– Mita Mukherjee
The Congress party will “revisit” NEP 2020 and it will continue to “oppose policies” that “weaken” the country’s “public education system”, wrote the party leader Rahul Gandhi in a letter to the All India Save Education Committee (AISEC), an association of educationists, intellectuals, teachers and students, which had urged him to take the necessary steps to scrap NEP.
The platform, comprising a vast section of the academic community, had been opposing the NEP saying that it is “anti-people,” “anti-poor,” “not inclusive”, “anti-secular” and indulges “unscientific education”.
Ever since the Centre announced the implementation of NEP, the association had continuously appealed to various political parties, except the BJP and its allies, to support their demand to withdraw NEP and incorporate it in their election manifesto, Tarun Kanti Naskar, a former professor of Jadavpur University and secretary of AISEC said.
After the BJP-led coalition assumed power at the Centre, the AISEC had written to Opposition MPs including the leader of the Opposition to raise their voices in both Houses of the parliament and mount pressure upon the government to withdraw NEP 2020.
Taking note of the demands of the organisation, Gandhi recently wrote in his letter to Naskar, “The Congress party’s manifesto for the 2024 Lok Sabha elections committed to revisit the New Education Policy and amend it in consultation with the state governments. We will continue to oppose policies that weaken our public education system.”
The AISEC is of the opinion that NEP 2020 will encourage privatisation, commercialisation, corporatisation, centralisation and saffronisation.
According to the organisation, the NEP 2020 should be scrapped because it denies the state governments their rights to have their own say on education, which is a subject in the concurrent list of the Indian Constitution. At the same time, it strips the educational institutions and teachers off their autonomy, the organisation said. The NEP also fails to address the problems of marginalised states with large tribal populations.
In its letter to Gandhi, AISEC had said that NEP needs to be reviewed because if it is fully implemented, the policy will divide the people of India into two distinct classes. One group might have the financial ability to avail of education by paying high fees and the other would remain uneducated because of not being able to bear the high fees and other charges.
When “glaring discrepancies” surfaced following the announcement of the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) results in June this year, AISEC had demanded scrapping of NEET and National Testing Agency (NTA) that conducts the NEET as it said that the NTA was set up to align with the recommendation of the NEP.
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