NEP stresses freedom, don’t dilute It

One of my greatest concerns is that no matter how well the National Education Policy (NEP) has been crafted on paper, when it comes to implementing it at the ground-level, there are so many misconceptions and dilutions. These are likely to cause more harm than good. If I had to capture the spirit of the NEP in one word it would be ‘freedom’. Unfortunately, most of our universities are unable to take cognisance of this spirit of freedom, and thus, they have not been able to take full and real advantage of the policy. 

As little as I have been able to understand, the University Grants Commission (UGC), too—in spite of very good intentions—has perhaps unwittingly managed to muddy the waters. It has circulated a draft curriculum for universities to draw ideas from, for their own use, so that they may have some ease of understanding as to what is it that the NEP prescribes. 

From what I can infer, the UGC has not asked for universities to implement the NEP in complete consonance with the draft document. Most universities, however,—at least those in the realm of publicly funded institutions—have more or less mechanically implemented the draft guidelines without any major thought. This then hinders any true trans-disciplinarity.

In fact, the universities are mechanically including credit courses from different disciplines in the name of trans-disciplinarity. Hence, if one were to enrol in a Sanskrit degree programme, the universities tend to then ask the Sanskrit student to also undertake credit from a mathematics course or even from a computer science course. 

As things stand, this violates the spirit and substance of the NEP. What universities have failed to grasp is that the NEP has also quite boldly asked for a project-based pedagogy, so that students from mathematics, Sanskrit and computer science can collectively look at problems where the three disciplines work in synergy.

Hence, if the students were to study what Pingala had done in the realm of prosody in 200 BCE, they would have a field day. The Sankrit students will look at the business of creating new metres and mathematics students shall suggest the use of devices like the Pascal’s triangle, and computer science students shall produce computer simulations via algorithms. 

In my description of the Sanskrit-based project, students from all three disciplines benefit and see how knowledge in action can bring about major learning through problem-solving pedagogies. In addition, the three disciplines have enormous synergy between them and that is what trans-disciplinarity is all about. The pedagogy, according to the NEP, has to be project-based where real-world problems are tackled in this trans-disciplinary fashion.

Unfortunately, this aspect of the prescription of the NEP has more or less fallen completely by the wayside. Perhaps, the powers that be may be more convinced if they learn that the Tony Blair Faith Foundation, in a recently released report, has actually asserted that this is the pedagogy that must be adopted by all institutions.

Dinesh Singh
Former Vice-Chancellor, Delhi University; Adjunct Professor of Mathematics, University of Houston, US
Twitter: @DineshSinghEDU