National education policy 2020

On the second anniversary of the presentation of NEP 2020 to Parliament and the nation, grave doubts have arisen about bona fide implementation of this policy formulated after an interregnum of 34 years, writes Dilip Thakore

Launched with great expectations and considerable fanfare on July 29, 2020 after an interregnum of 34 years, the National Education Policy 2020 — the outcome of mountains of labour of the T.S.R. Subramanian (2016) and Dr. K. Kasturirangan (2018-19) committees — seems to be floundering in shallows.

“This National Education Policy 2020 is the first education policy of the 21st century and aims to address the many growing developmental imperatives of our country. This policy proposes the revision and revamping of all aspects of the education structure, including its regulation and governance, to create a new system that is aligned with the aspirational goals of 21st century education, including SDG 4 (United Nations Sustainable Development Goal universal primary-secondary education — Editor) while building upon India’s traditions and value systems. The National Education Policy 2020 policy (sic) lays particular emphasis on the development of the creative potential of each individual. It is based on the principle that education must develop not only cognitive capacities — both the ‘foundational capacities’ of literacy and numeracy and ‘higher-order’ cognitive capacities, such as critical thinking and problem solving — but also social, ethical, and emotional capacities and dispositions,” says the preamble of NEP 2020.

On July 29, 2020 when NEP 2020 was presented to Parliament and the country, Dr. Ramesh Pokhriyal Nishank, a lightweight Hindi language novelist appointed Union education minister for mysterious reasons in 2019, said it would “bring transformational reforms in school and higher education systems in the country”. Likewise in a prepared statement his deputy, Sanjay Dhotre, minister of state for education, described NEP 2020 as the “most comprehensive, radical and futuristic policy document in the educational history of this country”.

Curiously but not surprisingly, at that time both ministers declined EducationWorld’s pressing requests for interview for further and better particulars. Neither did they publicly defend NEP 2020 in any major media publication, a tradition of unaccountability sustained by Pokhriyal’s successor Dharmendra Pradhan, a former ABVP (students’ wing of the BJP) leader in Odisha who was moved from the Union petroleum ministry to Shastri Bhavan, Delhi in July last year.

During a successful six-year stint in the petroleum ministry Pradhan had established a good reputation for liberalising the country’s hydrocarbons exploration policy dominated by the dog-in-the-manger public sector ONGC and was the prime mover behind the prime minister’s Ujjwala scheme under which below-poverty-line households were provided free-of-charge cooking gas cylinders, a programme that won the BJP millions of votes in General Election 2019. Delighted that he had replaced Hindi language chauvinist Pokhriyal whose 25 months’ term in the ministry was a period of masterly inactivity, your editors enthusiastically welcomed Pradhan’s appointment as Union education minister by featuring a cover story introducing him to the public. But again despite numerous entreaties, all requests for an interview with Pradhan to detail his plans and priorities were rejected. Despite this rebuff, EducationWorld published a comprehensive lead cover feature titled ‘Can This Man Revive India’s Shattered Education System? (September 2021 see www.educationworld.in).

Since then except for sporadic, turgid official statements posted on the Union education ministry’s website, all has been quiet on the education front. Occasional statements of intent to universalise early childhood education, introduce skills learning in primary-secondaries and internationalise the higher education sector have not been followed by implementation details. Admittedly, NEP 2020 implementation was derailed by the devastating Covid-19 pandemic during which all education institutions from pre-primaries to universities were under Central and/or state government-mandated lockdown for an unprecedented average of 82 weeks — the longest closure of education institutions worldwide. However during the pandemic, there was precious little communication from minister Pradhan or Shastri Bhavan, Delhi justifying the world’s most prolonged education lockdown. Citizens just had to lump it.

Moreover since then even the critically important issue of making good the enormous learning loss of the world’s largest child and youth population because of the unduly prolonged education lockdown, has been brushed under the carpet. Alarming reports testifying that millions of primary school children have totally forgotten alphabets and numerals have been ignored by the education ministry and state governments which manage the overwhelming majority of the country’s 1.2 million government primary-secondary schools.

