NEP, All Smoke And Mirror
Nilotpal Basu
Any worthwhile policy making has to start with an objective assessment of existing ground realities. Proceeding from this, discerning the challenges, policies must then set out a road-map for overcoming these. However, despite the Prime Minister’s loud claims that the New Education Policy (2020) was preceded by intense research that lasted around 3-4 years, no data or reference to these appear in the policy document. This leads us to the inescapable conclusion that more than anything else, this is a vision statement.
The PM has uncharacteristically been pitching for the NEP, asserting that it faces no opposition. Nothing could be so further away from the truth. This is the third version of the policy, which has been cleared by the Cabinet — the first, in 2017, was summarily rejected in the Parliament; the second, in 2019, was forced to be amended within a day, based on differences regarding the language question. The draft version had prompted thousands of critical responses from every section of stakeholders.
From the 68th page of NEP (2020) published on the government’s website, it is apparent that although education figures in the Concurrent List of the Indian Constitution, the document does not reflect any of the serious disagreements put across by state governments, the academia or student bodies. With these consigned to waste bins, the PM must obviously be living in an echochamber of conformists.
Taking advantage of the severe restrictions on public protest during the pandemic, in its familiar aggressive pursuit of anti-democratic and anti-federal agenda, the Modi government is aiming to unabashedly promote corporate intrusion through NEP 2020. Such a crisis-laden atmosphere seems to have reinforced his illusion about the absence of active resistance as well. With the document itself setting out a timeline which will go beyond 2030, the tearing hurry in finalising it without public discussion and more importantly, a discussion in the Parliament, clearly establishes their unilateral authoritarian drive which betrays anxiety over the possible opposition and resistance.
The RSS is euphoric. Reportedly, during the consultation over NEP, the most influential voice was that of the Sangh’s. Their affiliates were even part of the drafting process meetings which took place with the education ministers of some BJP-ruled states, representatives of the Central Government and the NEP Drafting Committee Chairman, K. Kasturirangan. The RSS’s emphasis on what they claim to be “ancient Indian knowledge” has been incorporated in the final version of the policy document.
Fundamental Departure From The Past
Education has always been recognised as a powerful instrument for national development and a means for realising the potential of people. In fact, the battle to ensure equal access to education was aimed against the exclusive control of elites through the British colonial policy of limiting mass education. Therefore, this battle had merged seamlessly with the struggle to achieve Indian freedom. Post-Independence, this basic thrust on universal mass education had found its way into the Constitution and its directive principles. Born in the crucible of the freedom struggle, the Constitution also recognised the rich diversity of the Indian society — its multi-lingual multi-cultural nature, the caste stratifications, discriminations and exclusions, the historical lags suffered by dalits, tribals, as well as the status of girl children.
Post-Independence, education policies aimed towards overcoming these handicaps through the principle of social justice and affirmative action towards reinforcing the secular democratic character of the republic, based on equal citizenship. Divorced from such an anti-colonial legacy, NEP (2020) has completely broken away. In stressing the pre-eminence of the Indian past without detailing the course of such an assimilation, the ‘Vision of NEP 2020’ seems to be to “to instil among the learners a deep rooted pride in being Indian, not only in thought but also in spirit, intellect and deeds” and “curriculum and pedagogy from the foundational stage onwards will be redesigned in the Indian ethos”. (Para 4.29)
However, the document does not define ‘Indian’. Bulldozing the country’s rich diversity and ignoring still persistent realities like social stratification and exclusion, NEP (2020) does not elaborate on how it will relate to the changing landscape of global knowledge commons; it does not underline the need to nurture scientific temper. With eloquent silence, the policy has stopped short of spelling out the Hindutva straightjacket. No wonder that RSS is ecstatic!
Centralisation: Death Knell for Federalism, Autonomy and Democratic Participation
Even before the new policy has begun its formal journey, the central thrust has been in naked display through the audacious insistence of the UGC to implement its inflexible prescription for holding final semester examination for potential graduates and post graduates across the country — denying leeway to states and respective universities for credible evaluation, as well as avoiding discrimination based on the digital divide. It is ironic that the very Act which the Union Government is using to pursue its unilateral agenda empowers the states to exercise a flexible approach. But, NEP 2020 will signal the end of such resistance. The policy will put in place extraordinary centralisation in decisions on every aspect of Indian education, from early childcare to research.
The Constitution makers had placed education under the state list in the Schedule. The Emergency and the 42nd Amendment transferred this from the State to the Concurrent List. But, even with this change, school education was managed by the states through respective state school boards. The NEP virtually abandons this. In the case of higher education, the role of the central government will be absolutely overarching. Now the apex of higher education governance will be assumed by the Higher Education Commission of India (HECI), superseding the roles of UGC, AICTE and other such bodies. Headed by the Prime Minister, it will have 12 government appointees and 2 academics alone. The four parallel streams of structures, dealing with funding, accreditation, standard setting and examinations, will function under the HECI. For research, the policy proposes a national research foundation, which will take over all decisions on advanced research funding from a range of overlapping institutions, thus concentrating all conceivable powers for guiding research activities.
The federal arrangements following the 1976 Amendment will be altogether eliminated as the NEP 2020 does not lay out any comprehensive framework for redeeming democratic obligations under the Concurrent List of the Constitution, related to power sharing between the centre and the states. The federal character of India, as ‘Union of States’ under the Constitution, is already under great stress due to the centralisation of taxation powers of GST, the abrogation of special protection to states and the dismantling of the Planning Commission. The NEP 2020 proposes to further centralise this anti-federal trend.
