The city that houses Doon School is now playing host to a whole array of new education barons–with big money and bigger ambitions.

Some weeks ago, a Gurgaon-based businessman walked into the office of Upendra Arora, proprietor of the Natraj Bookshop on Dehradun’s popular Rajpur Road. The visitor was planning to set up an “international-class school in Bangkok” and, sotto voce, explained that “a general close to the king of Thailand” was helping him. The problem was he needed a principal and sought his host’s help. “Tum Mason ko tudvao (You get us Mason),” he said, in a reference to John A. Mason, headmaster of Doon School.

Arora acknowledged a nodding acquaintance with the man who heads Dehradun’s best-known institution but pointed out he was a humble bookseller, not a headhunter. He also suggested his guest set up a school in Dehradun instead. The reply was direct: “Arre yahan to school dal hi denge. Magar tum Mason ko tudvao … Bangkok ke liye Doon ka chaap chahiye. (I’ll set up a school here but you get me Mason. I need the Doon stamp in Bangkok).”

What Detroit was to cars and Silicon Valley is to information technology, Dehradun has become to whole millions of aspirational Indians for schools: the benchmark. Sandeep Dutt of the English Book Depot–he supplies books to almost every school you name and also runs the website doonsschools.com-is quite clear, “There was a time when ONGC ran the local economy; now schools do.” 

Dutt’s regularly updated database tells him Dehradun has 253 schools at the moment. They range from the “common garden schools” to the government-run Kendriya Vidyalayas to, of course, the Doon. Jyotsna Brar, principal of Welham School for Girls, points to the “mile-long Curzon Road” behind her house and counts nine schools on that tiny stretch. 

Yet recent months have been hectic even by standards Dehradun has become inured to. “A certain spurt”, to use Mason’s expression, in school building is perceptible. The trend began about two years ago and seems to be peaking this academic session (2001-02), with four schools-if one includes the Mussoorie Girls School, located in the hill station an hour away-opening their doors. That aside, Analjit Singh of the Max Group has bought land in Dehradun for, an associate says, “the biggest school of them all”.

The new institutions are being promoted by people who bring to their schools a wide variety of experiences. R.K. Sinha (Indian Public School) covered the Bangladesh War for Hindustan Times before, in a display of remarkable entrepreneurial ingenuity, setting up a security agency that initially employed demobilised soldiers and now has 300 offices all over India. Sunny Gupta (Aryan School) is director of Wheezal Labs, “the biggest homoeopathic combinations unit in northern India”.

For Amarjeet Singh, Asian School is a diversion from his limestone quarrying business. Kamal Sehgal (Hope Town) is a jeweller who ran Gem India in Mumbai’s Kala Ghoda before closing down the outlet, returning to Dehradun and commissioning a project report on a girls’ school. Om Pathak is a former civil servant whose most recent venture was a poultry farm in Ghaziabad. In February 2002, he hopes to begin classes at the 55-acre SelaQui School.

So strong is Dehradun’s association with education that Sumer Singh, headmaster of Asian School and an old Doon hand himself, smirks, “If you set up a school here, you could cut your advertising budget by 75 per cent.” Not that this stops the New Horizon International School from putting up hoardings that announce its “profile of a child” is “a Spartan in build with an Athenian mind”. 

What makes Dehradun such a centre for schools? Traditional answers like a conducive climate and that wives of officers posted at the Indian Military Academy and the Forest Research Institute formed a catchment area for teachers can only be a partial explanation. Today, the single most important propelling factor is the brand recall of “Rajiv Gandhi’s school”. Parents from as far away as Bihar, Assam, Nepal, east Africa, North America send their children to Dehradun and boast that their child “studies at Doon”. “There is often an inability or a reluctance,” explains a local teacher, “to distinguish between Doon the valley and Doon the school.” 

In admission season, parents alighting at the railway station are surrounded by touts who offer to take them to “Doon School”. That alluringly simple promise actually leads to a whole menu of options-Doon Global School, Doon Presidency School, Doon International School, Doon Preparatory School, Doon Cambridge School, Doon Girls School, Doon Public School. There’s even a Doon College of Spoken English. As Jayanth Lal, old boy of and now housemaster at the (real) Doon, jokes, “A new arrival could spend the rest of the year telling the difference between one Doon school and the next.” 

The fixation with Doon-or the (almost) equally famous all-girls Welham-runs deep. There are junior schools, says Brar, the USP of which is that “our children get into Doon or Welham”. Former teachers from the big two are often the pivots around whom new schools are created. Asian’s Sumer and Devpriya Lahiri, headmaster-designate of SelaQui, both taught at Doon. When Madhuri Mathur retired after 40 fulfilling years as teacher and, finally, vice-principal at Welham, she was offered the job of principal at Hope Town. Among those who joined her were the bursar and caterer of her former school, as well as the art, science and music teachers.