Unsurprisingly, given the pervasive disinclination of BJP ministers at the Centre and in the states to engage with media — and EducationWorld in particular — a detailed feature published in EducationWorld early this year, which contended that the heavens won’t fall if 2021-22 was declared a zero academic year
(see https://www.educationworld.in/declare-2021-22-zero-academic-year/), was also totally ignored by Central and state governments and the middle class establishment. While a small minority of the country’s 450,000 private schools were able to somewhat continue their children’s education through digital technologies enabled online classes, the overwhelming majority of 131 million children in 1.10 million (mainly state) government schools have suffered enormous learning loss which has endangered their future education and ultimately, workplace productivity, with grave implications for the already low productivity Indian economy.

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Nevertheless, despite these untied loose ends and unresolved issues, Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan doesn’t seem to be bothered. Despite a rain of email messages and telephone calls requesting him to respond to an innocuous bona fide questionnaire soliciting his opinion on a range of important issues (see box p. 44), Pradhan obstinately refused to respond. All that your editors received were bland acknowledgments of our email messages. According to reports emanating from Shastri Bhavan, Delhi, Pradhan is sanguine that the system upgradation and policy initiatives prescribed by NEP 2020 are in process of smooth implementation.

Knowledgeable monitors of India’s education system tightly controlled by the Central, state and even local governments, are less optimistic. Although NEP 2020 prescribes elaborate architecture to separate the operational, assessment and regulatory powers of government to ensure a level playing field for private schools, colleges and universities which host the majority of India’s 300 million children and youth, education professionals with decades of experience are sceptical about government willingness to dilute control and command of the education system. There is also pervasive scepticism about the capability of the neta-babu brotherhood which will continue to guide and shape the rejuvenated education system envisioned by the somewhat naive report of the Kasturirangan Committee which has inspired NEP 2020.

Dr. Ramamurthy Natarajan, former director of the blue-chip IIT-Madras and former chairman of the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), the apex organisation which supervises all technical and business management higher education countrywide, is of the opinion that NEP 2020 has “the potential to introduce several long-pending reforms required to upgrade and contemporise India’s critically important higher education system”. In particular, he welcomes the policy’s mandate to abolish the affiliation system under which a large number of undergrad colleges — often 600-700 — are governed by one university; awarding progressive autonomy to undergrad colleges to evolve into full-fledged multi-disciplinary universities in their own right; improved governance systems prescribed for all education institutions across the spectrum, and establishment of “a superior R&D (research and development) ecosystem” through a well-funded National Research Foundation (NRF).

However, Dr. Natarajan entertains grave misgivings about the implementation of NEP 2020. “For a start, the time frame of 15 years to completely restructure the higher education system is highly unrealistic. Structural changes such as integrating the University Grants Commission (UGC) and AICTE into a composite HECI (Higher Education Council of India) have just begun — whether this is desirable is another matter. Likewise, the integration of NAAC (National Accreditation and Assessment Council) and NBA (National Board of Accreditation under AICTE) into the National Academic Council (NAC) has also not begun. Neither has NRF been established. Nor has the issue of granting greater autonomy to colleges and universities been addressed as yet. Moreover sufficient meaningful discussions have not been held with senior academics on the efficacy and desirability of major changes recommended in NEP 2020. Setting targets is not enough. Devising implementation strategies, setting timelines, milestones are also necessary. For implementation of the policy, well-qualified academics to man the large number of supervisory and regulatory committees have to be appointed quickly and the policy has to be backed by serious political commitment which is not currently evident,” says Natarajan.

