NEP 2020: Unfolding of three quiet revolutions

Five years have passed since the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 was unveiled, a document that intends to reshape India’s education system over a 15-20 year horizon. Two of these first five years were consumed by the pandemic, forcing schools to shut down and governments to scramble for solutions to keep learning alive, and then later to recover lost learning. Despite this disruption, this last half-decade has seen significant developments – some promising, some contested, and some quietly transformative.

As a member of the NEP drafting committee, I have watched these unfold with both hope and impatience. The policy’s vision is bold: a fundamental reimagining of school education in India. That is equally true for higher education, but this piece is focused on schools. Like any longterm roadmap, it has set milestones. The unfulfilled potential of the NEP is reflected in those cases where these milestones have not yet been met.

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Take, for instance, the idea of clustering public schools – an administrative structural improvement meant to enable 10-15 schools to share resources like labs, playgrounds, and specialist teachers in arts or physical education. This would not only have optimised scarce resources but would also have improved equity. Simply because given the small sizes of many of our primary schools, it is not possible at all to have all these resources in each school. Yet, only a handful of states have made progress here. Similarly, board examinations continue to remain high-stakes, memory-driven affairs – across too much of the country, with few boards changing and improving assessment to measure genuine learning.

The transition from school to college is still a maze of entrance exams, a stress-inducing ordeal for students. NEP 2020 has addressed all these issues, with a clear and practical approach and architecture, yet implementation has been at variable pace across states and different institutions involved. But since this is about implementation, and in a practical sense we are only three years into the implementation phase, we can be hopeful that the laggards will catch up. Then there have been the controversies – most of them unnecessary, often stemming from misreadings or deliberate distortions of the policy.

The three-language formula, for example, has been a feature of Indian education since 1968. If anything, NEP 2020 made it more flexible, and responsive to local and regional preferences. Yet, it became a political flashpoint, with critics either unaware of the policy’s actual provisions or projecting their own anxieties onto it. Similarly, claims that NEP promotes privatisation are baffling to anyone who has read the document, which explicitly emphasises strengthening public education. Such debates distract from the real work at hand.

Beneath the noise, however, three under-recognised shifts are unfolding — changes that will, over time, redefine Indian school education. The first is the system wide focus on early childhood education (ECE). Research has long shown that ages 3- 8 are critical for every dimension of the development of the child – physical, cognitive, social, ethical and emotional. Yet India’s system historically neglected this phase. NEP 2020 changed that, spurring curricular transformation, infrastructure upgrades, and appropriate teacher development and support for ECE.

Everywhere in the country you can hear the buzz of early childhood education, including in the vast public ‘anganwadi’ system. This shift, while in its early stages, is laying the real foundation for a truly equitable and effective system. Children from vulnerable and disadvantaged communities and homes will benefit most from these changes – if we don’t let the momentum slip, and so we must not. The second – and perhaps equally foundational – change is the push for mother tongue-based education in gaining early literacy. Decades of evidence show children learn best in a familiar language, yet India has not implemented this approach, exacerbating the crisis that we have in basic education.

NEP 2020’s clear on use of familiar languages to gain literacy is potentially a game-changer. Its overall approach effectively tackles the multilingual reality of our classrooms. As states implement this approach, along with other key measures of the policy in foundational literacy and numeracy and teacher support, we are likely to see improvement in basic educational outcomes. The third, and potentially even more far-reaching, reform is in teacher education. Our teacher education system has been marred by poor quality and corruption for decades. Almost all efforts to improve have come to a naught. In a very real sense this state of teacher education has been at the bottom of our troubles in school education.

The NEP has confronted all of the issues in teacher education frontally. By introducing four-year integrated programmes in top universities and making them the benchmark qualification, and moving the entire teacher education system to that circular approach, combined with decisive regulatory reforms, we are truly at the cusp of a new era. The job is not yet done, but the right start has been made. This will change our education at the core. No policy as vast as NEP 2020 can be flawless, nor can progress be linear. But amid the as yet unmet promises and needless controversies, these three quiet revolutions – early childhood focus, mother tongue-based learning, and teacher education reform – hold the seeds of a more equitable and effective system. The next five years must see faster execution, but we are on the way.

(The writer is CEO, Azim Premji Foundation. He was a member of the NEP 2020 Drafting Committee.)