Sharpen Educational Tools
At 484 pages, the draft National Education Policy (NEP) 2019, released for comments by the human resource development (HRD) ministry, is a massive document. A policy should be a short and crisp framework document, with details eventually spelt out in legislations and rules and regulations that flow from it. This outcome could still be achieved by placing the key proposals in a short, single document with supporting arguments, analysis and data, useful in their own right, into an appendix.
Turning to the substance of the policy on higher education, the draft NEP offers some excellent ideas. Its key recommendation to separate the functions of regulation, funding, accreditation and standard setting ought to be at the heart of future reform of higher education. It is broadly in the spirit of many of the ideas we have put forth earlier, though we differ on the details. The draft NEP also builds on recent HRD ministry reforms granting autonomy to higher education institutions following the recommendations of a NITI Aayog committee on which we served, and of the Higher Education Commission of India (HECI) draft legislation to which we contributed.
It is essential that a liberal and transparent regulatory body such as HECI replace the current multiple, command-and-control institutions of the University Grants Commission (UGC), All India Council for Technical Education, and the National Council for Teacher Education.
But the recommendation by the draft NEP that a National Higher Education Regulatory Authority of India be all-encompassing and, additionally, subsume the functions of many professional regulatory bodies such as the Bar Council of India and the erstwhile Medical Council of India (MCI), runs the risk of becoming overly contentious with the reform getting stalled altogether. It will be best to let the reform in these areas proceed on separate tracks along the lines of the National Medical Commission Bill, which would replace the MCI Act and is soon to be reintroduced in Lok Sabha.