A Critical Assessment of the Draft National Education Policy, 2019

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 a background of Constitutional commitments, realities of higher education, experiences from the past, existing social realities and the future needs of ordinary people of India. Mindful of the continuities with and breaks from previous policy paradigms in education, this note discusses Constitutional values as they are (or are not) articulated in the DNEP, and its use of categories such as caste, gender, class, language, and identity as social axes in education policy. School and higher education will be discussed separately, with a particular focus on the far-reaching changes in higher education that have been proposed in this draft. To put it quite clearly, the DNEP is an important document and this note is written in the earnest hope of contributing to a nationwide debate on what should drive a national education policy.