The language policy and the disproportionate priority for Sanskrit, not as a subject but in competing with different Indian languages, is aimed to institutionalise this arrangement, while further loading against non-Hindi Indian languages.
Apart from centre-state issues, the NEP also takes away the role of democratic participation and engagement of the academic community, students and the society at large, to address the unevenness in our development process. The university-laboratory linkage with the community, which has been hitherto recognised as a basis for our education and research activities, will be replaced by a highly centralised, bureaucracy-driven process. Elected senates, syndicates and academic councils will be substituted by HECI.
Over the years, the demand to grant more ‘academic autonomy’ is now being finally and decisively abandoned. NITI Ayog’s ‘Three Year Action Agenda’ (2017) and the UGC’s Graded Autonomy Regulations (2018) had formally spoken of autonomy for HEIs. The NEP 2020 continues with the same refrain. But the ‘spirit of autonomy’ will be primarily predicated by ‘financial autonomy’ — only a euphemism for fast-track privatisation.
Refashioning Education
The Prime Minister’s unusual interest in the NEP (2020) is unsurprising, with gross failures in handling the pandemic and the catastrophic downturn of the Indian economy even before the pandemic arrived before us. Therefore, more rhetoric! His sales pitch hinges on the argument that the NEP (2020) will ensure ‘job creators’ instead of ‘job seekers’.
Perhaps his speech is prompted by the proposed fragmentation of both the school and the higher education process, with several exit points and variable degrees and certificates. These proposals are being flaunted as ‘flexibility’ and ‘choice’. The absurdity of such an argument can be understood from the fact that the first ‘exit point’ is after class VI in school, where it is proposed that a child at the age of 12 will learn through ‘fun and work’ as an intern without pay. If this is not legitimising child labour in a country where there is prohibition of any labour below the age of 14, what is!
In all these Post-Independence years, the dropout rates in schools and higher education have been a major concern for education policy makers. This concern has prompted attempts to overcome socio-economic inequality by inclusive affirmative action. For example, only about 6% of STs, 8% of SCs, 9% of Muslims and 10% of OBCs are able to complete schooling till class 12 among children who are admitted in class I. This massive exclusion from schools, as well as, higher education is now being glossed over through the frequent use of terms like ‘exit/entry option’ and ‘lifelong learning’ and ‘flexibility’. Therefore, it is not surprising that Reservation does not find a single mention in the entire text of the document.
Frontal Assault on Public Funded Inclusive Education
Notwithstanding the PM’s rhetoric, which conveniently overlooks the horrific conditions of employment, where thousands of PhDs and post graduates jostle for recruitment to Group D posts in the government sector, the claim of offering ‘exit points’ is pure delusion. Employability and employment are completely different propositions, as much as ‘job seeking’ and ‘job creation’. The fact of the matter is that the NEP 2020 constitutes a frontal assault on public funded education.
Notwithstanding the pious commitment to increase public expenditure on education to 6% of the GDP, the document does not clarify how much this expenditure burden will be shouldered by the Union Government, which collects 4% education cess on income, and how the cost of expansion of pre-primary education for ages 3-6 years will be managed by the severely resource-constrained Anganwadis under state governments. As per the current record, the Central Government’s budgetary expenditure and categorisation of higher education institutions (HEIs) give away the game. Research universities, teaching universities and autonomous colleges aim to actually open the floodgates of privatisation. For example, autonomous colleges will be encouraged to ‘consolidate’ potentially un-viable institutions.
That the NEP is not based on any concrete study becomes further clear from the fact that the policy has pegged such autonomous colleges at the minimum student strength of 3000. The All India Higher Education Survey shows of all the 39,000 colleges in the country, at present only 4.3%, have this prescribed strength. The promise of ‘light but tight’ regulation will facilitate private promoters to go berserk on collecting fees. To ensure access to higher education, the challenge is to guarantee affordability. Access to education in India is abysmally low at all levels compared even to other developing economies.
A similar exclusionary approach is evident in the proposal for cluster development in school education. The NEP 2020 proposes that schools which are spread over in remote habitations are complex to manage and therefore must be clubbed together to form a ‘cluster’. Apart from running contrary to the ideas of the Right to Education Act, which stipulates that every habitation must have a school within a radius of 1 km, such a proposal repeats ideas of multinational consulting agencies, which under the stewardship of BJP-led state governments, forcefully closed thousands of schools. Legitimising drop outs, the closing down of institutions to slash infrastructure costs and pushing large scale online education, while opening up for major privatisation/commercialisation, is the preferred route proposed in the new policy.
In contrast to this is Kerala, where students of private schools are opting to join appropriately publicly funded institutions.
New Paradigm: Abandoning Goal of Modern Democratic Secular Republic
The NEP 2020 sets out a blueprint that is directly against the path of empowering Indian education suited for a democratic secular republic. It is a rejection of ‘unity in diversity’, attempted to achieve through decentralisation put in place in order to address the social, economic and cultural realities that exist in India’s different regions. It unabashedly promotes the vision of an Indian past characterised by caste hierarchies and a backward looking, unscientific orthodoxy. There is a need to draw from the past — but a past which has seen confluences of different cultures and knowledge systems. More importantly, we need to imbibe the rich educational experiences — which continue to inform our battles geared to throw off the colonial yoke — initiated by Vidyasagar, the Phules, Rabindranath Tagore and several others. We cannot allow our precious education system to be harked back to an unrecognisable ancient past influenced by an RSS-driven Hindutwa ‘vision’ with the accompanying quest for obnoxious corporate profit.
Nilotpal Basu is a former General Secretary of the Students’ Federation of India (SFI).
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