2016 Much Ado About Nothing Year in Education

In a year marked by controversies and agitations on university campuses countrywide, the critical issue of preschool, school and higher education reform was neglected by the ruling BJP/NDA and state governments -Summiya Yasmeen 2016 was a status quo year for Indian education. In a 12-month interregnum marked by inconsequential controversies and agitations on university campuses countrywide, the critical issue of preschool, school and higher education reform was neglected by the ruling BJP/NDA and state governments countrywide. The biggest education promise made by the Narendra Modi government of enacting a National Education Policy (NEP), 2016 — three decades after the National Policy on Education 1986 was promulgated — came to nought with the Union human resource development (HRD) ministry side-stepping the inconvenient recommendations of the five-member T.S.R. Subramanian Committee for Evolution of the National Policy on Education 2016. The constructive 217-page Subramanian Committee Report, which forthrightly calls for the Central government to revise its financial priorities and raise annual expenditure (Centre plus states) to 6 percent of GDP “without any further delay”, and confer full autonomy upon higher education institutions (anathema to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) — the acknowledged ideological parent organisation of the BJP), has in effect been shelved. Union HRD minister Prakash Javadekar has since expressed the intent to constitute another more amenable committee to submit a new NEP 2016 policy draft. Yet the highlight of the recently concluded year was the ouster in July of BJP fire-brand Smriti Irani from Shastri Bhavan, Delhi, headquarters of the Union HRD ministry. During her two-year tenure, Irani hit headlines for reckless interference with the administration and autonomy of the country’s few centres of higher ed excellence, rather than for constructive reform initiatives. In a sudden cabinet reshuffle in July, Irani was shunted to the Union textiles ministry and Prakash Javadekar, hitherto Union minister of state for environment, forests and climate change in the Narendra Modi-led government, was promoted to Shastri Bhavan. Although relative calm has returned in the HRD ministry after Irani’s transfer, little progress has been made on the issue of overdue reforms in the country’s fast-obsolescing education sector across the spectrum. On the contrary, toeing the RSS line Javadekar dismissed the Subramanian Committee Report as “just another input” for framing NEP 2016, and has reportedly shortlisted more malleable members of a new committee to prepare a new policy draft. However on the credit side, under Javadekar’s leadership the HRD ministry has reworked Irani’s controversial IIM Bill, 2015, which proposed to drastically dilute the academic and financial autonomy of the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs), to confer greater autonomy on these globally respected B-schools promoted and subsidised by the Central government. Moreover the HRD ministry has finalised an amendment to s.16 of the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act (aka RTE Act), 2009, to remove the no-detention of children in elementary education (classes I-VIII) provision. The general consensus among educationists was that this well-intentioned provision had depressed learning outcomes of children countrywide. In late October, the…