Ambitious Modi plan to restructure HE and boost research

India’s Ministry of Human Resource Development this week unveiled a draft National Education Policy (NEP) 2019, just days after Prime Minister Narendra Modi secured a solid majority for his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in national elections, giving him a second term in office.

The ambitious plan lays out a wide-ranging restructuring of higher education in the country and aims to promote a research culture in higher education with the creation of a new National Research Foundation.

The 470-page NEP document covering early years, primary and secondary as well as higher education “is built on the foundational pillars of access, equity, quality, affordability and accountability”, according to a government statement, and would be aligned with global Sustainable Development Goals.

It notably proposes an extension to India’s Right to Education (RTE) Act to the age of 18, which could significantly boost numbers continuing on to higher education. One of the country’s main goals is to increase the gross enrolment ratio, currently at just 23%, to 50% by 2035. It would also cover early years education from age three. The RTE Act currently covers the six to 14 age group.

Among the eye-catching proposals in the document presented on the first working day of the new government are a restructuring of higher education institutions into three tiers – Type 1 institutions will focus on world-class research and high-quality teaching, and Type 2 on teaching across disciplines with an important contribution to research.

“It is expected that there will be initially several hundred such [Type 2] universities, and between 1,000 to 2,000 created over a period of two decades. As they begin to achieve higher quality in research and the range of programmes offered, some of them may aim to join the ranks of Type 1 institutions,” the NEP document says.

Type 3 institutions will be mainly colleges offering high-quality teaching focused on undergraduate education.

More liberal and broad-based

R Subrahmanyam, higher education secretary in the Human Resource Development Ministry, said the draft policy advises a more liberal and comprehensive education system that will allow students to pursue broad-based education in the first year of their undergraduate programme before specialising.

The draft NEP says “several institutions of higher studies across the world have implemented what we today characterise as liberal education through an array of different disciplines that include the arts, humanities, mathematics and sciences, suitably integrated with a deeper study of a special area of interest".

The report also recommends the creation of a National Higher Education Regulatory Authority (NHERA) as the sole regulator for higher education, including professional education, although previous governments have attempted and failed at such regulatory body reforms in the past.

Several new policy initiatives – for promoting internationalisation of higher education; improving the quality of open and distance learning; enhancing participation of under-represented groups, and eliminating gender, social category and regional gaps in education outcomes – have also been recommended.

Policy declaration for the next decades

The NEP, a key policy declaration, is the first of its kind in three decades, over which time there have been huge changes in India’s demographics as well as the emergence of new technologies and Industry 4.0 or the fourth industrial revolution, which is changing the work environment and the need for new skills.

“It will be a policy for the next 20-30 years,” an official said, noting the need to increase university access and upskilling for the new technology era.

“Education must build expertise that society will need over the next 25 years and beyond. Simply tailoring people into jobs that exist today but that are likely to change or disappear after some years is suboptimal and even counterproductive,” the NEP document said.

“The future workplace will demand critical thinking, communication, problem solving, creativity and multidisciplinary capability. Single-skill and single-discipline jobs are likely to become automated over time.”

The proposals state that India “must take the lead” in preparing professionals in cutting-edge areas such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, 3-D machining, big data analysis and other areas such as technical education, genomic studies, biotechnology, nanotechnology and neuroscience.

These and other cutting-edge sciences must be woven into undergraduate education, with support from the country’s three national academies of sciences and the Indian National Academy of Engineering to devise appropriate curricula.

New push into research in the higher education sector

A new focus on postgraduate and doctoral education and a major push to improve the research environment in universities are proposed. “The masters degree will also have a strong research component to strengthen the appropriate professional competence in the domain area, and to prepare students for a research degree,” the NEP document says.

“The biggest lacuna in the present education system is the lack of a coherent direction for planning and implementation of research at the university level,” it notes.

It proposes for the very first time the idea of a new National Research Foundation (NRF) to focus on funding research within the higher education system and promote research through better funding mechanisms. It will grant “competitive funding for outstanding research proposals across all disciplines, as determined by peer review and success of proposals”.

NRF “will encompass the four broad areas of sciences, technology, social sciences, and arts and humanities. Besides strengthening the presently weak support that subjects such as the social sciences and the humanities receive, NRF will also bring in cohesion among the various research endeavours of multidisciplinary character,” the document says.

“The NRF will also act as a liaison among researchers, ministries of government and industry, in order to ensure that the most relevant and societally useful research reaches the people as soon as possible.”

It adds that strengthening the linkages between universities and their counterparts at the global level will be addressed. An important mandate of the NRF will be to seed, grow and facilitate research at institutions where research is currently very limited.

For example, the NRF “will be encouraged to support special schemes for offering research scholarships to talented international students from developing countries”, according to the document.

