By Bhagirathi Panda
Of late, led by the Government and the Academic Community, a lot of interest is shown by different sections of our society towards the New Education Policy 2020, popularly called the ‘NEP 2020’. The central government considers it as one of its pathbreaking initiatives and disruptions in the education space. To them, NEP 2020 envisages fundamental and structural changes in the abstraction, content, approach, evaluation and outcome dimensions of education at all levels. Unsurprisingly, the interest in the policy reflects both hope and apprehension. This write up is about examining some such aspects of the policy in the sphere of higher education in our country with special focus on the different rationales of its adoption and the encompassing strategy to realise it. We can list out five important rationales for the introduction of NEP 2020. These are the rationales of (i) contemporariness, (ii) economics (iii) Indigenisation (iv) Inclusivity and (v) Excellence. In an article published in this daily few months back, we had mentioned about the first two rationales.
The rationale of contemporariness presupposes the need to reform our education system in the light of the continuous changes happening in global societal institutions that include and manifest in the forms of arrival of the knowledge economy in scale, the seamless change in technology, the imperative of brand building through accreditation, autonomy, ranking, multidisciplinary liberal learning and innovative pedagogy in teaching and evaluation. The rationale of economics considers higher education an exportable service and to be used as a strategy of economic development of the country. Existing global powers such as USA and western European countries have gone for this strategy and continue to do so. Emerging global powers such as China have started aggressively pursuing this strategy too. USA, UK. Canada, China and Australia were the top 5 countries in the world hosting 56 percent of international students worldwide in 2019. India as an emerging global power cannot afford to bypass it particularly in a situation when it has not yet been able to become the manufacturing hub of the world.
The indigenisation rationale is a corollary to the economic rationale viewed as an important initiative in creating factors contributing to USP making in education services. Because of its rich cultural heritage enriched by its plurality and diversity, its experimentation in democracy, its civilisational history, its indigenous power in software, space and digitalisation technology and its avowed interest in world peace etc., it remains a potential destination for international students and researchers. However, this needs to be properly tailored in to our education service and marketed efficiently.
The rationale of inclusivity is about improving access, equity and inclusion in higher education. Access is enabled through formulating and putting in place at the Government, Community and Institution levels proper policies and practices so that students have equal opportunities to take full advantage of their education in terms of enrolment and choice of subjects. Equity is more about fairness in treatment and opportunities in educational institutions so as to ensure that personal and social conditions do not act as stumbling blocks for students from achieving their academic potential. Inclusion refers to ensuring benchmarked and standardised education to each student regardless of background, personal, social and geographical characteristics. Important indicators of increased access, equity and inclusion in higher education are the improved Gross Enrolment Ration(GER), Student Teacher-Ratio, Per capita availability of different educational infrastructures and measures to promote vertical equity through positive discrimination, reservation and fellowship/scholarship arrangements. Finally, the rationale of excellence assumes importance in the context of globalisation of higher education so as to remain relevant and realise the economic benefits in terms of export of education as a service. Here excellence presupposes benchmarking and maintaining relative quality and standard. These relative qualities and standards evolve through time and space.
If introduction of NEP 2020 owes its justification to the above rationales, the ease of its implementation and the realisation of its objectives depends upon the nature and degree of challenges that we come across in the fields of availability of (i)financial, physical and human resources and (ii)our ability to form a firm resolve across stakeholders(Government, Market, Community and Civil Society) through calibration, mobilisation, synergization and synchronisation. This requires a serious situational and process analysis with hard data and facts. In our previous write up which this esteemed daily carried out on 29th March 2022, we have made a situational analysis of some of these critical indicators. The next step is to go beyond it and make appropriate process analyses. For example, if the GER in the country is low vis-à-vis many of the leading countries of the world or if it is low in the North Eastern Region vis-à-vis the country as a whole, what are the contributory factors responsible for it? Same would also be the case with low accreditation, high student-teacher ratio, sub-optimal quality of research, gender disparity in enrolment and faculty availability, faculty shortage, poor employability of the pass-outs and sub-optimal regulation and management etc.
However, it would be unjust to dub NEP 2020 as unwanted or ill timed. Economist Albert O. Hirschman in his strategy of economic development advocates for deliberately unbalancing the economy by initially undertaking investment in leading sectors of the economy. He suggests that in a situation of limited capital, the economy can be unbalanced by either having excess of DPA(Directly Productive Activity) over SOC(Social Overhead Capital) or vice-versa. DPA includes investments in establishing firms/business units which produce increased goods and services. SOC includes investments on education, public health, irrigation, electricity, roads, railways etc. Applying Hirschman’ s analogy there could be two strategies to implement NEP. Strategy-I would be to create the necessary physical and human infrastructure and institutions first and then introduce NEP 2020. However we feel, this would be a time consuming exercise with the current institutional values and practices. We feel in a democratic society like India it is better to implement strategy-II by introducing NEP 2020 first, which would in the next stage, bring out the required infrastructure and institutions through political and social pressure. For example, when the Government implements NEP provisions, there would be a lot of pressure exerted on it by citizens and groups to increase the allocation of GDP on education.. Currently the central government spends about 3.5 percent of its GDP on education. With the kind of push and movement being made by the current central government on implementation on NEP, there would be constant pressure on the Government to increase the allocation on higher education to 6% level as recommended by Kothari Commission earlier. Similar pressure would also be there from different sections of society on state and local Governments to provide for required infrastructure. We consider this approach playing out more positively in Indian context.
Hence, let us consider NEP 2020 as a journey. This implies that we need to implement NEP provisions incrementally and, in the meantime, allow for the complementing infrastructure and enabling global practices to emerge through pressure, conviction and partnership.
(The author teaches at the department of economics, NEHU.)