2013 was another uneventful year for Indian education. With the thoroughly disgraced Congress-led UPA-II government fire fighting a spate of corruption scandals, unremitting inflation and devaluation of the rupee, and the opposition BJP blocking legislative business in Parliament, as all political parties gear up for general election 2014, education and welfare of the world’s largest child population — 480 million — was relegated to the back-burner in the recently concluded year. The hope and expectation that the dream team of Dr. Pallam Raju (Union minister), Shashi Tharoor and Jitin Prasada (ministers of state) who took charge in the Union human resource development (HRD) ministry on October 28, 2012, would belatedly usher the much needed reform of Indian education and push pending education legislation, was belied. As in 2012, last year too ended dismally without any education legislation debated by Parliament. None of the 20 pending education Bills — 11 relating to higher and nine to primary-secondary education — have been passed. Two years on, the National Commission for Higher Education and Research, Foreign Educational Institutions (Regulation of Entry and Operations), National Accreditation Regulatory, Prevention of Malpractices, and Education Tribunals among other reformist legislation are still hanging fire. The calendar year 2013 began on a bad note with the Union government slashing the school education and literacy allocation of Rs.45,969 crore earmarked in Union Budget 2012-13 by 7 percent i.e, Rs.3,240 crore. Sources in the HRD ministry attribute this cutback to the “economic slowdown and need to control expenditure” even as two surveys — the Annual Status of Education Report 2012 and All India Education Survey — released in January painted a grim picture of plunging learning outcomes and crumbling infrastructure in the school education system. Imperfect implementation of the historic Right to Free and Compulsory Education (aka RTE) Act, 2009 — the UPA government’s sole education legislation which came into force on April 1, 2010 — was another damper. The three-year time window given to all schools countrywide to improve their infrastructure and teacher-pupil ratios and other norms as detailed in s.19 of the Act and Schedule of the RTE Act, ended on March 31 with 93 percent of primary schools still non-compliant and facing the threat of closure. While the Union government turned down requests from states to extend the three-year deadline, ground reports indicate the RTE Act is still a non-starter as state governments struggle with implementation, funds constraints, teacher shortages and shoddy infrastructure. In higher education as well there was little cause for celebration. The Parliamentary Standing Committee on HRD rejected the NCHER Bill, 2011 which proposes creation of an overarching National Commission for Higher Education & Research to subsume all other regulatory bodies in tertiary education. The committee recommended continuance of the University Grants Commission (UGC) and All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE). Perhaps the highlight in education of 2013 was the out-of-the-blue announcement of the HRD ministry that the Central government proposes to enact an ordinance allowing foreign universities to set up campuses and…
