DUTA Press Release; 26 July 2019

DNEP is an attack on educational rights of the People

DUTA submitted its detailed feedback on the policy recommendations on Higher Education contained in the Draft National Education Policy (DNEP) to the MHRD today. Through its feedback, DUTA has slammed the thin and uninformed recommendations made in the DNEP that favour extreme centralisation of command, transfer all local, state-level and parliamentary decision-making prerogatives to the executive authority of the union government, and pave the way for handing education entirely over to the markets.

The DNEP talks about the need for expansion in educational infrastructure and teachers, but does not bind the Government to any financial commitment; instead it makes a purely abstract case for privatisation, expansion through online digital learning and financial autonomy of institutions. In doing so, it completely ignores questions of justice – especially institutional responsibility in ensuring social and professional justice to students, teachers and non-teaching employees. 

There is nothing original in the DNEP. Its operative part is wholly derived from the NITI AAYOG’s Three-Year Action Agenda. In fact, the DNEP’s recommendations will only exacerbate all the existing problems in institutions – ranging from growing contractualisation in appointments, erosion of participative decision-making, arbitrariness in promotions and career progression to denial of social justice and democratic rights of the already marginalised sections. Moreover, the inattentiveness regarding institutional justice, and the advocacy of variable pay and service conditions for teachers, will increase insecurity, discourage talent and contribute to the brain-drain.

DUTA has also slammed the insidious manner in which the DNEP has eliminated teachers’ role in statutory decision-making and policy interventions. It has removed the provision for democratic representation of the academic community in statutory bodies. Instead, it advocates the formation of a new technocratic managerial cadre of “Institutional Leaders” cultivated through the nurture of slavish conformism and rewarded with decision-making privileges. Its recommended closure of affiliating-type universities will prevent the pooling of resources, encourage duplication and wastage, and weaken the reach of many premier public-funded universities and colleges.

Its advocacy of autonomous unitary institutions in place of large, federally-governed institutions is guided as much by the intention to make education a business, as it is to dismember sizeable collectives of teachers such as DUTA that have critiqued policies of commercialisation and privatisation and acted as a bulwark against authoritarian attempts to curtail academic freedom.

The DNEP has also ignored the need to review the disastrous impact of continuous academic restructuring on the quality of teaching-learning in recent years. Semester system, FYUP and CBCS have had failed outcomes in most universities, due to the lack of adequate faculty and infrastructural inputs. Instead of addressing the shortage of inputs, the DNEP simplistically advocates a readymade and homogenous Outcomes-based model of education (Liberal Arts) that claims to give choices to students but ignores the tragic fact that these choices remained confined to paper.