 Communalization, Centralization and Corporalization slash Commercialization. These are the three essential aspects of the draft national document, policy document that I am concerned with. Thematic formal learning from even the age of three is something that would be disputed by many scholars and educationists. Almost moving it de facto from the concurrent to the union list. And this certainly will work against girls, Dalits, religious minorities, all sorts of private agencies to assess educational institutions, opens up a large space for pretty nefarious practices in the process of evaluation and assessment. The draft report of the committee to formulate national education policy chaired by Dr. Kasturi Rangan has been in the public domain for some time now. The present government of the center was very keen on releasing it very soon after coming back to office and initially they had given hardly a month for discussions and suggestions. Although the document was available only in English and Hindi and even subsequently the government has taken a position that they will not take the responsibility for translating it to all languages. Luckily democratic minded people have done it across the country to translate this into many languages. Now there are three essential features of the draft national education policy document which cause a great deal of concern. One, it seeks to further and comprehensively commercialize education, make it completely a commodity and what is more also corporate is it in that process. So commercialization and corporatization of education is a key feature of the draft document. Second important feature of the document which is also a matter of being concerned is that it is highly centralizing both in terms of the structures of authority it creates and in terms of its many recommendations on how education should be conceived regulated and implemented. So it is a highly centralizing document which does particular violence to the rights of the various states of the Indian Union whose people are often you know consisting of people speaking a given language with a particular historical background. So the rights of states and of linguistic nationalities are not being respected in this process. Third is the fact that the system of values that is held up in the document as exemplary all better a commitment to a Hindutva view of the world and the report therefore also has a bias that you can only call the bias of communalization. So these three aspects communalization, centralization and corporatization slash commercialization. These are the three essential aspects of the draft national document, policy document that I am concerned with. In the document you will find many good passages, many fine words, many fine formulations but when it comes to recommendations these are completely abandoned and we get a whole set of recommendations which is sometimes contradictory but overall they carry these three features that have already identified. One could of course talk about the positive recommendations of a certain kind for example when it says that the right to education should be extended to all children from the age of three years to 18 years as opposed to the present 16 to 14 but that's a very nominal kind of advance because in effect the emphasis that the document puts on early childhood care and education ECC for example has some problems it is not first of all backed up by any suggestions as to how this enormously increased expenditure would be funded especially if you want quality ECC in the country but equally importantly it is also the case that the pedagogical approach of the document which suggests fairly systematic formal learning from even the age of three is something that would be disputed by many scholars and educationists. When it comes to school education the document suggests that we should think in terms of school complexes where there will be one institution that offers classes 9, 10, 11, 12 education and then there will be a whole cluster of institutions in that campus which offer primary and elementary education and so on now this involves significant centralization of the access to schools and since this will not be viable for every hamlet or habitation we'll end up having complexes that will require younger students including three-year-olds to travel quite some distance to access education that is something that is going to work against access to even school education for those who are socially discriminated against or socially weaker in terms of access to opportunities this will be women, Dalits, scheduled tribes and religious minorities especially Muslims so again there is an element of centralization here that has to be seen for what it is also the approach to evaluation although there are fine words about pedagogy and about the need to move from root learning to critical learning and all that there is an enormous number of examinations being proposed for the children from class 3, class 5, class 8 and then semester examinations in classes 9 to 12 all of which are to a huge burden on the children and this very notion of evaluation through classroom exams defeats the notion of a critical open-ended educational system more can be said on this but basically what I find is that if the school education proposals are to be implemented in their ideal form it would require a great deal more resources than is presently being spent on school education in this country secondly the whole idea of a single model of school education across the country militates against the need to provide states of the union space to design their own school systems you must recall that education was in the state list until it was taken away from the state list and put in the concurrent list during the emergency period when country suffered the obligation of civil liberties the real task now is to restore education from the concurrent list to the state list instead what the recommendations of the draft document do in fact are to further empower the center to decide on all policy issues in education so that essentially you're almost moving it de facto from the concurrent to the union list this is something that is highly objectionable when it comes to college education or higher education the draft proposes three types of institutions those universities which primarily are research universities although teaching will be there in those universities as well and likewise universities which are primarily teaching institutions but there will be some research there as well and then finally stand alone colleges autonomous colleges which are degree awarding institutions now it also says that the size of each such higher education institution must be much larger than it is now and it recommends anywhere between five ten fifteen twenty thousand depending on the level you're talking about this means again a significant degree of centralization this means for example that children who finish higher secondary school class 12 would then have to move distances hundred hundred fifty kilometers stay in a hostel or some accommodation and study and this certainly will work against girls Dalits religious minorities from accessing higher education because many in these particular categories that I have just mentioned there will be financial impediments as well as social impediments for children to pursue higher education in this manner so again this centralization does not do any good moreover while the draft document talks about what ideal education should be like it also expresses itself against any serious regulation of these institutions they talk about how regulation must be light but tight whatever that means but de facto what it means is that you are going to allow these institutions to function as they please with very little regulation and that I think is something that is a matter of concern especially when this goes along with the de facto emphasis on privatization and commercialization of education so this is something that is a matter of great concern little is said about governing structures and processes in these institutions in the draft document but whatever it does have to say is worrying enough it it does not see any role for democratic representation and participation of students teachers and non-teaching staff in these higher education institutions or in the school complexes so what we get is a kind of a free shit to the management to run these institutions as they please and this can be extremely harmful for any democratic discussion and participation in the education system and certainly this idea of a critical education would be next to impossible