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Review and revise the National Education Policy (NEP) to realise the right to education, promote the democratic and secular values of the country, stop the closure and merger of government schools in the name of rationalisation, and extend the right to education for children up to 18 years of age: These are some of the recommendations stated by the Delhi-based Right To Education Forum in a report.
The Wada Na Thoda governance review report is a compilation analysing the performance of state and central governments and their implementation of the National Education Policy 2020, to be published on November 27. Wada Na Todo Abhiyan (WNTA) is a national civil society platform initiated in 2004 to “monitor governance accountability to eliminate poverty and social exclusion in India”.
The WNTA is a campaign of more than 3,000 organisations, including the RTE Forum, which authored the chapter on primary education in their governance review report this year.
As per the WNTA’s official website, the pillars of its work are “brings out a review report of the Union government on their performance annually, based on their electoral promises and constitutional mandates” among others.
Speaking to The Indian Express, Anjela Taneja, co-convenor and founding member of the RTE Forum, said, “The RTE Forum and its members have been tracking the process of implementation of the right to education in India for over a decade. This report draws upon a series of annual stocktaking reports covering this period. This draws upon official statistics, government reports (including parliament questions), media reports, civil society reports and academic research over the reference year of the report and also draws on discussions with civil society organisations across the country.”
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“The NEP is far from perfect in terms of its weak focus on equity, absence of focus on the right to education and accompanying risks of privatisation of education even while it did have a positive focus on early childhood education and the intention to lighten the load for students. Its success was predicated on the influx of additional financial resources for its implementation which has not materialised,” said Taneja.
Taneja highlighted the purpose of the governance report: “The purpose of this report is to reflect and amplify citizen perspectives on the status of governance while also drawing a special focus on the rights of marginalised communities. The critical insights on development in this report are made by more than 25 members of civil society, including organisations, rights-based campaigns and coalitions, academics, and individuals who all have decades of experience working on the subject they’ve written on. We hope to draw government attention to these challenges and hope that they can duly inform the policy-making processes and the quest for equity with dignity.”
Taneja added, “As such, some of the more innovative strands of the policy have not been implemented and several of the early implementation deadlines timelines have been missed on the back of the Covid pandemic, inadequate financial allocations, and other reasons. At the same time, more should have been done to address the states’ concerns, some of which have stated that they would not be implementing the NEP.”
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