Karnataka: Unwarranted haste
Reshma Ravishanker (Bengaluru) One year after the ambitious National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 was presented to the nation by prime minister Narendra Modi on July 29, 2020, the southern state of Karnataka (pop.68.4 million) has become the first countrywide to implement its higher education reform proposals. On August 7, the BJP state government issued a circular to 28 state and 19 private universities and 481 undergrad colleges to implement NEP 2020 in the current academic year 2021-22. Two weeks later on August 23, it announced that admissions into all higher education institutions statewide should be made under NEP 2020 guidelines. Formulated after an interregnum of 34 years and crafted over four years following recommendations of two (TSR Subramaniam and K. Kasturirangan) committees, NEP 2020 decrees four-year undergad degree programmes with a foundational year of liberal arts learning for all streams; multiple certified exit and re-entry options and a system of credits to be stored in a national ABC (academic bank of credits) digital repository; phasing out the system of undergrad colleges affiliating with parent universities, and graded autonomy for undergrad colleges under a ‘light but tight’ regulatory framework. It also mandates establishment of a National Research Foundation and permitting top-ranked foreign universities to set up campuses in India. Given this long list of prescribed reforms, the out-of-the-blue announcement of the BJP government in Karnataka to implement the radical NEP reforms in the current academic year which began in August, has taken the state’s academy by surprise with college and university managements totally unprepared to implement the new policy. While the state government has no doubt earned brownie points with the BJP leadership at the Centre for being first off the blocks, institutional managements are unprepared to implement the new undergrad admission guidelines. Moreover, most of the state’s 481 undergrad colleges, which reopened for in-person classes in August, had already begun the admissions process in July and were forced to put it on hold after the government announced on August 7 that all admissions have to be made through a new Unified University and College Management System (UUCMS). Three days later, the government cancelled admissions under UUCMS because of “technical glitches” in the new hastily prepared software. Knowledgeable academics in the state are amazed that NEP 2020, which calls for the constitution of 32 subject committees to prepare a new curriculum framework; mandates flexibility in subject selection across science, arts and commerce streams and switch to transferable academic credits-based system; multiple exit and entry points during the four-year undergrad study programme; and mandatory skill enhancement courses based on the National Skills Curriculum Framework, has been introduced at such short notice by the state government. Comments Prof. A.S. Seetharamu, former professor of education at the Institute of Social and Economic Change (ISEC), Bengaluru and education advisor to the Karnataka government: “Implementing NEP 2020 requires detailed planning and preparedness. The majority of the state’s government and private colleges are small to medium-size and don’t have trained faculty and necessary infrastructure to introduce inter-disciplinary…
Why NEP 2020 prescribes multi-disciplinary education
Liberal education can unlock all inherent capacities of human beings — intellectual, aesthetic, social, physical, emotional and moral — in an integrated manner, writes Viraj Kumar A key pillar of the National Education Policy (NEP 2020) is liberal (“holistic and multidisciplinary”) education, which sensitises students to the fundamentally interconnected nature of all human knowledge and enquiry. Given the tradition of single-disciplinary undergraduate education over the past seven decades since independence, why NEP 2020 takes a contrary stance requires explanation. There are three principal arguments. First, no education system should deprive learners of holistic mental development associated with broad-based exposure to multiple disciplinary ways of thinking. A liberal education enables learners to develop both sides of the brain — creative/artistic and analytic — which can make learning a joyful experience. Historically, such education has been unaffordable for most students. The Kothari Commission report (1964) acknowledged this inequity and stipulated that “some study of science should become a part of all courses in the humanities and social sciences at the university stage, even as the teaching of science can be enriched by the inclusion of some elements of the humanities and social sciences”. NEP 2020 endorses and extrapolates this viewpoint. Second, the Yash Pal Committee’s report (2009) noted: “We have overlooked that new knowledge and new insights have often originated at the boundaries of disciplines… one could almost say that most serious problems of the world today arise from the fact that we are dominated by striations of expertise with deep chasms in between.” Such striations have altered the course of history. For instance, as Prof. Roddam Narasimha noted in 1999, the British were able to rapidly close Tipu Sultan’s technology advantage in military rockets thanks to stronger interconnects between their scientific and technological communities. Third, for graduates entering a world buffeted by pandemics, climate change, and disruptive technologies such as AI (artificial intelligence), liberal education provides a combination of transferable and uniquely human skills, enabling them to adapt to challenging work environments. Failure to adapt could result, in the staggeringly prescient words of Dr. Vikram Sarabhai, to the “obsolescence of people”. More recently, the historian Yuval Noah Harari has coined a similarly thought-and-action provoking term: the “useless class”. Even if one accepts some or all of these arguments, she may still wonder how an education system that currently fails to provide universal foundational literacy and numeracy can provide meaningful liberal education at scale. A one-size-fits-all approach contradicts NEP 2020’s recognition of the importance of institutional autonomy. At the same time, it is evident that among the vast majority of institutions currently operating within a discipline-specific framework, a substantial number lack the resources to develop suitable liberal education models de novo. In the absence of models, some institutions pay mere lip-service to the idea of liberal education, or develop flawed models (for instance, merely offering a set of unrelated courses). Therefore, it is essential to create baseline models that institutions can adopt and refine over time. Two models proposed in a book…