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HRD ministry rushes to finalise education policy

Last Updated 07 June 2019, 09:33 IST

After a gap of 33 years, the country is set to have a new national education policy in a couple of months with the Human Resource Development (HRD) ministry racing against time to give final shape to the draft policy formulated by an 11-member committee under former scientist of the ISRO, K Kasturirangan.

The HRD ministry has convened a meeting of state education ministers later this month to discuss the recommendations made in the Kasturirangan's draft national education policy.

The meeting is tentatively scheduled to be held on June 22.

HRD Minister Ramesh Pokhriyal will preside over the day-long meeting during which key recommendations will be discussed to elicit the views and suggestions of state education ministers.

The ministry has to complete the consultation process on the draft policy by the end of this month and place the final draft of the policy before the Union Cabinet for its approval in the first week of July.

The ministry recently uploaded the draft policy on its websites for public comments and suggestions from the people.

While the last national education policy was formulated in 1986, formulation of a new national policy on education has been in the making for the past four years.

The then HRD minister Smriti Irani had launched the move in January 2015 during the previous regime of the NDA under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, setting in motion nationwide consultations with teachers, students, parents, academicians and other stakeholders.

During the first phase of the consultation process, while the HRD ministry organised over 2 lakh meetings at the level of villages to elicit views and suggestions of the stakeholders on a total of 33 different themes from the grass root level, it also held hundreds of meetings at the block, district and state levels.

A four-member committee under former Cabinet minister TSR Subramanian later formulated the draft of the education policy and submitted to the HRD ministry in May 2016.

Smriti, however, rejected the panel's report following a tiff with Subramanian over the leaking of the contents of the draft policy.

The ministry revised the committee's report and declared it as “some inputs” for the proposed new education policy after the original report drew flak from the students, teachers and Opposition parties over some of its recommendations which included a suggestion to “abjure” students politics on the university campuses.

The ministry constituted the Kasturirangan committee in June 2017 for the drafting of the education policy which submitted the draft policy in December 2018.

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(Published 06 June 2019, 19:04 IST)

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