NEW DELHI: The TSR Subramanian Committee report on the draft education policy has called for fair and equitable deployment of teachers across regions and between rural and urban areas.
Vacancies for teachers and headmasters for each block should be placed in the public domain. Shorter tenure and other incentives should be offered for posting in tribal and remote areas. Besides, there should be a minimum eligibility condition with 50 per cent marks at graduate-level for entry to existing BEd courses. Teacher Entrance Tests (TET) should be made compulsory for recruitment, the report recommended.
The report also proposed to institute 10 lakh new fellowships every year for higher education. The class XII exam could provide national benchmarks to identify beneficiaries based on merit standards. It said that no university should have more than 100 affiliated colleges and universities which have more than 100 affiliated colleges should be split for achieving better academic oversight and management efficiency.
Besides, it has called for transforming at least 1,000 institutes of higher learning into world-class universities so as to stop the migration to foreign universities. Turning attention to campus politics, the likes of which has been widely reported of late, the policy has proposed non-recognition of students’ groups that are “explicitly based on caste, religion or one political party”.
The recommendation is being seen as crucial in light of the report’s observation that one has rarely heard in the context of US or Europe or other educationally developed countries, of postponement of examinations or disruption of academic activities, arising out of groups of students pursuing their ‘right’ to free speech and association.