HYDERABAD: Disempowerment of States and the near-absolute power that the policy gives to the Centre disregarding the federal setup is something that the State needs to pay attention to while communicating its feedback to the Kasturirangan Committee that formulated the draft New Education Policy 2019. This was the concern expressed by the school and higher education department, at the day-long discussion on the policy, here on Tuesday.
Education Minister Jagdish Reddy while lauding the comprehensive policy and its proposed three-language policy found fault with excessive importance being given to Sanskrit. The draft policy envisages that higher education in India will become multi-disciplinary by 2030 and to ensure at the apex of all education-related agencies there will be Rashtriya Shiksha Aayog (RSA) which will be headed by the Prime Minister.
This, the minister said would place too much power in the hands of the PM. “From pre-primary to higher education, the policy has given a lot of power to the Centre and is not clear on the role of the States. This ambiguity is pushing us to think that there would a bigger hidden agenda,” he said.“Will a student in Adilabad find relevance in the curriculum framed by NCERT? Localisation is must and therefore should be left to States,” he said.
The minister also expressed apprehension over the inclusion of suggestion in the NEP considering that the draft committee has already received 8,000 recommendations from across the country. RS Praveen Kumar, Secretary, Telangana Residential Educational Society, was critical of the 5+3+3+4 curriculum and pedagogical structure of school education on the ground that between zero to three years of age, the vocabulary gap of a rich and poor child is that of 30,000 words.
He also suggests that instead of putting the focus on Sanskrit, as was done by the policy, coding, AI, computational thinking, should be promoted to make the students ready for technological advancement.
Prof R Limbadiri, VC Telangana State Council of Higher Education, said that funding was another aspect that the State was not very happy about. Commissioner of Technical and Collegiate Education, Navin Mittal, said that NEP has correctly decided to do away with universities granting affiliation and instead let colleges become degree-granting institutions.
Constitutional values are missing in New Education Policy Draft 2019, says AIFRTE
Hyderabad: The Constitutional values have become quite conspicuous by their absence in the vision statement of Dr K Kasturirangan Committee’s Report on Draft NEP, Prof. Anil Sadgopal, member of All-India Forum for Right to Education, has said. Addressing a press conference organised jointly by TS Save Education Committee and AIFRTE on Tuesday, Prof. Sadgopal said, although the committee repeatedly referred to the ‘Indian Tradition’, but the developments during the medieval period stand ignored. He elaborated how, under the pretext of philanthropy, private educational institutions would be given autonomy to charge fees without any regulation by the govt