Starting A New Chapter

The National Education Policy draft is path-breaking in the changes it suggests to reform Indian education. But implementation and funding could be huge challenges.

- E. Kumar Sharma

SPACE SCIENTIST K. Kasturirangan points out that sky is the limit and there is enough room to drive growth in the Indian education sector. Anyone who has read the 400page draft of the National Education Policy 2019 (NEP), authored by the nine-member team headed by him, will not only agree with him but also find that the draft is an excellent text on what needs to be done for education in India, with clearly stated objectives to be achieved by 2030.

“This is a document with vision and futuristic thought and there are many aspects within higher education that are progressive, such as the emphasis on taking a longer term view of skills to be developed (as opposed to job readiness),” says Ranjan Banerjee, Dean of SP Jain Institute of Management Research (SPJIMR).

The NEP looks at the complete chain of education in India, from primary schools to higher educational institutions. It suggests the creation of a Rashtriya Shiksha Aayog or National Education Commission. It also says that all higher educational institutes (HEIs) should evolve into one of three types of institutions: research universities (Type 1), teaching universities (Type 2) and colleges (Type 3). It wants the current “complex nomenclature” of ‘deemed to be university’, ‘affiliating university’, ‘unitary university’ and others to be phased out and replaced with public, private or private-aided; and as multidisciplinary research universities or comprehensive teaching universities.