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Journalism of Courage
From a new policy that outlines the education roadmap for the next 20 years to sweeping changes in school textbooks and the opening up of the Indian higher education space to foreign players, the Modi government’s second term has proven to be more eventful in terms of education compared to the first.
In contrast, during the initial years of the first term, the Education Ministry was busy firefighting controversies, many of which were of its own making. However, even as its education agenda picked up pace in 2019, there are a few promises and initiatives of the first innings that couldn’t take off at all or seem to have lost steam in the second:
* NEP and Reforms: Seven years in the making, the NEP 2020 is a policy document outlining a series of reforms to be pursued in education till 20240. A new education policy comes along every few decades, and India has had three to date. The NEP 2020 proposes vital shifts — from creating a system in which “children not only learn but more importantly learn how to learn” to one in which “pedagogy must evolve to make education more experiential, inquiry-driven, flexible” and in which there is “no hard separation between arts and sciences”.
To its credit, the policy document faced minimal political opposition, unlike many other initiatives and decisions of the Modi government. Its broader acceptance and support were attributed to the consultative approach undertaken during the drafting process.
After its launch in July 2020, the implementation got off to a sluggish start due to the disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. But there has been some progress in the past year. This includes the introduction of a common entrance test for central universities, granting more autonomy to universities for collaborating with foreign institutions, engineering colleges offering BTech programs in regional languages, establishment of a national assessment centre to align curriculum and assessment standards across school boards, the launch of a digital storehouse for student credits, and the NIPUN Bharat scheme. The NIPUN Bharat scheme aims to strengthen foundational literacy for children aged 3 to 9 years.
However, there are concerns that some of the grand announcements on NEP execution are cosmetic in nature. One example is the repackaging and renaming of the mid-day meal scheme as PM POSHAN without any additional funding allocation. Despite the NEP’s recommendation to include breakfast as part of the mid-day meal, the Finance Ministry rejected the Education Ministry’s proposal to implement this for pre-primary and elementary classes during the scheme’s revamp.
Furthermore, the relaunch of the Samagra Shiksha Abhiyan Scheme, supposedly realigned with NEP suggestions, has been allocated funds significantly below the proposals made by the Education Ministry. The Standing Committee on Education noted that in 2021-22, following the launch of the NEP, the scheme received an allocation of Rs 31,050 crore, while there was a demand for Rs 57,914 crore. This was when the department of school education had clearly stated that it needed Rs 19,164 crore solely for implementing NEP interventions under the Samagra Shiksha scheme.
* National Curriculum Framework: Besides the NEP 2020, the National Curriculum Framework (NCF), a crucial policy document for revising textbooks and classroom pedagogy, is nearly complete. On April 6 this year, the ministry released the NCF pre-draft for public feedback. Among its key recommendations are conducting board examinations twice a year, creating a semester system for Class 12 students, and providing students with the freedom to pursue a combination of science and humanities, aiming to reduce the rigid boundaries between arts, commerce, and science in classes 11 and 12 across all school boards.
The final proposals of this policy document are crucial, especially considering the incumbent government’s past changes in school textbooks. The NCF will be the foundation for the textbook re-writing exercise, particularly if the BJP returns to power for a third term.
*School Textbooks: The one area in education where the Modi government seemed heavily invested was textbooks. The National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT), the apex body advising the Centre on school education, has undertaken not one, not two, but three rounds of revisions in school textbooks.
The first two rounds, in 2017 and 2019, were relatively free of controversy and focused on updating chapters to reflect recent events, including schemes and initiatives of the Modi government. But the third and most recent round, completed last year, has sparked outrage. This round of revision, aimed at reducing the curriculum burden on students, includes deletions that have acquired political implications under the current regime — specifically, topics such as the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughal Empire.
In addition, key moments in independent India’s political history, such as Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination, the emergency period, and the Gujarat 2002 riots, have also been tweaked. These alterations have drawn criticism, with accusations that the ruling party wants to discourage students from engaging with uncomfortable truths.
*Foreign Universities: Following their initial opposition to the proposal during the UPA-II regime, the BJP-led government at the Centre has made significant progress in liberalising higher education to accommodate foreign universities. In its first term, the government set up committees to explore feasibility, but considerable progress was achieved only when the proposal found an endorsement in NEP 2020.
Presently, the UGC is giving final touches to a regulation that would allow foreign universities to establish campuses in India that have their own admission process, the freedom to determine fee structures and recruit faculty and staff from here and abroad. However, even as the UGC is finalising the specifics, Modi government has notified regulations to facilitate the establishment of offshore campuses by foreign universities in GIFT City, Gujarat, with incentives for profit repatriation.
Two Australian universities — the University of Wollongong and Deakin University — have already announced their entry into India via the GIFT City route.
*New Institutions, Enhanced Capacity: In addition to the new centrally-run educational institutions (including 7 IITs, 7 IIMs, 16 IIITs, 15 AIIMS of which 12 are partially or fully functional) set up in the last nine years, there was a significant capacity enhancement of existing institutions by way of the EWS quota.
