By Dr. Gyan Pathak
Under India’s National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, the country has lost five years. There has been considerable backsliding of the level of education to the children because of ‘back focus error’ in place of ‘right focus’. Educational autonomy of the teachers and institutions has been eroded. Efforts are being going on to reconfigure children’s mind with certain biased backward-looking doctrines and ideas rather than with contemporary reality based bias free forward-looking education. These derailed even the provisions the NEP 2020 which were actually worth welcoming.
The achievements so far are therefore merely statistics, devoid of quality, full of bias, and even far below than what was promised in the NEP 2020, as it was approved by the cabinet five years ago on July 29 replacing the then National Policy on Education, 1986 in place.
From its beginning, the NEP 2020 was ridden with serious lapses, including in vocational education, coupled with deliberate distortion with RSS-Hindutva ideology in the name of nationalism. Policies were based on mere ideas while they should have been based on empirical contemporary realities of life. It has proved to be dangerous so far, and if it continues as usual, India is sure to fall into an abyss full of non-analytical, non-creative, and destructive minds.
Our Prime Minister and the entire RSS-BJP clan had resorted to self back-patting on this policy with undue praise and epithets like ‘major transformational reforms’, ‘result of largest consultation and discussion process of its kind in the country’, ‘immense potential for better learning and employment outcomes’, ‘most comprehensive, radical, and futuristic’ and so on. It seems they are believing in ‘Barnum Effect’, a psychological condition in which one tends to accept whatever they are told to be true even when they are so vague as to be worthless.
The Union government had unwittingly admitted that the policy was not based on the basis of any scientific study of the real requirement of development of a child into a great human being, when Union Minister of HRD has himself said, “2.25 lakh suggestions received after the draft was placed in public domain for consultations.” It made the government’s position clear that they were trying to make yet another experiment with their idea-based education which was just playing with the future of the children of this country. The minister had claimed that it would create the “New India” of PM Narendra Modi, which is nowhere to be seen after five years. PM Modi had promised “New India” by 2022, when failed had shifted to “Vikasit Bharat by 2027”.
When the policy was announced, India was under lockdown for the last four months due to COVID-19. All educational institutions were closed, and therefore could not be implemented. The policy included great words in abundance, but lacked clear cut measures as to how they were to be achieved. After a lapse of one year, the implementation of NEP 2020, started from early August 2021, from Karnataka followed by Madhya Pradesh from August 2021.Lack of logistics, finances, manpower, and so on prevented the full implementation of NEP 2020. It is being implemented in phased manner, and many provisions are yet to be implemented after five years of the announcement of NEP 2020 as on July 30, 2025. Unimplemented provisions are many, the three-language formula is only one of them, which states across the country are struggling with, and non-Hindi speaking states are opposing it.
Even implementation of the most important recommendations is not satisfactory and marred with controversies, which included new institutional framework – the Higher Education Commission of India (HECI) with four verticals based on division of labour rather that based on field of study; National Higher Education Regulatory Council (NHERC) a single point regulator for higher education; National Accreditation Council (NAC) a meta accrediting body for accreditation of institutes; Higher Education Grants Council (HEGC) for funding and financing of higher education and General Education Council (GEC), to frame learning outcomes for higher education programmes including vocational education. GEC was to identify specific skills for preparing well-rounded learners with 21st century skills.
Implementation of the NEP 2020 remained challenging from the beginning, and it never progressed as it was envisaged which included Comprehensive National Curriculum Framework for Teacher Education and National Professional Standards for Teachers (NPST) by 2022; universal foundational literacy and numeracy in primary school and exposure to vocational education to at least 50 per cent of learners through school and higher education system by 2025; and 100 per cent gross enrolment ratio in preschool to secondary level. Vocational education is still far from satisfactory, and there remains, and in many cases widening, mismatch of skills and jobs in the country.
It was claimed that the NEP 2020 was built on the foundational pillars of access, equity, quality, affordability and accountability and was aligned to the 2030 agenda for sustainable development (SDG).The latest SDG report shows India is failing in almost all the targets. It was claimed that the policy would make India global knowledge superpower by making school and college education more holistic, flexible, multidisciplinary, suited for 21st century needs. It was also claimed that the policy did not recognise any barrier in bringing quality and outcome-based education to each and everyone. However, they were too vague to have any sense, since we all know there is no “fair opportunity of education” to all in India.
The new policy included children during their most foundational years, that is 3-5 years, for their care and education. Only a little progress has been reported in only certain areas. Implementation of the NEP 2020 at school to higher education level is also unsatisfactory, primarily due to lack of resources, including finance and manpower. Disadvantaged students have been suffering due to higher cost of education.
On completion of the five years of NEP 2020, the Union Government has enumerated several achievements. However, they are too little to have any perceivable impact on the overall educational scenario in the country. It has been claimed again that NEP 2020 is “rooted in India’s rich civilisational heritage” and here is the catch. The curriculums are being devised to instil RSS-Hindutva bias into the minds of our students, and many of the ideas are backward looking keeping the scientific way of neutral analytical thinking at abeyance. This is the new dynamics of the education system that is being created under the NEP 2020, especially since 2023.
New rules have been rolled out across the country and educational institutions. Most fundamental changes are inclusion of non-traditional educational disciplines at almost all levels of education, saffronisation, and greater push for privatisation making entire education system even more costly and unaffordable to disadvantaged classes. Universal access to equal and quality education, especially in higher education remains in the policy document. Chief focus is on teaching an ‘updated and corrected version’ of Indian history which is nothing but RSS brand of history.
The NEP 2020 had created controversy, and states like West Bengal, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and Maharashtra are yet to agree to implement it. Supreme Court of India has refused to intervene and said that the court can’t give direction to any state to implement the NEP 2020, which is indicative of the fact everything is not good with NEP 2020.
Only a few reforms have actually entered into our educational system in the last five years, while most of the other proposed provisions are either stuck into several financial, logistic, and manpower constraints, or are being badly implemented. Centre, states, and Institutions and academicians are divided and tussle is going on its implementation. All these make a case for an urgent revamp of NEP 2020. (IPA Service)
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