National Education Policy 2020
Rationale:
India’s population below the age of 14 years is at about 28.6%. Over the next few years, this population will enter the workforce and contribute to the growth and development of the country. The nature of jobs that are being created is mostly in the tertiary sector which needs a higher level of education or education that helps these young men and women adapt to the work that is demanded and deliver the results. India’s education system, though respected and revered in some corners has not delivered the kind of results that would help its large population get a decent education and work in jobs that pay decent wages.
Successive education policies have progressively moved the needle in the right direction given the kind of challenges that they faced at that time. But, none of them has been able to fully achieve their stated impact. And, the governments over the years have ignored the recommendation from the Kothari commission that at least 6% of the GDP should be spent on education. Instead, the government has cut down expenditure on education — primary and higher education in the last 7–8 years.
This policy comes at a time when we are amidst rapid technological and social change and attempts to make the education system respond to the demands that will be placed on the future generation.
Conceptual Framework
The policy touches on all the right keys to move education as a whole — from ECCE to tertiary education — to a newer and better orbit. The intent of the policy is in the right direction to move from a ‘rote’ education system to a more ‘learning’ focussed education system. The focus on multi-disciplinary learning or at least enabling opportunities for multi-disciplinary learning is a welcome move from the current rigid and forced separation between subjects and specialisations. The focus on the key stakeholder — the teachers — and their capacities and continuous improvement in their capacities are crucial and receive impetus from this policy. The disaggregation of schooling years into 4 different stages and the method of integration of these stages into one whole is well articulated and defined.
However, there are certain ideas that are intuitively appealing but have been left without much detail — like the idea of a school complex. Though this has been tried in states like Karnataka, its efficacy in terms of reaching the students and the method of arriving at a convenient location to have the school complex is not detailed. This can be used by the line bureaucracy to suit their whims and fancies when they implement this initiative on the ground.
Additionally, there are a few areas that appear to have been force-fitted into this forward-looking policy. While it talks about taking India into the ‘knowledge society’ and enabling it with ‘21st-century skills’, it also forcefully (not contextually) mentions the use of local/mother tongue until 8th grade which goes against the whole idea of multilingualism that the policy has dedicated a full section to. This is against the 21st-century skills that the policy document has as an underpinning throughout. The other force-fitted aspect is the reference to the ‘rich heritage of ancient and eternal Indian knowledge and thought’. There is no denying that ancient Indian knowledge should serve as a base for what we do but to refer to it without a compelling reason is completely out of place and appears to have been done to please political bosses.
Critique
Finances and sourcing:
The policy makes a call for raising the spending on education to 6% of GDP (as envisaged originally in the 1968 policy, reiterated by the 1986 policy and reaffirmed by the 1992 policy). However, there are no suggestions as to where the finances will come from and a detailed road map on how and on what aspects of education this money will be utilised. It just mentions that these resources, if allocated, will go towards one-time expenditures primarily related to infrastructure and resources and six thrust areas that it has identified.
In the context of ever-competing causes that a government is faced with, a clear, purpose-driven, well-articulated, and timeline-based monetary requirement will go a long way in putting pressure on the government for allocations. Such a high-level statement that 6% of GDP will be spent to set up infrastructure and run some existing schemes is unlikely to move the government or a country’s people to put the money where it is needed. In a scenario where expenditure on education is declining, it is pertinent to make a case to ramp up the expenditure in a planned manner.
In addition to this, it has not shown any details or data on how we have fared over the years with respect to spending on education and its impact. For instance, a year-wise mapping of the variation of actual expenditure on education vis-a-vis the stated 6% expenditure and on what purpose would have been more meaningful in the policy document. It would have helped the policymakers focus on the right set of issues plaguing the raising and spending of money.
FYUP & MEES: An Avoidable Mess?
Higher education in India needs reforms. The NEP’s core objective for higher education is to make it “holistic” and “multidisciplinary” — these words appear 41 and 70 times respectively in the 60-page document. As a broad objective, “holistic and multidisciplinary education” (HME) is uncontroversial and even welcome, but the devil is in the details. The NEP ties the goal of HME to three specific reforms: A four-year undergraduate programme (FYUP); a “multiple exit/entry system” (MEES); and a nationwide Academic Bank of Credit (ABC) system for storing and transferring credits1.
The policy is unclear on how the FYUP and MEES will work. Under FYUP, a certificate will be awarded after one year, a diploma after two, and different Bachelors’ degrees after the third and fourth years. As stated in a July 2021 UGC document, the MEES has three aims: Reducing the dropout rate; providing flexibility and a wider choice of subjects to students; and enabling credit transfers for lateral movement or re-entry2.
These are worthwhile objectives, but the policy has not presented how FYUP combined with MEES will achieve them.
If the dropout rate remains the same after the first year, just because students have a certificate after the first year, will they be any better than a dropout? How is it adding to the policy’s goal of enhancing learning & creating a knowledge economy and readying India for a leader’s role? These are questions that the policy has left unanswered that have potential to upend the policy’s intentions and results.
The rationale behind the FYUP also needs to be questioned. The three-year programme has delivered the desired results in preparing the young population for the job market and beyond. The FYUP appears to be a blind imitation of the undergraduate programmes in the United States of America.
It would be better if the intent of MEES and FYUP is restated and the solution arrived at after consultation with the core stakeholders.
Regulatory Framework: Are We Asking The Right Questions?
