The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 came up with many promises for India’s education system. As an educator, I was looking forward to certain systematic changes. I also gained first-hand experience of how the policy would be implemented in one of India’s premier public universities: The University of Delhi (DU). While working in an undergraduate college affiliated with DU, I was also involved in aspects of the NEP 2020, such as curriculum design. Revision of the curriculum was necessary as the NEP 2020 mandated a shift from a three-year to a four-year undergraduate (UG) degree programme.
However, the process of revising the syllabus crushed any hope of the needed reform. Teachers had very little time and had to juggle between teaching, evaluation, invigilation and administrative duties along with the syllabus revision work. It resulted in long online meetings after 7 pm. Many courses were simply rehashed instead. Teachers were also expected to introduce several new courses. Syllabus designing is a mammoth task and requires proper time and critical thinking. However, none of it was possible on such short notice. Nonetheless, the first batch of students under the NEP 2020 in DU was enrolled in 2022.
Teaching had its own challenges. While the number of credits and classes were reduced for a particular course, the syllabus remained vast. The timetable also didn’t allow us to schedule extra classes. The timetable is packed as students now not only have Discipline Specific Courses (DSCs) and General Elective Courses (GECs), but also Value Added Courses (VACs) and Skill Enhancement Courses (SECs). Conducting classes for SECs also proved to be challenging as skill-based courses require specific faculty, training and infrastructure. For instance, SECs titled “Harmonium”, “Digital Film Production” and “E-Tourism”, offered to first-semester UG students, would require dedicated faculty and resources. While the intent of the policy to build professional skills is commendable, there are implementational challenges.
This first batch of students enrolled under the NEP 2020 will be entering the fourth year this July. The flexibility of exiting was seen as a key characteristic of the NEP 2020. Under the four-year programme, if a student exits at the end of the first year, they get a certificate. If it’s an exit after two years, it’s a diploma. Exiting after three years gets one an honours degree, and completing four years means an honours degree with a research specialisation. One of the reasons the NEP 2020 was appreciated was for its emphasis on research. However, as DU enters the fourth year of the new UG program, the university seems to lack the necessary infrastructure for providing a research-conducive environment at the UG level. The university has recently released (July 3) a notice clarifying its exit policy.
Many DU colleges are old and do not have the classrooms and laboratories required to accommodate an extra batch of students. Colleges are also facing a human resource crunch — of faculty and administrative staff. DU has heavily relied on contractual faculty, popularly known as “ad-hoc”, to meet its workload requirements. However, in the recent past, permanent faculty have been hired, displacing many ad-hoc teachers. Even then, most colleges do not have the required number of teachers according to the student-teacher ratio. Given that each faculty may have to supervise up to 10 students, it is a huge burden. This is in addition to existing teaching and other duties. Producing quality research is not an easy task and requires a lot of time and engagement. The university expects undergraduate students and their mentors to produce publishable material without offering the necessary resources for it.
The university has said that colleges can hire guest faculty to solve their resource crunch. But this cannot be a permanent solution. Writing a dissertation requires training and commitment of the highest order, and quality supervision. Guest faculty members have no job security, and as such, their positions can be terminated at any time. Some might also leave of their own volition if they find better opportunities elsewhere. Not having stable research guidance can be detrimental for students who choose to pursue a four-year undergraduate programme. This is especially true in the context of a system where such students will be expected to pursue a one-year MA programme. The university’s expectation that research funds should be generated by the colleges is also unrealistic. Most colleges are short-strapped for funds, and corporate collaborations can be harmful to the interests of public education.
Another issue that students are facing is concerning internships, which have been made mandatory. It is not easy to find internships, especially for certain disciplines like Philosophy or literature. This is particularly difficult in smaller cities and towns. Most firms and organisations are also reluctant to hire undergraduates as interns, as it means procuring an additional burden of training them. Even faculty at research institutes prefer postgraduate students as interns for research work. However, for some organisations, having a reserve army of interns means more human resources to exploit as free labour. The idea of experiential learning seems ideal on paper, but it needs serious rethought before it can be effectively implemented. We need to learn our lessons soon from the DU experience before the promises of the NEP 2020 fall apart. Such major policy changes need large-scale dialogue between stakeholders before execution.
The writer teaches Sociology in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS), Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Guwahati
