NEP policy buffet needs À La Carte implementation

Restaurant gastronomy’s eternal tussle between the buffet and à la carte swings like a pendulum searching for its equilibrium position. The final choice always goes to the wire and more often than not favors the restaurateurs. The profitability of food and beverages sale through a buffet is higher than à la carte, making buffets the hotel industry’s revenue accelerator. The gastric session ends with a burp, the volume of which is proportional to the level of an epicurean’s satisfaction and the hole in the purse. Public policy implementation is also a tough choice between a buffet of diverse choices and a focussed à la carte.

The National Educational Policy (NEP) is a transformational buffet policy to elevate India into higher levels of educational orbit and requires a la carte implementation menu. The NEP is special as it has a longer than usual shelf life considering the propensity of the impact it is designed to create across generations, current and next. It is this expanse and excitement that makes it a policy that needs to tread a la carte implementation incrementally, instead of a richly spread buffet right at the start creating avoidable resource wastage with deceiving policy profits.

There are many policy items of the 1968 and 1986 NEPs that are still uncooked but consumed huge resources. The success of this NEP, as I had written in my previous article, is in its implementation pathway. The a la ÚÉÁpacity to be customised at all levels—school, higher education, research, vocational education, etc, along with their support systems of governance, finance, norms and standards, etc. Here are some a la carte implementation menus.

Fixing the school education system is an elixir of all of India’s education woes. The school education is not only about students but also its teachers. The annual ASER results and the PISA scores project a bleeding school education resume that now needs to be decorated with certain implementation delicacies. School infrastructure modernisation has to magnetically attract young minds voluntarily into foundational and elementary education and middle and secondary education pedagogy should aim at overall student development than to churn out humanoids for competitive exams such as NEET, JEE, etc.

Teacher education has to come out of its regimental statutory control giving full autonomy to universities to offer innovative and creative teacher education programmes on their own at all levels and for all purposes. This intertwined school-teacher education starter will not only lay down a perfect platform for long-term reforms in school education but also a good feeder into the higher education.
The much-promised autonomy in higher education to progressive public and private institutions still awaits its I-day. For a country like India, 20 Institutions of Eminence are not adequate even for a sumptuous salad. We need 100 IoEs to ensure eminence and weed out exorbitance.

The proposed Higher Education Commission of India, which is the higher education’s main course, needs to be cooked on a war footing mode mixed with institution builders, diverse academics, industry leaders, civil society members and other critical stakeholders in a major deviation from the polarised and antiquated policy-making machinery. Many low-hanging higher education policy fruits need to be served to the deserving HEIs who are starved of policy juices.

The National Research Foundation is NEP’s long-term artillery and requires a detailed implementation plan with different dimensions encompassing the whole nine yards of research that has sweeping impact on a multitude of issues. The need of the hour is to simply plant the research seeds with adequate fertilisers and cook the produce at ripe times. Other NEP reforms involving Indian Knowledge Systems, digital pedagogy, online education, etc. are crucial desserts that need to be cherry-picked with ease by capable institutions without any bureaucratic or policy hurdles.

The phased and comprehensive implementation of the NEP (briefly highlighted in para 27.2) needs to be prioritised for effective presentation for hungry end-users. The NEP is a nutritious buffet diet of policy reforms and the implementation must not be hurriedly cooked to serve all items over a confusingly rich buffet. It has to be a la carte. In short: Policy buffet needs à la carte implementation.

S Vaidhyasubramaniam
Vice-Chancellor, SASTRA  Deemed University vaidhya@sastra.edu