Ahallmark of Smriti Irani is not her off-white sari, but for those who have watched her closely, it’s her affinity for her Blackberry. Passed over as a relic in this age of touch screen smartphones and 4G connectivity, the queen bee of the HRD Ministry confidently tells us that she would be “lost” without her Blackberry and it’s keypad. Her candour and clarity in acknowledging that her Ministry has had a lot of turbulence in the recent past, show that she’s got her eye on the ball. All the time.
She tells us that the new draft education policy would have several game-changing systems — including a potential system that could link the promotion of teachers to the performance of their students, “I told bureaucrats that we need the views of citizens and it can’t be generic. We decided to leverage every democratic interface possible and reached out to over 1.5 lakh villages who gave us their inputs,” she said.
Talking to a hall packed with students, teachers, academics and corporates, Irani engaged in direct dialogue with TNIE Editorial Director Prabhu Chawla and the audience, opting out of delivering a formal keynote address. “I’m of the opinion that I am here to be grilled and I’d rather answer questions about burning issues and see if we get somewhere,” she said at the outset.
She also spoke about how one of her pet projects — which no one has wanted to talk about for a year now — could be a game changer for lakhs of students studying in Indian languages across the country.
The Union HRD Ministry is two months away from opening a new portal that has curriculum, Indian research work and International journals — that will be translated into 22 Indian languages.
“The language divide is one that we seek to address in conjunction with the Centre for Indian Languages, Mysore. We’ve been working on it for one year and all the data in the higher education system will be translated into 22 scheduled Indian languages. And I’m hoping to scale it up to 100 languages in the next three years,” she said.
Explaining how this project was inspired by a series of encounters she had with students who lamented their lack of growth in formal education circles because their English wasn’t too good, Irani said that the project Bharatvani, would bridge a whole lot of divides.
“It’s a mammoth task to translate and digitise all that data but we’re hopeful that we can get it done when we launch in the next two months,” she added.
Speaking to Edex, she explained that it would be a constant work in progress, to ensure it was updated and current, by a team of academics who selected content from international journals and post this content online.
“We have students from poor backgrounds go to IITs and find it tough to go to the second year. They feel that it’s their background that is to blame. So we want to fix that issue.”