ON INDIA’S 66th REPUBLIC day (January 26), the Union government invited public participation on the website http://www.mygov.in to help prepare the long-awaited New Education Policy (NEP). A set of 33 ‘themes’ have been identified — 20 in higher education and 13 in school education — for public participation and debate.
According to a note of the Union human resource development (HRD) ministry, “the objective of the consultation process is to ensure that an inclusive, participatory and holistic approach is undertaken, which takes into consideration expert opinions, field experiences, empirical research, stakeholder feedback, as well as lessons learnt from best practices”. The slogan of the new NEP initiative is “educate, encourage, enlighten”. Closure date: March 31.
Among the 13 themes of school education on which public comments and suggestions are invited are improving learning outcomes, extending the outreach of secondary and senior secondary education, strengthening vocational education, reforming school exam systems, revamping teacher education, etc.
Likewise, the 20 themes on higher education opened up for public debate include governance reforms, ranking and accreditation, regulation, role of Central institutions, improving state universities, integrating skill development programmes in higher education, promoting online courses and technology enabled learning, among others.
The invitation to the public to participate in the process of formulation of the New Education Policy 2015, to revise and update the NEP of 1986 modified in 1992, is in consonance with the BJP’s 2014 election manifesto which had promised a new education policy. To her credit, shortly after her surprise appointment as Union HRD minister, former TV star Smriti Irani said the new NEP would involve public participation and exhaustive public consultations starting from children and parents from the village to block level in a process that could stretch over a year.
Unsurprisingly, this break away from the traditional process is causing disquiet within academia and educationists. “There’s a lot of confusion within academia about the new NEP Policy formulation which is professional work requiring an orderly process. It involves identifying issues followed by choice analysis done by education experts. Processing a huge volume of suggestions from the lay public will be an impossible task,” says Dr. Veera Gupta, professor of educational policy at the National University of Educational Planning and Administration, Delhi, speaking “not in any official capacity but as a citizen”.
Although there’s some substance in Gupta’s argument, the plain truth is that for the past 67 years since independence, education policy and syllabus formulation has been restricted to education bureaucrats and selected experts with disastrous results. In early childhood, primary, secondary and higher education, post-independence India, which still hosts the world’s largest population of illiterates, lags way behind Western and even parvenu South-east Asian countries.
“A new inclusive process is needed to formulate education policies and syllabuses. Contemporary parents and even children are well-informed about latest trends and developments in advanced countries which they learn from gadgets, games, e-books, social media and the web. The involvement of consumers of education with policy formulation is a welcome development,” says Dr. Sarvesh Naidu, director of the avant-garde Pathways World School, Gurgaon.
Although some educationists anticipate a huge volume of recommendations and suggestions from the public to the new government’s open invitation to become engaged with formulation of the new NEP, the probability is that only experts — real and self-styled — will accept the invitation. And their fresh ideas and suggestions may well start a healthy debate on the contours of the imminent NEP which the country desperately needs.
Autar Nehru (Delhi)
Telling priorities
THE SHALLOW COMMITMENT of politicians of all ideological hues and stripes to social welfare and development is repeatedly exposed when the revenue expenditure of the Central and state governments overruns budgetary provision. The first ministries to experience budget cuts are education and health. And true to form, in a concerted bid to meet the fiscal deficit target (4.1 percent of GDP) set in the hastily drawn up Union Budget 2014-15 presented to Parliament by finance minister Arun Jaitley last July shortly after the BJP-led NDA alliance swept to power in General Election 2014, the Narendra Modi government has slashed the outlay for higher education by a whopping Rs.3,900 crore (24 percent) in its revised budget estimates for fiscal 2014-15. This has reduced the Plan (infrastructure/capex) allocation from Rs.16,900 crore to Rs.13,000 crore. 
According to Union human resource development ministry sources, the brunt of the budgetary cuts will fall on the eight new IITs established in 2008 by the Congress-led UPA-I government. These new IITs were scheduled to move to their permanent campuses before the start of the academic year 2015-16. But with the finance ministry having cut the budgetary allocation of all 16 IITs from Rs.2,500 crore to Rs.2,337 crore, the axe is likely to fall on the new IITs operating out of temporary campuses. Six of them (except IIT, Ropar and Jodhpur) were to move to their permanent campuses by July this year. Up and running IITs have to bear an additional burden of Rs.150 crore due to the recent hike in junior and senior research fellowships which have been increased from Rs.16,000 to Rs.25,000 per month and from Rs.18,000 to Rs.28,000 respectively. “Given that raising heavily-subsidised, rock-bottom IIT tuition fees are a no-go zone, the axe will have to fall on the new IITs,” says a Union HRD ministry official.
In the stampede to cut the fiscal deficit to impress foreign and domestic investors, budgetary allocations of the five IITs and five IIMs grandly announced in the last budget session of Parliament have been even more drastically slashed from Rs.500 crore to a token Rs.65 crore, and the budget for Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) from Rs.100 crore to Rs.5 crore. In addition, the allocation for the Madan Mohan Malaviya National Mission on Teachers and Training has been revised to Rs.15 crore as against the original Rs.100 crore. And perhaps the most unkindest cut of all is that the allocation of the ambitious Rashtriya Uchchatar Shiksha Abhiyan (National Higher Education Development Programme) has been slashed from Rs.2,200 crore to Rs.397 crore in 2014-15, i.e to cover the salaries of officials appointed for the programme.
The vicious cutting of already meagre education and healthcare outlays of the Union budget through executive order has outraged academics in the national capital. “The government is completely bypassing Parliament by peremptorily slashing budgetary outlays sanctioned by it. The idea that we need to cut social sector budgets to maintain the fiscal deficit to attract foreign investment is totally misplaced. An unhealthy, ill-educated and underfed population is likely to lead to social unrest which is certain to deter foreign investors,” says Dr. Jayati Ghosh of the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), Delhi.
Adds Dr. Prabhat Patnaik, the well-known economist and professor emeritus at JNU: “The government takes pride that the economy is growing at 5 percent per year, a rate of growth higher than in most countries of the world. But there’s negative growth in public health and education. In that case who is benefitting from economic growth? What is the rationale of this growth?”
Interestingly, after the budgets have been slashed, the combined expenditure on the five new IITs and IIMs, MOOCs programme, Madan Mohan Malaviya National Mission on Teachers and Training, and the Rashtriya Uchchatar Shiksha Abhiyan in 2014-15 aggregates Rs.483 crore — lesser than the budgetary allocation of Rs.500 crore made for the construction of the 597 ft. tall statue of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel in Gujarat, which on completion will become the world’s tallest statue. It’s a telling indicator of the priorities of the BJP/NDA coalition whose manifesto promised to double annual expenditure (Centre plus states) to 6 percent of GDP.
Somdev Thakur (Delhi)