The declared vision of the draft National Education Policy (DNEP) organized through a committee chaired with the aid of the former chairman of Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), Dr. Kasturirangan, is ‘…an India concentrated training device that contributes without delay to remodeling our nation sustainably into an equitable and vibrant understanding society, through imparting excessive fine education to all.’(Emphasis in authentic) But the rules encouraged in DNEP will not offer excessive high-quality training to all. Instead, they’ll increase the degree of exclusion that is already any such defining function of India’s schooling device.
There are three fundamental functions of DNEP that it miles unable to camouflage despite its clever attempts to achieve this. These are complete commercialization and corporatization of training; significant centralization of the schooling sector in phrases of policy-making, law, assessment, evaluation, and financing; and a communal slant that assigns to at least one strand of ‘Indian’ traditions privileged fame while displaying no commitment to the constitutional values of secularism, social justice, democracy, and federalism.
In direct competition to treat schooling as a fundamental human proper to be guaranteed by the State, the DNEP makes suggestions that flip training absolutely into a commodity and be sold and offered. Further, it now takes ahead with rapidity in privatization and commercialization of training in any respect levels, which are already underway inside the neoliberal regime winning since the early Nineties in India, however, also seeks to corporatize the schooling quarter. Along this course, the DNEP makes several reputedly grand, however, basically empty declarations with no associated operational commitments. Its recommendations – both about high school schooling and better education – notwithstanding a few affordable feedback on pedagogy, a number of the ills of the existing education device, instructor schooling, and so forth, run counter to inclusive and equitable training in any respect ranges.
At the school stage, it calls to close down small faculties on the grounds of non-viability and to create large school complexes, containing inside one campus a whole gamut of establishments from the ones turning in early formative years care to the ones offering to coach from classes nine to 12 will mean a good deal longer distances and greater expenditure for children to attend faculty, and will result in reduced get entry to for the Underrepresented Groups (URGs), especially ladies.
When it comes to higher education, the DNEP proposals are even greater drastic. It requires remaining down the gadget of association of schools in a given territory to a college. It recommends the simplest 3 sorts of better academic establishments (HEIs): (i) universities usually focussing on studies, (ii) those focussing typically on coaching, and (iii) stand-alone, independent faculties empowered to supply levels without any association to any college. It additionally insists that man or woman HEIs of each type should be big with several heaps of college students and have multiple disciplines. The call to close down the device in which several faculties in an area are affiliated to a college inside the equal region completely fails to comprehend the mutual blessings that the college and its affiliated colleges derive from this machine and its fine impact quality of collegiate schooling. Moreover, it centralizes HEIs geographically, hence raising the private fee of education for the man or woman students who may need to journey a great distance to reach the HEI and might, in truth, bear the expenses of residential lodging in many instances. It talks breezily of lowering the present-day variety of HEIs near 50,000 to a fifth of this variety in a decade or so.
The DNEP swears with the aid of “autonomy,” whereby each HEI turns into a self-reliant, degree-granting group and actions swiftly to a scenario of educational, administrative, and economic autonomy. But this doesn’t mean dedication to the democratic functioning of HEIs. In truth, DNEP way pretty the alternative of this. It sets up a corporate model of control for HEIs. It is the autonomy of the “Board of Governors” and the “CEO” of the HEI that DNEP celebrates. It makes no inspiration for the democratic participation of teachers, students, and non-coaching staff inside the strolling of HEIs. It wishes as little regulation of HEIs, mainly personal ones.
DNEP units a goal of a gross enrolment ratio (GER) at the tertiary education level by 2035 of 50% from its gift stage of 25.8%. It seeks to attain this no longer by increasing brick and mortar HEIs but in general through mass open online guides (MOOCs) and open digital gaining knowledge of (ODL). It pays no heed to evidence that suggests the weak spot of MOOCs. Digital mastering can’t be a choice to elegant room interaction between teachers and college students. It can handiest be a compliment. The pressure on MOOCs and ODL derive directly from the implicit view of the DNEP that authorities cannot find the cash to finance the order of expansion envisaged inside the GER target of fifty%.
