Implementing NEP 2020

A Roadmap

The government unveiled the New Education Policy on July 30 with the objective of bringing in wide-ranging transformations in school and higher education sectors and make India a vibrant knowledge society. The mandate of NEP is to make the current education system holistic, flexible and multidisciplinary to fulfil the promise of a ‘New India’.

However, while the nationwide excitement about NEP continues, it is time for us to understand what factors shape and impact its implementation across the country. Before I delve into more serious factors, I see unmistakably many good ingredients in this NEP: the problem and goals are well-elucidated, it is evidence-based and is backed by the stakeholders, with wide-ranging support. This is a propitious beginning. However, NEP is multi-faceted and multi-levelled. Therefore, let us see now what approaches we should consider making NEP operational.

Policies often fall short of getting implemented due to several pitfalls. The first is the lack of communication with the stakeholders. Any policy should first be well understood by the stakeholders through effective communication. Fortunately, to the credit of the persons behind NEP, there were large-scale consultations with the stakeholders on the draft NEP well before it was announced. The feedback and suggestions received on the draft NEP were effectively deliberated through a truly democratic process, resulting in collaborative policymaking.

Second, policies fail due to a lack of ownership by the stakeholders. Since the NEP has been announced, there have been widespread debate and discussion across the country by those who are involved in education on what NEP is set to achieve. A number of webinars are being conducted to discuss NEP and education experts are writing in the media very positively about NEP. This visibly suggests that effective communication about NEP has led to a sense of ownership by stakeholders. Ownership of policy also leads to a sense of responsibility.

Third, policies often fail due to conflicting goals and a complete disconnect with previous policies. The new NEP is a major departure from the previous education policies and addresses their most critical limitations and fault lines. But there is visible continuity in terms of realising universal access to quality education to enable citizens to make India a developed country and a major economy in the world. This continuity, built into the new NEP, is certainly a great advantage for its successful execution.

Next, setting the right priorities is another important step of successful implementation of any policy. There are two key players in the implementation of NEP – the Ministry of Education at the Centre and the stakeholders, which includes state governments, schools and academic institutions. Ministry of Education will play a pivotal role in the implementation of NEP from the point of providing direction, funding, governance, regulation and review. Both the players have to set the priorities right and these priorities should be based on both the short-term and long-term needs of educational institutes, funding requirements and realistic deadlines for achieving the set goals.

It must be kept in mind that not all goals in NEP require funding. Many of the changes that NEP sets out to achieve require attitudinal changes by adopting effective teaching-learning processes, academic and administrative procedures. Educational institutes have ample autonomy in NEP to make the education holistic and multi-disciplinary by merely incorporating changes in the institutional functioning without a nudge from anyone.

Duplication and overlap of efforts must be eschewed by distinctly outlining the chain of command for implementation. People who are tasked with implementing NEP should be technically savvy, decisive, open-minded and committed. The leadership role is paramount here as they should also be good team players and risk-takers. These leaders need to be self-driven with enthusiasm and high integrity. Absence of such people in policy implementation will be a sure recipe for failure.

Since the NEP is long-term in nature, we need to build support mechanisms as the first priority. The idea of support mechanism is already built into NEP through the establishment of Higher Education Commission of India (HECI) with its four verticals with distinct functions for regulation, accreditation, funding, and academic standard-setting. The Ministry of Education and HECI need to work in tandem with the states and the educational institutes by collaboratively setting realistic and achievable targets and by tracking progress against critical policy priorities.

But this tracking requires collection, categorisation and analysis of good quality performance data. A robust system should be in place with an integrated and unified database by linking records across states and union territories and all educational institutes.

We need to define the key performance indicators, both for the officials in the Ministry of Education mandated to work on NEP implementation and also the stakeholders. It is vital that there is a periodic review of their performance indicators with a view to plug inefficient processes that impede the policy from being turned into results in a time-bound manner. The need to have a well-thought-out plan with well laid-out long-term goals, its stepwise implementation through short-term goals and periodic evaluation and data-driven review cannot be undervalued in the effective implementation of NEP.

Speaking at the “Conclave on transformational reforms in higher education under National Education Policy (NEP)” on August 7, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said: “To implement the National Education Policy, we all have to work together determinedly. A new round of dialogue and coordination with universities, colleges, school education boards, different states and different stakeholders is about to start from here.” I couldn’t agree more. A mammoth task as big as implementing the New Education Policy across India can indeed be realised only through effective collaboration between the central and state-level institutions and the Ministry of Education.

(The writer is Vice-Chancellor, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi)