The fashionable new buzzword in contemporary education is ‘inclusive education’. The Right of Children to Free & Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, 2009, which makes it mandatory for privately promoted schools to admit children from socio-economically disadvantaged households in their neighbourhoods (s.12 (1) (c)), is the latest instance of inclusive education. Earlier, inclusive education was propagated to accommodate children with physical and mental disabilities into mainstream schools.

But paradoxically, education is also becoming more exclusive. If not, how do we explain near-impossible cut-off marks ranging from 97-99 percent, which have become mandatory for admission into the country’s best undergrad colleges particularly in Delhi, or the high tuition fees demanded by elite schools and newly emergent private universities and B-schools?

This phenomenon of lip-service to inclusive and universally accessible education while at ground zero quality education is becoming increasingly exclusive, cannot be explained away by saying schools and colleges have limited capacity and that the student-teacher ratios must be maintained. The plain truth is that education in our country is systemically flawed. Even in expensive and exclusive private education institutions, learning-by-rote androgogy or pedagogy is widely prevalent. And despite the dawn of the new age of the Internet, ‘cut and paste’ is the favoured pedagogy of students and teachers. In the country’s 1.2 million public/government schools, the situation is worse because of chronic teacher absenteeism.

Contemporary education has become very complicated due to several new factors: the need for balance between work and study, lifelong education, education for women, working people, challenged persons etc. The new Internet age demands a steady flow of learning precepts from childhood to adulthood unimpeded by the trauma of failure to acquire degrees and pursuit of ‘disinterested’ learning for its own sake and pleasure.

Within an education system confronted with myriad seemingly intractable problems, open learning systems can play a vital role in infusing it with dynamism, flexibility and continuity. New technologies-driven distance learning systems can address the problems of inclusivity, burgeoning teacher-pupil ratios and rote learning. They are ideal for addressing the problem of ‘drop outs’ from the system as they give students unlimited time to complete courses and programmes as also the opportunity to resume learning after one or more breaks. Moreover, they offer flexible options such as associate degrees and credit transfers and enable dialogues with other institutions, facilitating inter-institution mobility. Little wonder that open and distance education freed of myopic restrictions, has become increasingly popular in India with annual enrolment amounting to 25 percent of students in higher education. Moreover, distance higher education counters degree bias by offering a range of professional, vocational and short-term diploma programmes.

Unfortunately, instead of being encouraged, the spread and reach of open and distance learning in higher education is being discouraged by regulatory organisations. The University Grants Commission, the apex body for licensing distance education programmes, insists on reviewing curriculums every two-three years, imposes restrictions on introducing new courses and prohibits twinning programmes. Likewise, NCTE (National Council for Teacher Education), AICTE (All India Council for Technical Education), the Nursing and Dental councils of India have also imposed a plethora of restrictions upon open universities, preventing them from introducing new professional programmes through partnerships and alliances. Consequently, access and flexibility in distance higher education are fast becoming mythical and tertiary education in India is slowly regressing to learning by rote for high grades in do-or-die exams.

At a time when the Union HRD ministry is in the process of finalising its National Education Policy 2016 (NEP 2016), the national interest demands a thorough review and revision of the country’s open and distance education policy. Given the high capital costs of establishing greenfield brick-n-mortar colleges and universities, well-developed, new technologies-driven open and distance learning programmes offer the only realistic chance of attaining the targeted GER (gross enrolment ratio) of 50 percent of youth in the age group 18-24 in higher education by 2030.

Facilitative policies, liberal rules and regulations in terms of entry norms, extension of the classroom by introducing innovations such as reflexive technology, Internet access and free and open source software to enable students to learn at their own pace through synchronous and asynchronous media including mobile phones need to be integrated into NEP 2016. E-learning via skype, Google/Yahoo groups and social networking sites will reduce ‘distances’ and break the barriers of isolation which discourage self-learners.

(Ananya S. Guha is regional director, IGNOU, Shillong)