed,whereas the number of colleges in Indore division alone is 55 and is 550 across the state. In 2014, nearly 1.44 lakh students had applied for the course, which subsequently dropped to 65,000 in 2015.

Much of the reason of the loss of interest in BEd programme is attributed to National Council for Teacher Education (NCTE) which made the one-year course to two-year duration from 2015-16. Nearly 80 per cent seats in BEd colleges of Indore city remained vacant after first counselling for admissions. Of 3,200 seats in 31 BEd colleges in the city, 2,549 seats were vacant after first counselling.

On Tuesday April 26, the Delhi education minister made it very clear that fee hike in private schools in Delhi should be used for the sole purpose of the development of the institute and not for expanding their teaching shop empire.
This came as a response to a question asked by a student over the high fees charged by private schools and quality of education in government schools at a function organised by Bharat Ahshara Social Organisation (BASO),an NGO working to build mohalla libraries and clinics.

Recently two private schools were pulled up by the Delhi government and ordered to roll back their fee hike.
The Department of Education has asked the private schools in the national capital to submit their proposals of fee hike for prior sanction latest by May 7.

Asserting that his government is committed to improve the quality of education in schools, Sisodia also noted that not all private schools have good teaching standards.

Mr Sisodia also said he once found that Hindi medium students of Class X were not able to read properly. He also expressed concerns over the atmosphere prevailing in government schools.

The Central Government has sought modifications to its Thursday’s order for separate entrance tests for private and government medical colleges for the academic year 2016-2017 by moving the Supreme Court.

Attorney General(AG) Mukul Rohatgi while making suggestion pointed out some genuine difficulties in the two-phased single common entrance test for MBBS, BDS and PG courses through National Common Entrance Eligibility Test (NEET) scheduled to take place in May 1 and July 24. He suggested that the first phase of NEET scheduled for May 1 be scrapped and students be allowed to take the exams on July 24. An estimated number of 6.5 lakh candidates are likely to appear in the entrance of MBBS and BDS courses.

The apex court had said those who had not applied for AIPMT will be given the opportunity to appear in NEET-II on July 24 and the combined result would be declared on August 17 so that the admission process can be completed by September 30.

According to the order all government colleges, deemed universities and private medical colleges would be covered under NEET and those examinations which have already taken place or slated to be conducted separately stand scrapped.

The court was of the view that since it has recalled its April 11 order, there was no hindrance in holding the single entrance test.

NGO Sankalp Charitable Trust had filed a petition in which it had said that the Centre, MCI and CBSE were dilly-dallying in implementing the court’s order on the National Eligibility Entrance Test.