Newly-appointed education minister Dharmendra Pradhan is confronted with the challenge of scaling two mountains simultaneously — repairing huge damage suffered by the education system during 60 weeks of pandemic lockdown, and implementing NEP 2020, writes Dilip Thakore With General Election 2024 looming on the distant horizon and the legislative assembly election of Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state (240 million) that sends 80 MPs to the Lok Sabha, the lower house of Parliament, scheduled for February next year, there is a hint of desperation within the top leadership of the Bharatiya Janata Party which dominates the BJP/NDA government at the Centre. Although the malignant challenge of the novel Coronavirus which migrated to India from the neighbouring People’s Republic of China in early 2020, forced a lockdown of business and industry and wreaked havoc on the economy, has been substantially met with a national vaccination campaign, the fast-mutating virus is still infecting citizens, taking lives and destroying livelihoods. The economic turnaround that the country requires is nowhere in sight and the predicted rate of economic growth at 9-10 percent in fiscal 2021-22 on the low base of the pandemic year, will at best restore the status quo ante of 2019-20, while inflation and unemployment are indicating upward trajectories. These ominous auguries explain the night-of-the-long-knives Union cabinet reshuffle of July 7 in which prime minister Narendra Modi axed some of the most senior ministers of the seven-year BJP/NDA government and replaced them with new, younger cabinet members. Among the casualties were Union health minister Harsh Vardhan, information and broadcasting minister Prakash Javadekar, information technology and law minister Ravi Shankar Prasad, and most notably, education minister Dr. Ramesh Pokhriyal, a Hindi language pulp fiction writer and hindutva revivalist who presided over masterly inactivity during his two-year stint in Shastri Bhavan, Delhi, headquarters of the Union education ministry. The new incumbent of Shastri Bhavan is Dharmendra Pradhan, hitherto Union minister of petroleum and natural gas where he earned good notices for resisting intense public pressure to reduce petrol and diesel prices which are among the highest worldwide, and implemented the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana (PMUY) providing subsidised cooking gas cylinders to over 200 million socio-economically underprivileged households. Not a few media pundits believe that success of the Ujjwala scheme contributed substantially to the BJP’s sweeping victory in General Election 2019, and in the UP legislative assembly election held shortly thereafter. “Dharmendra Pradhan is a rising star of the BJP who enjoys the confidence of prime minister Narendra Modi and Union home minister Amit Shah who call the shots in the BJP/NDA government. During his tenure in the petroleum and natural gas ministry, Pradhan did a fairly good job of implementing the Ujjwala scheme which required a large number within the middle class to surrender their gas cylinder subsidies to enable the distribution of highly-subsidised cylinders to bottom-of-pyramid households. Undoubtedly, he has programme implementation capabilities. But on the downside, as a former ABVP president, he has a strong connect with the RSS and I doubt…
