NDA government introduced the National Education Policy two years ago, generally called NEP 2020. However, the root of NEP can be traced back to around the period of implementation of Liberalisation Privatisation and Globalisation (LPG) in India. In 1996, it was proposed by the World Trade Organisation of which India became a member in 1995 that education be brought under the ambit of GATS. Thus, binding the member countries to turn education along with 12 other services like health as a tradable commodity, thereby allowing unrestricted access to the education market by foreign and domestic capital. Since then, there has been increasing privatisation of education causing education to get costlier day-by-day. In 1998, Murli Manohar Joshi, then HRD minister from BJP, at a UNESCO conference on higher education said, ”higher education benefits the individual, so individuals should pay for it.” Hence, NEP 2020 should be seen as an accelerated and consolidated form of privatisation and commercialisation with saffronisation as an added component.
The steps taken by the present government clearly shows that they are on the same path. Recently, the central government scrapped the Maulana Azad National Fellowship (MANF) meant to provide scholarships to students coming from minority communities to pursue MPhil or Phd in Indian universities. MANF was brought as per the recommendation of Sachar committee that exposed the socioeconomic gap between minority communities and the Hindu majority. Recently, the central government also scrapped pre matric scholarships for students from SC,ST, OBC students. Karnataka being the first state to implement NEP, there has been a recent reduction of fellowship amount from Rs 25,000 a month to Rs 10,000 a month for minority PhD students. All state and central government universities are already reeling under severe fund crunch.
Going through some of the NEP 2020’s suggestions will help us understand the exact future plans of the government regarding education. For example, research funding will get worse because NEP 2020 suggests establishing a centralised body called National Research Fund (NRF) which will finance and direct research across all disciplines, like humanities, science, etc. The same document says that ‘the higher education system must aim to form the hub for the next industrial revolution.’ (MHRD 2019: 203). It is clear from this point that this NRF will also focus on catering to research benefitting industries, kicking aside social or basic sciences.
It encourages setting up of Higher Educational Institutions (HEI’s) following a public-philanthropic partnership model, which is a whitewashed term for private institutes. These institutions that need not follow reservation guidelines will become shops where one can buy education according to their class or few can get institutional ‘mercy scholarship’ on identity/class basis. This will ensure better ranking in the global market as well as prevent marginalised students from moving on economic issues as has been the trend in all government institutes like JNU, HCU, JU etc. With the introduction of centralised tests like CUET for undergraduate admissions for all central universities, inequalities will get amplified with free loot by coaching institutes. Even for school education, hardly any stress is given on education being a fundamental right for all Indians by this policy. Vocational training as per ‘local needs’ is being pushed very early on. There is no mention of ‘Reservation’ anywhere in the document. In a nation that has not yet achieved 100% electrification, online education is being promoted extensively by the NEP 2020.
The only field where the government is investing is ‘skill training programs’, where young people are trained ‘free of cost’ for a month or two so that they can directly serve as cheap labourers. Some also encourage self- employment among youth through these programmes, but without capital, they can’t start a business and if they had capital, why would they not go for higher education.
Our government has already been quite successful in privatising and commercialising the basic necessities like health, education, etc. NEP 2020 is a perfect example of how the government has officially declared that only individuals who can afford the costly education can dream of having a safe and secure career. If we do not unite and oppose this tooth and nail, in a decade or so we will find an army of workers churned out by a post-NEP system that would only serve the system without any zeal for fighting societal inequality left in them.
