Words and numbers

India's education policy needs to be both more & less ambitious

One of the besetting sins of Indian policy making has always been an excess of ambition. Policy is only rarely written for the actual constraints of implementation in the Indian context — a chronic shortage of resources, poor monitoring and supervision capacity, political differences, and delays in funding. Sometimes this combines with a fundamental misdiagnosis of the immediate and most severe problems holding back progress, or with a refusal to accept reality.

It is in the light of this tendency that one should read the National Education Policy, which was released last week by the Union government. The importance of this document cannot be understated: It has been the first such exercise since the 1980s (the 1986 NEP was revised by the last solo Congress government, in the 1990s). It has also been produced by the human resources ministry after a great deal of work over several years. 
 

But its importance should not be overstated, either. It is not Holy Writ. Like any government policy documents for subjects in the concurrent domain, it will have a combination of actual and persuasive force. State governments can choose to ignore aspects of the policy where it interferes with their choices — Tamil Nadu, for example, has traditionally gone its own way when it comes to language policy in particular.

There is much to be pleased about in the NEP. Certainly, many of the principles it seeks to uphold — multidisciplinarity, flexibility, and “easier” examinations — deserve unstinting support. The regulatory overhaul the NEP proposes looks good on paper, but unfortunately this administration’s record on regulatory independence and on higher education means that we will generally wait to see if this is, when implemented, merely a method to exert greater political control over universities. What is definitely worth worrying about is the National Research Fund, which will certainly turn into a method for imposition of ideological hobby-horses of one kind or another.

Illustration: Binay Sinha

 

The ministry should also be commended for its ability to shift ground on matters that were previously controversial. Years after the attempt to shift Delhi University to a four-year programme was rolled back by the Union government, it has now suggested that four-year undergraduate education (with multiple exit points) become the norm. This should be seen as something of an apology to former vice-chancellor of DU Dinesh Singh, who had fought unsuccessfully for that change.

There are, however, two aspects that bear closer examination. One is a sin of commission, and one of omission.

First, the NEP’s suggestions on the matter of language. These are not an enormous departure from the previous paradigm, and to the extent that they are, they are in the wrong direction. Unlike the draft version of the policy, the final NEP specifies that there will be no attempt to impose any language (read Hindi) on students. That said, there is a strong recommendation that children be taught in their mother tongue, or the regional language, till class five and preferably till class eight. It is important to note that this emphasis reflects a general belief, propagated in particular by UNESCO, that early education in the language of the parents is important for later educational achievement. (It is worth noting that the empirical evidence on this is suggestive but not conclusive.)

The questions are twofold. For one, the “regional language” is not necessarily the same as the “mother tongue” in a country as diverse as ours. This will of course be particularly true in multi-ethnic and non-Hindi speaking metropolitan cities like Kolkata, Mumbai, or Bengaluru. From the point of view of the NEP, there should be a reasonable number of Hindi- and Tamil- and Gujarati-medium schools in Mumbai, for example. But will the state government promote or even permit this? We need to be very clear about the distinction between regional and parental language as we enter decades in which inter-state migration will escalate. Non-Hindi speakers can also justifiably worry if the cognitive load is greater on their children — a child in a Hindi-speaking state can get by with just Hindi and English, but a Tamil child in Mumbai may be expected to know Tamil, Marathi, Hindi, and English. (There is also an unsubtle attempt to push Sanskrit.)

And then there is the status of English. Frankly, the NEP needed to take a stronger stand on the propagation of English. This is one of those few occasions when national integration, parental pressures, geo-strategic considerations and economic imperatives all agree. Indian children should be introduced to English early. In the absence of a commitment to English, the differentiation between those who receive a government school education and those who can afford a private school will only grow. If class barriers in this country are to be broken down and greater equality of opportunity assured, then there is no alternative to spreading English more widely. We can hope that the country changes enough that there is no longer a premium for English, but that would be closing our eyes to the realities of decades of our own and even global history. This is one of those cases when policy making has simply refused to accept reality and evidence. Parents want more English education, and employers want more English education. Only government does not.

The second large problem with the NEP is when it comes to early childhood education. Here, again, the principles are broadly praiseworthy. Indeed, the most important and vital line in the document is this: “The very highest priority of the education system will be to achieve universal foundational numeracy and literacy.” This is exactly right. 
 

This should indeed be the highest priority of the educational system. It has not been so far. In particular, as Karthik Muralidharan of UC San Diego and others have discovered, there is an enormous heterogeneity when it comes to literacy and numeracy in early years. The average is in any case low: Indian students leave primary school with a maths knowledge that is 2.5 years behind for their age. But the bottom third are doubly troubled: For they essentially make no progress at all. In other words, a vast proportion of nominally educated Indians are functionally illiterate and innumerate.
 

Correcting this requires an immediate focus on pre-school education. The NEP’s extension backward of the 10+2 system into 5 + 3 + 3 + 4 is thus vital.

But we must also face the fact that our entire education policy is designed on the assumption that we are turning out primary school students who are in fact literate and numerate. We need to moderate our ambitions. Our focus has to be on universal literacy and numeracy. As with the national health missions, this is where the Union can step in on a state or concurrent subject, and provide financing for a cadre of special remedial tutors for the bottom third.

The NEP has high ambitions, and is full of praiseworthy principles. But good policy making would instead have been to construct a National Numeracy Mission which aims to ensure universal literacy and numeracy in the next five years. We do not have much time.