to implement if institutions are controlled by a caughtry of management which also have a national interest in the institution as well as the higher education and governance structures are concerned the report really retrograde features or that it visualizes at the national level an apex body for higher education that will be chaired by the prime minister the the Rastri Shiksha Ayog it's called and even the education minister will only be a vice chairperson or whatever and it will be packed with ministers and bureaucrats of the education department some representation for the states by turn and maybe a handful of so-called educationists or experts appointed of course by the ruling government this is an extremely worrying understanding of how education should be regulated and this is such a powerful body so almost all decisions on education need clearance from this body secondly it talks about a national higher education regulatory authority which will have the power to ratify or approve higher education institutions now currently universities are created only by acts of the legislature or of the parliament I mean there are deemed to be universities in the private sector which are which are only deemed to be universities but now this document says that the national higher education authority which will be appointed by the center again in highly centralized manner will have the power to license all higher education institutions again a very very unhealthy tendency to centralize education and also take away parliamentary and legislative accountability from these institutions there are many such features for example the when it comes to assessment the document suggests that institutions can be evaluated or assessed by any agency provided that agency is nominated to do so by the national assessment and accreditation committee again a centralized body which will be determined whose composition will be determined by the government of India so the idea that NAC can then authorize all sorts of private agencies to assess educational institutions opens up a large space for pretty nefarious practices in the process of evaluation and assessment I think this is something that should also be viewed with serious concern then going into this question of the key question of financial allocation because the recommendations here and there talk about world-class institutions although it's not clear what that means because one would think that any curriculum at any level in India should be one that relates primarily to the needs of our people of course knowledge is very fundamental in universal and certainly that should be understood and practiced and implemented but what is the world-class education institution what is the point of reference is it and then you know interestingly enough the document vacillates between citing contemporary global institutions of repute like the American universities and on the other hand talking about the greatness of Dalanda or Takshasila of which we very little form evidence in terms of how universal they were in character how easy was it to population sections to access it we do know that for most of the history of the Indian the territory that is now we call Indian Union education was not accessible to the majority of the population formal education was a preserve of a very small proportion of the population so even Randa and Takshasila would reflect the informities of such an exclusive society in any event the higher education sector recommendations or of great concern because they are undemocratic in character they they talk about a four-year undergraduate degree in liberal arts education despite the fact that the four-year degree has been shown to have many flaws in the past when du Delhi University implemented it for example and there's no learning from the ground experiences in this process so one gets a feeling that the personnel of the committee which drafted this policy document may not have had much hands-on experience in running institutional institutions of education at any level so I think I think these are matters of concern finally the there is nothing in the document that tells us where the money is to come from for implementing suppose you take it face value the really ideal descriptions of the system which of course make for good reading then the question of financing such an ideal system should be addressed and in fact what the report does is to dodge that question by either sometimes suggesting that the government of course it does suggest that the governments that the expenditure on education would rise to six percent of GDP as suggested long back by the Kothari Commission in the 60s but the catch is Kothari Commission was talking about six percent of GDP as public expenditure on education not all expenditure so here there is no an ambiguous commitment to six percent of GDP as public expenditure on education by all levels of government and moreover although this is formally stated at the end of the day when the question of financing is raised it is said that oh you know that we found by private philanthropic this is not our mandate we have provided our next year and which is our some guidelines are there but basically we expect that the funds can be obtained by government partly but also by resort to private philanthropy now this is actually laughable in the context of a country like India share size of the education budget this is a very non-serious suggestion that has come from a committee we should have known better at the last point I want to make is the communal aspect of the report because when I say that we are not talking only about Hindutva we are talking about corporate Hindutva because there is a whole emphasis on privatization commercialization and so on but the report has an interesting discussion on the constitution and its relevance in the in discussing value education it the usual you know sermons are presented on values and their importance in education but ironically the report when it drafts it especially after saying constitutional values doesn't have the word secularism or federalism anywhere in the discussion instead we are told about jataka tales panchayatana tales and we're also told from time to time that you know that the Indian tradition has many many valuable stories of the victory of dharma or adharma and other such absolutely patent nonsense we shouldn't find a place in the report of this kind and then there is this whole you know bit about how it's a fair system not even taking into account the enormous exclusion of the features of the Indian social system caste gender tribe these things don't enter at all into the understanding of the very flawed nature of the Indian societies over long periods and therefore you know the the invocation of is sometimes it gets very dangerous because example on legal issues that legal judgments take into account the prevailing community you know held values which is absolutely dangerous which means that you don't intercast marriages will be frowned upon and people who different intercast marriages can be open to serious difficulties so this is very disappointing from a committee of people who should have known better to kind of take up one strand of the much more complex and multilayered cultural heritage of the territory that we now call India and to present that as a soul and desirable cultural heritage notwithstanding is many flaws is something that certainly suggests to us that the document is inclined heavily towards hindutva in terms of philosophy and towards corporate culture and corporate values in terms of the largest set of recommendations that it makes so in my view this is a draft document which it is pointless to modify here and there the document must be rejected lock stock and barrel one needs much more time to discuss the serious issues that are being raised here and this one month in English in Hindi is just not okay we need a much wider country wide discussion with the draft being made available in all the national languages underline national because I heard one of our ministers talk about all local languages in another contest in Rajisabha and it came to the postal entrance examinations but let me repeat here that the languages listed in the aid schedule are all national languages in the English maybe official languages but Tamil Malayalam Kannada all these are national all these are national languages so the document must be made available in all national languages must be widely discussed from the grassroots and then we have enough time to take a call on it not there's no need to rush it and turn it into a in inflexible piece of legislation