Reading the NEP 01: The Document on Your Desk
English

On the notice board
outside your staff room
there is probably a circular
that carries these words.
As per NEP 2020.
For six years people have been
telling me what the NEP says,
and I have never opened it.
Most of us haven't.
It runs to 66 pages,
and on page 4
there is a sentence about you.
The teacher must be at the centre
of the fundamental reforms
in the education system.
In this series we read
those 66 pages together,
and find out
what has become of them.
The Union Cabinet approved
the National Education Policy
on the 29th of July 2020.
It replaced a policy written in 1986,
and it calls itself
the first education policy
of the twenty-first century.
There are 27 chapters.
Higher education
takes up chapters 9 to 19,
from page 33 to page 50.
Those eighteen pages are the ones
that concern your college.
Do eighteen pages from Delhi
have anything to say
about a small affiliated college
like ours?
Chapter 10 is about colleges like yours.
The system of affiliated colleges
is to be phased out over fifteen years,
and each college is expected to grow
into one that awards its own degrees.
The same chapter wants
the enrolment ratio in higher education
to reach 50 per cent by 2035.
And near its end,
the policy asks for public spending
on education
to rise to 6 per cent of GDP.
A lot of promises.
Is any of it binding on me?
On its own, no.
A policy says
what a government means to do.
It becomes binding only after
somebody turns part of it into a law,
a regulation or an order,
and the Centre and the states
share that work.
Follow one sentence,
from paragraph 11.9.
The undergraduate degree will be
of either three or four year duration,
with multiple exit options.
Among the states,
Karnataka acted first.
In August 2021 it issued an order
to implement the policy
from that academic year,
and its colleges
began admitting students
to a degree
with an optional fourth year.
In December 2022
the University Grants Commission
gave the sentence its arithmetic.
In its credit framework,
three years come to 120 credits
and four years to 160.
In April 2025 it wrote
those numbers into a regulation.
After that it is in other hands.
In a state university,
the state government decides
how to adopt the new structure,
and sometimes whether to.
Then the university
writes it into an ordinance,
and a board of studies
rewrites the syllabus around it.
And one morning there is
a new timetable on our notice board.
In May 2024 Karnataka
withdrew the four-year degree
for new students
and went back to three.
A year later the Supreme Court
dismissed a petition
asking it to order three states
to implement the policy.
So a teacher in one state
and a teacher in another
can say NEP
and mean different things.
Six years on,
the latest official survey,
for 2023–24,
puts the enrolment ratio at 30 per cent,
against a target of 50 by 2035.
And the single regulator
that the policy asks for
is still a Bill before Parliament.
The policy allowed itself time.
Its closing paragraph says
that all of it will be in operation
during the decade
from 2030 to 2040.
And by 2040,
its opening pages say,
India should have an education system
that is second to none.
And is it any good?
People who have thought hard
about Indian education
disagree about that.
Here are two of them.
The late K. Kasturirangan,
the space scientist who chaired
the drafting committee,
said the policy was meant to touch
the life of every citizen
and build a just
and equitable society.
He called liberal education,
which explores how the sciences
and the humanities relate,
an age-old Indian idea
finding recognition in a new form.
Shyam Menon,
who taught education
at the University of Delhi
for most of his career,
has written that earlier policies
had the legitimacy
of scrutiny by Parliament,
which this one bypassed.
He doubts that the states,
which carry most public spending
on education,
can afford what the Centre
has promised on their behalf.
All right.
What do I do with all this?
Read the eighteen pages.
Chapters 9 to 19 take about an hour
with a pencil.
If you teach a language, music
or one of the arts,
add chapter 22.
When you reach paragraph 12.2,
mark the sentence that says
institutions and faculty
will have the autonomy to innovate
on curriculum, pedagogy
and assessment,
within a broad framework.
Set it beside the sentence on page 4.
And when the next circular
says as per NEP,
ask which document it stands on:
a UGC regulation,
a state government order,
or your university's ordinance.
That is the document
that governs your work,
so read it next.
An hour I can find.
Getting that autonomy
out of my university may take longer.
It may.
The full text and our sources
are linked below.
Next time,
where these 66 pages came from.