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A Country in Search of an Education Policy
The draft National Education Policy, out in May 2019, when accepted, will be the third education policy document of the country, coming after a gap of 33 years since the last one. Some of the relevant concerns, such as around the question of provisioning for good quality universal education, are examined, and focusing more specifically on school education.
If we assume that the principle of good quality universal education, at all levels, ought to be the lodestar of an education policy, India’s record has been quite dissatisfying, to say the least, throughout the period since the country embarked on nation-building after independence from British colonial rule. In fact, even at the elementary education level, legal recognition of education as a right came well after 60 years of independence, with the enactment of the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act (RTE) in 2009, which itself was seriously flawed in many ways, as we have referred to in a couple of pieces in this journal (Jha and Parvati 2010, 2014). India’s quest for a comprehensive, coherent, equitable, universal, public-funded education has been a long and tortuous one. Going by the policy pointers emerging from the draft National Education Policy (NEP) report submitted to the Human Resource Development (HRD) Minister on 31 May 2019, it would appear that the above-noted quest may have become even more worrisome on several counts. We have flagged some of the relevant concerns here, especially with respect to school education.
Setting the Context
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