Like election manifestos, draft NEP is merely a statement of intent

The nation awaits the new born DNEP’s janmakundali to reveal its future. But we already know one of its possible epitaphs: It was just too good to be true.

Caste discrimination has long been an important issue in higher education, and has received intense public attention in recent times, from Rohith Vemula to Payal Tadavi. (Illustration: C R Sasikumar)

What does the new National Education Policy (NEP) have to say about the future of Indian higher education? Before trying to answer this question, it is necessary to spend a moment or two on the roughly 500-page draft of the NEP (henceforth DNEP) that the new government unveiled on the day it took office. Ever since Kapil Sibal took over as the human resources development (HRD) minister a decade ago, relations between the academic world and successive Union governments have inhabited a triangle defined by morbidity, chaos, and toxicity. For most of this period, there seemed to be no overall policy, only an incoherent plethora of schemes that could be contradictory, overlapping or isolated from each other. Grand Tughlaqian projects predominated, and they tended to assume a clean slate, ignoring the entrenched mess of modalities and institutions already in existence. Abortive attempts to produce a coherent national vision document had only made matters worse.