A deficit of official information on ways and means to invest substance and form in NEP 2020 also perturbs Dr. C. Raj Kumar, the polymath (alum of Delhi, Oxford, Harvard, Hong Kong universities) founding vice-chancellor of the O.P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat (JGU, estb.2009). Within a decade of its promotion, JGU has rapidly established a global reputation and is ranked India’s #1 private university in the World University Rankings (WUR) of the highly-respected, London-based varsity rating agency QS and is ranked India’s #1 private liberal arts and humanities university in the EducationWorld India Private University Rankings 2022-23. The point is that Raj Kumar is a proven and highly knowledgeable higher education institution builder.

The strategy for effective implementation of NEP 2020 higher education reforms must include the following five components: monitoring of policy implementation by the political leadership at the highest level of government; focus of Union education minister and his top team on unblocking bottlenecks and challenges impeding implementation; UGC taking the lead to bring all regulatory bodies and subject-based councils together to implement the policy proposals; activating state governments and higher education councils in the states to effectively implement NEP 2020, and empowerment of AIU (Association of Indian Universities) to work closely with vice chancellors of all universities to implement the policy. It’s also very important for government and the proposed HECI to bear in mind that a large number of HEIs (higher education institutions) are under the ownership and jurisdiction of state governments. Moreover, nearly 70 percent of India’s HEIs are in the private sector and 70 percent of students are enrolled in private HEIs. Therefore, the entire government machinery, including the education ministry at the Centre needs to acknowledge the critical role that state governments and private HEIs have to play for successful implementation of NEP 2020,” says Raj Kumar.

Although he is too diplomatic to say so, implicit in Dr. Raj Kumar’s call to government to actively involve private universities in implementing NEP 2020 is criticism of pervasive prejudice against private initiatives in education. This prejudice, which is rooted in the foolish decision to transform post-independence India that has a several millennia tradition of private enterprise into a Soviet-inspired “socialist pattern of society”, mandated tight government control of academia and education. Comprehensive control-and-command of the academy for over seven decades through numerous education regulatory authorities (UGC, AICTE, NAAC, NCTE, MCI etc) by ill-educated politicians and bureaucrats (aka the neta-babu brotherhood) mainly drawn from the socio-economically backward Hindi heartland states, has severely dumbed down the education system from pre-primaries to research universities.

Measured by learning outcomes metrics, India’s school children compare very poorly with their counterparts around the world as testified by poor PISA scores and the annual ASER surveys published by the globally-respected Pratham Education Foundation. Moreover, not a single Indian university — some of whom were established 150 years ago — is ranked among the global Top 200 in the World University Rankings (WUR) league tables published annually by the authoritative London-based HEI srating agencies Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) and Times Higher Education.
Yet it’s an indicator of India’s deeply-rooted spirit of private enterprise that despite official discouragement and socialist judges of the Supreme Court ruling that education provision is necessarily a charitable and philanthropic vocation, over 450,000 private schools have mushroomed countrywide and are educating 119 million in-school children. Likewise, an estimated 25,000 private colleges and 700 private universities have over 20 million (of 35 million) youth on their muster rolls.

Indeed, it is no exaggeration that the great majority of post-independence India’s 300 million middle class has been nurtured in private schools and HEIs. Despite this reality, not even one private education representative (except Dr. Manjul Bhargava who teaches math at Princeton University, USA) was included in the nine- member committee which wrote the 484-page Kasturirangan report whose recommendations have shaped NEP 2020. Unsurprisingly, the K’rangan Report (2019) and the NEP 2020 policy document is strewn with prejudicial and censorious obiter dicta against private education providers.

This prejudice endorsed by ill-considered judicial pronouncements deploring “commercialisation of education” is shared by the influential middle class which loves private education but (like electricity and piped water) doesn’t want to pay market price for it. Foolishly, parents’ associations across the country routinely invite government control of private school fees unmindful that it perpetuates supply-demand imbalance, pushes down teachers’ remuneration and discourages best university graduates from entering the teaching profession. In turn, this adversely impacts learning outcomes and prompts top-ranked private schools to demand upfront capitation fees/donations. Persistent middle class demand for ‘regulation’, i.e, capping private school fees, has encouraged intrusive government interference and audit of school finances and opened doors for official rent-seeking and corruption.

