‘Communal, coercive agenda’, Sonia Gandhi attacks Modi govt on education

New Delhi: Sonia Gandhi, MP and Chairperson of the Congress Parliamentary Party, has accused the Modi-led government at the Centre of following an agenda “leading to damaging consequences in the domain of education.”

She in an article in a newspaper shared by Congress leader Pawan Khera has said there are ‘3Cs’ that haunt Indian education today — centralisation, commercialisation and communalisation.

Gandhi has said the government was coercing the state governments to implement the PM-SHRI scheme of model schools by withholding the grants due to them under the Samagra Shiksha Abhiyan as leverage.

Criticising the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, she says in the article, “The introduction of the high-profile National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 has hidden the reality of a government that is profoundly indifferent to the education of India’s children and youth. The Union Government’s track record over the last decade has convincingly demonstrated that in education, it is concerned only with the successful implementation of three core agenda items the centralisation of power with the Union Government, the commercialisation and outsourcing of investments in education to the private sector, and the communalisation of textbooks, curriculum, and institutions.”

She says the most damaging consequences of centralisation have been in the domain of education. The Central Advisory Board of Education, comprising Ministers for Education in both the Union and State Governments, has not been convened since September 2019.

She has accused the government of not consulting the states and considering their views. “Even while adopting and implementing a paradigm shift in education through the NEP 2020, the Union Government has not seen fit to consult State governments on the implementation of these policies even once. It is a testament to the Government’s singular determination not to heed any voice other than its own, even on a subject that is squarely in the Concurrent List of the Indian Constitution.”

She says that the lack of dialogue has been accompanied by a “bullying tendency” and cites the PM-SHRI (or PM Schools for Rising India) scheme as a case.

Gandhi has also accused the Centre of commercialisation of the education system, saying it “has been happening in plain sight, in full compliance with the NEP”

“Since 2014, we have seen the closure and consolidation of 89,441 public schools across the country and the establishment of 42,944 additional private schools. The country’s poor have been forced out of public education and into the hands of a prohibitively expensive and under-regulated private school system,” she says.

She also says that in higher education, the Centre has introduced the Higher Education Financing Agency (HEFA) as a replacement to the University Grants Commission’s erstwhile system of block grants. “Universities are being encouraged to seek loans, offered at market rates of interest, from HEFA, which they are then obliged to repay from their own revenues. In its 364th Report on the Demand for Grants, the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Education found that between 78% to 100% of these loans are being repaid by universities through student fees. In other words, the price of the Government’s retreat from financing public education has been borne by students facing fee hikes,” she writes.

The veteran Congress leader has accused the Centre of following a communal agenda in education. “The Union Government’s third thrust is on communalisation the fulfilment of the long-standing ideological project of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the Bharatiya Janata Party, of indoctrinating and cultivating hatred through the education system.”

She says the textbooks of the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) have been revised to sanitise Indian history.

“Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination and the sections on Mughal India have been dropped from curricula. In addition, the Preamble to the Indian Constitution was dropped from textbooks until public backlash forced the Government to commit to mandatory inclusion once again,” she says in the article.

She has also raised the appointments being made in the universities. “In our universities, we have seen the large-scale hiring of professors from regime-friendly ideologically backgrounds, no matter the comically poor quality of their teaching and scholarships. Leadership positions in key institutions even in the Indian Institutes of Technology and Indian Institutes of Management that Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru so evocatively described as the temples of modern India have been reserved for pliant ideologues.”

The former Congress chief has accused the government that over the last decade, the education systems have been systematically “cleansed of the spirit of public service and education policy has been sanitised of any concerns about access to and the quality of education”.

IANS