Prakash Javadekar, the newly-appointed Union minister for human resource development (HRD) who assumed charge at Shastri Bhavan, New Delhi on July 5 following a Cabinet reshuffle at the Centre begins his new innings with the goodwill of the entire academic community and the media. In his earlier two-year stint as minister of state for environment, forests and climate change, Javadekar won good notices all round for commendably balancing the need for environment conservation with sustainable industrial growth.
Reportedly a patient listener unlike his predecessor Smriti Irani, who during her two-year stint as HRD minister antagonised almost the entire academy with her domineering, bull-in-a-china-shop style of governing this sensitive ministry, Javadekar needs to adopt a simultaneously loose-tight style of governance in a ministry which has proved the graveyard of four successive political heavyweights — Dr. Murli Manohar Joshi, Kapil Sibal, Dr. Pallam Raju and Smriti Irani — since the dawn of the new millennium. None of them were able to slow — let alone reverse — the steady slide of Indian education from school to Ph D into irrelevance and mediocrity.
Javadekar’s immediate task is to formulate the new National Policy on Education 2016 based upon the recommendations of the high-powered T.S.R. Subramanian Committee which suo motu released its 200-page report on May 28, after Irani refused to make it public without prior consultation with state governments. The most important recommendation of the Subramanian Committee’s report is to increase national (Centre plus states) annual expenditure on education from the current 3.25 percent to 6 percent of GDP (as recommended by the Kothari Commission in 1966) “without further loss of time”.
The backstory to this recommendation is that although every major political party since 1966 has promised to meet this goal for the benefit of the world’s largest — and most short-changed — child population, national education outlays have averaged a mere 3.5 percent per annum in post-independence India.
The committee has suggested several other overdue reforms to get the country’s floundering education system back on track. Among them: repealing the no-detention until class VIII provision of the Right of Children to Free & Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, 2009, and introducing examinations after class V; provision of early childhood education for children in the four-six age group; introduction of vocational education from class VIII; establishment of an all-India education service on the model of the Indian Administrative Service, among others.
But the first priority of the new HRD minister should be to persuade prime minister Narendra Modi and the Union Cabinet to provide an additional one-time capital outlay of Rs.1.10 lakh crore to revamp Indian primary education as repeatedly roadmapped by EducationWorld (see EW April, 2016). Given the foolishly low priority accorded to education during the past 68 years since independence, that’s a formidable task requiring more than mere listening skills.
Unwarranted brexit apprehensions
A discerning tourist visiting the UK in the aftermath of the June 23 referendum under which the majority population voted for Brexit or exit of Great Britain from the European Union — an assortment of 28 nations of continental Europe initiated as the European Economic community in 1956, which has been steadily progressing towards economic and political integration — cannot but be struck by the mood of grim foreboding suffusing the British establishment, particularly in London.
This pervasive despondence is a telling measure of the extent to which this once great nation which less than a century ago ruled arguably the most expansive colonial empire in history, fathered the industrial revolution and singularly and successfully resisted European dictators in the 19th and 20th centuries, has lost confidence in its capabilities and potential.
Although such retrospection tends to be dismissed by the UK’s Remain proponents as sentimental nostalgia of greying citizens of imperial Britain, it’s futile to deny that the character and psyche of nations are shaped by history. Therefore, it’s highly improbable that the UK which hosts the mother of all Parliaments and is equipped with excellent law, order and justice systems, the world’s best schools and universities, and a record of proven political and diplomatic skills, won’t be able to withstand the impact of a negotiated Brexit from the European Union. Indeed, even to casual monitors of British politics, it’s plainly evident that steady integration of the UK with the European Union has infected this once industrious and inventive kingdom with vices of indolence and effete epicureanism for which several nations of continental Europe have acquired notorious reputation.
The vote to leave is being widely interpreted as a vote against immigration and in favour of Little England racial intolerance.
This interpretation is fallacious, because the UK has more successfully integrated its racially distinct immigrants from Commonwealth countries who constitute 10 percent of its population, than any European nation. Moreover, control and selection of immigrants is a fundamental right of all nation states, and as such a perfectly rational demand of the Leave majority concerned about the uncontrolled entry of EU migrants without any language or historical affinities with the indigenous population.
Inevitably, a divorce after four decades of partnership — it never was a full marriage as evidenced by the UK’s unwillingness to accept the Euro as its currency — will cause disruption, inconvenience and even pain. But the gains of separation — assertion of identity, stimulation of creative response and perhaps nurturance of English-speaking nations of the world into a mutually supportive community and trade bloc — are likely to outweigh the loss of Britain’s exit from the European Union.
