Two years down the line, how has NEP fared out

India has one of the largest education systems in the world and the NEP 2020 is the first education policy of the 21st Century. Emphasising on ensuring Universal access to school education and having the mother tongue as the medium of instruction, the NEP stirred a lot of emotions and generated a lot of talk. Two years later, how effective has the policy been? Has it changed the education scenario at all? Let’s see how it has fared!

NEP which was launched on July 29, 2020 was created with the aim to provide increased flexibility and choice of subjects, students were expected to make creative combinations of subjects as per their choice for example science with arts. Focussing on integrating vocational education with mainstream education to uplift skill-based learning has been the goal, Government launched the “Skill India Mission (SIM)” for this. Under the project, more than 20 Central Ministries/Departments are implementing Skill Development Schemes/Programmes to enhance skill levels of millions of students. Furthermore, 2,000 institutions in higher education are set to begin as skill hubs and of this 700 have registered on the common portal of the Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship. A single national online internship platform has also been established in which 69.1 lakh students have registered.

The NEP has prescribed UG education to be of 3 or 4 years with multiple exit options as well as the setting up of Indian Institute of Translation and Interpretation (IITI), National Institute (or Institutes) for Pali, Persian and Prakrit for an increased interest in mother tongues and local languages. The promotion of Indian languages lies at the core of this policy and many steps have been taken towards this measure, All India Council of Technical Education (AICTE) has approved 19 engineering colleges to impart courses in six Indian languages in the academic year 2021-22 namely Bengali, Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, Tamil and Telugu.