Education reforms - I
Friday, June 5th, 2009
Are education reforms finally on the anvil? That’s what the latest reports say. The approach, according to those in the corridors of power, will be along the lines of those proposed by the YashPal Committee and the Knowledge Commission.
I’ll talk about the Knowledge Commission (which I was on) in my next post. The YashPal committee, if I recall, had suggested reforms that brought in more autonomy for institutes, and stopped the process of recognising institutes as ‘deemed universities’. One of the things their report especially bemoaned was the ‘loss of primacy’ for Indian universities. The committee argued that universities ought to be made self-regulatory, and that our regulatory institutions right now - such as the UGC - had taken up too many of the university’s functions.
It also recommended that courses be restructured so that undergraduate students have access to all disciplines. If this comes through - I’d written about it in an earlier post - it would be an enormous step for innovation and quality in our education system.
Such reforms are not going to be easy. Now that the planned steps have been made public, there will be plenty of lobby groups readying for protest. People and groups in power don’t like to lose control, and these reforms are ambitious - task committees have been recommending similar steps since the Kothari Commission in the 1960s, all of which were quickly gutted by university groups, bureaucrats and politicians.
Will we be fortunate this time?