Against this backdrop, a major reform proposed by NEP 2020 is to provide private schools a better deal by diluting government controls. Currently, the Central and state governments formulate education policy, operate government schools and tightly regulate private schools. Acknowledging this clear conflict of interest, NEP 2020 incorporates the Kasturirangan Committee’s proposal to distribute discharge of these functions to “separate independent bodies”.

The four distinct roles of governance and regulation, namely (a) policymaking (b) the provision/operation of education (c) ensuring professional and quality standards in education and (d) academic work (sic) will be conducted by separate independent bodies in order to avoid conflicts of interest and concentrations of power, and to ensure due and quality focus on each role,” says NEP 2020 (para 8.6).

For separation of these functions, NEP 2020 proposes an elaborate schema in the states comprising the Department of School Education for “policy making and continual improvement” of school education; Directorate of School Education for “operations and provision of the public (government) schooling system”, and the all-important State School Standards Authority (SSSA), “an independent state-wide body” to “establish a minimal set of standards based on basic parameters (namely safety, security, basic infrastructure, number of teachers across subjects and grades, probity and sound processes of governance which shall be followed by all schools)”. By this mandate, NEP 2020 eliminates official prejudice against private schools sanctified by the landmark Right of Children to Free & Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, 2009.

The critical importance of the SSSA is underlined by the wide powers conferred on this independent authority to direct private schools to make transparent public disclosure of all regulatory information (i.e, financial accounts) on a public website maintained by SSSAs and to adjudicate “any complaints or grievances arising out of the information in the public domain”. The prime function of the SSSA spelt out in para 8.7 of NEP 2020 is “protecting parents and communities from usurious practices, including arbitrary increases in tuition fees” by private schools.

In the circumstances, it’s vitally important that the SSSA in every state is a truly independent body which will impartially set equivalent standards of minimal infrastructure, teacher-pupil ratios, teacher qualifications and training for government and private schools and maintain parity between the actual cost of education provision in government schools and fees permitted to be levied by private schools.

However according to Prof. Geeta Kingdon, chairperson of the faculty of economics of international education at the top-ranked University College, London and president of City Montessori School, Lucknow, ranked #1 in Uttar Pradesh (pop.215 million) in the co-ed day category of the latest EducationWorld India School Rankings 2021-22, the government is already backsliding on the issue of independence of SSSAs.

“Division of the role of the state Directorate of Education as operator, assessor and regulator of the school education system and appointment of an independent SSSA is perhaps the most important systemic reform proposed in NEP 2020. However two years after the policy was approved by Parliament, there’s been no progress on this front. On the contrary CBSE, a subsidiary of the Central government which has 25,000 affiliated government and private schools for which it prescribes governance standards and conducts board examinations, has been appointed SSA for Central government and CBSE schools. And there is every indication that state governments are set to follow its example and appoint state examination boards as SSSA. This will surely compromise their independence and perpetuate discrimination against private schools,” warns Prof. Kingdon.

Another area of darkness in Indian education on which the TSR Subramanian and Dr. Kasturirangan reports threw a strong beam of light is vocational education which perhaps for reasons rooted in the pernicious caste system of the country’s Hindu majority, has been woefully neglected by post-independence central planners and the academy.
The 60-page NEP 2020 policy document admits that “less than 5 percent” of India’s youth in the 19-24 age group “has received formal vocational education” as against 52 percent in the US, 75 percent in Germany an 96 percent in South Korea. Similarly, your editors have repeatedly been highlighting that whereas the number of vocational education and training institutes (VETs) in neighbouring China is 500,000, in India they aggregate a mere 14,000.
In acknowledgement of this glaring lacuna in India’s education system, in 2013 a National Skills Qualifications Framework was announced by an ambitious National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC, estb.2009), a public-private initiative chaired by former TCS chairman S. Ramadorai, to establish sector skills councils to draw up syllabuses and curriculums for VET programmes.

