India’s leading stock exchange, the National Stock Exchange, conducts many initiatives in different parts of the country to empower the youth and professionals with financial education so that they can take good financial decisions.

One such initiative is being carried out in 200 schools across 15 cities. This financial education drive in schools is addressed at students of classes 8 and 9, through which they are familiarised with basic concepts of finance like needs and wants, inflation, interest rate, value of money etc.

This is the second year that this initiative is being conducted. This year, more than 40,000 students is being covered in cities like Ahmedabad, Indore, Raipur, Dehradun, Lucknow, Nagpur, apart from some metros and tier II and tier III cities.

The initiative includes multiple programmes to sensitise students on the basics of finance as an essential life skill.

The workshop for students focuses on the concepts of financial planning, called the “The Three Jars: Spend, Save and Grow.”

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As a part of this initiative, NSE also conducts special two-hour movie screenings for the students on inspiring global business leaders like Bill Gates to motivate young peopleto follow their dreams. This is followed by a project, in which students choose a career option of their choice and plan running a simulated business, in which they will have to work out logistics like where will they get the finance, capital and resources from, where will they get labour from etc. This will help in training children to think about how businesses are run, and the kind of challenges that are faced in the course of running a business.

The next workshop called Junior Economist focuses on economics where students are taught about trade, demand- supply and are given a brief on banking.

NSE has also introduced a website for educating India’s young on financial basics, called www.nsefunancialquest.com. This interactive website is designed in such a way that it reaches out to educate a large number of students and explains the basics of finance to them at an early stage.

http://www.indiaprwire.com/pressrelease/education/20140125286193.htm

Standards of education in rural India have declined almost every year since 2009 despite huge government investments, one of the organizers of a major new study said on Thursday.

The annual survey by Indian education research group Pratham showed that the proportion of children aged about 10 who are able to perform a basic reading task dropped from 52.8 per cent in 2009 to 47 per cent in 2013.

A Right to Education Act passed in 2009 guarantees state schooling for children from six to 14 years of age and enrolment levels reached 96 per cent in this age category in 2013, little changed from 2012, the study said.

“This decade has been good for schooling, for improving infrastructure and development. But learning for all is only just beginning and it really needs to pick up momentum,” Banerji told AFP.

The survey showed 52.8 per cent of children in standard five (children aged about 10) across government and private schools were able to read a text from standard two (children aged about six) in 2009.

This fell to 47 percent in 2013, according to the report released on Wednesday.

In maths, 33.2 per cent of children in standard three in government schools (children aged about eight) were able to solve a simple two-digit subtraction problem in 2010. This fell to 18.9 per cent in 2013.

The drop was smaller in private schools, with 47.8 per cent of children able to solve the same problem in 2010, compared to 44.6 percent in 2013.

“The guarantee of education is meaningless without satisfactory learning. There are serious implications for India’s equity and growth if basic learning outcomes do not improve soon,” the report.

http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2014-01-16/news/46263579_1_private-schools-rukmini-banerji-education-act