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Journalism of Courage
National Education Policy Chairman Dr K Kasturirangan on Friday spoke about NEP’s key themes while delivering a lecture at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) on its foundation day.
“We made sure we start from the day the child is born and starts going to anganwadi. On the other side, education without discussion on research is incomplete… we wanted to have an end-to-end policy having the necessary flexibility,” he said.
On the integration of vocational education as part of mainstream education, he said that the committee is trying to bring equivalence and alignment between national vocational curriculum framework and national academic curriculum framework. “We don’t have the final answer to many questions but the importance and connectivity has been shown. We need to alleviate vocational education from our present day understanding to a much higher level consistent with fourth industrial revolution.”
When asked about the meagre pay scales of teachers, he said, “There is so much to be understood about child psychology. We have made sure that there should be no difference between teachers belonging to pre-primary, primary or secondary school.”“We want to strengthen publicly funded institutions and increase their number. We hope that in the next five years there will be a step-up in public investment in school education and then make sure there will be real competition between privately funded and publicly funded institutions,” he said.
He appreciated the move by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman to touch upon facets of NEP by proposing to create and operationalise National Science Foundation.
Speaking to The Indian Express about the implementation of NEP, he said, “It is being seen as complex in education circles. However, the job of implementation can be given to a professional rather than an educationist and the responsibility of taking it forward could be handed to them later. Implementing the policy is not an issue but we need tocreate a cadre of people in different areas. Whenever the country has decided to do somethingdifficult, it has done it.”
