This note on the Draft National Education Policy 2019 (DNEP) seeks to evaluate the recommendations, the vision that steers the effort, and the implications the proposed changes will have on the future of education in India by scrutinising it against…
The Draft National Education Policy (NEP) 2019 envisions an ‘India-centred education system that contributes directly to transforming our nation sustainably into an equitable and vibrant knowledge society.’ I would like to focus on knowledge economy, avowedly the central agenda of…
One cannot but be struck by the tone of smug self-satisfaction that pervades this report, that India was the origin of most great ideas including the Pythagoras theorem and the Fibonacci series, that Indian universities like Nalanda and Taxila were…
India is the corn chest for Scotland, where we poor gentry must send our youngest sons as we send black cattle to the south, - Walter Scott, 1821. The monolithic construction of identities by the imperialist and anti-imperialist historiographies of…
Crisis in Higher Education Higher education is in crisis. The nature of the crisis is not what Phillip Coombs (1968) identified in the 1960s, nor it is the ‘continuing crisis’ of the kind J.P. Naik (1982) described. The crisis is…
The indigenous educational institutions had their own history of evolution and had been known as the repositories of knowledge. There was a set structure and curriculum and they often thrived on the patronage given by the ruling class/elite/local magnate. However,…
25 June 2013, New Delhi. Third US–India Higher Education Dialogue, co-chaired by US Secretary of State John Kerry and India’s Minister of Human Resource Development M.M. Pallam Raju. Apart from the senior policy makers and heads of regulatory bodies (e.g.…
We have not abandoned purely student demands, but the best way to bring the university into question is to intensify the workers’ movement. – Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Jean-Pierre Duteuil, March 22nd Movement, 1968 It was towards the end of 2012…
In the context of the recently introduced Four Year Undergraduate Programme (FYUP) in the University of Delhi for the academic year 2013–14, it has become imperative to make an attempt to analyse critically the rationale behind such a measure which…
The educational ‘reforms’ we are witnessing today in India are usually attributed to the changing requirements of the economic system. This is no doubt true, but in addition they are also meant to serve the needs of the new ‘Ideological…