100 days that will change education

Human Resource development minister Kapil Sibal on Thursday unveiled an ambitious plan to reform education — from adult literacy to schools and colleges — to optimise India’s demographic dividend.

Updated on: Jun 26, 2009, 02:18:29 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Human Resource development minister Kapil Sibal on Thursday unveiled an ambitious plan to reform education — from adult literacy to schools and colleges — to optimise India’s demographic dividend.

Half of India’s population of 1.1 billion is under 25 and only a quarter of Indian graduates are considered employable. By 2020, India will have the world’s youngest population. Sibal said the action plan for reform would be ready in 100 days.

The plan is targeted at doubling India’s Gross Enrolment Ratio (GER) in higher education, a dismal 12.4 per cent currently, in five years. The GER — the ratio of primary school students to graduates — increased by only about 7 per cent in the past 10 years when Arjun Singh and M.M. Joshi were ministers.

Sibal said school education would be revamped. There will be an accreditation system for schools, Class X examinations will be made optional, there will be grading instead of marking in CBSE schools and madrasa students will be allowed lateral entry into mainstream institutions.

Also, there are plans to connect all government schools with broadband internet in the next five years and a unified national teacher-training syllabus.

The ministry proposes a public-private partnership model for government schools.

“A private player can be allowed to construct two more stories above a municipal school to admit new students for a reasonable fee,” said Sibal. “Then, they will have also have to provide quality to existing students. There will be no license raj. Anyone who meets strict accreditation norms will be allowed to open institutes.”

“If we fail to provide quality education to our 50 crore youth, our country’s future will be in darkness,” said Sibal. Moreover, in the last five years, China has attracted 2,000 teachers back to its state universities. “We can give financial and social incentives to bring back top Indian faculty back home,” Sibal said.

But these radical moves have their critics.

The first protests have come from the two Left-ruled states: West Bengal and Kerala. West Bengal school education minister Partha Dey opposed making the Class X exam optional. His Kerala counterpart, M A Baby, reportedly demanded a conference of state education ministers to discuss the issue.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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