The Delhi University Teachers’ Association (DUTA), which comprises of 22 executive members, has unanimously given a thumbs-down to the new National Education Policy (NEP). In a series of meetings, some inputs for the Draft National Education Policy 2016 were discussed by the teachers and it wasn’t defended by even the four “pro-BJP” members. As a matter of fact, the teachers called it the “National Exclusion Policy.”
What Led to the Decision?
Nandita Narain, President of DUTA, said that, on matters of internationalisation, commercialisation, recruitment policies, and massively open online courses (MOOCs), the members of DUTA have long-standing positions. She mentioned that they can’t go against them now. Besides demanding the immediate withdrawal of this document and initiation of a spread-out, transparent debate involving all sectors of Indians, a sub-committee is being set up by the association to prepare an exhaustive document report.
The document doesn’t offer any clues to its provenance and, questioning the input’s origins, DUTA has joined organisations. The document also doesn’t reference the Subramanian Committee which was recognised to formulate the draft.
DUTA’s statement state an even more shocking feature about the document, which is that there was no authorship acknowledgment when it appeared. It seems to be lifted from the seminar that was held from 11-14 July this year – the “Final Vision NEP Policy Document International Seminar on National Education Policy and NAMODI Framework”.
More Say from the Teachers
The teachers said that a narrow plan of privatisation was reflected by the inputs. The statement claimed that more cost-cutting and commercialisation were favoured by the policy document by supporting the merge of present govt. schools and MOOCs’ promotions; this is a cheap choice in place of taking care of the urgent need for more public-funded institutes at all educational levels. Student loans were also suggested and this, in turn, would result in terrible consequences on the students’ academic creativity and choices as they’ll be under the burden of debt.
In addition, the statement said that the deterioration of schools’ values of education due to deficiency of able teachers and learning environment was not accounted by the inputs. Besides this, the inputs have been claimed to maintain a fraudulent silence on incessantly deteriorating service conditions for recruitment ad-hocism, teachers, and absence of promotional avenues and erosion of the self-sufficiency of universities in issues of examinations and syllabi.
The teachers stated that the policy needs to voice the economic, cultural, and social empowerment of citizens, which is the biggest role of education. Instead, the document hints at reducing education to just a feeder-process which intends to give the global employment market some cheap labour. The teachers feel that the policy has completely ignored the backward groups and the disabled.
In essence, the new NEP was criticised by the DUTA as they saw it as an articulation of “Indian culture” to reflect an uncritical and monolithic idea of the country; the policy disregards the multiplicity of subcontinental knowledge traditions and shows a Vedic and Brahminical bias.