The incapability of the Kasturirangan Committee members to shed naive belief that flogging the dead horse of government control and command of the education system will rejuvenate it, is likely to reduce the voluminous NEP draft report to yet another elaborate exercise in futility – Dilip Thakore The long-awaited New National Education Policy (NEP) draft submitted by the nine-member committee of academics chaired by eminent space scientist K. Kasturirangan, former chairman of ISRO (Indian Space Research Organisation), to the Union HRD (human resource development) ministry on December 15 last year, was released for public debate on May 30. The Kasturirangan (KR) Committee had been constituted in June 2017 by the BJP/NDA government to prepare a new draft NEP after the 217-page draft NEP of the TSR Subramanian Committee proved inconvenient, because it criticised “corruption and inefficiency of education management at all levels”. It recommended greater autonomy for higher education institutions, and an increase in the national (Centre plus states) annual outlay for education to 6 percent of GDP “without further delay”. This would have required the Central government’s budgetary provision for education to rise from 0.45 percent of GDP to at least 2.5 percent. Therefore, it was transformed into a mere “input” for the KR Committee. However, as soon as it was released for public scrutiny and debate, after General Election 2019 in which the incumbent BJP/NDA government was swept back into office in New Delhi with a two-thirds majority in the Lok Sabha, the KR Committee’s report triggered a storm. Several political parties of southern India — notably the opposition DMK in Tamil Nadu and the JD (S) in Karnataka — took exception to the languages learning prescription written by the committee comprising eight academics of no special distinction. It speaks volumes of the market intelligence of the committee that despite the huge Dravidian anti-Hindi agitation of the 1960s in south India, the KR Committee again recommended the rejected three-languages formula for primary-secondary school children. Way back in the 1960s following a constitutional mandate, the then Congress government at the Centre made the study of the state language, Hindi and English compulsory, prompting riots in Tamil Nadu during which dozens of people immolated themselves in protest against “Hindi imperialism”. The KR Committee members also seem to have been unaware that substitution of English with Sinhalese as the national language of neighbouring Sri Lanka in 1956 alienated the country’s Tamil minority and provoked a decade-long civil war that ended only recently in 2009. Following the outbreak of widespread protests in the south immediately after the NEP 2019 draft was made public, the newly-elected BJP/NDA government was quick to mollify public opinion by stating that the KR Committee’s report was a mere recommendation to the Central government which has no intention of re-introducing the three-languages learning programme in school education. Moreover in several media interviews, Kasturirangan clarified that the committee had recommended that children should learn their mother tongue, English and any other Indian language. Shortly thereafter, the HRD ministry’s website…
