The document summarizes India's draft National Education Policy from 2019. The key points are: 1) The policy aims to transform India into an equitable and vibrant knowledge society by providing high-quality education for all, with a focus on access, equity, quality, affordability, and accountability. 2) It proposes reforms to school and higher education, including strengthening early childhood education, ensuring foundational literacy, integrating vocational education, increasing public funding for education, and consolidating higher education institutions. 3) The draft policy faces challenges in its implementation due to issues around funding, coordination with states, addressing disparities in learning levels, and ensuring quality especially in rural government schools.

1. Draft Education Policy 2019: Transforming
India into a Knowledge society
By Vishnu Agarwal

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3. Why in news?
•Draft National Education Policy was submitted on May 31,
2019.
•Last day for feedback extended upto July 31, 2019.
•It is highly debated topic with many experts and celebrities
praised it but some other criticised.
•The provision of making Hindi mandatory in non-hindi
speaking state was most controversial. After wide spread
protests in Tamil Nadu, this provision was changed in
revised draft.

4. 5 major Focus Areas/Objectives
(i) access,
(ii) equity,
(iii) quality,
(iv) affordability, and
(v) accountability.
Vision
• It envisions an India-centered education system that contributes directly to
transforming our nation sustainably into an equitable and vibrant knowledge
society, by providing high quality education to all.

5. Overview
School Education
•Strengthening Early Childhood Care and Education:
• Quality early childhood education available for all
children between 3-6 years by 2025.
• Right to Education Act extended to all children
between 3-6 years. (It is also extended upto Grade 12.)
• Special attention/priority to socio-economically
disadvantaged areas and communities.

6. • Ensuring Foundational Literacy & Numeracy:
•Increased focus on early language and mathematics in
Grades 1-5.
•Launch of two new programmes:
• National Tutors Programme: focusing on peer tutors
and
•Remedial Instructional Aides Programme: instructors
from the local community.
•Social workers and counsellors to help ensure positive
mental health and retention of all children.

7. • Ensuring Universal Access & Retention:
• 100% Gross Enrolment Ratio from preschool to secondary levels
by 2030.
• School rationalization supported by transport and hostel
facilities while ensuring safety of all students, particularly girls.
• Transformation of Curriculum & Pedagogy:
• Integrated and flexible school curriculum: Curriculum to develop
language proficiency, scientific temper, sense of aesthetics,
ethical reasoning, digital literacy, knowledge of India and current
affairs.
• Integration of vocational and academic streams.

8. • New Curricular & Pedagogical Structure: “New 5+3+3+4 design”
which recognises different stages of development of cognitive
abilities of children:
• Foundational Stage (Upto Grade 2): Rapid brain development;
“play-based, activity-based, and discovery-based” learning and
interaction.
• Preparatory Stage (Grade 3-5): consisting of basic education
incorporating some textbooks as well as aspects of more formal
classroom learning.
• Middle Stage (Grade 6-8): Concepts in subjects; developing more
abstract thinking and subject teaching leading.
• Secondary Stage (Grade 9-12): Preparation for livelihood and
higher education.

9. • Equitable & Inclusive Education for Every Child in the Country:
• Special Education Zones in disadvantaged regions.
• National Fund for providing scholarships, developing resources
and facilities for students from under-represented groups.
• Language:
• Since children learn languages most quickly between 2-8 years,
and multilingualism has great cognitive benefits for students,
children will be immersed in three languages early on, from the
Foundational Stage.
• The three languages formula will be continued with “flexibility” in
choice of languages.

10. • Teachers: The Torchbearers of Change: Rigorous teacher
preparation, robust recruitment, well-defined career path.
• “School Complexes”: Effective Administration & Management of
Schools: A School Complex is a cluster of around 30 public schools
from Foundational to Secondary stage within a contiguous
geography.
• Integration of Vocational Education: Vocational education
integrated into all education institutions in a phased manner over
the next decade.

11. • Education Technology: Technology in education to be used to
• Improve teaching, learning and evaluation.
• Support teacher preparation and continuous teacher professional
development.
• Enhance educational access to disadvantaged groups.
• Streamline education planning, administration and management.
• Adult Education:
• Achieving 100% youth and adult literacy by 2030.
• Community volunteers encouraged - each literate member of the
community to teach at least one person to read.