To accommodate the 10% reservation for the Economically Weaker Section (EWS), all centrally -funded educational institutions, including IITs, NITs, IIMs, central universities, IISERs, and IIITs, were asked to increase their overall student strength by 25% within two years. Implementation has been uneven, mainly because of the disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, but the IITs, for instance, have collectively added about 5,000 seats for undergraduate programmes since 2019. The last notable increase in seats (of this scale) occurred when the 27% OBC reservation was introduced in 2006, and seats across CEIs were increased by 54% in a phased manner till 2012.
*Female representation: The last nine years have witnessed initiatives aimed at increasing female representation in traditionally male-dominated educational institutions. For instance, the supernumerary seats were introduced for women at IITs and NITs in 2018, resulted in a rise in female representation from 9% in 2017 to 20% in 2022 at IITs over five years. Additionally, in 2021, all 33 Sainik Schools transitioned from being all-male to admitting girl cadets, following a successful pilot in 2018.
According to AISHE data, there has been a reduction in gender disparity in higher education enrolment since 2014. The gender gap in the BCom program closed in 2019-20, resulting in a balanced ratio of 100 women to 100 male students. This was the third major programme in which the gender gap in enrollment had closed, following similar progress in the B.Sc and MBBS programs in 2017-18. However, the pandemic year posed challenges and caused setbacks to some of the significant strides made in bridging the gender gap across various undergraduate programs.
# The no-detention policy under the Right to Education Act 2009, which guaranteed promotion through Class 1 to 8, was scrapped in 2019. After this, several states framed rules to start holding back children in classes 5 and 8.
# A single agency to conduct all entrance tests to higher education, the National Testing Agency, was set up in 2017.
# In a bid to end “inspector raj” and dismantle lobbies, the country’s apex medical education body, the Medical Commission of India, was dissolved in September 2020 and replaced with a new body – National Medical Commission.
# Higher Education Financing Agency or HEFA was set up in 2017 to leverage funds from the market to finance infrastructure development in educational institutions through long-term loans.
*Autonomy: One of the highlights of the Modi government’s first innings was the steps taken towards liberating higher education from government and regulatory control. It began with the passage of the IIM Act in 2017, which granted unprecedented levels of academic and administrative autonomy to the 20 Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs), including the power to appoint their chairpersons and directors.
This was followed by the Institutions of Eminence (IOE) scheme in 2018, which promised significant regulatory relief for 20 higher education institutions (10 public and 10 private) to help them achieve world-class status. Furthermore, the same year, the University Grants Commission (UGC) introduced the graded autonomy scheme, which granted certain freedoms to higher education institutions (HEIs) based on specific quality benchmarks.
For instance, HEIs with a NAAC score of 3.51 or ranking among the top 500 in reputable world rankings were placed in ‘Category I’, allowing them to start new courses, establish off-campus centres, offer skill development courses, hire foreign faculty, and run open distance learning programs.
However, the momentum seen in the first innings seems missing in the second. After the passage of the IIM Act, which was seen as a precursor to more radical reforms in higher education, none of the other centrally-run institutions of similar calibre and excellence (read: central universities and IITs) have been granted similar freedoms. The Education Ministry has established two committees in the past nine years to explore governance reforms and the feasibility of reducing government control over the 23 IITs.
However, nothing concrete came out of it. Moreover, a recent investigation conducted by this newspaper revealed that despite the promises of increased autonomy under the IOE scheme, much of it only exists in theory. The ten private IOEs, which do not benefit from any funding under the scheme, still face bureaucratic hurdles and regulatory interference.
To date, only 48 universities (out of almost 1,000 in the country) have been placed in ‘CategoryI’ as part of the graded autonomy scheme of UGC.
*Vacant Faculty and Leadership Positions: Shortage of teachers and vacant leadership positions have been a constant for CEIs in the last nine years. Teacher recruitment efforts have only been prioritised and accelerated in a “mission mode” since September 2021, when the ministry directed all central universities and Institutions of National Importance to fill vacancies within a year. However, recruitment remains tardy. According to parliamentary records, only 1,471 teachers have been hired across all central universities since the start of this recruitment drive, and approximately 6,000 positions (almost 30% of the sanctioned posts) remain unfilled.
Furthermore, appointment of heads of CEIs has been extremely slow, resulting in several universities and institutes of national importance operating without leaders for prolonged periods. As of January this year, nearly 50 institutes of national importance had no chairpersons, with ten institutions having no permanent chairperson appointed for eight years.
# The National Research Foundation (NRF), intended to incentivise interdisciplinary research, has not materialised despite being announced in consecutive union budget speeches from 2019 to 2021.
# The ruling party, in its 2014 election manifesto, had promised to raise public spending on education to 6% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). In 2020, the new NEP also set the same target for the government. However, since 2015, the overall allocation towards education has been stagnant at 2.8% to 2.9% of the GDP.
# Despite being announced in 2018 through a draft Bill and included in the NEP 2020, the Higher Education Commission of India, intended to replace UGC and AICTE as an overarching regulator, has yet to be established even five years after its initial announcement.
# Digital University was announced in last year’s union Budget speech but has also failed to fructify thus far.