The policy document starts off on the right note by calling out for a regulatory rethink in the education sector. It also makes the right move of separating power — accreditations, funding, and academic standard setting — between different regulatory bodies. However, it combines all of them under one umbrella agency — the Higher Education Council of India (HECI).
The HECI is likely to have four verticals under its umbrella, including:
a) National Higher Education Regulatory Council, intended to be a single-point regulator for the higher education sector
b) National Accreditation Council, which will deal with the accreditation of institutions
c) Higher Education Grants Council, which will be tasked with carrying out funding and financing of higher education; and
d) General Education Council, the final vertical, is expected to have a more academic based-role, as it will frame expected learning outcomes for higher education programmes. Foreign universities coming into the country will also fall under the purview of this framework.
While the Universities Grants Commission and the All India Council for Technical Education have played a major role in this direction until now, questions pertaining to the role of the University Grants Commission (UGC) and All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) remain unanswered under the new policy3.
While some ‘big’ regulatory issues have been addressed (though not completely), the regulatory challenges at the state level and at the primary education level have been left completely untouched. The current arrangement at the state level is such that the department of education, department of higher education, department of medical education, and technical education directorate are all part of the ‘regulatory matrix’ that ‘controls’ education. There is absolutely no mention of how these institutions would function and contribute to achieving the impact envisaged by the policy.
Another larger policy issue that this policy skips is to re-look at the need for having education in the concurrent list. Given that it is in the states where the majority of the action happens on education, the union government’s role must be limited more to being the proverbial ‘friend, philosopher and guide’ to the states. And, of course, the union government can run and maintain schools, institutes of education and excellence, guide on syllabi, pedagogy, and look at the larger picture and direction in which education should move into. The policy could have suggested some changes to set right this anomaly.
Use Of Technology:
Technology will play an extraordinarily critical role in catering to the learning requirements of a large student population. The policy recognises this imperative. But fails to elaborate on how technology should be leveraged, who are the critical actors in this, and what is the role of different stakeholders, especially the private sector.
Apart from spelling out that there will be a National Educational Technology Forum (NETF) and identifying four functions of the forum, there is precious little on how technology will be used in the education of children, training of teachers and in the general administration of education. It delves into rhetoric in some places where it says ‘Our present education system’s inability to cope with these rapid and disruptive changes places us individually and nationally at a perilous disadvantage in an increasingly competitive world.’
There are existing platforms (DAKSH, SWAYAM) that are already being deployed as pilots in various parts of the country. The policy could have used the lessons learned from these pilots and used them to extrapolate the role that technology should play in students’ and teachers’ learning. Another important question that the policy skips answering is how technology can lead to learning outside of a school and how the government plans to recognise such learning and integrate such learners into mainstream higher education. The silence of policy on these aspects clearly indicates a lack of foresight and not enough thought being poured into the role of technology in education and leveraging the private sector’s contribution to reaching out to the unreached.
Performance Of The Policy So Far
One of the steps that kicked off the policy implementation was of asking the states to prepare position papers on National Education Policy. Every state has been asked to submit their respective position papers under 26 various headings with regard to NEP. These are later uploaded on the National Council of Education Research and Training’s (NCERT) website. The central government then uses these recommendations to bring about the National Curriculum Framework4.
The position paper of each state represents their stand which can be used to create a state’s curriculum as well4.
The rhetorical references to ancient Indian knowledge, rootedness and pride in India and its ancient learning in the policy have taken an ugly twist. This has led to unwanted deviation from the focus of providing quality primary ad higher education. The Karnataka position paper says, “Encouraging an attitude of questioning and not merely accepting whatever the textbooks say as infallible truth, with a clear foundation of how knowledge generation takes place and how fake news such as Pythagoras theorem, apple falling on Newton’s head etc are created and propagated.”5
We can only imagine what the position papers from all the states can look like from the Karnataka example or controversy. And, how much effort and time this will take to bring all the states to a common understanding and then a common curriculum framework.
The policy’s unwanted, rhetorical chartering into ancient tradition, and culture as points that guide this policy could have been avoided. This would have forced all states to quickly put up their position papers without any controversy and then focus on the implementation of the curriculum.
What Could Have Been Better?
The policy identifies the right set of goals to aspire for — human potential development, national development, scientific advancement, leadership on the global stage, etc. and to a large extent identifies the right levers of change that India should be working on to make this policy successful — regulatory overhaul, focus on the individual, making learning holistic and fun, starting off education from ECCE, teacher training, etc. What it fails to do is to clearly articulate how these levers of change will operate together as a coherent whole and how much money is needed for these levers over the next one to two decades.
Any policy must have a well-defined theory of change with clearly articulated goals. Failure in being clear of the expected outcomes or assumptions made and how these actions fit into the larger ecosystem they function under and failure to create the right incentives for different stakeholders will lead to the policy failing to deliver the envisaged results.
There is an inkling that the assumptions that have been made — we get a sense that the state governments’ interests have not been given enough weightage, the union government has assumed the driver’s position and expects everyone else to follow its word — are not completely rooted in reality. The operation of the policy within the ecosystem has not been thoroughly thought through in this policy and not all stakeholders’ incentives have been taken care of. So, the likelihood of a false start, small pockets of success and large pockets of failure, and regional disparities in implementation are high and we have to prepare for them with alternate strategies and plans that are aligned to the intent of the policy.
