Page 43 - EW August 2025

NEP 2020 fifth anniversary celebration, Delhi: "not just policy but greatest national investment"

years on, the shower of programmes/schemes announced the K’Rangan Committee — on which NEP 2020 is based
to implement NEP 2020 has yet to impact learning out- — recommends that to make up for lost years, government
comes. (Centre plus states) should raise the Centre’s outlay to 10
The latest Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) percent of national expenditure — which would have raised
2024 published by the highly respected Pratham Educa- the Centre’s outlay 4.5x to Rs.5 lakh crore in Budget 2025-
tion Foundation indicates that learning outcomes in India’s 26.
rural schools are stagnant. The Union education ministry’s Moreover, smooth national rollout of NEP 2020 has
own Performance Assessment, Review, and Analysis of been derailed by resurrecting the buried ghost of the three-
Knowledge for Holistic Development (PARAKH) 2025 sur- language formula. This ill-advised mandate has reignited
vey reports major learning deficits among school students passions in several southern states which were up in arms
countrywide (see p.50). Likewise, industry reports that the when in 1965 Hindi was declared the national language,
great majority of 10 million graduates annually certified and violent protests against “Hindi imperialism” and impo-
by India’s 52,081 undergrad colleges and 1,338 universi- sition of this lingua franca of the socio-economically back-
ties annually are not sufficiently qualified for employment ward northern states countrywide, broke out in peninsular
commensurate with their qualifications. Although there is India.
a flurry of activity in the education sector, there is little evi- The outcome of this history agnostic mandate of NEP
dence of reforms-driven forward movement and systemic 2020 is that several states of peninsular India including
transformation. Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Kerala, have rejected the policy
The root cause is that the long-standing promise of all in toto. Tamil Nadu has already drawn up its alternative
political parties including BJP, to increase the annual out- SEP (State Education Policy) arguing that since education
lay (Centre plus states) for education to 6 percent of GDP is a ‘concurrent’ jurisdiction subject under the Constitu-
is nowhere near fulfillment. Since the policy was officially tion, it is entitled to formulate its own independent SEP.
approved in 2020, national public spending on education Karnataka and Kerala have followed suit while several other
as a percentage of GDP has inched from 3 to 4 percent per opposition-ruled states including West Bengal and Chhat-
year, way below the 6 percent GDP recommended by the tisgarh are mulling this proposition.
Kothari Commission back in 1967, and the T.S.R. Subrama- When the Kasturirangan Committee report was made
nian (2016) and Kasturirangan (2019) committees. Indeed public in 2019, and again when NEP 2020 was officially ap-

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