Maharashtra Education Commissioner Suraj Mandhare will hold a meeting with experts Monday to discuss the integration of Anganwadis and primary schools in the state as recommended in the National Education Policy, 2020. A committee that includes the director of the Maharashtra State Council for Education Research and Training (MSCERT) will soon be formed to look into the implementation of the integration. “I am meeting some experts who have studied this subject and drafted some proposals. We decided to look into this task a month or two ago and had some discussions about it. Then I formed the committee but the director of the MSCERT got transferred, so now we have to reconstitute the committee,” said Mandhare. The integration of Anganwadis with primary schools has been laid down in the NEP as an essential way to strengthen early childhood care and education with the view that almost 85 per cent of brain development occurs before age six. The NEP 2020 states, “Children in Anganwadi Centres shall take activity-filled tours - and meet the teachers and students of their local primary schools, in order to make the transition from Anganwadi Centres to primary schools a smooth one. Anganwadis shall be fully integrated into school complexes/clusters, and Anganwadi children, parents, and teachers will be invited to attend and participate in school/school complex programmes and vice versa.” The official said that linkages will be made between the two early-childhood educational institutions so that every Anganwadi has a definite primary school connected with it. When the children of the Anganwadi grow up, they will join their connected primary school. Mandhare had earlier told The Indian Express. “Anganwadi sevikas are experts in handling kids and do an excellent job of ensuring nutrition but they are not experts in developing students intellectually.” “Primary teachers are experts in teaching but not in handling children below six years of age. What we need is a combination of both and that planning is going on,” he had said. “So far, our pedagogical thinking started with the assumption that the student is well versed with reading and writing. Now that children of ages 3 to 6 have been brought within the education system, we need to develop an appropriate pedagogy.” Sometimes, this integration could also mean co-locating Anganwadi and primary schools, he had said. According to the Union Ministry of Education’s Unified District Information System for Education Plus (UDISE+) 2022 report, 43,004 primary schools in Maharashtra had Anganwadi centres on campus in the academic year 2021-22. This is over 43 per cent of the total primary schools in the state.
