Curiously, although the Azim Premji Foundation (APF) registered by the eponymous IT (information technology) tycoon in 1998 and EducationWorld (estb.1999) share several commonalities — both organisations are Bangalore-based, education-centred and have similar objectives — except for a brief period circa 2003 when Wipro Ltd, Premji’s flagship company advertised in this publication — they have remained strangers to each other. Although your editor regarded APF as a natural ally in this advocacy publication’s national campaign to “build the pressure of public opinion to make education the No.1 item on the national agenda”, the sentiment alas, wasn’t reciprocated and EW has enjoyed neither the advertising largesse of Wipro or APF nor access to the great man himself. Rather surprising given that I knew him socially in Bombay and in my previous avatar as editor of India’s first two business mags.

Be that as it may, the outcome of Wipro’s brave diversification into the IT industry in the early 1980s has been amazing. Since then Premji has morphed Wipro into one of the world’s most respected IT and BPO (business process outsourcing) services companies with an annual revenue of Rs.27,124 crore (2009-10) employing 112,925 personnel in 72 global delivery centres spread across 55 countries.

Moreover, no doubt on the basis of the hard time he has had in recruiting, training and retaining professionals to sustain Wipro’s growth and transformation into a blue-chip transnational, Premji has discerned the vital linkage between abysmal quality education dispensed in the country’s schools and low productivity in all sectors of the Indian economy. And unlike his peers in India Inc who can’t have missed this connection, Premji took the extra step of promoting APF in 1998 to find ways and means to improve and upgrade learning outcomes in primary education which has adversely impacted the education continuum all the way into university. Since then over the past decade, APF has accumulated a vast body of information, knowledge and learning relating to policy, processes and operational maladies of post-independence India’s crumbling, dysfunctional education system.

This vast information, knowledge and education delivery experience has now been invested in the Azim Premji University established by a special Azim Premji University Act, 2010 passed by the Karnataka state legislative assembly last year. Empowered and enabled by a $2 billion (Rs.8,400 crore) corpus — the largest education-centred philanthropic endowment in the history of post-independence India — irrevocably transferred by Premji to the foundation, APU has the potential to flower into a perhaps first-of-its-type education university which will impact a massive multiplier effect on India’s moribund government school system in particular, and may well transform the education landscape of the country. The detailed corporate-style plans and clear-cut objectives set by APF and APU are highlighted in this issue’s cover story in which your editor has made a conscious effort to block out personal equations and prejudices while undertaking an objective assessment of this momentous enterprise. With what degree of success is for readers to judge.

And in our special report feature we present a progress report on the historic Right to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009 (aka RTE Act), one year after it became law last year. Unfortunately there isn’t much progress to report. Managing editor Summiya Yasmeen tells you why.