"New Draft Education Policy"

Draft of New Education policy 2020,is highly ambitious, focussing on promoting multi-dimensional development of personality of students from school to college level.

Doing post graduation would be almost history under the new dispensation. One has to complete graduation, pursue studies further, if interested, and go straight for the Research. M Phil would be redundant.

Introducing 360 degree assessment system for students is fantastic. The students will have to self-assess their performance before getting assessed by the peer groups.

Will the students be intelligent and fair enough to grade their assessment. A plebeian suggestion, that needs a re-think.

Learning music, painting, sculpturing and other works of Art etc. with Science and humanities subjects, no doubt, will give flexibility to students to fine-tune and promote their hobbies and educational predilections.

Another noteworthy feature of new policy is to make it mandatory for students to study upto class 5th in their mother tongues. During my schooling in a sarkari school, I started learning English language from class 6th onwards.

Earmarking 6% of GDP for Educational sector, as against 4% at present, was long overdue. Fair enough. But, the first priority remains jobs creation. A multi- faceted personality and absence of jobs, will lead to a contradictory situation like : “Padhey Farsi, Bechey Tel”.

Do we have trained teachers and infrastructure to cope up with new Education policy, which will have to pass through many tests and hurdles.

Keeping standards of new education policy at par in all States is not so easy as perceived by the draft New Education policy. This has anti- rural bias.

Success of the new policy will depend how soon we overcome the Implementational road blocks. Possibility of chaos. A mechanism will be needed to bring order into chaos by grasping the inherent factors, harmonise them in right proportion to achieve the objective.

The outcome of the new policy will determine its success or failure.

The policy will take several years to operationalise. Not a matter of one or two years.

As stated earlier, we are living in a highly competitive world. Knowledge of English is the sine qua non in global jobs competition.

Changing Syllabii of subjects will require substantive efforts. This will remain a subject of perennial controversy between the elite schools and sarkari- schools and will further sharpen the urban divide. The impact on municipal schools in rural areas will be disastrous.

All things considered , the new draft Education policy is a welcome change for the sake of change. Fulfillment of BJP Manifesto promised in 2014, is , no doubt, creditable. But, it could be fraught with political undertones and overtones.

A K Saxena (A former civil servant)

Has Modi govt gone intellectually bankrupt ?

What is the urgency for any extensions ? So, the bankruptcy of ideas in Modi Govt is to the extent of (1) second extension to the incumbent, (2) extension to new chap even before vacancy arises. Aren’t there others ? No wonder this govt is earning epithets and ridicules.

Vijay Kumar

Congrats – new DG, AIR News

Congratulations Sir. I hope you will give a new dimension to All India Radio

Matosh Chander