The CJP’s journey, however, is no longer confined to the politics of examination failures and youth precarity. Its School Thik Karo campaign has extended the movement’s work towards accountability for basic public-school infrastructure, while its latest mobilisation has turned to electoral accountability.
Whether or not “Himalayasia” ever catches on as a name, the underlying question it poses is a serious one for a region that houses a quarter of the world’s population, spends tens of billions of dollars a year arming itself against its own neighbors, and still trades more easily with the far side of the globe than across its own borders
South Asia often discusses youth mobility after a student has already decided to leave the region. A stronger regional system would give students another option before that point: international experience that is close enough to be practical, but different enough to change what they learn.
If dummy admissions, prolonged school absenteeism, and an unregulated coaching culture continue unchecked, we may end up producing students who have spent enormous amounts of time and money on education without actually receiving the education they need.
If South Asian governments urgently review and reform their education systems, the region can all benefit within 15 years from our demographic dividend and unleash the region's immense knowledge and growth potential within a generation.New education systems must be interactive and inter-operative to allow free movement of professionals, capital and labour around the region
Nalanda serves as a counterweight to the historic monopoly of Western universities over social, political, and ecological theory. It invites Asian and African scholars to address regional dilemmas such as resource sovereignty, post-colonial statehood, and sustainable modernization using indigenous analytical categories.
The daughters and granddaughters of these warlords, like those of several key Taliban commanders, live and study abroad. Sabori’s school in Archi is half-closed, owing to the ban on education for girls over 12 years of age. Several underground schools have sprung up where even some Taliban foot-soldiers send their daughters.
As democracies around the world confront public dissatisfaction, Bhutan reminds us that the health of a democracy cannot be measured only through the ballot box. It must also be evaluated through the well-being, dignity, security, and trust experienced by citizens.
India's digital infrastructure can certainly deliver free coaching to millions. But an even greater achievement would be to build an education and employment system in which families no longer feel compelled to buy coaching in the first place. Making bottled water cheaper is useful. Making the water from taps trustworthy is the real solution.
The message is clear. India needs not merely more children entering classrooms, but more children staying, completing and learning. Achieving the ambitions of NEP 2020 and SDG 4 will require sustained public investment, stronger secondary-school retention, better support for vulnerable learners and a sharper focus on completion.
The virtues like civic discipline or gender sensitivity in India are not at premium. Basic civic sense is conspicuous by its absence. It gets manifested as indiscriminate littering, spitting, traffic indiscipline, vulgar or derogatory comments against women etc. Such attitudes find manifestation in foreign destinations as well.
Ties between India and East and Southeast Asia are bound to strengthen, given the growing synergies in strategic areas such as defence, critical technology and higher education. It is important for Indian students, professionals, and skilled workers to harness educational and work opportunities in that region that is open to receiving Indian students and techies. This is especially important given that countries in the Anglosphere, not just the US but also Canada and to an extent Australia, are adopting increasingly insular immigration policies and tightening student and work visa regulations.
Across Kashmir, the image of crowded reading rooms alongside empty classrooms should compel us to reflect on the direction our education system is taking. Reading rooms may help students prepare for examinations, but schools and colleges prepare them for life.
The future of Indian higher education may depend not on greater central control, but on creating autonomous institutions operating within a strong framework of accountability.
Pakistan’s absence is not without costs. Diplomatic exclusion is only one facet of the spectre that looms over the country: limited transit access, reduced prospects for integration into Bay-centric supply networks and weakened soft-power influences across the Indian Ocean littoral.
It has been formally recognised in the Report of the Advisory Committee on Women Pradhans, Transforming Women’s Representation and Role in Panchayati Raj Institutions: Efforts to Eliminate Proxy Participation, which recorded that elected women representatives are often “represented by their husbands or male relatives” and recommended the imposition of stringent and exemplary penalties to curb such practices.
When the university community itself has not succeeded in resolving many serious problems confronting higher education, on what moral basis should students simply be asked to remain silent and trust the system?
The treaty that once symbolized diplomatic success should now become a model for climate-resilient hydro-diplomacy. The river has changed, the climate has changed, and the needs of both nations have changed. The treaty must change with them.
Until the region’s economies produce jobs, and its ministers produce respect, at the pace they produce graduates, South Asia’s Gen Z will keep finding new, and increasingly desperate, ways to be heard
