Against the backdrop of the invitation of the Union HRD ministry for public involvement with drafting NEP 2015 possibly being an elaborate cosmetic exercise, EducationWorld presents its recommendations on the 13 ‘themes’ of school education shortlisted for public debate – Summiya Yasmeen Six months ago on India’s 66th Republic Day (January 26), the BJP-led NDA government invited online public participation in preparing the long-awaited New Education Policy (NEP) 2015. Since then, over 12,000 suggestions have been submitted (as on April 22) on the portal www.mygov.in. According to a ‘timeline’ drawn by the Union human resource development (HRD) ministry, village education committees in 250,000 gram panchayats countrywide were scheduled to deliberate and provide inputs on the proposed NEP during April-May, and 6,600 meetings were to be convened during June-July by block education officers and representatives of urban local bodies to elicit public opinion on the shape and contours of NEP 2015. Several e-mails to the Union HRD ministry to confirm how many of these meetings were actually held, remain unanswered. Moreover, over the next two months, zilla parishads, district education committees, principals of selected secondary schools and colleges, block education officers, and other education officials in the country’s 29 states and seven Union Territories are expected to hold NEP deliberations. Following these consultations, each state/Union Territory will hold three multi-stakeholder roundtable meetings and present 36 state/UT-level outcome documents. By December, the draft of a new education policy will be ready. “Our last education policy was formulated over two decades back but the world has changed a lot since then. We launched a project to formulate another one this January and made people participate in the exercise. Earlier, a select band of bureaucrats, academicians and politicians used to make this policy, but we have been asking people what they want their children to study. Aspirations vary across India. This is the first such endeavour in India,” said Union HRD minister Smriti Irani at a conference in Delhi on July 21. The first National Policy on Education (NPE) was promulgated in 1968 by the Indira Gandhi-led Congress government on the basis of recommendations made by the Kothari Commission (1964-66). But given the low priority accorded to education by all political parties, it remained a pious proclamation. Its three main recommendations — provision of compulsory elementary education to all children to the age of 14; introduction of the ‘three language formula’ (teaching English, official language of each state of the Union, and Hindi) in schools; and increasing annual government (Centre plus states) expenditure on education to six percent of GDP — have yet to be implemented. A constitutional amendment (Article 21-A) and the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009 (aka RTE Act) obliging the State (Central and state governments) to provide free and compulsory education to children aged between 6-14 (not all children to 14) was enacted 41 years later. But instead of focusing on raising the pathetic standards of 1.2 million government schools, the RTE Act has passed part of the…