Former course director at the Indian Institute of Mass Communication, New Delhi, WA Qazi, said the NEP seeks a major overhaul of higher education and “puts forward some brave new ideas. It makes bold propositions to make the universities and colleges the hubs of research.”

BS Bhatia, former mechanical engineering department head at Maulana Azad National Institute of Technology, Bhopal, said it would create a strong research culture as the proposed NRF seeks to build research capacity across higher education.

“There are several new ideas for encouraging globalisation of higher education, technology integration at all levels of education, and initiatives to boost participation of under-represented groups, and end gender, social category and regional gaps in education outcomes. These are good ideas and must be implemented effectively.”

A long time to prepare

New measures for promoting the globalisation of higher education, encouraging quality, open and distance learning, technology assimilation at all levels of education, and actions to improve participation of under-represented groups feature in the draft.

The proposals come as a new Human Resource Development Minister, Ramesh Pokhriyal, was sworn in. But the nine-member drafting committee was set up in 2017, led by the chairman and former head of the Indian Space Research Organisation, K Kasturirangan, who submitted the draft report to the new minister on 31 May.

A new national education policy was part of the BJP manifesto for the 2014 general elections which brought Modi to power, with the original delivery date set for the end of 2017, but drafting was postponed several times to include more stakeholder consultations.

Inputs for the report began much earlier in 2016. According to a government press release, the ministry had first “initiated an unprecedented collaborative, multi-stakeholder, multi-pronged, bottom-up, people-centric, inclusive, participatory consultation process”.

The extensive consultations “undertaken across multiple levels of online, expert and thematic, and from the grassroots”, including the village, district, state and national level, “provided an opportunity to every citizen to engage in this massive exercise,” which led to a 2016 report that informed the committee set up in 2017.

Different from EQUIP

The new education policy is separate from the Education Quality Upgradation and Inclusion Programme or EQUIP, a five-year project aimed at revamping higher education. Ten groups headed by experts have been set up under EQUIP.

EQUIP is a more specialised scheme prepared by top experts to bring about sweeping changes in the country's higher education sector, while five-year educational policies are routinely prepared by governments to address various aspects of the education sector.

While some of the objectives of the NEP and EQUIP appear similar, the two projects are different and will be implemented separately, according to officials. Notably NEP is a project that will be implemented over several decades.

Other proposals

Other proposals by the NEP include:

• Undergraduate level: A restructuring of undergraduate programmes including reintroduction of four-year degrees alongside three-year programmes with “multiple exit and entry points”. The four-year programme will provide for “greater rigour” and allow students to conduct optional research.

• Postgraduate level: The masters and doctoral levels to be strengthened with at least three routes into the masters degree – a one-year degree, a two-year degree and the integrated five-year degrees.

• Teacher training: In a special emphasis on teacher training, the NEP notes that teacher education has been beleaguered with mediocrity as well as rampant corruption due to commercialisation. It recommends the closure of substandard and ‘dysfunctional’ teacher education institutions. Departments of education in universities, in addition to teaching, will need to be strengthened and developed as spaces for research and innovation in education.

• Professional education: Postgraduate education in the professional streams needs to be strengthened considerably, according to the NEP document. The curriculum must ensure that postgraduates acquire knowledge, skills, self-confidence and entrepreneurship training, to enable them to contribute to social and national productivity.

• Combating faculty shortages: To mitigate the shortage of faculty across disciplines, universities and institutions will be encouraged to take measures to attract and retain faculty; engage with other institutions in the vicinity to share faculty; invite rolling faculty of eminent and superannuated scientists, professors or experts from industry; provision teaching assistantships for doctoral students; make use of talent from the private sector; and invite overseas researchers.

• Offshore campuses: Public and private universities that meet specified eligibility criteria will be encouraged to set up campuses in select countries, particularly in the Global South. Both the central and state governments will take up the task of initiating amendments in the acts of the central and state universities to enable such initiatives.

• Foreign universities in India: A legislative framework permitting the entry of universities from among the top 200 in the world will be permitted to operate in India, contingent on such universities following the regulatory, governance and content norms applicable to Indian universities.

• An Inter-University Centre for International Education: The IUCIE will be set up along with an International Education Centre within selected Indian universities to support internationalisation of higher education in universities. Necessary budget provision will be made available.

• Research exchanges: The NRF will provide funding support for the two-way movement of talented research students and post-doctoral fellows, as part of funding joint research projects, and offer services and support to international students – working with the proposed IUCIE.

• Ministry of Education: To bring the focus back on education and learning, the Human Resource Development Ministry should be renamed the Ministry of Education.

The policy was put up for public comments for a month on 1 June, and will be taken to cabinet in July for final approval.