Since then, little has been heard about NSDC and curiously this institution is not mentioned at all in NEP 2020. Instead, NEP 2020 declares that “by 2020, at least 50 percent of learners through school and higher education system shall have exposure to vocational education”. “Towards this, secondary schools will collaborate with ITIs, polytechnics and local industry etc. Higher education institutions will offer vocational education either on their own or in partnership with industry. The B.Voc degree introduced in 2013 will continue to exist, but vocational courses will also be available to students enrolled in all other Bachelor’s programmes, including the 4-year holistic Bachelor’s programmes,” says NEP 2020.

But two years on, there’s very little buzz about vocational education despite wide awareness that government, industrial shopfloor and agriculture productivity in 21st century India is way below BRICS nations and a large number of developing countries. Dr. Mukti Kanta Mishra, an alumnus of Utkal (Odisha) and Victoria (Australia) universities and former marketing manager at the public sector Hindustan Petroleum Corp, and currently president of the Centurion University of Technology & Management, Paralakhemundi, Odisha (CUTM, estb.2007), is delighted that for the first time VET “has been accorded cognisance as part of mainstream education” by NEP 2020.

“For India to become a $5 trillion economy within the next two-three years, annual GDP growth must average 7-9 percent. This is only possible if the education system integrates vocational and skills education and makes it inspirational and aspirational. To this end, I recommend that a special Right to Skill Act must be enacted by Parliament. This will give VET a boost and there will be a perspective change to introduce and integrate skilling and vocational education into mainstream study programmes,” says Mishra. Currently, CUTM has an aggregate enrolment of 15,000 students (including 7,000 women) mentored by a faculty aggregating 450 and over 300 lab instructors. Moreover, under its Gram Tarang Employability Training Services initiative in collaboration with NSDC and the Central and state governments, this private university has trained and certified 450,000 rural youth and farmers — mostly school dropouts — as machinists, fitters, welders, electricians, plumbers, mechanics and retail assistants.

However, Mishra’s enthusiasm for the overdue importance accorded to VET is somewhat dampened by policy implementation lethargy. “Currently, provision of grants and financial support for skill and vocational education in universities is non-existent. To skill India, all grants dispensing entities such as Department of Science & Technology, University Grants Commission, All India Council for Technical Education and the Union education ministry and state governments should revise their budgets to make provision for skilling and vocational education,” says Mishra. But with half the financial year 2022-23 almost over and the Centre and state governments running substantial fiscal deficits, this is unlikely to happen.

Arguably, the most important recommendation of the Kasturirangan Committee incorporated into NEP 2020 is universalisation of early childhood care and education (ECCE). Perhaps influenced by EducationWorld’s continuous advocacy of ECCE from 2007, NEP 2020 mandates that all children above the age of three should be enrolled in formal ECCE classrooms. For this purpose, the architecture of K-12 education which was 10+2 has been redesigned as 5+3+3+4 with ECCE merged into lower primary school education. The rationale of this new systemic architecture is that 90 percent of children’s brain development is complete by age eight. Therefore, early stimulation provides a strong foundation for life-long learning.

Unsurprisingly Dr. Swati Popat Vats, president of the Podar Education Network’s 600 owned and franchised pre-primary schools, and founder-president of the Early Childhood Association of India (ECA, estb.2010), is elated that formal, professionally administered early childhood education hitherto viewed as peripheral, has been given pride of place in NEP 2020.

“Inclusion of early childhood education into the formal school system has impacted the critical importance of ECCE, especially nursery, as the starting point of education. Work on developing content, curriculum and assessment framework has to begin on priority. But the pace of implementation is slow with many states not having begun to constitute the numerous committees mandated by NEP 2020. A detailed document called SARTHAQ has been developed by the Union education ministry which has separated each proposal of the policy into tasks with responsibility to complete them within given timelines by specified government departments and organisations to attain measurable outcomes. These 297 tasks need to be started and completed urgently to ensure that the NEP does not just remain a mere wish-list document,” warns Dr. Popat Vats.

