Why in news?
The government has decided to junk the TSR Subramanian committee report on education reform.
What is the view of HRD ministry?
- It termed the report as a “mere compilation” of older reports
- The ministry will soon announce another committee to give a fresh report.
What the original report contains?
- In 2015, the TSR Subramanian was set up to give a new education policy, which submitted its report in May, 2016.
- The original report bans the political parties from universities. However it is not present in the officially published report.
- Banning political parties from the campus is unlikely to go down well with the political class considering this is where they get recruits from.
- It had talked of the need for a standing Education Commission to continually assess the changing circumstances of the education sector and advise the HRD ministry on the need to upgrade policy accordingly.
- At the school level, it proposed that the Right to Education Act be amended to include mandatory learning outcome norms with the existing norms on infrastructure.
- It wanted to bring minority institutions under the purview of applicability of the Economically Weaker Sections quota.
- It had recommended that the selection of teachers for government schools be handled by an autonomous body to reduce corruption and politicisation.
- On the higher education front, it had called for a “flexible and nuanced” regulatory regime that allowed high-quality institutions much greater freedom than before on financial and administrative decisions.
- It suggested that accreditation of quality be made more outcome-based instead of being based on input metrics such as spending on infrastructure.
What is the way ahead?
- It is the government’s prerogative to accept, fully or partially, or reject a report it commissioned.
- But junking a report that had many progressive recommendations is odd.
- Some of the recommendations it made represented a radical change from the past thinking and some aren’t entirely new.
- But together they could have proven a worthy template for the country’s education policy.
- The government should retain the best of what the Subramanian panel had recommended.
Source: The Indian Express
