NEP: Kashmir’s Education Revolution - Bridging Tradition and Tomorrow

The sound of children reciting multiplication tables in Kashmiri echoes through the corridors of Government Middle School in Pulwama, where 12-year-old Aatif is solving algebra problems by calculating apple yields from his family's orchard. This scene captures the quiet revolution unfolding in Kashmir's classrooms under the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 - a transformation that's rewriting the future of the Valley's youth while preserving its cultural roots.

- AIYAN GULZAR PAUL

As the morning sun filters through Chinar trees onto school courtyards across Kashmir, the NEP's impact becomes visible in unexpected ways: vocational workshops buzzing alongside traditional classrooms, tablets loaded with digital textbooks next to handwritten Urdu notebooks, and students debating scientific concepts in their mother tongue. Three years since its implementation, the policy is dismantling colonial-era teaching methods and building an education system that speaks Kashmir's language - both literally and figuratively.

In the secluded Gurez valley, Mubeena Akhtar, a primary school teacher, starts her math class with a Kashmiri folk story about a smart monkey sharing apples with its companions. "When I previously taught solely in Urdu or English, many students found it difficult," she clarifies. "Now, ideas resonate better because we connect them to what the children are already familiar with." The NEP'S emphasis on mother tongue instruction has produced remarkable outcomes: a 23% improvement in learning outcomes in grades 1-3, a 17% reduction in dropout rates in primary schools, and 89 government schools have introduced Kashmiri-medium instruction. At Higher Secondary School in Anantnag, language teacher Riyaz Ahmed notes an unexpected benefit: "Students fluent in Kashmiri are picking up Sanskrit and English faster through comparative linguistics exercises."