Kerala Higher Education Minister R. Bindu said the New Education Policy (NEP), released by the Centre in 2020, will function as a vehicle for “communalising and commodifying education”. Inaugurating the ‘Assembly on Education’, organised by the All India People’s Science Network, here on Sunday, she added that the NEP should be viewed in the “background of current socio-political situation” where communal forces are joining hands with corporate forces. “NEP urges to impose centralisation, denouncing the federal principles of the country,” she said.
She demanded parliamentary scrutiny of the NEP. “The NEP has not been subjected to any legislative or social scrutiny; it has bypassed the parliamentary procedure; through a travesty of social audit, it has invited public opinion through UGC and disregarded the replies,” Dr. Bindu said. “An educational policy should scrutinise the impacts, merits and demerits of the previous policy documents. But the NEP never makes an attempt to study the impact of the previous policy documents. Most of the time, it revels in a remote past in the glories of an ancient India,” she said.
Dr. Bindu said Kerala’s experiment is to resist NEP with a higher education model that suits the specific needs of the State and its people. “Kerala intends to build a people-centric knowledge society. This model of knowledge society is different from the model projected by the developed, capitalist society. Our model intends to take engagement with knowledge production and research to a larger society,” she claimed.
The NEP, the Kerala Minister said, is for dismantling of the affiliating system of colleges and such a move will be detrimental for the students from the rural areas especially the tribal students. “Regional availability of educational facilities is important in the case of access. Despite the claims of the NEP, it has failed to identify and address the socio-economic challenges faced by India’s educational progress,” she added.
She said the word “Indianness” is repeated in the document many times, but the definition of “Indianness” is too narrow and constricted. “The repeated assertions of Indianness paves the way for the very narrow concept of the nation in the present situation. The variety, plurality and diversity of our nation is the wealth of India, but unfortunately instead of seeing this multiplicity and cultural polyphony as an asset, the NEP dismisses it as fragmentation,” she alleged.
