Mita Mukherjee

The Supreme Court on Friday said that the court could not compel any state to adopt National Education Policy 2020, but if a state’s action or inaction related to the policy violated any fundamental  rights, then the court can intervene.

The top court said this while dismissing a PIL seeking a directive to states like Tamil Nadu, West Bengal and Kerala to implement NEP.

A bench of Justices J B Pardiwala and R Mahadevan said that the court could not directly ask any state to implement a policy like the NEP.  The bench noted that Article 32 of the Constitution only allows the court to enforce fundamental rights but does not say that it can direct states to adopt a specific policy.

“…. It cannot directly compel a state to adopt a policy like national Education Policy 2020….. The Court may, however, intervene if a State’s action or inaction related to the National Education Policy violates fundamental rights….. We do not propose to examine this issue in this writ petition….” the court said.

Arguing that the three-states are constitutionally bound to implement the NEP, a Tamil Nadu-based lawyer and BJP leader had urged the court in his petition that the three states be asked to implement the three-language formula as recommended in the NEP. The petitioner contended that the three states are constitutionally bound to follow the NEP. The plea said that the NEP intended to bring about uniformity in education and the three states were refusing to adopt it for political reasons.

The NEP 2020 proposes that students should be imparted education at least upto Class V preferably till Class VIII in their mother tongues. Classical languages like Sanskrit has to be taught at all levels and foreign languages at secondary level.  

The petition was filed amid the ongoing controversy centering the three-language curriculum as Tamil Nadu chief minister M K Stalin has strongly opposed it saying that through the three-language formula the Centre was trying to impose Hindi in non-Hindi speaking states.. Kerala opposed the policy saying that it aims towards commercialization and centralization of education and West Bengal criticized the proposal as it undermines the deferral structure.

Organisations of academics too opposed the NEP and demanded the policy should be scrapped entirely. Tarun Kanti Naskar, general secretary of All India Save Education Committee, an organization of college and university teachers, said they welcomed the top court order and fully supported it.

“ We fully support the order dismissing the writ petition. The Union government through 42^nd amendment of the Constitution brought education under concurrent list, which means both Centre and state can legislate on education. However, the present ruling dispensation at the Centre is used to consider it as under central list and forcibly impose all central policies including NEP 2020 in states. Also it is true that NEP is not a legislation but only a Cabinet decision. The Central government thus violates all the spirit of federalism. This policy is a blueprint of privatization, commercialization, corporatization and communalization of education. We have been opposing this policy from the beginning and so we welcome this judgment of the apex court,” Naskar told EducationWorld.

Also read: UGC asks universities to implement NEP 2020 curricular reforms