The new schools draw more than just human talent from Doon. When Indian Public School published its daily schedule in a city newspaper, at least one Class XII boy at Doon raised his eyebrows, “It seemed so much like ours.” Terms like STA (spare time activity) and schools-the Dosco term for periods-had been borrowed. Perhaps uniquely among Indian schools, Doon uses the word “Toye” for prep. Well, now so does Indian Public School.

It would be unfair, however, to dismiss every new school as a poseur and just another poor clone of an established institution. Hope Town, for instance, is an honest effort in its own right and has fairly quickly carved a niche for itself as among the best schools in Dehradun. 

The scale, geographical or financial, of the “21st-century schools” also indicates a departure from the past. To quote Gupta, “Schools were a cottage industry in Dehradun. If I had five rooms, I set up a school. Now the concept has changed to an organised school. Everything from a staff room to a swimming pool is necessary.” The upshot: schools are becoming big business and, at some stage, “the small school may just die”.

While not one of the businessmen behind the recent or upcoming schools says profit is a motive, the fact is the economics of the sector is scarcely bleak. Take Asian School. When completed in 2005-the year Class XII begins-it would have cost Rs 15 crore to set up a 20-acre campus. Yet from its first year-2000, when three sections of 30-35 children each in every class from nursery to VI went functional-it had started covering its operational costs. The smaller Aryan-which began classes on April 8 with a Rs 3-crore capital investment and a principal who, according to promoter Gupta, is the “best English tuition teacher in Dehradun”-will “break even by 2002-03″. The mega-sized, 65-acre Indian Public School-”Investment over the next 10 years could be over Rs 100 crore,” says Sinha-will be self-sustaining by its fourth year.

The rosy projections are, of course, based on well-structured revenue models. Doon charges its pupils Rs 95,000 per year. Indian Public School and SelaQui will exceed that from the first year itself, with probable premia for overseas Indians paying in dollars and for those who choose the British GCSE or the Geneva-based International Baccalaureate rather than the plain vanilla Indian School Certificate.

All that comes later, of course. Initially the schools open merely up to Classes VI or VII. Only when they reach Class X do they need a board affiliation. Should they seek to tie up with an examining authority located outside the state, they require a no-objection certificate (NOC) from the government. Since the school is already established by then, the NOC becomes a bit of a fait accompli, complains a bureaucrat. 

Template Of Doon: ABIDE WITH US: Few schools want to break away from the Doon School model

For a city that has its own Vasant Vihar, Defence Colony and Connaught Place–everyday place names to any Delhiite–the mimic act may not be entirely unfamiliar. Almost all the schools set up in Dehradun know only one framework of imparting education and rearing a young adult-the one at Doon School. As Arun Kapur, director of Delhi’s Vasant Valley School and formerly a teacher at Doon, tells you, “It’s almost as if a template exists and every school tries to get as close to it as possible.” Not that this necessarily makes these schools inferior. It’s just that the “school capital of India”–as Dehradun is sometimes called, jocularly or otherwise–is not quite a microcosm of the universe of modern Indian schooling. Of the five new school projects visited by this reporter, only one promises to try and break the mould.

“Old model”, for lack of a better term, schools in India borrowed from military or English public school or missionary traditions or a combination of these. The emphasis was on discipline and a certain rigour. In a sense, when Doon was set up in 1935 it was a trifle radical for its time, notably for its ban on corporal punishment.

Of course much has changed since then. As an educationist points out, there are a host of “new model” schools-Rishi Valley in Andhra Pradesh, Sardar Patel, Shriram, Mother’s International and Vasant Valley in Delhi, Aditi Mallya in Bangalore, Nath Valley in Aurangabad and so on. True, these schools are very different from each other but, to quote Kapur again, they share a certain temperament: “Fresh concepts have arisen in pedagogy. There are new systems of grading, multiple intelligence, a whole cognitive science.” The child is approached as more of an individual and the school itself endeavours to be in a process of constant change.

Admittedly, these innovations in schooling have triggered much debate. A school today may address a specific parent mindset. Some experiments fail, some succeed. The point is this great churning is almost completely missing in Dehradun. Only SelaQui raises hope of an alternative system, if that be the word, to Doon’s. Its biggest stress is on technology, promising a completely wired school. In addition, each teacher will be required to devote “45 days each year to upgrading skills”. The proof of the pudding will, of course, lie in the eating. Doon School too has a “Teacher Resource Centre” but critics say its use has been minimal.

