The National Education Policy 2020 (NEP) envisages far-reaching transformations in the prevailing Indian education system. It is a significant stride towards making education meaningful, assimilative and skill-centric.
It intends to build a self-reliant society on the foundations of the great ancient Indian wisdom. It is an attempt to make pedagogy “more experimental, holistic, integrated, discovery oriented, learner-centred, discussion based, flexible and enjoyable." It is focussed on character-building, inculcating rational thinking and compassionate care, and ensuring employment through skill development. It is indeed an honest endeavour to dissolve disciplinary boundaries that have been creating hindrances in the holistic development of a learner.
The defining principles of the NEP are flexibility for students to choose their learning trajectory and programmes, autonomy for teachers to design and implement their courses and a blurring of disciplinary and curricular boundaries. The NEP reorients learning towards skill-acquisition and multi-disciplinarity. It lays particular accent on conceptual understanding, creativity and critical thinking on ethical, human and Constitutional values. A regular formative assessment of the learner, respect for diversity, equity and inclusivity, light-but-tight regulatory system, and a wide-ranging autonomy are the other standout provisions of the policy that aims to overhaul a sector that was caught in a time warp.
A striking feature of the policy is its aim to curtail dropout rates and ensure universal access to education at all levels. The fundamental lacuna of the current education system is that it has largely failed in creating skilled citizens ready to take up the challenges of life. The NEP is a sincere endeavour in this direction to ensure that every learner develops some life skills through vocational training while studying in school/college/university.
That language is an important skill and proficiency in multiple languages opens new avenues cannot be overemphasised. The NEP not only underlines the significance of mother tongue, regional languages, and classical Indian languages, but also makes provisions for the introduction of foreign languages as an option right from the secondary-school level.
Learning a foreign language at an early age not only simulates cognition, but it also inculcates cultural tolerance and conviviality. A foreign language is not just another tongue. It opens a window to a foreign culture, people, their customs and attitudes, helping the learner evolve into a truly global citizen and actualise the concept of Vasudhaiva kutumbakam. With the three-language formula, the NEP virtually provides wings to fly. Thanks to the NEP, a learner can acquire an engineering degree or a diploma in hotel management or a diploma in journalism or a degree in medicine with proficiency in a foreign language of his/her choice. Such an academic degree under the extant system is inconceivable.
The NEP intends to establish Higher Educational Institutions (HEIs) as large, multidisciplinary universities in every district by 2040. In today’s globalised world, demarcations between various disciplines are becoming less rigid. A research in Medical Sciences requires Engineering inputs. Similarly, a research in Computer Science may need to refer to Linguistics and languages. A researcher in Economics may draw on the insights from Sociology or Anthropology. Thus, a multidisciplinary university that provides flexibility to students to choose courses as they desire would lead to a cross-fertilisation of ideas, potentially turning out individuals who not only understand the cosmos, but also the creative arts.
One of the biggest drawbacks of higher education in India today is that higher academic degrees do not always lead to better employment opportunities. The blame lies with archaic curricula and academic programmes that have lost relevance. Few undergraduate (UG) and postgraduate (PG) programmes equip students with skills that are employable. The NEP has proposed vocational training from grade 6 onwards to curb the rat race for securing UG and PG degrees. If a student gets a job that pays a decent salary after school education itself, then the burden on HEIs will ease considerably. This will also lead to an improvement in quality of higher education and research. In such a scenario, only those who are genuinely interested in scholarship and research would knock the doors of HEIs.
The NEP has a clear objective to make higher education in India at par with international standards. To begin with, four-year undergraduate programmes are fairly common in several countries. Here, it is pertinent to note that the proposed four-year degree programme has multiple respectable exits that will ensure zero dropouts. For instance, a student leaving a UG programme after completing one year may get a Certificate, a Diploma after two years, and a bachelor’s degree after three. The fourth year of the programme would be mandatory only for those students who wish to pursue further research. The students get a certification of whatever they have learnt. They need not spend three years in case they wish to take up a job after one year itself. However, it is easier said than done. To make it work, the HEIs will need to design their curricula after wide consultations with the industry so that students could be equipped with employable skills at every stage of exit from the UG programme. To elaborate, if a four-year B.Tech programme’s curriculum is designed in such a way that after the completion of two years, a student gets an employable engineering diploma, then many would likely be willing to exit with a diploma and start working. Such a scheme would help save a lot of precious time, energy and resources.
HEIs will have the flexibility to offer different designs of PG programmes. For example, the NEP envisages a two-year PG programme with the second year devoted entirely to research for those who have a three-year bachelor’s degree, a one-year PG programme for those who have a four-year bachelor’s degree, or a five-year integrated UG/PG programme. Undertaking a doctorate (PhD) shall require either a master’s degree or a four-year bachelor’s degree with research. MPhil has been done away with, and rightly so.
MPhil in its present form has become obsolete. The relevance of MPhil has been questioned multiple times by a number of pedagogues. There is no parity in the duration of MPhil programmes in the country. Some HEIs award MPhil degrees in one year, and some in two. A one-year MPhil programme has one semester of coursework involving research methods while the second semester is devoted to writing the dissertation. The quality of such research work is almost always suspect. A two-year MPhil programme has one year of coursework (which is fine), and the other for completing the dissertation. Writing a research dissertation in one year often compromises the quality of research. It is generally known that collecting bibliography, data and finalising synopsis/research proposal itself take a year or more for serious research. Research is not just about collecting data and bibliography. The researcher has to process the collected data, and analyse them to reach a logical conclusion. It is only then that the actual process of writing the thesis/dissertation begins. The duration of the current MPhil programmes had bred ad-hocism in research, which is otherwise a serious business and requires rigour.
The NEP has made its objectives clear. It aims to restructure the existing higher education system to make it holistic, integrated, accountable, enjoyable and employable, reorienting it towards quality research. It is a revolutionary document and marks a tectonic shift from the existing norms that will shake the narrow boundaries of disciplines and programmes. If implemented sincerely with a careful designing of syllabi and curricula, it has the potential to transform India into a self-reliant knowledge superpower by the end of the first half of this century.
(The author is assistant professor of Russian language and literature at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. The views expressed in this column are his own and do not reflect Mint's.)
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