New Education Policy 2016: Subramanian committee report love’s labour lost?

In the face-off between entrenched leftists and ‘invader’ right-wing intellectuals and academics on university campuses countrywide, the detailed and constructive recommendations of the Subramanian Committee have little chance of being incorporated into the New Education Policy 2016:  Dilip Thakore Two years after it was first proposed by former firebrand Union minister for human resource development Smriti Irani, and almost three decades after the National Education Policy (NEP) 1986 was promulgated, a cloud of uncertainty hovers over NEP 2016. To her credit on October 30 last year, eight months before she was dramatically shifted to the textiles ministry in July where she has since maintained an uncharacteristically low profile, Irani constituted a high-powered committee chaired by former Union cabinet secretary T.S.R. Subramanian and comprising educationist J.S. Rajput, bureaucrats Shailaja Chandra, Sevaram Sharma and Sudhir Mankad to suggest the shape and contours of NEP 2016. Working with unusual speed under the direction of Subramanian, an alumnus of Imperial College, London and Harvard University, USA, who was inducted into the powerful IAS (Indian Administrative Service) — the 5,000-strong fraternity which in effect manages this fractious democracy — in 1961, and rose to the highest position of Union cabinet secretary (1996-98), the Committee for Evolution of the New Policy on Education (aka NPE) 2016 completed its report on April 30 this year, and submitted it to Irani on May 28. The detailed 217-page report diagnoses the myriad ills of the country’s education system (KG-Ph D) which has suffered continuous under-funding and neglect (perhaps because of the pathetic failure of the world’s first official birth control programme) and the reality that contemporary India grudgingly hosts the world’s largest child population (480 million). It proposes comprehensive reform, including a forthright call to increase the annual national outlay (Centre plus states) on education from the average 3.5-4 percent of GDP of the past 69 years to 6 percent “without any further delay”. The Subramanian Committee’s report ran into a storm ab initio because his first recommendation to the BJP-led NDA government at the Centre was to make the report public for debate and discussion. This perfectly reasonable suggestion was turned down by Irani on the ground that the report is “the property of 110,000 villages, over 5,000 blocks, over 500 districts, and 20 states, which have entrusted it to us with the confidence that any recommendation that comes to the Centre will be shared with them before it is made into a draft policy”. The reluctance of the BJP government to make public the report, which is obviously too liberal for the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) the Hindu majoritarian ideological mentor organisation of the BJP, is understandable. The prime objective of the RSS is to transform secular India into a Hindu majority rashtra (nation). Moreover, it has promoted and runs over 17,000 Vidya Bharati primary-secondary schools countrywide apart from 15 teacher training and 12 degree colleges, providing the type of “nationalist” education RSS believes the country needs, to over 2.2 million students. In the circumstances, the progressive education…