The danger of NEP 2020 remaining a wish-list document in the manner of its predecessor policies of 1968 and 1986 is very real. Over half a century since NEP 1968 was promulgated with high hopes and ambitions, Indian education at all levels has suffered stagnation, if not regression. The country hosts the world’s largest number of illiterate adult citizens estimated at 300 million; learning outcomes in primary education have gone from bad to worse; our secondary children are bottom ranked in international competency tests and none of India’s universities is ranked among the Top 200 in respectable WUR (World University Rankings) league tables. The overwhelming majority of much trumpeted and lionised Indian nationals who head transnational corporates in the West, are alumni of Western universities.

The half-heartedness with which NEP 2020 is being implemented arouses apprehension that the new policy is in danger of being hijacked by RSS and sangh parivar ideologues to rewrite history and attain political objectives rather than improve learning outcomes.

The fatal flaw of NEP 2020 is that instead of making a clean break with the past, it reinforces government control and guidance of education across the spectrum from pre-primary to university levels. Although the Kasturirangan Committee recommended that the numerous supervisory bodies such as SSSA, HECI, NHERC, NAS, NAC etc should be chaired and filled with academics and public representatives of “unimpeachable integrity”, past experience indicates that these supervisory organisations will be dominated by ruling party ideologues and faithfuls with dubious academic credentials who could push the country’s already failing public education system in particular, into a morass.

In this connection, the rule of the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM) over the state of West Bengal for 34 years (1977-2011) is instructive. During those fateful decades, ill-qualified Marxist intellectuals and party cadres massively infiltrated education institutions and almost totally ruined them. The ruination of Bengal’s higher education system notable for its excellent colleges and universities, offers a chilling example of what could be in store for India’s faltering education system in years to come.

The greatest infirmity of NEP 2020 is that its authors are firm in their belief that more rather than less government control and direction of the education system is necessary and non-negotiable. Therefore, the policy document decrees a host of new ultimately government-controlled supervisory and regulatory bodies for school and higher education. Moreover, despite the reality that post-independence India’s middle class has been almost entirely educated in private schools and institutions, NEP 2020 is clearly prejudiced against private initiatives in education.
Patently, NEP 2020’s elaborate supervisory and regulatory architecture has been designed to “protect parents and communities from usurious commercial practices” of private education providers. It ignores the reality that India’s private educators provide the cheapest school and collegiate education worldwide and educate 48 percent of school-going children and 70 percent of youth in higher education. Consequently, it has not liberalised and deregulated Indian education to encourage the flow of private investment into the education sector even as government (Centre plus states) expenditure in public education has averaged a mere 3.25-3.50 percent of GDP as against 6 percent recommended by the Kothari Commission in 1967 and by NEP 1968, and NEP 1986.

Yet, despite mandating greater government control, NEP 2020 paradoxically recommends abolition of the college affiliation system under which undergrad colleges — often 500-700 — are affiliated with parent universities. The new policy recommends conferment of autonomy on high-performing colleges and their gradual evolution into autonomous multidisciplinary universities.

Overall, although NEP 2020 makes the right noises about institutional autonomy and level playing fields for public and private education institutions, it is essentially a continuation of past policies of government control and command of the education system.

Neither the Kasturirangan Committee nor the professedly market-friendly BJP government at the Centre have grasped the logic of conferring true autonomy on education institutions and letting academics govern and manage academic institutions. Therefore, the auguries are not good for the world’s largest — and most high potential — child and youth population, doomed to suffer more of the same.

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Dharmendraji’s obstinate silence

One of the major failures of the BJP government at the Centre is conspicuous reluctance to prepare the ground for implementation of its reforms and policies. For instance, demonetisation, overdue farm reform bills and the Agnipath armed services recruitment scheme. By failing to discuss and debate its often excellent reform legislation, the BJP leadership provokes public confusion and anger and repeatedly shoots itself in the foot.

