Maharashtra: Kalyan Dombivli Municipal Corporation (KDMC) officials assess students learning levels to improve educational standards in civic schools
A notable aspect is the appointment of senior KDMC officials, ranging from Commissioner to Assistant Commissioner and department heads, as guardians across 61 schools. These officials will assess pupils' subject knowledge in lieu of parents.
KDMC Commissioner Abhinav Goel and other designated senior officials visited their allocated schools to evaluate academic standards. Goel, who oversees an Urdu school in Kalyan West as a guardian, actively participated by teaching students using the blackboard.
KDMC's Education Department Deputy Commissioner Sanjay Jadhav highlighted that the corporation enhanced infrastructure across all 61 schools prior to reopening, providing students with uniforms, books, raincoats, and additional facilities. Jadhav stated, "Now we want that the children studying in schools should get quality education, for which we trained 250 teachers of all our 61 schools of the civic body on how to give them quality education and increase their intellectual level by testing the intellectual level of the children apart from education.
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Jadhav explained that they are utilising the Vinoba Bhave application to assess students' intellectual capacity. The application contains class-appropriate questions from first to tenth standards to evaluate students' comprehension levels. If learning gaps are identified in any subject, the respective subject teacher will provide targeted support to address these deficiencies.
The appointed guardian officers will conduct final assessments of students' intellectual capabilities to identify and address any teaching inadequacies, thereby improving educational standards. The education department plans to continue this initiative until November to ensure proper implementation.
KDMC Commissioner Abhinav Goel commended this educational department initiative and directed all officers to fulfil their guardian duties alongside their departmental responsibilities.
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Along with the growth of missionary institutions, calls for the creation of regional language institutions began to grow as well. And right after the Revolt of 1857, once the British Crown had taken over the administration of India, the idea of a Lahore-based university began to take form. These developments occurred amid the mid-Victorian boom of print and education in British India. Lithographic printing presses were on the rise and so was steam technology. Eventually, this boom in printing technologies provided a theatre for the aggressive politicisation of grammar, script and language along communal lines. But in the late 19th century, students, local aristocrats, and colonial officials still had space to negotiate the creation of educational institutions that taught Persian, Sanskrit, Hindi, Punjabi and Urdu alongside English. GW Leitner, a Hungarian-born British linguist, became the institution's first principal. He had previously taught at King's College London and had been known for advocating indigenous education over English-only models. Leitner believed in building institutional infrastructure for regional language learning. He founded the Anjuman-i-Punjab (Punjab Literary Society), launched journals and started a madrasa. He envisioned a university where European administrative concerns met regional language needs and where Persian, Sanskrit and Urdu could sit alongside European sciences and comparative theology. At the second jalsa (meeting) of the anjuman, the following decisions were recorded: that a committee would form an Academic Senate and draft bylaws; that grammar books would be prepared in Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian; that a plan would be made to distribute literature among schools across the Punjab; and that examinations be held in all three languages. The agenda was ambitious and multilingual from the outset. The British bureaucracy was divided. One group hesitated when it came to funding the opening of a regional language institution of higher learning despite the jalsas undertaken by the anjuman. Letters between provincial officials reveal concerns about how graduates of such a system would become alienated from their 'fellow-citizens'. As one Provincial Government letter dated 11 February 1868 put it: 'Whoever has gained higher education instruction from within this new model have all become separated from their fellow-citizens. The ethical effects of this education are therefore defective.' This was because Western-based regional language institutions of higher learning aimed at the general masses would, it was assumed, alienate people from each other and from the British Raj by entrenching provincial proclivities in quotidian and regional languages. 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Letters from HM Durand and RH Davies suggested that the university would link practical knowledge with subcontinental literature and better enable clerks and civil servants to serve the local population. Another meeting was held on September 11, 1860. During this meeting, academic curricula were debated and the publication of a college journal was proposed. From these discussions emerged the Anjuman-i-Punjab journal, which began to tackle local issues and were printed in regional language languages. The anjuman sought to admit students of the highest calibre; the purpose of this university, which was established in the 1860s, would be to refresh regional language thought, and further, to spread finesse, urbanity, and propriety or shayastagi. The anjuman and the university eventually became theatres where binaries such as refined and crude, and urban and rural cultures came to mingle. It was also, strangely, the anjuman's idea that Hindi and Urdu language education would never be quite perfected without the teaching of Arabic, Persian and Sanskrit, which the British Indian Association agreed with. II. A place where everyone could learn. Within a few years of its launch, the university began a journal. The earliest volumes of the journal reflect this multilingualism. An essay might be published in English, with a Persian translation printed side-by-side. A history of Persian poets might be followed by a Sanskrit poem or an Urdu essay on moral instruction. This was not an accident. Leitner viewed this multilingual production as part of a larger pedagogical plan: to preserve regional language knowledges while adapting to colonial expectations. Under his stewardship, the Oriental College curriculum came to include comparative theology, classical literature, modern science, and political economy, all of which were taught in multiple languages. Grammar books were prepared for Sanskrit, Urdu, Arabic and Persian. Translations were undertaken between English and Hindi, between Persian and Sanskrit, and between Urdu and Arabic. This curriculum was not insulated from contemporary debates. As the colonial state leaned increasingly toward English-medium instruction, the Oriental College and its affiliate journal, the Oriental College Magazine, offered a counter-model. These concerns were not anti-English. Rather, they embedded European and English questions within regional language frames, provincialising them in the process. It is no surprise, then, that in the early years of the twentieth century, the pages of regional language journals produced by institutions such as Lahore's Oriental College became key forums for nationalist contestation – especially around the politics of language, nation, and ethnicity. III. 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