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 the schooling device in India.
There are three fundamental functions of DNEP that its miles not able to camouflage despite its clever attempts to achieve this. These are: complete commercialisation and corporatisation of training; significant centralisation 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 a privileged fame, while displaying no commitment to the constitutional values of secularism, social justice, democracy and federalism.
In direct competition to treating schooling as a fundamental human proper to be guaranteed by the State, the DNEP makes suggestions that flip training absolutely into a commodity, to be sold and offered. Further, it now not only takes ahead with rapidity the manner of privatization and commercialization of training in any respect levels, which are already under way inside the neoliberal regime winning since the early Nineties in India, however additionally seeks to corporatise the schooling quarter. Along this course, the DNEP makes several reputedly grand however basically empty declarations with no associated operational commitments. Its recommendations – both with regard to highschool schooling and about 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, its call to close down small faculties on 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, and recommends simplest 3 sorts of better academic establishments (HEIs): (i) universities focussing usually 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 a multiple of 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 at the 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 should bear the expenses of residential lodging in many instances. It talks breezily of lowering the present-day variety of HEIs that is 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 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 extent of tertiary education by 2035 of 50% from its gift stage of 25.8%. It seeks to attain this no longer by way of increasing brick and mortar HEIs but in general through mass open on line 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 an alternative choice to elegance room interaction between teachers and college students. It can handiest be a complement. The pressure on MOOCs and ODL derives 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%.
