India And Education

Published in

MUNner’s Daily

9 min readMar 7, 2021

#opinion

Science has shown us that the universe originated nearly 14 billion years ago. The age of our planet earth is around 4.5 billion years. Our first ancestors appeared roughly six million years ago. And human civilizations have been around for a good 12,000 years, which as you can see is barely a few seconds on the geological clock. In that short amount of time, we have managed to create quite an uproar with our achievements. To quote Stephen Hawking,

“We are just an advanced breed of monkeys, on a minor planet, of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special”.

Needless to say, we have come a very long way from tree houses and cave dwellings to huge villas and skyscrapers. But the change was not uniform, leaving some regions across the globe underdeveloped, while the development in some regions were huge. A large part of the human population on earth live in poverty. The 2020 global multidimensional poverty index states that: Across 107 developing countries, 1.3 billion people — 22 percent — live in multidimensional poverty. That’s as much as the population of India .

The USA became a majority urban country in 1920, and China in 2010. Even by 2030, India will only be 42% urban .

Development of a nation not only depends on its resources but also on the extent to which it’s people can efficiently utilize the scarce resources. This is where the role of education is so important; therefore we have got to focus on education to transform our lives.

Now, let us look at some facts and also the history of education in India so far.

Education and History

It has been 74 years since the star of independence dawned on the horizon of Indian history, and until now, the government has sponsored a variety of programs to address the problems of illiteracy in both rural and urban India. The resolution on scientific policy was adopted by the government of Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister. The Nehru Government sponsored the development of High quality scientific education institutions such as the IITs.

Based on the report and recommendations of the Kothari Commission (1964–1966), the government of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi announced the first National Policy on Education in 1968, which called for a “radical restructuring” and proposed equal educational opportunities in order to achieve national integration and greater cultural and economic development. The second NPE was introduced by Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1986, and the third by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2020 .

India became one among 135 countries to make education a fundamental right of every child when the Right to Education Act (RTE) came into force on 1st April 2010. The title of the RTE Act incorporate the words ‘free and compulsory’. ‘Compulsory education’ casts an obligation on the appropriate Government and local authorities to provide and ensure admission, attendance and completion of elementary education by all children in the 6-14 age group.

India witnessed a hike in the literacy rate during the decade of 1990. According to the Census of 2011, “every person above the age of 7 years who can read and write with understanding in any language is said to be literate”. According to this criterion, the 2011 survey holds the national literacy rate to be 74.04% , 82.14% for males and 65.46% for females.

The Centers of Learning

Education in India is primarily provided by public schools (controlled and funded by the government at three levels: central, state and local) and private schools. The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) was set up in 1962 as a national level board of education in India for public and private schools, controlled and managed by the Union Government of India. While the State Board is restricted to states. Even the syllabus of states differ, and that is completely the decision of the State based authority to determine the syllabus. The National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) was set up in 1961 as an autonomous organization to advise both the union and state governments on formulating and implementing educational policies.

The Reality

While more than 95 percent of children attend primary school, just 40 percent of Indian adolescents attend secondary school. Since 2000, the World Bank has committed over $2 billion to education in India. And the National education budget is 3.6% of the GDP ($ 120 billion). Even though India is slowly yet surely inching closer to universal education, the quality of its education has been questioned, particularly in its government run school systems. Some of the reasons for the poor quality include the absence of around 25% of teachers every day.

The new National Education Policy (NEP 2020) introduced by the central government is expected to bring profound changes to education in India. The policy approved by the Union Cabinet of India on 29 July 2020, aims to transform India’s education system by 2021.

The major change envisaged by the policy will be in early education where 10+2 format will be replaced by 5+3+3+4 (or 5+3+3+2+2 or 3+2+3+3+2+2). 5+3+3+4 refers to 5 foundational years, whether in an anganwadi, or preschool. This is followed by 3 years of preparatory learning from classes 3 to 5. This is followed by a middle stage that is of 3 years length and finally a 4 year secondary stage until class 12 or 18 years of age.