12. Higher Education
• Institutional Restructuring & Consolidation:
• Consolidation of current 800 universities and 40,000 colleges into
about 15,000 large, well-resourced, vibrant multidisciplinary
institutions.
• All higher education institutions to be consolidated into three
types of institutions:
• Research Universities - equal focus on research and teaching.
• Teaching Universities - primary focus on teaching with
significant focus on research.
• Autonomous degree-granting colleges - almost exclusive focus
on teaching.

13. • Towards High Quality Liberal Education: An imaginative and broad-
based liberal undergraduate education with rigorous specialization
in chosen disciplines and fields.
• Optimal Learning Environments & Student Support:
• National Higher Education Qualifications Framework to articulate
learning “outcomes”.
• National Skills Qualifications Framework aligned with the above
to ensure equivalence and mobility.
• Academic, financial and emotional support available for students
to help attain better outcomes.
• Internationalization of education facilitaties.

14. • Energised, Engaged & Capable Faculty:
• Faculty recruitment based on academic expertise, teaching
capacities, dispositions for public service.
• Continuous professional development plan for all faculty.
• Higher Education Governance & Regulation:
• Standard setting, funding, accreditation and regulation separated -
conducted by independent bodies, eliminating concentration of power
and conflicts of interest.
• National Higher Education Regulatory Authority - only regulator for all
higher education including professional education.
• University Grants Commission - transform into Higher Education Grants
Council.
• Higher education institutions to be governed by Independent Boards with
complete academic and administrative autonomy.

15. • Integrating Professional Education into Higher Education:
Stand-alone technical universities, health science
universities, legal and agricultural universities, or institutions
in these or other fields, will be discontinued.
• National Research Foundation:
• To expand research and innovation in the country.
• Autonomous body to be set up through an Act of
Parliament.
• Annual grant of Rs. 20,000 crores.

16. • Rashtriya Shiksha Aayog:
• Rashtriya Shiksha Aayog or the National Education Commission -
apex body to be constituted, chaired by the Prime Minister.
• The Aayog will be the custodian of education in India.
• Aayog will work closely with every State to ensure coordination
and synergy.
• Financing Education:
• Increase in public investment by Central and State Governments
to 20% of overall public expenditure over a 10 years period.

17. Challenges/Criticism
• Operationalisation of pre-primary education system.
• Funding requirement.
• National Higher Education Regulatory Authority: Bringing medical
or agricultural or legal education under one umbrella is likely to be
met with stiff opposition.
• Stand alone Technical Institutions etc. will be discontinued – then
what about recent National Medical Commission?
• Language issues have to be handled sensitively in view of their
emotional overtones.

18. • Education is a subject in the Concurrent list: Thus, suggestions
from the State governments on the draft policy should also be
taken.
• Multiple languages: For this we require at least 1 million
language teachers. The students studying in rural schools may be
at disadvantage.
• Integrating skills to education is not sufficient. Increasing
employability of youth and creation of employment
opportunities are more important.
• The poor quality of government schools have received very less
attention.

19. •It reduced role of Anganwadis in pre-primary school. But,
they have performed an important role in improving
health and nutrition of children.
•School education is based upon age structure. But, not all
children have same capacity in at same age.
•Some experts criticised exclusion of some crucial
elements like gender, environment, secular education,
human rights, constitutional rights etc.

20. •Issues raised by recent ASER report 2018 revealed:
•wide-disparities among states in learning levels.
•1 out of 4 children in rural India leaves Class 8 without
basic reading skills and over half of them (55.9%)
without the ability to do a simple division sum.
•Only a quarter of all children in Class 3 are at their grade-
level, only 27.2% of these children can read a Class 2
textbook and only 28.1% can do Class 2-level
subtraction.
•Implementation of this policy.

21. Conclusion
•The New Education Policy (NEP) is conceptually
bold, progressive and promising. But, to
succeed, this policy has to fare better in
implementation than its predecessors.

22. Thank You