I went back to the National Education Policy, 2020 and read it all over again.
Why wouldn’t I? That, we the teachers and students in higher education are told, is the basis of all that makes up for the changes in the last one and a half years; one short hand that justifies the new steps; one open sesame of newness, if you like!
This “first educational policy of the 21st century”, intended to be “operational during 2030-2040”, presents certain aspects as foundational and it would be good to review these ideas against the steps taken so far using the teaching experience in Delhi University – an early bird and thus a likely forerunner in NEP implementation.
“Holistic development” is one mantra in the NEP. The NEP argues against “the hard separation” of arts and sciences as well as between curricular and extra-curricular activities. Student-run, faculty-mentored clubs and activities are said to be so important that the NEP has provisions for funding them! But in Delhi University, where I teach, the NEP system has increased the number of courses for students, leaving them in the class room practically throughout the day. The number of classes in courses has been reduced – when many of these courses were taught with almost the same content and in 60% of the number of lectures in the earlier scheme. This overcrowded scheme not only makes learning rushed, summary-based and superfluous but also takes away the time for student activities, diminishing their “holistic development”.
The NEP does talk about its aim to make the student number in higher education institutions 3,000, with a promise that “the student-teacher ratio will not be too high” and insisting on the “physical infrastructure and appropriate resources conducive for learning”. If student numbers are increased (as Delhi University colleges have increased seats up to 20%) without increasing the number of teachers and building infrastructure and resources, it goes against the NEP’s plan. “Quality classroom transaction”, a passing mention in the document, there lay abandoned.
“Multidisciplinarity” is one central and most repeated NEP theme. In its conceptualisation of a Four Year Undergraduate Programme, a student has multiple exit options the NEP offers: after one year, certificate; after two years, diploma; after three years, bachelor’s degree; and after four, multidisciplinary bachelor’s programme. The first year is over and there is no record of how many left with a certificate. Whatever that number is, the difficulty is that the first year courses haven’t been formulated with such cohesiveness that there looks a beginning, middle and end for it as a one year stand-alone entity. Under the category of Value Added Courses and Skill Enhancement Courses, a number of courses have been introduced: any department can teach these courses without worrying about expertise and specialisation, caricaturing the very idea of “multidisciplinarity”!
“Teacher”, the NEP proclaims, “is at the centre of all reforms” and “at the heart of the learning process” and they are supposed to be mentors as well. While the NEP talks of “tenure track” (a sort of probation) and “tenure” (permanent) in proper American university terms, this is the domain in which the cruellest kind of exploitation has come in.
Delhi University’s ad hoc appointment system had three benefits: ad hoc teachers were paid almost the same amount as that of an entry level permanent staff minus increments and some allowances, their experience counted when they applied for permanent jobs, for their promotions later, and they had vacation salary if they worked on the last and first day of the vacation.
This has been replaced by the new guest system – where each guest can only handle half the workload of an ad hoc, they are paid by the teaching hour which effectively means paid only for 8 out of 12 months with no vacation salary and their guest teaching doesn’t count as teaching experience. Over-worked, under-paid and undocumented labour of young minds can’t be teacher centricism!
In addition to this, the horrible backlog of permanent appointments in Delhi University created another issue: many long-serving ad hocs, some more than of a decade, got displaced from their job, and their contribution to the growth of departments went thanklessly unaccounted for. Due to the fast forwarded nature of interviews, some actually lasted only for a minute or two, and serious allegations of favouritism in some colleges students got pushed into staging protests against this unfair treatment of teachers, making one wonder whatever happened to NEP’s “teacher centrality”.
The assessment systems, the suggested criterion-based grading system with more continuous and comprehensive evaluation, “moving away from high stake examinations” has increased the internal mark component. Given the number of courses a student has to attend, the number of graded tasks in a semester and the persistent bureaucratic notions, teachers would be tripling up as exam superintends, invigilators and evaluators, all rolled into one, for most of the teaching time.
If the implementation of the NEP is in such contrast with the stated projects, who is to be blamed? I think it is the fault of professors sitting in on the highest decision-making bodies, such as the academic council and the executive council, for they do not use their discerning power, domain expertise and educational experience ethically in heralding a newly developed policy to an area they are in charge of. Either there is cynical resignation or timid collaboration with some policy makers – in both cases they are not doing their job. This chasm between what is said and what is done will waste our public universities into a demonetised state – the inefficiency and the mayhem witnessed in admissions, course content, academic directives and examination process in the last one and a half year have started demonstrating already.
The NEP concludes by talking about the need to have comprehensiveness in implementation and the need to review the linkages between multiple parallel steps and in such a task is undertaken with its implemented version, the NEP is unlikely to recognise itself.
The organising principles of the NEP were always contested. There is an Indian story in education which is the basis of India being the largest provider of skilled engineers for the knowledge economy and its substantial contribution to the global academic scene. This immediate past was totally hidden and an ancient India “golden age narrative” was formulated to redress the majoritarian fears, concocted by the majoritarian political propaganda of fear and inferiority. This obsession is one major flaw of the NEP. Moreover, its deployment of choice and freedom seem to address consumers of an academic mall and not citizens-in-the-making of a republic (This is not to say earlier it was all picture perfect. In experience, the shift might just be from one that scared students as subjects to one that is scared of students as consumers). The NEP’s secret agenda, those who disagreed maintained, is the state’s withdrawal from the social sector by emptying out the existing organisations of character and quality and enabling the market players to extract wealth from the moneyed for their children’s education.
Even if those views are kept out for now, shouldn’t the NEP supporters be specially concerned, if their journey to the promised land of Indian education has already started on missteps, with so much being out of syllabus?
Given the new world order in the making, techno-economic givens, insights in educational philosophy and psychology, generational conflicts and paradigm shifts accelerated by the pandemic and the environmental scene, nobody will say our educational practices don’t need revision. Indian educational system’s reach, in spite of its socialist proclamations till 1990s or a mixed situation thereafter, went beyond feudal, upper caste, metropolitan and plutocratic constraints only in exceptions and that does need to be addressed and corrected. But all these require an inclusive and egalitarian vision for the future, a plan that can actualise it and an institutional system that can perform this script with understanding and rigour – bulldozing of the existing institutional structures for the spectacle of old in the guise of the new can’t even begin to do it. What falls through the cracks of NEP theory and practice is the future of India.
The situation is like that of Trishanku, the Ikshwaku king sent to heaven alive with the blessing of a powerful human-sage but was stopped without getting entry by the enraged chief of gods. The king hanging in the sky, struggling in the neither-here-nor-here of empty air is a suitable but sad metaphor for what Indian higher education scene is living through: one that we need to take urgent notice of but, as a people, can’t afford to get accustomed to!
N.P. Ashley teaches English at St. Stephen’s College, Delhi.
