NEP makes mainstream education available for all: Prakash Javadekar

The discussion on the NEP was organised by Board of College and University Development and Savitribai Phule Pune University Teachers Association hosted on the Facebook page of National Youth Cooperative Society.

Javadekar said many foreign educational institutions will set up shop in India and provide new educational opportunities with this policy. He said while at present Indian students worked abroad and strengthened their economies, now these students could stay in India and become the “backbone” of the Indian economy.

He also said this policy would increase the accountability of educational institutions, students, teachers and management.

Bhushan Patwardhan, Vice-Chairman of University Grants Commission, said flexibility was the “soul of the new NEP”, which was useful to students, teachers and administrators.

“This educational policy must be effectively implemented. So far, we have travelled through two modes of education: our own and one imposed by the British Raj. Despite an educational lineage of several hundred years, our universities, once the best in the world, do not feature in the top list today. To date, students at university and college level are only assumed to fit into the framework we have set for them. But this policy will provide many new opportunities to students through multi-disciplinary study. It has changed the definition of education,” he said.

Nitin Karmalkar, vice-chancellor of SPPU, said some of the newer concepts like credit transfer and cross-discipline study had already been implemented at SPPU even before the NEP came into existence.