The absence of pedagogical argument is not, of course, a hindrance to commercial viability. Dehradun’s emerging schools-many of them on the Chakrata Road, which is becoming something of a local silicon alley with the Uttaranchal Government allocating land for an it park as well-are unlikely to be short of custom.

Doon School inducted 90 boys this year after receiving 450 applications. In 2000-01, its first year, Asian School admitted 575 children, turning away 800. Sinha of Indian Public School puts matters in perspective, “There’s enough space for everyone. We’re talking of a few thousand seats in a country of millions.”

These doctors are practitioners of ayurveda, unani and siddha, ancient Indian medical systems that date back thousands of years.

One of them is Jaya Saklani Kala, a young ayurveda doctor, who is wading through a dog-eared 500-year-old text book for information on a medicine derived from the mango fruit.

“Soon the world will know the medicine, and the fact that it originated from India,” she says.

With help from software engineers and patent examiners, Ms Kala and her colleagues are putting together a 30-million-page electronic encyclopaedia of India’s traditional medical knowledge, the first of its kind in the world.

‘Bio-piracy’

The ambitious $2m project, christened Traditional Knowledge Digital Library, will roll out an encyclopaedia of the country’s traditional medicine in five languages – English, French, German, Japanese and Spanish – in an effort to stop people from claiming them as their own and patenting them.

The electronic encyclopaedia, which will be made available next year, will contain information on the traditional medicines, including exhaustive references, photographs of the plants and scans from the original texts.

Indian scientists say the country has been a victim of what they describe as “bio-piracy” for a long time.

“When we put out this encyclopaedia in the public domain, no one will be able to claim that these medicines or therapies are their inventions. Till now, we have not done the needful to protect our traditional wealth,” says Ajay Dua, a senior bureaucrat in the federal commerce ministry.

Putting together the encyclopaedia is a daunting task.

For one, ayurvedic texts are in Sanskrit and Hindi, unani texts are in Arabic and Persian and siddha material is in Tamil language. Material from these texts is being translated into five international languages, using sophisticated software coding.

The sheer wealth of material that has to be read through for information is enormous – there are some 54 authoritative ‘text books’ on ayurveda alone, some thousands of years old.

Then there are nearly 150,000 recorded ayurvedic, unani and siddha medicines; and some 1,500 asanas (physical exercises and postures) in yoga, which originated in India more than 5,000 years ago.

Under normal circumstances, a patent application should always be rejected if there is prior existing knowledge about the product.

But in most of the developed nations like United States, “prior existing knowledge” is only recognised if it is published in a journal or is available on a database – not if it has been passed down through generations of oral and folk traditions.

The irony here is that India has suffered even though its traditional knowledge, as in China, has been documented extensively.

But information about traditional medicine has never been culled from their texts, translated and put out in the public domain.

No wonder then that India has been embroiled in some high-profile patent litigation in the past decade – the government spent some $6m alone in fighting legal battles against the patenting of turmeric and neem-based medicines.

In 1995, the US Patent Office granted a patent on the wound-healing properties of turmeric.

Indian scientists protested and fought a two-year-long legal battle to get the patent revoked.

India got a patent on turmeric, used in curries, revoked

Last year, India won a 10-year-long battle at the European Patent Office against a patent granted on an anti-fungal product, derived from neem, by successfully arguing that the medicinal neem tree is part of traditional Indian knowledge.

In 1998 the US Patent Office granted patent to a local company for new strains of rice similar to basmati, which has been grown for centuries in the Himalayan foothills of north-west India and Pakistan and has become popular internationally. After a prolonged legal battle, the patent was revoked four years ago.

And, in the US, an expatriate Indian yoga teacher has claimed copyright on a sequence of 36 yoga asanas, or postures.

Dr Vinod Kumar Gupta, who is leading the traditional wealth encyclopaedia project and heads India’s National Institute of Science Communication and Information Resources (Niscair), reckons that of the nearly 5,000 patents given out by the US Patent Office on various medical plants by the year 2000, some 80% were plants of Indian origin.

Practitioners of traditional medicines say their importance cannot be denied – according to the WHO, 70% of the people living in India use traditional medicine for primary health care.

Also, some 42% of the people living in the US and 70% of the people living in Canada have used traditional medicines at least once for treatment.

By one estimate, a quarter of the new drugs produced in the US are plant-based, giving the sometimes much-criticised practitioners of alternative traditional medicine something to cheer about.

The mammoth Indian encyclopaedia may finally give alternative medicine the shot in the arm it sorely needs.

By Soutik Biswas  BBC News, Delhi