Though politically it was a significant year with Congress re-emerging as an electoral threat to the BJP in General Election 2019 scheduled for next summer, 2018 was a business-as-usual year for Indian education – Summiya Yasmeen No news is good news. This aphorism sums up the year 2018 for Indian education. Led by the unassuming Prakash Javadekar, the Union human resource development (HRD) ministry refrained from issuing any controversial diktats or announcing major breakthrough education initiatives in the year that was. With the BJP-led NDA government at the Centre having its hands full dealing with a nationwide agrarian crisis and farmer distress, mob lynching murders over cow slaughter, a renewed campaign for building a Ram mandir in Ayodhya and contesting legislative assembly elections in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Telangana and Chhattisgarh, the important issue of upgrading early childhood, primary-secondary and higher education was off radar for the Union and state governments, and the country’s major political parties. While in Telangana the TRS won a majority, in MP, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh a resurgent Congress wrested these states from the BJP. Therefore, although politically it was a significant year with Congress re-emerging as an electoral threat to the BJP in General Election 2019 scheduled for next summer, 2018 was a business-as-usual year for Indian education. Even as Javadekar, unlike his control-and-command predecessor Smriti Irani, remained controversy-free, he failed to make a major national impact. The nation is still awaiting the new National Education Policy (NEP), deliberations for which began in 2015 soon after the BJP swept to power at the Centre. In June 2017, Javadekar had dismissed the somewhat inconvenient recommendations of the comprehensive 200-page T.S.R Subramanian Committee Report on the National Education Policy 2016, and appointed a reconstituted committee under the chairmanship of eminent scientist Dr. R. Kasturirangan to prepare a new draft of the long-awaited NEP. Though Javadekar promised to present NEP to the nation by end-2017, another year has gone by with more promises. The last the nation heard from the minister is that the NEP is ready and will be made public soon. Javadekar’s major achievement in 2018 is enactment of the RTE (Second Amendment) Bill, 2018 to repeal the Right to Education Act’s no-detention in primary school provision (s.16) and introduce exams in classes V and VIII. With several state governments ascribing the drastic fall in student learning outcomes in primary education to s.16, the chorus for removing the no-detention provision was growing louder. Under new provisions of the amended RTE Act, state governments have the freedom to detain children in primary school if they fail in class V and/or class VIII exams. The higher education sector too, received a boost from the Union HRD ministry. On March 20, the Delhi-based University Grants Commission (UGC) issued a circular granting substantial autonomy to 60 high-performing higher education institutions across the country, including 52 Central, state, deemed and private institutions plus eight autonomous colleges. Henceforth, these 60 institutions will have the freedom to start new courses, establish off-campus learning centres, introduce…
