KEYNOTE ADDRESS: RENU SINGH NECCE opportunities and challenges After decades of hesitation in September 2013, the Congress-led UPA II government approved a National Early Childhood Care and Education (NECCE) policy paper of the Union ministry of women and child development (WCD). By adopting the NECCE policy draft, the Central government accepted an important principle of latter day education enunciated by Nobel laureate Dr. James Heckman in the millennium year (2000) that œearly learning begets later learning and early success breeds later success, just as early failure breeds later failure, and the UNESCO EFA Global Monitoring Report which proclaimed ECCE as the bedrock of education for all and further initiatives. The NECCE policy is overdue acknowledgement that a large number of children in India are growing up in disadvantaged family contexts, and are therefore œat risk in terms of developing to their full potential. However it™s a credit to Indian educationists and policy formulators that India has the distinction of having launched the world™s largest integrated child development programme for infants and lactating mothers way back in 1975 ” Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) ” under which 1.3 million anganwadi centres have been established across most habitations countrywide. Available data indicates that 64.5 percent of three-year-olds and 76.3 percent of four-year-olds in rural India are attending anganwadis. The significance of NECCE is that for the first time, special emphasis has been given to developing and expanding the education component of ICDS with all state governments directed to develop their own ECCE curriculums. The recently restructured ICDS also makes a clear statement regarding conversion of all anganwadis into œvibrant ECCE centres ” a very positive development for the country™s hitherto neglected 158 million children in the 0-6 age group. Nevertheless, there™s much work to be done before the NECCE policy is translated into action. The first challenge is to ensure Article 21-A of the Constitution which legislated elementary education as a fundamental right of all children in the 6-14 age group, is amended to include all children upto 14 years of age, rather than restrict the fundamental right to education to 6-14-year-olds. This is critical since the constitutional amendment of 2002 ignores Article 45 which enjoined the state to provide free and compulsory education to all children below the age of 14 years. Another lacuna is that ICDS provides for ” the admittedly cursory ” education of three to six-year-olds while 23 of the 35 states/UTs have mandated five years as the official entry age for primary school, thus creating an overlap and possible double counting. A recent analysis indicates that 20 percent of children entering primary school in states that have six years as the entry age and a lesser percentage that have five years, are under-age. This needs urgent attention, because under-age children are unprepared to bear the pressures of primary schools where child-centric pedagogies are a rarity. In the circumstances it might be a good idea to encourage a year of pre-primary education to be added to every primary…
