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.
