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…
