Acknowledging that her ministry has been through turbulent times, Union HRD Minister Smriti Irani said the new draft education policy would have several game-changing initiatives — including a potential system that could link promotion of teachers to 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 and reached out to over 1.5 lakh villages who gave us inputs,” she said while inaugurating TNIE’s ThinkEdu Conclave at the ITC Grand Chola in Chennai on Tuesday.
Addressing a hall packed with students, teachers, academicians and corporates, Irani chose to engage in a direct dialogue with TNIE Editorial Director Prabhu Chawla and the audience, and opted 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 on burning issues and see if we get somewhere,” she said at the outset.
In what could be a game changer for lakhs of students studying in Indian languages across the country, the HRD Ministry is two months away from opening a new portal — that has curriculum, Indian research work and international journals — which 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, Mysuru. We’ve been working on it for an year and all the data in the higher education system will be translated into 22 scheduled Indian languages. I’m hoping to scale it up to 100 in three years,” said Irani. She explained how the project was inspired by a series of encounters she had with students who lamented their lack of growth in formal education circles since their English wasn’t too good. Irani said that the government’s project Bharatvani, which digitises material in several scheduled languages, will bridge a whole lot of divides and bright a vast people into the system. “It’s a mammoth task to translate and digitise all the data, but we are hopeful that we will launch it in the next two months,” she added.
Speaking at the fourth edition of the Think Edu Conclave, she explained that it would be a constant work in progress, to ensure it was updated and current, by a team of academics who select content from international journals and post it online. “We have students from poor backgrounds who enter IITs and find it tough to proceed to the second year. They feel that it’s their background that is to blame. So we want to fix that issue,” she adds.
Strangely, the questions that were thrown around were mostly policy and education oriented, until one about reservation popped up. Responding to a query from an ex-BSF officer, who suggested, “SC/ST quota is causing problem so that intelligent boys are being left behind. If Backward Classes are not using the advantage why can’t it be given to someone else?”
Irani cut him short quickly and responded, “Till we bring about justice to every family, those who are socially disadvantaged need that help. If we are one family, we cannot prosper if even one of us is left behind.”