Now let’s look at some (il)logical and (ir)radical arguments .

1. Centralization of schools

India needs to have a centralized education system all throughout the country. To stop the practice of state run school systems and encourage a more standardized system for the whole country, to have all the state schools put under the same board like the CBSE or ICSE.

It’s a known fact that the teachers at government run schools are paid well in addition to other lifetime allowances. But it’s a question of doubt whether the toughness of the syllabus they teach is in par with the syllabus taught by CBSE or ICSE teachers who are comparatively paid less when seen from a certain perspective. Hey, it is nice that the government school teachers are paid well, after all they are doing excellent service to the country teaching the young minds who are the future of the nation in addition to other services like election duties. But one may think that the government should consider training the teachers for a tougher syllabus than the ones that are currently being taught in the government LP and UP schools. In other words, it’s more like upgrading the syllabus of our government schools and also bringing them all under a single central board.

All the students across the nation will be writing all India board exams and we will be closer to making sure that every child has the right to the best education available in our country. We will be giving a better chance to everyone, especially the poor and underprivileged, like the children of the farmers who are the backbone of our nation .

2. Educational qualification of party workers

India, the world’s fifth-largest economy, has been the most populous democracy in the world for a very long time. The National parties are the INC, CPI, CPI(M), and the BJP. And also there is the AAP which is the fastest growing party in India now and also hoping to become a national party soon. So every five years these parties contest in the parliamentary general elections trying to win the minds of the people to form the central government.

The days prior to the election day presents quite a chaotic scenario. The party workers all across the country work tirelessly organizing campaign rallies to promote and publicize their leaders. Many of these party workers depend only on politics for their income throughout their lives, hoping to get promoted to senior positions within the party someday.

A large part of the youth of India today is joining some party of their choice right away. They do not care about pursuing higher education or any other job. These people grow to become the big political leaders of the future who will rule the country bringing about new laws or changing the old ones. So don’t you think there should be strict laws in place to ensure that any man or woman can not join a party right away and that only citizens who have some minimum educational qualification (undergraduate in any field of study ) and have worked a job before should be allowed to join any party when they wish to? But we also can’t deny a person ( who is serious enough to have a motive to join politics) his right to join a party just because he lacks the required educational qualification. In that case, we can have a screening test in place to test the person on the basis of his social values. We will be making sure that people who really want to make some changes in society and want to ensure the betterment of the lifestyle of the common man are the ones sitting in the chairs of power.

3. The options

The current school system is that a 15 year old, after passing his or her 10th grade board exams, is gonna have to choose between certain subjects that will decide the rest of his future. The main subject groups are science, humanities, commerce, etc., and the choice is between subjects like computer science, biology and economics. But many state and central boards have given children the freedom to opt extra subjects in addition to their main subject group. The children who are interested in learning many more subjects for their last two academic years can easily go for it. But one may think that it would be nice if a child can get to learn every major subject, instead of having to choose between them.

In this era of technology everyone is competitive about widening their skill set and gaining experience in multiple fields of study. And it would be good if a person knew the theory of evolution, working principles behind an LED or a transformer, how to write a computer program and also world class economics. Having an understanding about each of these subjects, they can choose to become something of their liking such as a doctor, engineer, scientist, economist, accountant or a computer programmer. But it is not possible to inculcate more subjects into the syllabus with our current two year senior secondary school system and we would have to extend it to three or four years. And also we would have to lose the ‘final exam’ system and change to the semester exam model like it is done in colleges.

All these arguments may sound folly, nonetheless the only intention was to point out that, in a field as big as education, we have to constantly revolutionize and rejig the system in order to identify and eradicate the glitches that are standing between us and a better developed nation.

Disclaimer: We are a platform which allows all views to be represented without bias or discrimination. This piece is not to be judged upon as the final stance of MUNner’s daily or MEC MUN Society.

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