Education Policy

For the last two decades, there have been attempts to allow the branch campuses of foreign universities through legislative measures. However, in the recent Draft UGC Regulations, 2023, effort is made to allow such universities to operate and confer degree, bypassing even the legislative route. The article contends the point that the draft regulation is anti-constitutional and stands on weak legal grounds. It will distort the public higher education institutions and by creating further exclusion, it fails to serve the national interests. The policymakers need to deliberate further on the implications of such a policy on the already unequal landscape of education.

The National Education Policy 2020 provides a framework for reorganising and revamping higher education in India. Among several of its recommendations, the decision to discontinue the MPhil programme is a signifi cant one. The article makes an attempt to understand the perspective behind the move to discontinue the MPhil programme. The MPhil programme is discontinued for the more research-oriented undergraduate and master’s degrees. In a way, the discontinuation of MPhil is the collateral damage caused by the new structure of degrees that the NEP has proposed.

For-profit edtech needs to be banned, and the government must play an active regulatory role.

The National Education Policy of India 2020 is a significant policy document laying the national-level strategy for the new millennium. It is ambitious and claims universal access to quality education as its key aim, keeping with the Sustainable Development Goal 4 of the United Nations Agenda 2030. One of the highlights of the NEP is its emphasis on mother tongue education at the primary levels in both state- and privately owned schools. The present paper critically assesses the NEP 2020, primarily in relation to the language-in-education policy. The paper argues that it presents a “contradiction of intentions,” aspiring towards inclusion of the historically disadvantaged and marginalised groups on the one hand, while practising a policy of aggressive privatisation and disinvestment in public education on the other.

Released 34 years after the previous policy on education, the National Education Policy, 2020 is framed in a context that is unrecognisable from that of the past policies. This article examines the discursive framework underlying the current policymaking process.