Teachers’ Day: Time to take stock of how NEP 2020 discriminates Premium

Teachers' Day marked as Student-Teacher Solidarity Day against education crisis, highlighting the struggle for equitable public education in India.

September 5 is celebrated as Teachers’ Day to mark the birth anniversary of Dr. S. Radhakrishnan, scholar, philosopher and former president of our country. This year it is being marked as Student-Teacher Solidarity Day by hundreds of thousands of students and teachers wearing black badges to protest against the present education crisis in the country.

We remind ourselves of India’s unequivocal commitment to public education for development, social justice and democracy, with the words of its first Education Commission (1948-49) chaired by Dr. Radhakrishnan. One of its members was Dr. Zakir Hussain, chairperson of the Basic Education Committee (1938), and co-founder of Jamia Millia Islamia.

“Freedom of individual development is the basis of democracy. Exclusive control of education by the State has been an important factor in facilitating the maintenance of totalitarian tyrannies. ...We must resist, in the interests of our own democracy, the trend towards the governmental domination of the educational process. Higher education is, undoubtedly, an obligation of the State but State aid is not to be confused with State control over academic policies and practices…. Intellectual progress demands the maintenance of the spirit of free inquiry”.

However, the last decade has witnessed an unprecedented trend of increasing centralisation and control by the Union government. Central funding is leveraged to push through its agenda of commercialisation, gross stratification of the public system, early vocationalisation (which can be caste-based) for the proletariat, and distortion and communalisation of curricula. The National Education Policy (NEP 2020) is a generic umbrella for new fiats directed towards institutions and states. Ironically, despite the “concurrent” status of education in the Constitution, the government seems to be bulldozing the best performing States to succumb and conform.

For instance, two years ago some teachers of Delhi University targeted students of Kerala (having the highest educational indicators), who were admitted through the cut-off system with their Class 12 marks, as beneficiaries of a “marks jihad” state board conspiracy. Moreover, the next year with a shift to a centralised entrance test based on the CBSE curriculum (CBSE students dominate DU admissions), officials stated that the Kerala ‘anomaly’ had been resolved. No such concerns were raised about the numbers admitted from Bihar or Haryana, being under the same dispensation.

Kerala and Tamil Nadu have been facing protracted delays with respect to centrally funded schemes, and have not received pending instalments of the Samagra Shiksha Abhiyan (SMSA), which expressly aims to ensure equitable access to quality education for all children, including the 6-14 year old under the Right to Education Act. The funding is shared in a 60:40 ratio by most States, amounting to a central support of about ₹3.2 lakh per school (as per 2021-22 figures). Indeed both States have been under implicit pressure to sign an MoU to implement the scheme of selected PM-SHRI schools, which requires states to contribute 40 percent of a much larger sum, but with the implementation of the CBSE curriculum, among other grounds for conformity with NEP.

The current budget allocates a large portion of its funds to this centrally favoured scheme of the ‘exemplar’ PM-SHRI, while substantially reducing funding to SMSA. As per an analysis by Center for Budget Governance and Accountability, of the central budget allocations between the years 2019-20 and 2024-25, while the share of funding to ‘exemplar’ schools increased from 19 percent to 29 percent, the share of SMSA dropped from 62 percent to 51 percent in the Department of School Education budget.