Education milestones 2017 With the BJP government at the Centre focused upon containing the disastrous fallout of the demonetisation initiative on the Indian economy, and preoccupied with implementation of GST countrywide, the important issue of reform of early childhood, primary-secondary and higher education was severely neglected – Summiya Yasmeen 2017 was a quiet year for Indian education. With the Narendra Modi-led BJP government at the Centre focused upon containing the disastrous fallout of the demonetisation initiative announced in November 2016 on the Indian economy, and preoccupied with implementation of its biggest tax reform — the Goods and Services Tax (GST) — countrywide, the important issue of upgradation and reform of early childhood, primary-secondary and higher education was severely neglected. Moreover with three big states — Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh — going to the hustings last year, the entire BJP machinery was in election overdrive. While in Uttar Pradesh and Himachal, the BJP swept the state legislative assembly elections with overwhelming majorities, in Gujarat its victory margin was substantially reduced with a resurgent Congress giving it a good fight. Consequently as economic and political events took centrestage, education was relegated to the bottom of the government national agenda in the past year. The unassuming Prakash Javadekar, who was appointed Union minister of human resource development (HRD) in July 2016, after his predecessor the mercurial Smriti Irani was shifted to the textiles ministry in a cabinet reshuffle, failed to make any major impact on Indian education. Like Irani, who was heavily influenced by the extreme right-revivalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) — the ideological parent of the BJP — Javadekar dismissed the somewhat inconvenient recommendations of the comprehensive 200-page TSR Subramanian Committee Report on the National Education Policy (NEP) 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. The deliberations for preparing a new NEP began in 2015 soon after the BJP came to power, and Javadekar had promised to present the NEP to the nation by end 2017 — a deadline unlikely to be met. Ditto his commitment to tabling a Bill in Parliament to rescind the Right to Education Act’s no-detention in primary school provision and introduce exams in classes V and VIII, came to naught the past year. Javadekar’s only major achievement in 2017 was enactment of the Indian Institutes of Management (IIM) Bill, 2017 by Parliament. Under his leadership, the HRD ministry reworked Irani’s controversial IIM Bill, 2015 which proposed to drastically dilute the academic and financial autonomy of the IIMs. The IIM Bill, 2017 provides autonomy to the country’s premier business management schools by restricting the government’s role in their functioning and grants them statutory powers to appoint directors, faculty members and award degrees instead of postgraduate diplomas. Javadekar must also be given credit for the Union cabinet clearing the establishment of the National Testing Agency, a centralised body which will conduct admission entrance tests for all institutions of higher education.…