The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 presented to the country after an interregnum of 34 years, proposes to comprehensively restructure and revolutionise Indian education from pre-primary to Ph D. Yet neither Union education minister Dr. Ramesh Pokhriyal who presented NEP 2020 to Parliament and the nation on July 29, 2020, nor incumbent minister Dharmendra Pradhan have seriously explained and defended NEP 2020 in the media. Both incumbents of Shastri Bhavan, Delhi have steadfastly declined to speak with EducationWorld, India’s pioneer and premier education newsmagazine (estb.1999).

Quite obviously, the minister believes that he is answerable only to the prime minister and perhaps RSS headquarters in Nagpur. One wonders why he declined to answer the following innocuous questions emailed to him by your editors followed up with numerous email and telephone entreaties to his office. I leave it to readers to decide if the letter and questions reproduced below are tricky and/or hostile.

Dear Dharmendraji: On the second anniversary of presentation of the National Education Policy 2020 to Parliament and the nation, EducationWorld is writing a cover story under the working title ‘NEP 2020: Policy Implementation Report 2022.’

I believe the public interest would be greatly served if you would kindly respond to the following questions preferably in a Zoom interview or in writing.

• 1. Two years after NEP 2020 was presented to Parliament and the country, how satisfied are you with its implementation progress?
• Sir, in your opinion what are the most important reforms proposed by NEP 2020?
• One of the most important reforms proposed by NEP 2020 is its stress on universal early childhood care and education (ECCE) and its integration with primary education. How satisfied are you with progress on this front?
• Children in primary education were worst hit by the lockdown of schools countrywide for 82 weeks because of the Covid-19 pandemic. What strategy has the Union education ministry devised to make good the huge learning loss of primary-secondary children?
• Complex procedures to establish greenfield schools and regulation of tuition fees by government-appointed committees at unrealistic levels is a major complaint of private schools. When can one expect liberalisation and deregulation of Indian education?
• Media reports indicate that your ministry has permitted prominent British private schools including Eton and Harrow to establish campuses in India. To what extent are these reports accurate?
• In higher education, UGC recently notified that all duly accredited universities are permitted to conclude twinning, joint and dual degrees with Top 100 ranked foreign universities. What is the government policy about foreign universities establishing campuses in India?
• Your ministry’s SARTHAQ document affirms that in NEP 2020, there will be a “separation of functions — standards setting, funding, accreditation, and regulation will be conducted by independent bodies to eliminate conflicts of interest”. What is the progress in setting up these independent bodies?
• In its election manifesto, the BJP promised to raise the annual national outlay for education to 6 percent of GDP. Currently, it is 3.5 percent. When is this promise likely to be fulfilled?
• Any other comment?

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SARTHAQ deadlines

During the two years after presentation of NEP 2020 to Parliament despite the Union education ministry experiencing the exit of two ministers, surprisingly the bureaucracy in Shastri Bhavan, Delhi, hasn’t been letting the grass grow under its feet. For instance under the chairmanship of Anita Karwal, former chairman of CBSE and currently secretary of the Department of School Education and Literacy (DoSEL), it has drawn up a detailed blueprint to implement NEP 2020 reforms relating to K-12 education. The blueprint named Students’ and Teachers’ Holistic Advancement through Quality Education (SARTHAQ) divides every K-12 reform mandated by NEP 2020 into eight-12 tasks to be completed by designated authorities/groups within prescribed timelines.

For instance, the mandated reforms in Early Childhood Care and Education have been divided into 297 tasks such as development of the National Curriculum Framework for ECCE (Task 1) by NCERT by 2022-23; SCERTs in the states to develop state curriculum frameworks with local contextualisation by 2022-24 (Task 2); NCERT will prepare total learning materials for ECCE by 2022-24 and so on. The SARTHAQ document has divided the school reform mandates of NEP 2020 into 295 tasks to deliver 304 ‘outputs’. The major implementation deadlines of SARTHAQ are:

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