Pursue Your Passion: A major potential outcome of NEP 2020

A national goal of every nation is to ensure that majority of its citizens perform to the best of their capabilities in their professional career, so that the overall national output peaks and the nation prospers as a result of this. An important element to achieve this goal is to ensure that maximum number of citizens pursue their passion as their profession, no matter in which profession they are.When a person works for something he/she is passionate about, he/sheperforms the job with utmost sincerity and dedication,contributing with his/her highest efficiency.

Unfortunately, it has been observed that in the current Indian education system, most students pursue their higher (college) education and subsequently their professional career in an area which was not of their choice. It was the choice of their parents, relatives, friends, etc. As a result, majority of the students end up pursuing their higher studies and subsequently their professional career in an area which they do not enjoy working and become a mediocre for the rest of their life. This drastically effects national output.

The recently announced National Education Policy (NEP 2020) attempts to address this issue. The following two features of NEP 2020 will help more students pursue their passion as their profession:

• Multiple entry and exit from a graduation course. For any graduation course, if a student completes only one year he/she gets a certificate, gets a diploma on completion of two years, and a degree on completion of full four years. Hence, after joining and pursuing a graduation course for some time, if a student discovers that this is not what he/she will like to do for the rest of life, he/she can quit the course in-between to change to a different disciplineof his/her liking that he/she later discovers due to the increased maturity with age. The fear of losing the already invested years with zero output (no certificate or diploma) in the current education system, makes the students and their parents worried, due to which they unwillingly complete the course and get locked into a profession in which their performance is only average or below average.

• Availability of vocational courses from 6th std. onwards and allowing students to choose various types of courses (finance, law, music, performing arts, etc.) in addition to their main stream (such as science stream) courses from VIII to XI std. will give a chance to the students and their parents to know early enough their likes/dislikes (strengths/weaknesses). Based on this, they can make a more informed choice of their graduation course in their strengths/likes area, leading to more students pursuing their professional career in their passion areas.

The ability to create more satisfied professionals and happier individuals in the long run, because they work in their passion areas, is one of the strongest aspects of NEP 2020.

(The author is Vice- Chancellor and Director, IIIT-Naya Raipur)