The National Education Policy (NEP) is being seriously debated among Indian educationists. As a teacher in the higher education sector, I will only focus on some issues related to university education, as mentioned in the policy document.
First, one good suggestion is that of scrapping the MPhil degree. It was meant to hide a lot of disguised unemployed, by spending two more years in the university, given the fact that the Indian economy is unable to absorb these students in proper jobs, not to mention the unemployable nature of the MPhil when the highest academic degree gets precedence over a masters research degree.
The adoption of four years of undergraduate with the provision to directly move on to the doctoral programme is a welcome step. Already, in the United States and in the United Kingdom, undergraduate programmes in basic sciences, arts, humanities and social sciences are of four years.
However, saying so, the NEP has several contradictions which need to be resolved after formal consultations and debates in the Indian parliament. This has been already legitimately raised by several opposition parties.
Secondly, there has been no reference to the discipline of political science in the policy document. Only one small reference is made to political science (paragraph 15.8 on page 43), and that too for teaching in the BEd colleges, which is already in place in the existing system. Hopefully, several professional bodies of political scientists will suggest that adequate attention must be given to opening up new political science departments in 21st-century Indian universities. At least the prime minister, who is trained in the ‘entire discipline of political science’, should comment on this discriminatory usage of language in the policy document.
Thirdly, the principal contradiction is the pulls and pressures of coping with the processes of globalisation, with English still holding the dominant position as the primary medium of instruction and the demands of vernacular education at the localised level. While the vernacularisation of higher education is a democratic goal, it is a practical problem for teachers to teach in the vernacular language at the university level in the absence of quality textbooks in these languages.
Fourthly, while the target of investing 6% of GDP in education is an ideal and an elusive promise without any delivery for ages, there has been no clarity on how to generate funds. Are we going to have a progressive tax regime to create more funds?
Finally, there is a definite recommendation to set up district-based universities. In effect, it will almost look like a situation of imparting mass higher education. Do we actually have such demand for higher education? Do we need mass higher education or mass school education? Are we going to still have the financial distribution of 80:20 between the UGC and the state government? In a regime of GST and fiscal constraints on the state, are we going to have total privatisation of higher education from the back door? These are essential questions to ask.
Privatising the future
In the early 1980s, 8% of the Indian population had access to higher education compared with only 1% in China. However, the global ranking of Chinese universities in the last two decades showed that a focused approach with humongous investments in the education sector had fantastic outcomes. The comparison between China and India is apparent. Both are large Asian countries with large peasant population. Both became a republic in the late 1940s with a hangover of an old civilisation.
The exclusion of Cordova and Al-Azhar universities in Islamic Spain and Egypt in the NEP does not have any justification, given the fact that India could not only learn from its ancient centres of learning but also from the Chinese and other Asian countries. Since there has been no direct allusion towards what is mostly labelled a the ‘saffronisation of education’, the inclusion of Al-Azhar and Cordova would have made the NEP more inclusive. After all, it is always better to learn from other contexts.