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At the heart of educational work is the teacher; and, everybody in the society from parents to the federal government, school administrators, industry, policy-makers, teacher educators, and not-for-profit organizations carry certain notions about the practice of teaching and work of teachers. Each constituency desires to have able, committed, and qualified teachers to care for the young ones of their society. Developing quality teachers is intricately linked to the quality of teacher education. Teacher educator professionalism is central to the improvement of teacher education and therefore school learning, and needs greater emphasis in the context of India. This chapter begins by outlining the work of teacher educators in higher education-based initial teacher preparation programs. It then gives a brief overview of the changes in initial teacher education in the early twenty-first century. This chapter further analyses the various dimensions of teacher educators’ quality of practice as framed by educational documents to gather insights about their practice among the diverse contexts in India. This chapter makes a plea to teacher educators in India to come together as a collective and take responsibility for strengthening quality teaching in India. This chapter concludes with a proposal for a framework of professional practice of teacher educators.

Since the spread of mass education around the world in the mid- to late-twentieth century, teacher quality has been heralded as the key factor to improve education quality nationwide. National education systems worldwide are also engaged in ongoing and often high stakes cross-national comparisons. As a result, policy-makers and educators in most national education systems are looking at and implementing new ways to improve education overall by raising teacher quality levels, and India is no exception. In India, teacher quality is publicly blamed for both perceived low education quality and demonstrated low average student performance, especially following Indian students’ performance on the 2009 Programme for International Student Assessment. Indian education policy-makers are, therefore, looking at teacher quality as a key factor to improve student performance. Little is known about the impact or implementation of Indian policy frameworks on teacher quality and associated student outcomes in India. This introductory chapter identifies and analyzes various measures of teacher quality and how teacher quality varies in India both in response to and in spite of national policies related to teacher quality. It begins by providing evidence regarding the global importance of teacher quality on student outcomes and then addresses the ambiguity of the term “teacher quality.” This chapter then briefly discussed national education policy in India and the role teacher quality has played in these national policies, especially in the early twenty-first century, including NCF 2005, NCFTE 2009, Draft NPE 2016, Draft NPE 2019, and NPE 2020.

Developing economies that are subject to global influences, such as through exposure to global product, labor and capital markets, may be expected to practice higher standards of corporate governance (CG) than less globalized developing economies. This paper seeks to understand the relationship between CG and firm ownership by private equity investors in India, and to understand whether CG practices in particular national institutional contexts change when the firm is exposed to investors with a background in other countries' institutional contexts. Taking India as a test case, the paper aims to explore how CG standards are affected by private equity investment that originates from developed countries.

A primary survey on Indian firms' CG practices for firms that receive private equity and for comparable firms that do not was used to determine differences in CG. Private equity investors were surveyed to determine their national institutional contexts. The CG practices were then related to the national institutional context that the private equity investors came from.

Private‐equity funded firms display higher standards of corporate governance than firms that do not receive such funding. The difference arises from the application of developed country standards of CG arising from the investors that own the private equity funds. These funds are primarily owned by developed country investors. The strategies through which these occur are: reconstituting the board of directors, influencing senior executive recruitment, and changing the firm's operating and strategic rules.

Developing countries like India usually display low standards of CG. Such standards tend to evolve slowly in line with the country's stage of development. The literature has not hitherto identified ways in which this process can be hastened. This study finds that standards can be raised above the prevailing standards through the governance practices imported into developing countries by private equity funds that are primarily owned by developed country investors. Hence, the findings of this paper contribute to the understanding of how globalization influences CG.