The National Education Policy (NEP) disrupts Kerala’s objectives noted for equity, access, inclusion, affordability, sustainability, and resilience, Rajan Gurukkal, Vice Chairman of the Kerala State Higher Education Council, has said.

“All these terms figure in the document but as rhetoric. The real (intent) is privatisation, commercialisation and commoditisation,” he said at a webinar on NEP organised by the district joint forum of teachers and students on Monday.

Mr. Gurukkal said the NEP was a document for the preparation of ‘Young India’, demographically the greatest number of young people in the world, as a land ready to supply innovative youth capable of producing marketable knowledge.

“Corporates have globally established huge research establishments for the production of intellectual property and patents. They need cheap labour to work in these establishments and a vast society fit to consume knowledge. Educational policy document for the corporates is an outline for social preparation suitable for the production, consumption and exchange of intellectual property and patents,” he said.

Terming the document as elitist in its concepts and design, Mr. Gurukkal said it relates to the knowledge society that is competitive, hierarchical, exclusive, exploitative, private, commercial, and naturally non-sustainable. “It is full of lofty ideals constituting the rhetoric, hiding the disturbing real, and hence a document distinct for self-contradictions and incompatibilities in vision and objectives,” he added.