To say that contemporary India’s cities are a globally unparalleled mess is perhaps an understatement. It’s one of the many ironies of history that a civilisation which invented civic planning, public water supply and drainage systems, seems to have completely forgotten the basic principles of managing urban — or even low-density rural —  habitats. Ironically, 60 years of Soviet-style central planning with its utopian promise of transforming newly-independent India, has instead multiplied the population (by neglecting primary education) by a factor of four, and transformed the country’s 7,900 towns and cities into cesspools of dirt and disease characterised by runaway property prices, pervasive power outages, water shortage, and traffic snarls with half their population living in insanitary slums. The frightening reality is that the country’s fast-growing metros — three of them will transform into mega-cities with populations of 20 million by the year 2030 — and second and third tier cities and towns, are planned and managed by armies of ill-qualified, functionally literate clerks inured to petty corruption and led by civil service generalists engaged in muddle-through learning by doing. And the bad news is that India’s urban population is set to rise from the current 350 million to 590 million by the year 2030.

Despite being a relatively affluent and privileged citizen spared the thousand unnatural shocks of the majority at the bottom of the nation’s iniquitous socio-economic pyramid, your editor is also obliged to suffer blackouts, water shortage, traffic jams and ubiquitous dirt and disease — not to speak of depressing evidence of urban blight — on a daily basis as we labour to produce 50,000 words every month describing, reporting and analysing the nation’s neglected and dysfunctional education system. Therefore when a peripheral report in a daily newspaper drew attention to an ambitious private initiative to establish an Indian Institute of Human Settlements (IIHS), and in particular an IIHS University — that too, on our doorstep in Bangalore — I lost no time in investigating and interviewing the visionaries and missionaries who conceptualised and are rapidly building the IIHS University. Their uplifting objective is to develop and draft an army of highly qualified urban practitioners equipped with interdisciplinary skills to save India’s beleaguered cities, and indeed all human settlements. Further and better particulars of the blueprint and expected outcomes of this welcome initiative in civic management and urban practice education are detailed in this issue’s first-of-its-type cover feature.

At the other end of the education spectrum in primary education as well, there are some exciting developments. In the special report feature, our Chennai-based correspondent Hemalatha Raghupathi reports on the implementation of Activity Based Learning (ABL) in Tamil Nadu’s primary schools and the impact this revolutionary pedagogy is making in neighbouring states, particularly Karnataka and Maharashtra. But although revolutionary in concept and practice, the ABL system has yet to prove its efficacy.

Meanwhile work has begun on our much-awaited EducationWorld-C fore India’s Most Respected Schools Survey 2011, coming up next month. Stand by for some surprises.