Formulated after an interregnum of 34 years and crafted over four years following recommendations of two high-powered committees, the new education policy aroused great expectations. But NEP 2020 is an amalgam of high rhetoric clouded by implementation uncertainty because of its conspicuous failure to make a clean break from bureaucratic control-and-command – Dilip Thakore The great expectation was that the new National Education Policy 2020 formulated after an interregnum of 34 years and crafted over four years following the detailed recommendations of two high-powered — TRS Subramanaian (2016) and the Dr. K. Kasturirangan (2018) — committees, would be a monumental, path-breaking blueprint. The anticipation was a re-engineering of the world’s largest education ecosystem to extricate 21st century India’s 256 million school children and 30 million youth in higher education from the mire in which they have been floundering for over seven decades. Instead, the 65-page policy document presented to the public at a virtual press conference in Delhi by former Union human resource development (HRD) minister Prakash Javadekar and incumbent Union education minister (the name of the ministry has changed) Dr Ramesh Pokhriyal ‘Nishank’ (a nom de plume) on July 29, is an amalgam of high rhetoric clouded by implementation uncertainty, because of its conspicuous failure to make a clean break with bureaucratic control-and-command. The policy charter acknowledges that “providing universal access to quality education is the key to India’s continued ascent and leadership on the global stage in terms of economic growth, social justice and equality, scientific advancement, national integration and cultural preservation”. But it fails to address the debilitating problems of Indian education — excessive bureaucracy, chronic underfunding and under-regulation of public education, a sin compounded by over-regulation of the country’s relatively superior private education system. When the diagnosis is faulty, repairing a dysfunctional system is certain to be a long and painful trial-and-error treatment. Dr. Ramesh Pokhriyal, the newly rechristened education minister, who began his career in a Shishu Mandir school promoted by the RSS, the ideological mentor organisation of the ruling BJP and was awarded this critical position in May 2019, promises that NEP 2020 “will bring transformational reforms in school and higher education systems in the country,” according to a ministry statement issued on July 29 by the Press Information Bureau of the government of India. His deputy, Sanjay Dhotre, minister of state for education, is more bullish. “NEP 2020 is the most comprehensive, radical and futuristic policy document in the educational history of this country,” says his official statement. Unfortunately, wishes are not horses and normatively in post-independence India, vaulting ambition falls on the other side. The upside of NEP 2020 is that it has substantially accepted the recommendations of the nine-member Dr. K. Kasturirangan (KR) Committee Report submitted to the Union HRD ministry in May 2019. The committee’s comprehensive 484-page report had made several sensible and overdue recommendations including unprecedented stress on ECCE (early childhood care and education), high priority for functional literacy and numeracy of all children by age eight; encouraging holistic…
