The Doon School

The Doon School is a selective all-boys private boarding school in Dehradun, Uttarakhand, India, established in 1935 and modeled on the British public school while remaining conscious of Indian ambitions, an idea championed by the Calcutta lawyer Satish Ranjan Das. It admitted its first pupils in September 1935 under its first headmaster, Arthur E. Foot, an English educationalist who had spent nine years as a science master at Eton College, and today houses roughly 580 pupils aged 12 to 18 admitted by competitive entrance examination and interview, drawn from across India and abroad. Students take the Cambridge IGCSE examinations in tenth grade and then choose between the Indian School Certificate and the International Baccalaureate for their final two years, and the school has been consistently ranked the best all-boys residential school in India, though it has drawn media attention, and at times criticism, for the outsized influence of its alumni in Indian politics, business and culture, including former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi.