Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan has begun his second innings in Shastri Bhavan, Delhi, at an inflection point in national development when a broad consensus has emerged that top priority has to be accorded to real education and skilling of the world’s largest population of children and youth writes Dilip Thakore The re-appointment of Dharmendra Pradhan who led the ruling BJP’s legislative election 2024 campaign in the state of Odisha (pop.48 million) and famously ended the uninterrupted 24-year rule of the BJD (Biju Janata Dal) and Cambridge (UK)-educated Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik in the eastern seaboard state, as Union Minister for Education doesn’t come as a surprise. An anthropology postgrad of Utkal University and ABVP activist student leader in his younger days, Pradhan is described as “the longest serving Union minister of petroleum and natural gas in the history of independent India” (2014-19) in his Wiki profile, and is widely credited for master-minding the BJP/NDA 2.0 government’s Ujjwala scheme under which 8 million LPG (liquid petroleum gas cylinders) for home cooking were distributed to women in targeted BPL (below poverty line) households. This initiative reportedly played a significant role in the BJP/NDA being returned to power in General Election 2019. The very next year after the disastrous incumbency of Dr. Ramesh Pokhriyal — a failed Hindi language pulp fiction novelist — and immediately after the new National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 based on the Dr. K. Kasturirangan Commiteee Report that recommended radical restructuring of Indian education from pre-school to universities was approved by the Union Cabinet in July, Pradhan was promoted to the office of Union minister for education, skill development and entrepreneurship. Welcoming Pradhan’s appointment as education minister in a detailed cover story (September 2020), your editor noted that he was confronted with the challenge of scaling two mountain peaks simultaneously — repairing huge damage suffered by the education system during 60 weeks of Covid pandemic lockdown, and implementing NEP 2020. “Pradhan’s promotion to the Union education ministry is likely to prove an arduous mission for this relatively young (52) and energetic minister who earned plaudits in his capacity as junior minister of entrepreneurship and skills development (2017-2019). For the simple reason that human capital development, and particularly modernisation of India’s moribund education system, has never been a priority of the BJP and especially of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the shadowy ideological and cultural mentor organisation of the party,” we wrote four years ago (see see https://www.educationworld.in/can-this-man-revive-indias-shattered-education-system/). Nevertheless even if the issue of whether India’s children, especially the 52 percent in the country’s 1.1 million government schools, have recovered the severe learning loss of the Covid pandemic is shrouded in mystery — a 2023 ASER (Annual Status of Education Report) of the highly-respected independent Pratham Education Foundation which field tested 34,375 teens in the 14-18 age group, reveals that 25 percent cannot read a class II level textbook fluently in their regional language and more than half struggle with division (3-digit by 1-digit) problems — there is a…
