Centre's move to corporatise education deplorable

The Centre's new National Education Policy (NEP) is apparently an attempt to create a corporatised, Hindutva-inflected, so-called "merit" driven higher education system which is aimed at doing away with the University Grants Commission and the All India Council for Technical Education and replace them with a single body, the Higher Education Commission of India — something that will come to pass in a month or so, if news reports are to be believed.

The idea of a university partakes of much that cannot be measured or quantified, and the success of a system of education cannot be judged solely in terms of the number of market-ready units of human capital it churns out.

The function of any institution of higher education worth the name, especially in a complex, multicultural democracy such as ours, lies as much in challenging received wisdoms and opposing cherished truths as it does in creating new knowledges and understandings.

Or, in the words of that iconoclastic Nobel-winning philosopher-bard-educationist, "Universities should never be made into mechanical organisations for collecting and distributing knowledge." Rather a university should be "a perpetual creation by the co-operative enthusiasm of teachers and students, growing with the growth of their soul; a world in itself, self-sustaining, independent, rich with ever-renewing life radiating life across space and time...

Its aim should lie in imparting life-breath to the complete man, who is intellectual as well as economic, bound by social bonds, but aspiring towards spiritual freedom and final perfection."

-Dr Amina Ahmed, Hyderabad